“You’re the only one that’s seen it?”
“For now, but like I said — ”
Rufus looked at Michael’s briefcase. “You didn’t bring my letter with you, did you?”
Michael followed his gaze to the briefcase. “Well, I wanted to ask you some questions about it. You see — ”
“Lord help us,” Rufus said so violently that the guard braced himself to pounce.
“Did they take your briefcase when you come in? Because two of the men I wrote about are at this prison. One of them is in charge of the whole damn place.”
“They’re here?” Michael went pale. He had confirmed that the men named in the appeal were in the Army back in the seventies. He knew the current whereabouts of two of them, but he hadn’t bothered to locate the others. He froze, suddenly realizing that he had just made a potentially fatal mistake.
“Did they take your damn briefcase?”
Michael stammered, “Just — just for a couple of minutes. But I put the documents in a sealed envelope, and it’s still sealed.”
“You done killed us both,” Rufus screamed. Like a hot geyser, he exploded upward, flipping the heavy table over as though it were made of balsa wood. Michael leaped out of the way and slid across the floor. The guard blew his whistle and grabbed Rufus from behind in a choke hold. Michael watched as the giant prisoner, shackled as he was, flipped the two-hundred-pound guard off like a bothersome gnat. A half dozen other guards poured into the room and went at the man, swinging their batons. Rufus kept tossing them off like a moose against a pack of wolves, for a good five minutes, until he finally went down. They dragged him from the room, first screaming and then gagging as a baton was wedged against his throat. Right before Rufus disappeared, he stared at Michael, horror and betrayal in his eyes.
* * *
After an exhausting struggle that had continued all the way down the hallway, the guards managed to strap Rufus to a gurney.
“Get him to the infirmary,” somebody screamed. “I think he’s going into convulsions.”
Even with the shackles and thick leather restraints on, Rufus wildly gyrated, the gurney rocking back and forth. He kept screaming until someone stuffed a cloth into his mouth.
“Hurry up, dammit,” the same man said.
The group burst through the double doors and into the infirmary.
“Good God!” The physician on duty pointed to a clear space. “Over here, men.”
They swung the gurney around and slid it into the empty spot. As the doctor approached, one of Rufus’s thrashing feet almost clipped him in the gut.
“Take that out of his mouth,” the doctor said, pointing at the handkerchief balled up in Rufus’s mouth. The prisoner’s face was turning a deep purple.
One of the guards looked at him warily. “You better take care, Doc, he’s gone nuts. If he can reach you, he’ll hurt you. He already took out three of my men. Crazy SOB.” The guard looked menacingly at Rufus. As soon as the cloth was pulled from his mouth, Rufus’s screams filled the room.
“Get a monitor on him,” the doctor said to one of the attending nurses. Seconds after they managed to attach the sensors to Rufus, the doctor was closely watching the erratic rise and fall of Rufus’s blood pressure and pulse. He looked at one of the nurses. “Get an IV over here.” To another nurse he said, “An amp of lidocaine, stat, before he goes into cardiac arrest or has a stroke.”
Both guards and medical personnel crowded around the gurney.
“Can’t your men get out of here?” the doctor yelled into the ear of one of the guards.
The man shook his head. “He’s strong enough to maybe break those restraints, and if he does and we’re not here, then he could kill everybody in this room within a minute. Believe me, he could.”
The doctor eyed the portable IV stand as it was placed next to the gurney. The other nurse raced up with the amp of lidocaine. The doctor nodded at the guards. “We’re going to need your help to hold him down. We need a good vein to get the IV started, and from the looks of things we’re only going to get one shot at it.”