The Corruptions Read online

  “You know what they want, don’t you?” Clark says.

  “No, what do they want?”

  “They want the money in the vault. That’s the only reason a fuckup like Sweet would risk breaking back into a prison he already broke out of.”

  “The cocksucker was already scheduled to come back. Blood and Marconi were to take care of the delivery under the blind eyes of the press. That’s what we arranged with Sheriff Hylton. But instead they pulled a fast one, and broke in through the laundry instead.”

  “You dumb shit,” Clark barks. “You don’t think Hylton and D’Amico aren’t aware of your little military operation inside their own jail? You think they don’t know it was you who killed those three key witnesses in cold blood?”

  Rodney swallows something cold, hard, and bitter. “We wore masks. They didn’t get a positive ID, but they did manage to shoot one of my men in the thigh.”

  Clark sucks on his cigarette so fiercely, half of it burns down to gray ash.

  “You’re dumber than I thought,” he says.

  Rodney feels the veins popping out of his tree trunk neck.

  “When this is over,” he whispers, “I’m gonna rip your head off and piss down your neck.”

  “What did you just say, Corrections Officer Pappas?”

  Rodney clears his throat. “I said this thing isn’t quite a total train wreck.”

  “We literally opened the doors for Marconi to bring Sweet back in according to SOP, only to be stabbed in the back.”

  “Look it, Mr. Clark. I agree that Sweet wants money. He was an integral part of our organization. He and Moss, may the devil never let his soul rest. If anyone knows how to breach the prison and breach the vault, it’s him. But I think Marconi and Blood want more. They’re good people. Moral people. I think their intention is to expose the Crypt for what it is. And expose you and me in the process. Just like Gene, Joyce, and Larry would have done if I…we… allowed them to live.”

  Clark approaches the window, stares outside at the late afternoon sunshine.

  “So what the fuck are you going to do to protect the Crypt, myself, yourself, and the two dozen COs and lab civilians working inside it?”

  “I’m already working on it,” Rodney says, lifting up his left hand, taking a glance at the time. “It’s three forty-five now. Trust me when I say that Derrick Sweet, Keeper Marconi, and that mountain of a coon, Blood, will not live to see the clock strike four.”

  The alarm blared.

  Sweet looked up from the computer.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “We’re busted.”

  “You got the code?” I barked.

  “I’m fucking working on it.”

  “Keep working on it. Blood and I will hold them back.”

  I went for the gun rack. Without my having to ask, Blood sprinted across the room for the ammo. I pulled an M16 from off the rack, tossed it to my partner, then took one down for me. I thought about locking the door, taking defensive positions behind it, but I knew it would be important to hold them back as soon as they stepped off the elevator. Make our defense our best offense.

  “Got it!” Sweet shouted.

  I looked at him over my shoulder. “You open the vault. We’ll take care of the screws. Go now!”

  The elevator doors opened up. Both of them. It was like a mad rush of adult-sized, black-clad GI Joe figurines. All of them armed to the teeth, all of them shooting from the hip.

  “You go left, I go right!” I shouted.

  Blood and I both fired, the rounds connecting with the first wave of COs, dropping them on the spot. Out the corner of my eyes, I saw Sweet open the door to the vault room. Then, I saw him enter inside, raise up his hand to enter a numeric code into the wall-mounted keypad.

  The bullets whizzed by my ears. The rounds connected with the solid block wall behind me, ricocheting and pinging off the metal door frames. I returned fire until I was out, then quickly ejected the empty magazine and slammed home a full one. Aim. Fire. Repeat. That was all we had to do.

  And then, just like that, no more on-the-take Cos.

  But we were still taking gunfire. It wasn’t coming from the elevators. It was coming from the now shattered window on the meth lab door.

  I turned to Blood. “Think we can take them out?”

  “How hard can it be? They not fighters. They lab rats.”

  “That gives me an idea.”

  I lunged across the corridor, pressed my back up against the wall. Blood followed. The shooters were still trying to hit us, but they couldn’t manage to connect with anything other than concrete block wall while firing their weapons through an opening barely larger than a laptop computer screen. Sliding my way over to the door, I was only inches from two separate barrels that stuck out of the broken glass. Maneuvering my M16 so that my left hand held the grip, the thumb on the trigger, and the right hand now holding the forward grip, I shoved the barrel into the broken glass opening and fired at random.

  First came the screams and then came the explosion that blew the door off the room

  From down on the floor, my back now pressed up against the opposite wall, I looked for Blood. He was also pushed up against the opposite wall, his body, like mine, having been propelled by the force of the explosion. I couldn’t be sure, but it was entirely possible that we’d been knocked out for a minute or more.

  “You hit?” I said.

