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  He gave the working girls a nod, then walked up the stairs and along the landing to room 18. Tox had entered a thousand rooms like this one looking for girls over the years; some he had found dead, lying with their brains splattered on the walls or slumped in the shower, storm blue and still needled up. The doors of rooms like this had been kicked in by drug cops so many times that the locks were almost always faulty or crooked. All he had to do to get into Tonya Woods’s room was jam his boot under the door and push upwards while giving the knob a good hard crank.

  As he entered the room, Tox took in the upturned furniture, the glass on the carpet.

  The scene before him was clearly the site of a violent abduction.

  Chapter 10

  IT WAS A sad place. The refuge of so many of society’s edge-dwellers. Tox looked at the bare mattress sitting askew on an old wooden frame, pushed up against one wall. The quintessential boxy television set, sitting on a milk crate, its black cord stretched taut near the doorway to a plug in the wall so that the set could be watched from the head of the bed. Smashed glass on the carpet, pillows and blankets on the floor. The bedside table was on its side. He pulled out his phone and took some pictures.

  There were signs of furniture broken or stolen and not replaced: the outlines of two cabinets against one wall, a missing picture frame by the door. Tox stepped over the TV cord on his way out of the room and looked at the little kitchenette, where a dish rack and at least one glass had fallen and shattered on the sticky linoleum. He lit a cigarette and emptied the little plastic bin, rummaged through the contents, found a receipt and read it. Stuffed it in his pocket.

  A bookshelf that had been stacked at the bottom with dozens of beauty magazines had toppled onto the end of the couch. He stood in the bathroom and looked at the bottles scattered everywhere, the smashed mirror above the sink.

  Tox crunched over broken shards to the wall where the mirror had been. There were tiny slivers of glass still clinging to the wall where something had impacted the mirror in the struggle. He would have to reach up to touch them. He thought about that for a while, opened a drawer and extracted a piece of paper stapled with a prescription. It was a hospital discharge report. On it he saw a familiar name and smiled to himself.

  The smile faded when he felt the touch of a gun barrel against the back of his ear.

  ‘Don’t move, fuckhead.’

  Chapter 11

  TOX DREW ON the last of his cigarette and stubbed it out on the edge of the sink. The instinct flashed through him – as it always did at times like this – to react with violence. He saw himself turning and batting away the hand that held the gun, grabbing the wrist as he went, landing a punch on the guy’s jaw. He’d shove the shoulder down, twist the arm back, snap it.

  But instead of doing all those things, he folded the piece of paper in his hand and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘I said don’t fucking move!’

  ‘Ali, what have you got?’ someone shouted from the main room.

  Tox turned calmly and looked at his captor, Ali. A plump Middle Eastern guy with a thin moustache clinging to the top of his lip. The guy who stepped into the small hall with them was white, also overweight. They both wore knock-off Nike hoodies and had chains running between their jeans and their wallets. The gun was small and battered.

  ‘You know what I don’t like?’ Tox asked. The two boneheads looked at each other. ‘I don’t like having a gun shoved in my face. I guess you could call it a pet peeve.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you, bro?’ Ali said.

  ‘I’m Tonya’s ex,’ Tox said. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Man,’ Ali said. ‘Your skankface girlfriend’s long gone. She left us high and dry. We’ve been lookin’ for that bitch for a week.’

  ‘You and everyone else. She owes me, too.’

  ‘Well, that’s just too bad, so sad, bro. We ain’t waiting in line. Get out of there.’ Ali yanked Tox by the collar of his jacket, poked him in the back of the neck with the gun to get him to move into the hall. Tox kept his hands up, not necessarily in surrender, but to get the boneheads used to him moving his hands at about shoulder height. They backed him into the couch, tried to get him to sit down.

  ‘Just take what you want,’ Tox said. They emptied his pockets, took his wallet and phone. Then Ali held the gun on him while his accomplice started searching the apartment.

  ‘What did she borrow money from you dopes for?’ he asked.

  ‘Baby stuff,’ Ali answered. ‘She was trying to buy a special kind of crib. Those things are expensive. She said her ex hocked all her baby shit. That you? You the baby daddy? What kind of deadbeat dickhead pawns all his baby’s stuff?’

