Noble Warrior (19 page)

Krewls nodded approvingly at the dismantling of Fixer's life. Then, discovering one more thing that required attention, Krewls reached out, removed the pair of black eyeglasses from
Fixer's face, and dropped them to the floor.

SMASH!
His boot slammed down on the spectacles and blasted them to smithereens.

“I'm sure once we requisition another pair, the order'll be filled in what, eight to ten months?”

“Fuck you, Krewls!” Fixer cackled. “You can't get to me. The kid beat you. The kid owns you. The whole prison knows it, too.” Fixer turned and shouted at the top of
his lungs so the entire cell block could hear. “THE KID KICKED YOUR ASS!”

BAM!
Krewls bashed the old man in the gut and Fixer fell to the ground, grabbing his stomach. Just as it wasn't a coincidence that the guy not named Timmy ended up in Cell One One
Three, it also wasn't a coincidence that M.D. ended up sharing a cell with Fixer. The old guy was supposed to guide the kid. Teach him the rules. Keep his belly full, his body healthy, keep
him out of trouble, and make sure the young stud toed the line.

Saving a guard hadn't just pissed off the entire inmate population; the guard M.D. saved was a guard Krewls had set up. Hell needed to be paid for the defiance, and the first person to
make good on the debt was the old man to which Krewls had granted lots and lots of leeway.

It took a moment for Fixer to catch his wind but once he did the old man raised his eyes and glared at Major Krewls.

“You can beat our bodies, but you can't beat our spirit. And the kid,” Fixer said. “He just reminded us all of that. Reminded the entire population.” After
forty-seven years in lock up, Fixer realized he had sold his soul. It never bothered him either, because every last con he'd ever encountered eventually ended up selling theirs, too. Except
McCutcheon. M.D. hadn't and he wouldn't, and that inspired Fixer to see his world in a whole new light.

The old man struggled to his feet and began to chant.

“Long live the kid! Long live the kid! Long live the kid!”

“Throw him in ad seg,” Krewls said.

“For what?” the guard asked.

“Defiance.”

“But he's a geezer, Major. Guy ain't gonna make it through a long bid in solitary.”

“I said throw him in ad seg!” The officer clearly didn't want to do it, but like every other guard on the staff, he knew that Krewls ran the ship and he feared the
major's power.

“Let's go, Fixer,” the guard said with a soft tug of the old man's arm.

“The kid beat you, Krewls. No matter what you do from here, the kid beat you.” Again Fixer began shouting at the top of his lungs. “We are human beings! We are people! You can
take our bodies but you can't steal our souls. Uprising! Uprising! Long live the kid! Long live the kid!”

Krewls pushed M.D. back inside his cell and locked the door. “Clean this mess up,” he said to M.D. “Or not,” Krewls added. “I don't care what he says about
‘Long live the kid' or about how badass you think you are, the chances of you making it to see dinnertime three nights from now fall somewhere between fuckin' nada and
nope-er-rooskie.”

“Long live the kid! Long live the kid!”

Fixer's shouts became more faint as the guard escorted him down the hall and into solitary confinement. A moment later Krewls walked away, but it didn't escape McCutcheon's
attention that not a single other prisoner on the cell block joined in on Fixer's chorus.

Not because the other cons didn't understand Fixer's sentiments. Not because they didn't agree with these sentiments, either. The reason that no single man offered even one
peep of support came because of only one thing.

Fear of retribution.

A green light had been issued on McCutcheon, a command that called for his death.

A green light that had been issued by the High Priest.

S
ince McCutcheon would have been flying the colors of the Priests in the Think Tank, it fell on the Priests to handle their own man. Otherwise, if
another gang had to do the deed of keeping a renegade convict in check, the Priests would be seen as “punk-ass bitches” who'd broken the unspoken code of life behind bars.

In lockup, all gangs self-regulated their own people. If they didn't police their own when a code was broken and another gang had to do it for them, rivals gangs would consider this
absence of retribution an act of war. The Priests may have been the largest gang in the facility, but if all the other gangs united against them, any battle was sure to be bloody and costly.

For their part, the Priests had no real reason to stick by the side of M.D. anyway. And there was every reason in the world to sell him out and make him pay.

All the shotcallers agreed: M.D. had to go. The High Priest concurred, as well. In fact, he even saw it as an opportunity to prove his unrivaled supremacy. D'Marcus would make the hit on
McCutcheon more notorious and more infamous than any other hit ever executed in prison. Cons would talk about this icing for decades. Not only would the Priests take out McCutcheon, but
D'Marcus decided that he'd make Demon seal the deal.

“Make a father kill his own son,” D'Marcus boasted. “Now that shit shows POWER!”

He decreed the order. Word spread through the prison. No one was to touch M.D.

No one except Demon.

Later that afternoon, the High Priest handed Demon an eight-inch silver shank fashioned from the leg of a broken bed frame. Its spiked end had been sharpened to a fine triangular point. When
Demon was first handed the weapon, he thought it looked like something that could kill a vampire.

“I have spoken,” D'Marcus said. Demon held the shiv in his hand and felt its weight. With masking tape wrapped around the back half of the shank the weapon owned a firm and
solid grip. A strong tool, indeed. Capable of great destruction.

“We'll rush as a mob, hold him down and then you'll strike. Am I clear?”

“Clear.”

“You got any reservations about what you're gonna do?”

Demon raised his eyes, confident and alert. “None at all.”