  He looked down at his legs and belly. Patted himself down.

  “Don’t think so, Keep. You?”

  I performed the same cursory examination. Nothing. Not even a scratch. Miraculously.

  “Nada,” I said, “but my ears are gonna ring for a while.”

  “What?” he said. “Can’t hear you.”

  We both stood up, brushed ourselves off. The general alarm had stopped, the electrical supply to it having no doubt been cut off by the blast. The lab was gone. Obliterated. The door and block wall blown entirely out, the lab rats evaporated, or blown to such tiny bits, not much of what remained resembled anything human. All that was left was a pit of mangled metal, jagged concrete, broken gas and severed electrical and water lines.

  “Sweet Jesus in heaven,” Blood said. “I knew meth was ignitable, but not that unstable and volatile.”

  “Meth labs blow all the time. All this one needed was a little help.”

  “Maybe we won the day. They ain’t making meth for a while.”

  But my gut told me that despite winning the battle, the war was far from over.

  “More ammo,” I said, jogging back into the office. “They’re gonna come back at us, and this time, with more fire power.”

  “True dat,” Blood said.

  We filled every available pocket with full magazines. On our way back out the door, I grabbed an extra M16, tossed it to Blood. Then I grabbed another for myself.

  “From this point on,” I said, “we go Rambo on those motherfuckers.”

  “Nobody fucks with Rambo,” Blood said, pulling back the slide on the second automatic rifle.

  I slapped a mag into my second M16’s housing, racked the slide, switched to full automatic mode. The mechanical noise of two descending cargo elevators filled the damaged corridor.

  “Here they come, Blood,” I said, now gripping one rifle in one hand, and the second in the other.

  Blood raised up his two-fisted M16s. “We end this now.”

  At the same time the elevator doors slid open, so too did the metal vault door.

  The new wave of COs came out shooting. Blood and I opened up on them, cutting them in half at the waist. Like the first time, it was a turkey shoot. They should have learned their lesson from the first go round. But as soon as the first wave was decimated, a second wave of one man per elevator positioned down on one knee clearly came into focus. The M16s they were carrying were armed with grenade launchers.

  “Incoming!” I screamed as two live grenades shot straight for us.

  If not for the terrible aim of the two COs launchi
ng the grenades, Blood and I would have become a permanent part of the Crypt, our flesh and blood painting the floor, walls, and ceiling. Instinct kicked in and we dropped flat onto our chests as the grenades passed overhead, striking the far wall behind us. We returned the fire, cutting down the last two COs only a split second before the elevator doors closed once more.

  We got back up onto our feet, brushed away the shards of concrete and glass from our bodies.

  I inhaled and exhaled a hot, sour breath. Then, “You think that’s the last of them? There can only be so many on-the-take COs working the Crypt.”

  “It’s not like they can sic all the guards on us,” he said. “They do that, they implicate themselves in some serious bad shit.”

  “That doesn’t mean there aren’t more coming at us. And when they do, they’re likely to pack some tear gas canisters inside those grenade launchers. They can’t kill us outright, they’ll try to gas us, then kill us.” Shifting my focus to the vault. “Sweet, how you making out in there?”

  “Come see for yourself!” he yelled.

  Blood and I made our way in, and nearly passed out from what we witnessed.

  The vault was maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Taking up almost the entirety of the floor space were no less than half a dozen aluminum laundry bins filled with cash.

  I turned to Blood. “Rough estimate.”

  He cocked his head, took a step forward staring into the closest bin. “Large denominations,” he said. “Each bundle, maybe three to five million, give or take, depending upon the consistency of the denomination. All told, maybe upwards of thirty million.”

  My eyes locked on the cash, glowing richly green in the overhead LED lamp light.

  “My guess is they won’t miss a million or so, should those kids happen to take notice.”

  “Cops might miss it when they investigate,” Blood said. “But then, you and me don’t take nothing for ourselves. That way we don’t have to lie. Much.”

  “We gotta keep up appearances, Blood. Do what’s right. But those kids deserve something after what they been through. If the FBI questions us, we’ll feign ignorance.”

  “Or, we could blame Sweet.”

  The con’s brow scrunched up. “You let me go when this is all said and done, you can blame me all you want. It will be my pleasure.”

  There it was again. The high-pitched wailing. The kids, locked in that room. Chained to the beds.

  “Jesus,” I said, both hands still gripping one M16 apiece. “The kids. We’ve got to free them before we give this cash another thought.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Blood said.

  Together, we exited the vault and sprinted the length of the battle damaged corridor to the dormitory.

  “Stand back,” I said, aiming the M16 at the door lever.

  I put three rounds into the lever and the deadbolt above it, managing to rip a six-inch gash in the metal door. Raising my leg, I kicked it open and revealed a room filled with maybe twenty early teenage kids.

