The Sanctuary

30

I FACED THE judge and all I could think was that I had to save Danny. Danny had saved me and now I had to save him. The judge was complicit in a plan to destroy him, and I alone knew the full truth.

As I saw it, there was only one way to save him.

I hurried to the door, turned the handle, and jerked it open. Keith spun from where he was pacing in the shadows. I gave the door a shove and let it slam behind me.

“We have to break into Basal.”

He stared at me. “What happened?”

“I’m done with this game. I’m going in there and I’m going to kill Randell.”

“You think that’ll stop Sicko? What happened in there?”

“He’s going to kill Danny, that’s what happened.”

“The judge told you that?”

“The warden’s in on it. They’re in that institution, free to do whatever they want, and right now what they want is to break Danny. I’m going after him.”

“Hold on, slow down.” Keith walked to the office door, cracked it wide enough to glance inside and, satisfied that the judge was as he was supposed to be, notwithstanding bloody feet, he shut it and faced me.

“From the top. Before any more crazy talk about breaking into Basal, I need to know what just happened in there. What did he say?”

“I shot off two of his toes.”

“I saw.”

“He told me that he came to some kind of agreement with the warden to send a boy to Basal so the warden could break Danny. But it’s all gone wrong and now Randell’s going to kill Danny.”

Keith dropped his eyes to the floor. “He knows we didn’t follow his instructions. The boy at the warehouse—we didn’t cut off his finger. He’s following through.”

“Either way, we have to get in,” I said. “And the judge can’t know. All it would take is one call from the judge to warn the warden.” I couldn’t say anything about the judge’s son—Danny’s first victim. “We have to go, Keith. It’s our only play.”

“Slow down…”

“They brought Danny to Basal to break him, but I know Danny. He doesn’t break easily. They’ll kill him instead.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “You’re forgetting about Sicko. Unless you think the judge is Sicko…”

No, that didn’t make sense, did it? “Sicko wants the judge dead,” I said.

“So who’s pulling the strings? The warden?”

“Maybe.”

He paced, running his hands through his hair. “Why would the warden have a grudge against Danny? I can understand trying to break him on the inside, but why go through all this trouble with us?”

“Because he knows how much Danny loves me. And if Danny knows what’s happening to me he’d…” Lose it, I thought, but a knot in my throat cut off my voice.

“I don’t know. The warden wouldn’t risk all this craziness to break a man.” He glanced back at the door. “That leaves the judge. But that doesn’t makes sense either. Why would he want us to kill him? And why would he make us jump through all of these hoops?”

In a perfect world, we’d have the answers we needed before we did anything crazy, like break into Basal. But we didn’t have time to unravel the mess. I had to get to Danny. That was all I cared about now.

“It doesn’t matter. We have to get in there before it’s too late.”

“It always matters.”

“We get inside the prison and stop Randell—that’s what matters. The answers are there. All of them, there, not here.”

He didn’t object as quickly this time.

“Assuming we could get in and stop Randell, the warden would just find another way to break Danny,” he said.

“Then we stop the warden. We blow the whole thing sky-high!”

“How?”

“I don’t know how,” I snapped. I took a deep breath and tried to gather myself. “You tell me how. Prisons are built to keep people in, not keep them out. Don’t tell me there’s no way. We either get in there and stop this or, like you told the judge, we’re all finished. All of us.”

He lifted a hand to quiet me. “Okay, calm down.” He absently scratched at his neck. “But Sicko’s still pulling strings. He can’t find out we’ve abandoned the judge. Which means…” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

He flipped me a glance. “His instructions gave us forty-eight hours to get the money. We’d have to do it within the next two days.”

I’d won him over, which could be either good or bad, but in that moment all I could think about was Danny, and Danny was in trouble now, not in two days.

“We can’t wait that long.”

“You can’t just drive up there and walk in. We’d have to get the right identification, make the arrangements, and plan it down to the minute. And then there’s the getting-out part.”

“So you know how we can get in?”

He averted his eyes. “Maybe. I’ve been thinking…I made a few calls.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“You would have insisted. We didn’t know enough to go off half-cocked. We still don’t.”

“I do.” I walked over to my kit open on the floor and shoved the gun into the bag. “Everything leads back to Basal. Everything.” I snapped the kit shut and snatched it off the floor. “We’re wasting our time here.”

“What about the judge?”

“We tell him he has two days to gather one million dollars. We’ll be back in forty-eight hours.”

“And what if he goes to the police? Or warns the warden?”

“He won’t,” I said. “I know too much about him now. If he can’t keep quiet, what I know about him goes to the press.”