“Good.” The High Priest smiled. “I can't wait to see this shit. We'll roll at chow time tonight.”

But M.D. didn't go to dinner that night, and though the S.O.S. offered little that he liked, the bag of food that Mends provided got McCutcheon through the evening.

And the next got him through breakfast, and the next got him through lunch, and the one after than got him through dinner the next day. The Priests didn't have a chance to get to M.D. out
in the open at all, and after twenty-four hours of inaction, the other inmates in prison started getting restless.

After thirty-six hours, rival shotcallers began to question the intentions of the High Priest. Maybe this was a power play, a way of showing every other con on the yard that the biggest dog in
the park got to make its own rules? A big fuck-you to everyone else. The whole prison grew tense and looked at risk of descending into chaos. Something had to be done. Krewls knew it. He understood
that the whole facility stood on the edge of anarchy.

“Mends thinks the guards are in charge,” Krewls told one of his lieutenants. “We don't take action, this whole place is gonna blow and we'll be living in a shit
storm for months.”

Of course Mends didn't live at the jail and couldn't monitor everything twenty-four hours a day, so on the third morning after McCutcheon had saved the major from Pharmy and Goblin,
while Mends rolled on the carpet of his town house with his twin three-year-olds rolling on top of him, Krewls arranged for M.D. to have a little rec time on the yard, whether he wanted to go or
not.

McCutcheon knew he'd been set up. He understood that he'd been tossed into the rec area where the ad seg guys got their daily hour of court-ordered fresh air, a
twenty-four-by-eighteen-foot pen, on purpose. There was only one way in and one way out, and after the guards brought M.D. into this rectangular steel cage and told him to enjoy his workout, he
knew to expect trouble.

Twenty minutes after he'd been locked alone in the steel enclosure, no other prisoners around, no other guards on duty, Mends at home spending some time with his family, McCutcheon saw a
door open.

In stepped seven Priests. Night Train first, four other beefy, hardened soldiers behind him, then Demon, and finally the High Priest.

McCutcheon backed up, took off his shirt, and neatly folded it up before placing it on the ground.

“This is gonna be delicious,” D'Marcus said with a beaming smile.

Five Priests fanned out before rushing at McCutcheon, while Demon and D'Marcus held their position in the back. M.D. knew there was no way possible for one man to fight five guys—but
he also knew he didn't need to fight five guys.

He only needed to fight one guy. Five different times in a row.

He landed an elbow in the center of Night Train's face, and re-smashed the nasal cavity he had already hammered in less than a week earlier. Night Train crumpled to the ground, and M.D.
knew that after a blow like the one he'd just delivered, Night Train would not be getting up.

Stay outside, M.D. thought. Fight the guy on the edge and keep pushing him away.

The huddle grew tighter around him and McCutcheon shot low and outside to the left. His punch landed right above the groin of his second target, and the gangster buckled forward from the impact.
M.D., however, instead of following up with a shot to the face, pushed the second Priest to the inside, causing him to block the path of his fellow attackers.

The obstruction worked, but only for a moment, because McCutcheon ran out of room. The fence behind him cut off the rear, and the fence to his right left him no space to maneuver to the north. A
third Priest rushed forward and ate a big fist, but attacker four and attacker five each landed clean, heavy blows. M.D. tried to trade with them, but there were too many assailants and not enough
space, and thirty seconds later McCutcheon found himself unable to hold off the assault.

They had him and they began to make him pay.

They drilled M.D.'s ribs, face, and head with thunderous blows and then, once wobbled, the Priests held M.D.'s arms up against the fence, laying the center of his chest bare. Demon
stepped forth, reached behind his back and withdrew the long, sharp killing device.

McCutcheon, bleeding from his face, made eye contact with his father. Demon's gaze looked empty, cold, and soulless.

“Daddy brought you into this world,” D'Marcus said. “And now Daddy's gonna take you out.”

The four Priests restraining M.D. smiled.

“I seen a lot of men die,” D'Marcus continued. “But this memory is gonna last a lifetime.”

Demon raised the shank, its edge poised to strike.

“Die, motherfucker!” His heart filled with rage, Demon struck with all his might and nailed his target exactly where he aimed, driving the metal spike five inches deep into the soft
flesh of his victim's neck.

The High Priest staggered backward and gagged, blood gushing from his jugular like an uncapped oil well spouting a red stream of liquid gold high into the air.

Stunned by the sight of their leader being stabbed in the neck, the four Priests restraining McCutcheon instinctively relaxed their grip. Demon led with an overhand right and then followed with
a crisp left cross, landing two stone cold shots, just like he used to do back during his days as a professional boxer. Each blow hit its mark, and the Priest holding McCutcheon's right hand
crumpled to the ground. With a newly freed arm, M.D. smoked an elbow that cracked a Priest on his temporal lobe, and the man on his left crumpled, too.

Four on two turned to three on two and three on two quickly turned to even odds.

Son fought by father, side by side, and before another two minutes had passed, the Daniels men were the only ones left standing inside the steel cage.

Demon and his son stepped over a fallen enemy and headed for the door, leaving a gaggle of bodies bloody and battered in their wake. D'Marcus spasmed as he tried to pull the spike from his
neck, but it had been lodged too deep, and with each passing moment he lost more and more blood.

Demon slapped M.D. on the back as they exited through the doorway and smiled.

“Good to see ya, son.”