  ‘This deadbeat dickhead, I guess,’ Tox said.

  ‘That’s low, bro,’ Ali said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s a dog act.’ The second man was kicking over papers, books, magazines, looking for cash or drugs.

  ‘Tonya ain’t a bad chick, you know.’ Ali turned the gun sideways, pointed the pistol teasingly at Tox’s jaw. Maybe imagining himself using it on something other than Coke cans he shot off a wall for YouTube videos. ‘I always thought she would make a good side bitch, but she never wanted to jump on board. She’s got expensive tastes now.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Tox said.

  ‘Last time I seen her, she was riding in a Beemer with some guy in a suit.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘When was this?’ Tox asked.

  ‘Like, sometime last month. Maybe if I blew her deadbeat ex’s head off she might suck my dick.’ He squinted, taking aim at Tox’s eye socket. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I splattered your ex’s brains for you,’ Tox said. He thought about it. Shrugged. ‘Worth a try, probably.’

  ‘This guy’s fucking funny,’ Ali grinned, showing blackened teeth. He stepped closer. The grin disappeared. ‘But you’re not so funny I wouldn’t shoot you. I’ve killed before, you know.’

  ‘Somehow I doubt that,’ Tox said.

  ‘What are you doing? You going to tell this guy your life story?’ the white guy snapped. ‘Bump him and let’s go! There’s nothing here.’

  Tox knew what a bump meant. He’d known when he saw the gun that he was likely going to be clocked with it. If they’d been serious gangsters, they would have carried a serious weapon, but the little pistol with the scratches and chips all over it had spent its entire life being used as a hammer, when it wasn’t starring on YouTube.

  As the gun rose, Tox sprang forward.

  He didn’t like headbutting people. It was a risky move, to be used in close quarters only. Still, he swept the gun arm sideways and smashed his forehead into Ali’s mouth. He swung Ali’s hand up as he flailed and popped off two shots towards his friend. The meat-brain looking for cash grabbed his knee and hit the deck.

  ‘Argh, shit! He shot me! Oh, God! Help!’

  Tox shoved Ali down and dragged the two idiots next to one another on the floor. The two men were a bloodied mess on top of the disarray of the room.

  ‘Don’t kill us,’ the white guy cried. ‘Oh, God. He’s gonna kill us!’

  ‘Phones and wallets,’ Tox said. ‘Including mine.’

  Tox tucked the goods into his pockets. ‘You two morons need a mentor or something. Practical experience. You’re pathetic. Stop smoking weed and watching Training Day and join a gang or something, for Christ’s sake.’

  Tox aimed and shot Ali in the calf. He put the gun in the back of his jeans while the kid screamed, spasming in pain. There was no sense in giving one of them the badge of honour of a real-life bullet wound and leaving the other out. He liked to be fair.

  He left the two men writhing and sobbing on the ground, gripping their wounds, as he stepped over the debris and left the room.

  Chapter 12

  WITH THE ALARM still screaming in my ear, I was dragged upright and marched to the door. The unnecessarily hard grip on my bicep told me I was in the company of Officer Hugh Ridgen, but even before that I knew him from the Brut deodorant he must soak his clothes in every day.

  ‘Oh good,’ I moaned. ‘It’s you. My day just keeps getting better and better.’

  ‘I heard someone gave you a kick in the face this morning, Blue,’ Ridgen said. ‘I’m only sorry I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I’m sorry you weren’t there too,’ I said. ‘I remodelled a girl’s face with a food tray. You could use some work on your hideous mug.’

  ‘You’re always such a flirt.’ Ridgen dug into the soft flesh under my arm with his fingers. ‘I understand it’s frustrating in here, but if you ever want someone to warm you up on those cold nights in solitary, all you have to do is ask.’

  ‘I spend my time in solitary fantasising about using your taser to fry your balls into tiny little bits of charcoal.’

  ‘You do, huh?’

  ‘It keeps me warm.’

  He led me through the door and down the hall. Another officer, Tommison, who I rarely see on my wing, joined us. Tommison was Ridgen’s superior, so I immediately felt safer.

