The Last Pursuit

A Short Story

Copyright ©
2010 &
2012 by Rick Mofina

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the creation of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Th
e Last Pursuit

Rick Mofina

Kindle Edition

Copyright
©
2012 Rick Mofina

Copyright
©
201
0
Rick Mofina

ISBN 978-1-927114-
32
-
2

e-
Formatting provided by
Carrick P
ublishing

This e-book is intended for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this e-book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to
Amazon.com
and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The story, “The Last Pursuit,” was selected by the Crime Writers' As
sociation of the United Kingdom
to appear in its anthology,
Original Sins
.

It is included in my e-anthology,
Three to the Heart
, my second small collection of short stories which is the follow
up
to my first anthology,
Dangerous Women and Desperate Men
.

I regard the stories collected in
Three to the Heart
to be among the best of my short crime fiction.

Rick Mofina

Rmofina @ gmail.com

by Rick Mofina

clinked in the Maximum Security Unit of Saskatchewan Penitentiary as eight men, four of them prison staff, approached the last cell at the end of the corridor, the one segregated from the rest of the population.

Inside on his cot, inmate Robert Lazarus Yacine, turned his attention from his worn paperback copy of Nietzsche’s,
Beyond Good and Evil
to consider the traces of cologne and cheap motel shampoo that had arrived outside his door.

“Time to go,” Powers, the deputy warden, said.

Yacine stood and slid his hands through the portal of his cell door. Cold steel tightened around his wrists and snapped.

“Step back, please,” Farrell, the youngest guard, said.

Keys jangled, metal clicked against metal and Yacine’s heavy cell door opened. He cooperated as a waist chain and leg irons were applied. Taking stock of the men, he knew Powers, Farrell and the other prison guards, but not the four strangers. One of them passed him a pen and held a clipboard, thick with forms before him.

“Your signature is required by the Xs on each record,” the stranger flipped crisp pages of official documents for Yacine to see.

Letterheads flashed by; the U.S. Attorney General, the U.S State Department, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, Immigration, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, U.S. Homeland Security, Correctional Service Canada, the U.S. Justice Department and several other agencies.

It was awkward for him to sign, his cuffs and chains knocked against the clipboard. Chewing gum snapped as one of the new men eyeballed Yacine; six feet two inches, two hundred rock-hard bench-pressed pounds, laced with tattoos, all packaged in prison-issued green coveralls and sneakers.

The strangers wore jeans, khakis, button-down oxfords, polo shirts and windbreakers. The men were cold, grim, and all business as they assessed him amid the distant clang of steel doors and shouting inmates.

From Yacine’s quick read of names on some of the documents, he figured that two were RCMP Corporals, John Garrett and Terry Cox and the other two were Deputy U.S. Marshals, Arlo Phife, and Moss Johnston.

But Yacine didn’t know who was who.

“Washington DOC will provide you with toiletries, underwear and the like, when they process you at intake,” Powers said after witnessing Yacine’s signature.

“May I bring my book?”

“Personal or library property?” Powers asked.

“Personal.”

One of the strangers fanned the book’s pages, examined its spine and binding before concluding that it was a harmless paperback. Nothing concealed.

“Can I bring it?”

Powers threw Yacine’s request to the four strangers. It bounced among them until one of them nodded; an indication of who was in charge.

Yacine figured the one who’d nodded was in his mid-forties and sensed something curious; the stranger’s still face and dark, distant eyes gave him the aura of a haunted man.

Dark Eyes
.

Yacine tucked his observations away.

After processing Yacine and signing him out, he was escorted from the Maximum Security Unit to the rear of the prison where a CSC van and two marked Chev Impalas from the RCMP’s Prince Albert Detachment waited within the high stone walls of the institution.

The men put Yacine in the van and helped him with his seatbelt. The gum snapper sat facing Yacine and never removed his eyes from him.

“Tell me,” the gum snapper leaned forward, invading Yacine’s space, “that time you shared a cell with Zukoff, that huge Russian, were you his bitch?”

One of the others turned away, smiling covertly.

Yacine stared at the gum snapper, his chains tingling softly as over and over he rotated his book in his hands without speaking.