Page 25

He had said it the way other people say goodnight. So casual, yet it was anything but.

By four in the morning, I had built an entire case for myself, and it was a good one. He was chained. He was on the other side of a hundred cameras, a great many men with radios, and more locked doors than I could count. He had gotten under my skin for one hour and that was because I was tired and low on sugar. So what if I had made the rookie mistake of looking directly at him instead of at the wound. It wasn’t like I was going to let that happen twice.

By five I had gone over the whole thing again and found the hole in it.

Because every single piece of my case was a thing that stood between him and me. The doors. The cameras. The men. The chains. And not one of them had been my idea. Not one of them was mine. They belonged to Ashlock, and Ashlock could move them any time it liked.

A man does not say ‘we’ll see’ about a door he cannot open.

And nobody plans a ‘next time’ they can’t make happen.

I got up at five thirty and drove in early, because the one useful trick I had learned in three years is that a body in motion is much harder to frighten than a body tossing and turning in bed.

The prison was wrong that morning.

Okay so, six days in a place didn’t exactly make me an expert, and I hadn’t been there long enough to know what normal looked like, so maybe I was imagining it. But I had Jones’s word for it, that a place like Ashlock runs on rhythm. Runs on a tight schedule of meds and meals and head counts and lockdowns. But even a woman as new as me could feel that the rhythm had gone off its beat.

The lot was half empty, which wasn’t surprising given how early it was. It also meant that there wasn’t a line to get through security and Mick wasn’t on the wand. There was a woman I had never seen doing it instead, and she went through my bag with the joyless thoroughness of somebody covering a shift she hadn’t planned on. She didn’t ask me a single question about my insulin, which I found I didn’t like at all, making me wonder how easy it was to slip in contraband. Of course, I also wasn’t completely naive to the inner workings of a prison, and I didn’t mean the type guards knew about. At least not the guards who were paid to look the other way.

I wanted to label this feeling as paranoia, which was a problem in itself, because ever since running from my past life the P word and I had become fast friends. Which was why I had a bad feeling about today.

Two of the corridor doors that had stood open all week were now shut. And the guards had gone quiet and not the professional sort of quiet that signified men doing their job.

But the other kind.

They stood in twos where they had stood in ones, and when they spoke it was in a low murmur that stopped whenever anyone came within ten feet of them. One of them in particular, a big kid with a jaw like a shovel, looked at me as I passed and then looked away so fast he nearly hurt himself.

Something has happened, said the part of me that has kept me alive for the last three years. Something happened here and nobody is going to tell you what it was.

“Morning,” I offered in an overly chipper voice to the officer walking me down.

“Morning,” he said, and nothing else, not even for the entire length of the corridor.

Fine. Great. Cool.

I have been ignored by plenty before him. Besides, being ignored was a good thing. It meant I was forgettable.

The infirmary door was propped open with a trash can, which it never was, and Dr. Halloran was standing up, which again was odd. Especially as I swear his ass was glued to the chair in his office. Because in six days I had seen the man vertical exactly twice, once to get coffee and once to move his chair closer to the coffee. He had a body built for sitting and a face built for radio, as long as the segment didn’t include people calling in to ask him things.

He was no Frasier Crane.

Yet there he was, now on his feet, at the staff filing cabinet in the corner. The second drawer was hauled all the way out, and he had folders pinned under one arm.

He also didn’t hear me come in, that’s how absorbed he was, and Halloran had never been absorbed by anything in his life except a lunch order.

“Morning,” I said and he jumped a mile, like I had fired a gun.

“Jesus.” He got a hand onto the drawer and shoved it half shut, which didn’t really achieve anything, since the folders were still under his arm.

“You’re early.” He said it like it was a bad thing, or some kind of accusation.

“Traffic was kind.” Kinder than my sleepless night that was for sure.

“Right.” His eyes went over my shoulder to the door, and back. There was sweat along his hairline, which was weirder still as it wasn’t exactly warm in here.

“Right, well. Good,” he stammered nervously, and I was left wondering what on earth was going on with him.

I put my bag down slowly and didn’t look at the cabinet, because not looking at things was a skill I had honed to a fine point. And I knew that a man sweating over a filing drawer will tell you far more if you let him keep believing he is the only clever person in the room.