  ‘What’s the trouble? Has there been an announcement?’ I asked.

  ‘Hopefully one of you bitches has gone on a killing spree over in E Wing.’ Ridgen walked me along just too fast to move comfortably with my wrists secured. ‘Who knows? We can only dream, huh, Harry?’

  During a level-one lockdown, all inmates were to be secured wherever they could be and prison officers were directed to supervise them until further notice. One officer could supervise a maximum of twelve women. The corridors were cleared to make way for Immediate Action Teams or key officers moving between wings of the building. Ridgen, Tommison and I turned a corner and discovered another inmate, Crystal Ch
ambers, standing looking through the windows of an empty room.

  ‘Inmate Chambers, you’re supposed to get down!’ Ridgen barked. ‘You must have done this drill a thousand times.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ Chambers turned and put her head against a wall, her hands at the small of her back to be cuffed. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Probably high,’ Ridgen said to Tommison as he cuffed the woman and dragged her roughly away from the wall. ‘Pretty little Crystal’s always high, aren’t you?’

  ‘We’ll put them in workroom B,’ Tommison said. ‘There’s a big crew of them in there, plenty of guards.’

  Tommison took my arm, and the alarm bells above us stopped ringing. The silence swelled for no more than a second before a different wailing siren took over. The quickening in the guards was immediate. Tommison shoved me into Ridgen, his body hot and hard against mine.

  ‘Jesus, level two,’ Tommison said. ‘You take care of these two. I’ll go.’

  He sprinted away, the keys at his belt jangling. In a level-two incident, all available staff were required to head to the section where the disturbance was happening. The sound made the hairs on my arms stand on end. More guards ran past us. I was so distracted by the tension and panic in the air that I almost didn’t notice Ridgen was walking us past the workroom where twenty or so women were being watched over by two guards. I glanced back, saw wrought-iron chair frames on the work tables half-painted a stylish matt black, probably destined for the terrace of some corporate building in the city.

  ‘Where are we going, Ridgen? He said to put us in the workroom,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ridgen said. ‘But you two are violent inmates. I’d rather secure you by yourselves. You never know – the level two might get you all excited.’

  He walked us to the end of the hall and unlocked a door. He prodded us into the small, empty education room. I realised there were no windows through which we could be seen by other guards or inmates. Ridgen took a spare set of cuffs from his belt and looped them through mine, locking me to a desk bolted to the floor beside the door. I knew we were in trouble when he went and hung his hat over the camera in the corner of the room.

  Chapter 13

  ‘IF YOU TOUCH me, I’ll make it so you wish you were never born,’ I told Ridgen. He laughed, leading Crystal to one of the desks in the first row of the classroom. She was taller than him but he lifted her and sat her on the desk without any trouble.

  ‘Harry, I wouldn’t touch you with a flamethrower mounted on the end of a barge pole.’ Ridgen lifted Crystal’s jumper and stuck his hands up beneath it. ‘You just sit there quietly and watch.’

  ‘You want me to watch?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ridgen smiled at me. ‘Get yourself some new fantasies about my balls.’

  Ridgen had been right about Crystal. She was clearly high. I knew drugs were even easier to get in prison than on the outside, but most of what I saw around me was inmates spaced out on marijuana or sleeping pills. Crystal had the drooping eyes and lolling head of someone on something much harder. She came out of the haze completely for a moment and tried to wriggle away from Ridgen.

  ‘Come on, Hughsie,’ she whined. ‘I don’t feel like it right now.’

  ‘Cryssie, we don’t have time for you to play hard to get. We’ve got a couple of minutes. Start feeling like it.’

  ‘I can’t start feeling it just like that! I’m tired! I need time!’

  ‘Ah, it’s just like that scene from The Notebook,’ I said. ‘I wish I had a glass of wine and a block of chocolate to enjoy this with.’

  ‘Shut up, Blue,’ Ridgen snapped.

