Her left hand reached up toward Joe’s shuttered eyes.
He felt no more pain, his brain already overloaded, but a tiny part of his mind was aware of a jagged intrusion beneath his eyelids. Probing and tearing. Warm liquid soaked his cheeks, and an infinite blackness was hovering about him.
Then he seemed to be floating. For a moment he thought of something really important that he wanted to say, but the words slithered away from him like a hand filled to overflowing with buttery maggots.
The floating stopped…and his breathing stopped.
The pain in his lower abdomen seemed to have eased, but now there was a terrible cutting agony in his throat. He struggled to draw breath, but his mouth was filled with the hot iron taste of blood.
Nanci took the Port Royale from his shoulder, one of her Heckler & Koch handguns from his belt. She moved away as the dying man’s heels began to drum against the wall in the neural spasm that preceded his slow passing from life.
In his cell Jeff heard the sound of a scuffle, but he didn’t dare to go again and peer through the narrow slit in his door. He sat on his bunk, head in his hands, mind racing over what was going to happen to him. He tried to concentrate on the lies he’d already told his inquisitors and the new ones that he might soon have to come up with.
He was aware of the smell of excrement drifting in, but he ignored it. Jeff had been in that part of the prison complex long enough to be used to it. Most of the victims of the wire-and-hook technique fouled themselves in their lingering agony.
Nanci was standing still, waiting and listening.
A doctor would have found that her pulse and respiration were only fractionally above normal.
“Thomas,” she breathed. If it really was the long-lost Jeff Thomas in that room across the passage, then it might be a delightful and unexpected bonus. It would be nice to see good old Jeff again, remind him how he’d walked away and left her to die out in the desert.
Her grip tightened for a moment on the butt of the 15-round automatic.
Behind her Ed unlocked the door and walked through, hopeful of getting himself a piece of the action before the woman got strung up on the wall.
He found himself looking straight down the railroad-tunnel muzzle of a big handgun.
“Close the door,” she whispered so that the tall guard could barely hear her. “Slow and easy. Or I spill your guts on the floor. Now.”
Ed was staring at the blood-drenched corpse of his friend, face swollen and disfigured as he hung from the hook. The smell of excrement and death filled the corridor.
“You… how d’you… who helped you?”
“Nobody.” She stepped close to him. “Close the door, slow and easy now.” She was watching him, listening to hear the lock click shut. “Good. You’re going to get to live awhile. That other door leads to the outside, does it?”
“Yeah, it do.”
“Excellent. You may go to the top of the class. One more question. Where is the motor pool?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, concentrating on squeezing his buttocks together to stop losing control. “Don’t know what…”
“Where are the vehicles kept? I believe that it might be in a compound just beyond this outer door. We came in that way, unless my sense of direction had departed from me. So, am I correct in locating the trucks and cars?”
“Why, yes, ma’am.” He was sweating so much it was running in his eyes, but the man didn’t dare even blink. Never in his life had anything terrified him as much as this sixty-year-old teacher lady.
“The bolts do the door?”
“Sure do. Chief don’t like too many keys. Cells and all bolt on the outside. That one on the inside. Door behind me needs a key to get in.”
Nanci smiled at him. “That is wonderful. You can be the blackboard monitor for all of next week.”
“Thank you, lady.” He was so relieved that she didn’t appear to be angry with him that he wasn’t even listening to what the woman was actually saying to him.