There was what she thought might be a smaller cell block, with only two or three rooms in it. The guard unlocked another grilled door, pushing her into a brightly lit room, then through another door. Two doors to the left. One to the right.
A second guard was lounging against the wall.
“Hi, Joe. How’re ya going?”
“Just got to get rid of this.”
“Want a hand?”
The same laugh that made Nanci bite her lip. “For this? You’re jokin’, man. Get her doing the chicken dance and be back ready for supper.”
“See you in there.”
“Sure.”
The door slamming.
A stretch of corridor about thirty feet long. Stark overhead strip lights. One door on the right. One more ahead, heavier, with steel double bolts.
And iron hooks, eight of them, set in the stone wall. The wall and the floor beneath were stained brown and black, and the smell almost made Nanci Simms gag. Terror and pain and death. Something that could never be cleaned away.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“End of the road, slut.”
There were two small four-legged stools against the wall. “You said I could go.”
“Won’t need them stools. Just lift you up and loop the wire around your scrawny neck. Let you dangle.”
“No, God Almighty. You can’t do that.”
“Watch me.” One hand scratched his balls. “Yeah, your eyes’ll pop out of your ugly bitch head watching me.”
“Mother of mercy, this can’t be the end of Veronica. Someone’ll hear me.”
“Yeah. Me and Ed through there. And our special prisoner in his own little room,” he said, pointing to the side door. “He won’t help. Nor me an’ Ed will.”
That was what she needed to know.
The door must be to the outside. If the guard had the key, it might work. If he didn’t…
And nobody else close enough.
She dropped suddenly to her knees, looking up at the hulking figure with a pleading, desperate expression, hands reaching in a hopeless, clumsy fumbling toward the guard’s belt. “I’ll do anything,” she stammered.
“Anything?”
“Everything. Bet you never been offered everything. I could be real nice for you.”
She stared into his face and saw the momentary flicker of crimson lust deep in the tiny eyes.
“No, forget it. Might let you give me a blow job ‘fore I swing you. Least you can die happy.” He bellowed with laughter. “Die fucking happy.”
IN HER OFFICE in the main administrative block, the chief of the Hunters of the Sun wiped her mouth with a white linen napkin, dabbing gently at her lips. She looked at the last few inches of wine in the dark green bottle and decided that she would wait until after the questioning.
It was going to be special.
Reports she’d read of the initial interrogation of the journalist by some of her juniors had tended to make her believe that he truly didn’t know much about Zelig and his secret rat hole in the north. But she was equally sure that her own tender, feminine touch might easily open up parts of his memory he didn’t even know about himself.
They knew that most of the crew of the ill-fated shuttle were dead. But some had dropped clean off the face of the earth, and Jeff Thomas would certainly be able to tell her all about them. Point a helpful finger.
She laid her napkin on the table and stood up, pressing a white recessed button beneath the edge of the table. “Think I’m ready to speak to the prisoner, Thomas, now,” she said when her skinny male assistant pushed his head around the door.
JEFF THOMAS had been sleeping, an uneasy, patched sleep broken by wakeful moments that seemed to have the horrors of nightmare seeping into them. There had been one where he’d been hounded through an echoing warehouse by a gang of young thugs, armed with tiny, pecking knives. It was something that clearly had its roots in the moment in San Francisco when he’d first met Nanci Simms.
The voice of one of the regular guards penetrated his fitful rest.
“Die fucking happy.”
There was a small slit in the door where food and drink could be passed through, and Jeff eased himself off the bunk and flattened himself against the wall. He tried to see through the narrow gap, but the angle was wrong.