  I sighed and sat against the wall. ‘Cryssie’ and ‘Hughsie’ had obviously arranged what a number of women in prison had over the years – an exchange of sex for perks, protection or drugs. Ridgen was notorious among the inmates for being partial to sexual favours in exchange for drugs. His favourite joke, about Johnsonborough being the perfect place to ‘find somewhere for your Johnson to burrow’, meant the other guards almost certainly knew about his extracurricular activities. The wailing siren, running footsteps in the hall and a second inmate watching his activities had driven Ridgen into a sweating state of passionate anticipation. I felt sick and looked around the room for something to distract myself with. On the table beside me was a stack of papers, tests marked and ready to hand back to inmates. Ridgen’s groaning was halted suddenly with a grunt as Crystal kicked him in the shin.

  ‘I said I don’t feel like it!’

  Ridgen pulled Crystal up from the desk and shoved her hard onto her front, so his crotch was against her backside. Crystal and I locked eyes across the classroom as he fumbled with her uniform trousers.

  ‘Ridgen, let her go,’ I said calmly. ‘She’s just not that into you.’

  ‘I told you to shut up!’

  ‘I’m giving you this one warning,’ I said. ‘You’d better listen.’

  ‘You’re warning me?’ Ridgen ripped at Crystal’s trousers. She whimpered as he shoved them down. ‘I’m going to remember you said that when I’m done here.’

  My cuffs, connected to the leg of the table by Ridgen’s second set, gave me about two feet of chain. I stood, sliding the chain up the table leg, and knocked the stack of papers onto the floor beside me, extracting a paperclip from the top of one. I used my sense of touch alone to straighten the paperclip and tear a strip of paper from one of the pages. It was difficult with my hands behind me, but Crystal was having a harder time. She had zoned out again, her eyes half open and staring at me as Ridgen struggled to unclip his heavy utility belt. I wrapped the strip of paper around the paperclip, squeezed and scrunched it tight then curved the wire to form a U shape, and shifted over to a power point on the wall just next to the leg of the table.

  ‘You asked for it,’ I said.

  Ridgen was ignoring me. I held the paper and fiddled around until the wires sank into the upper holes in the power socket. I couldn’t see, but I felt the burst of heat from behind me, searing against my fingertips. There was a crack like a gunshot.

  Ridgen and Crystal both jolted, and I shifted onto my knees, blindly grabbing at papers behind and beneath me. Blind to what was happening behind me, I could only hope that the paper wound around the wire had caught fire as I had planned, I began shoving test papers towards the power point, begging the universe to let the fire pass from the scrunched paper to one of the pages in my hands before it fizzled out.

  ‘What did you do?’ Ridgen grabbed at his pants. His legs were skinny and pale beneath stained white boxer shorts. ‘What the hell did you do?’

  The air smelled of burning paper. One of the pages had caught. I shifted away, as far as the two sets of cuffs would allow, and saw the fire spreading quickly through the papers, coiling and blue and small, but there. I shifted away, blew on the flames and watched them grow, heading for a pile of educational posters rolled and stacked under the table.

  Ridgen ran for the fire beside me. As he came I kicked out, struck his ankle and sent him sprawling into the table. The fire licked and slid into the pile of posters, rising slowly like a tide through the folds, the white centres of the rolls blackening and spewing smoke as Ridgen batted uselessly at them with his hands.

  I crouched beside the doorway as he ran into the hall for a fire extinguisher. The sprinklers above us sputtered and came to life. Crystal was lying still bent over the table, her pants around her ankles and her lips spread into a lazy smile.

  Chapter 14

  I LAY ON the concrete slab, staring at the brown swirls on the ceiling, trying to understand how the inmate who had used their own faeces to make the artworks had reached the fifteen-foot-high ceiling. The picture appeared to be some kind of angel or bird-woman emerging from a cave. The words in the angel’s speech bubble were barely decipherable: Jonsonburro gards r shit.

  ‘So.’ The guard sitting on a fold-out chair outside my cell flipped the page of her report. ‘You assaulted Inmate Jimmet, Inmate Briggs, Inmate Mallory and Inmate Scarborough. Your actions caused Jimmet and Briggs level-two injuries. You then went ahead and threatened Officer Ridgen and wilfully caused level-three damage to a facility classroom.’