Sanctuary

28

“TELL ME, OR I swear I’m pulling this trigger,” I snapped.

The judge was trembling from head to bloody feet, furious that I’d maneuvered him into baring his deepest secret. But he still wasn’t telling me.

“I swear…”

“I received a call from Basal this morning,” he breathed.

“That’s not enough. We’ll start over. Three, two,…”

“The warden called me an hour ago.” He was breathing hard. “He said there’d been an accidental death. A rape that went too far.”

A rape?

“You know the warden? Why would he call you? Who was raped?”

“I was instrumental in transferring a young man convicted of statutory rape to his prison. The boy was evidently raped.”

“What about Danny?”

He held his silence and I knew that this was the information that had him resisting all along. He could have told me about the boy earlier, but it was something about Danny that he wanted to keep from me.

“What was the name of your son?”

The muscles along his jawline bulged.

I pressed the gun in tighter. “Tell me!”

“Roman,” he said.

“He was a pedophile?”

“Yes. Now move the gun.”

So I really had been right. I stood back and lowered the gun to my side, still trying to connect the dots. Franklin Thompson had made the one confession he never imagined making, but I needed more. Danny had killed the judge’s son, and for that maybe I was sorry. But that was the past.

“What does the boy’s rape have to do with Danny?”

“The warden said there could be some trouble, and he wanted legal advice. If any of this comes out, you know I’ll deny it.”

“Tell me what I need to know and it won’t. Trouble with who? With Danny?”

The man’s eyes shifted. “He told me that the inmate behind the rape wants to kill Danny. And that he’s inclined to allow it. That’s all I know.”

“What do you mean kill Danny?” Waves of heat washed over my face. “Who’s going to kill Danny?”

“That’s all I know! I sent the boy there because the warden said he needed him to break Danny. I didn’t know he would be killed. Danny murdered my son!”

“If you could prove that you’d have gone through legal channels.” But my mind was on Basal. Randell was going to kill Danny, and the warden was in on it. “You have to help me stop it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t? You set this up—you have to!”

“I didn’t set it up. I only got him the boy.”

“Call the warden and tell him I know everything.”

“I can’t. And you don’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“The warden knows too much. He would turn on me. My life would be over.”

“I don’t care if your life would be over! You set Danny up, you get him out!”

Keith banged on the door. “Renee?”

“Hold on!”

Blind with rage, I walked back up to the judge and put the gun against his teeth. “Now you listen to me, Judge. I really have lost it. You hear me? I’m a neurotic, manic mess. I don’t care anymore if I live or die. You’re going to call that warden and you’re going to get Danny out of there, or I swear I’m going to blow off another body part!”

“You don’t understand. The warden would start cleaning up his mess the moment I called him! They’d all be dead—Danny, the boy, Randell—all of them. There’d be no witnesses. And then he’d come after me.”

My mind was in a dark fog, and all I could see was Danny, the gentle giant who’d taken a vow of nonviolence, turning the other cheek as the warden beat him to a bloody, dead mess.

But somewhere in that fog I knew that the judge was right. The machine that had growled to life couldn’t be stopped with a phone call. Or by the law, not quickly enough.

Danny had awakened a leviathan, and now he was in its jaws. He was in that monster factory, doing his time. Time that was grinding to a halt.