  Their mostly gaunt faces displayed an odd emotional mixture of fear, sadness, anger, desperation, grief, and just plain happiness that someone…someone good…had finally come to rescue them. First things first: we needed a key. We couldn’t just start shooting the locks and spraying the room with lead and shattered metal. Not with all these kids around. Blood locked eyes on mine. As usual, he knew exactly what was running through my brain.

  “I see some keys in the desk in the office. Sweet can help.”

  He ran out of the room before I could respond, and returned a minute later with several small keys. He dropped half of them into my palm and kept the other half. Both of us went to work trying them on the locks until it was discovered that I had the master. From that point on, it was just a matter of unlocking each child.

  The kids then began to scream not because they were afraid, but because they were finally free. Finally getting out of this place. Placing my fingers under my tongue, I whistled to get everyone’s attention.

  “Hang on, everybody,” I said. “We’re not quite done yet. We still have to make it out of the prison and outside the gates. But before we do anything, I don’t want you leaving here empty handed.” Then, turning to Blood. “Blood, my man, take a quick look in the kitchen. See if there are any bags we might use.”

  Blood skipped off in the direction of the kitchen which was accessible to the dorm via an interior door. When he returned he was holding piles of plastic supermarket shopping bags in his hands.

  “This do the trick, Keep?”

  “Damn straight,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

  Handing each child a shopping bag, we made the short hike down the corridor to the vault, then worked like a team stuffing each and every bag. When we were finished I glanced at my watch. The whole money grabbing operation took maybe ten minutes.

  That was when Sweet turned to me.

  “What about me?” he said. “I’m still planning on spending the rest of my days in beautiful Mexico.”

  Sweet was a killer. A cop killer at that. A reprehensible human being by all accounts. But he did help us with freeing those kids. He did cooperate in exposing this dungeon of horrors. If he took some of the cash for himself, that was his business. Right was right, but sometimes it was more right when you put your blinders on.

  “Do what you gotta do, Sweet,” I said. “And we never had this conversation. At this point, I just wanna get those kids out of here. Fast.”

  I looked around for another way out beside the elevators. Then I remembered the door at the far end of the office.

  “That door,” I said to Sweet as he was filling a shopping bag with cash. “Will it lead us out of here?”

  “It leads directly to the exterior of the laundry,” he said. “But you’re going to have to blow your way through the locks. You’re not going to find keys for them like you did the padlocks on those kids.”

  “We’ve got more ammo than we need.”

  I was just about ready to gather up the kids and escort them to the door inside the office when the mechanical noise of descending elevators once again filled the corridor.

  “Everyone back inside the room!” I shouted. “Close the door and jump back up on your beds. Make it look like you’re still locked to the bedframes.” Out the corner of my eyes, I spotted a girl of thirteen or fourteen who started to cry. “And don’t worry, I’ll be back for you. Without fail, I will be back.” My eyes went from Sweet and Blood to the elevator doors and back again. “Sweet,” I said, “grab yourself a weapon and join us out here in the corridor.”

  Sweet was a killer. A murderer. He knew how it felt to take a life. You might expect him to be an expert at killing. A man who not only enjoyed taking a life, but a man who didn’t fear his bloodlust whatsoever. In this case however, the expression on his face was anything but fearless. If it were humanly possible, I think he would have grabbed his money and run for the hills. But there was no way out of the Crypt. At least no way out without taking the time to unlock that far door, and even then there likely existed another metal door or two to unlock.

  He ran into the office, came back out a few seconds later with an M16 and a full mag which he slapped into the automatic rifle’s housing. Something had happened in the time it took him to retrieve the weapon and return to the corridor with it. The fear on his gaunt face had been replaced with a kind of determination. There were still beads of sweat covering his forehead, and even more streaks of sweat that ran down his cheeks, droplets that dripped off his chin. It was sweltering inside the concrete cavern of a crypt now that the air conditioning had been blown out. We were all sweating, but Derrick Sweet was hot on the inside and the outside. Maybe he bore a personal grudge against the COs of Dannemora, even the crooked COs who he must have worked closely with down in the Crypt. But when he pulled the slide back on the M16 and shouldered the weapon, I knew then that he was no longer afraid, no longer wanting to run, even if God himself somehow offered him the option to ru
n. He wanted nothing more now than blood. The blood of the COs whose responsibility it was to incarcerate him.

  The elevators descended. Within two or three seconds the doors would open, unleashing what I could only assume would be a final assault. Winner take all spoils.

  “Okay, gentleman,” I said, taking aim. “This is it.”

  “We do this right,” Blood said, “we be outta here in a few minutes. With those kids. Dinner on me.”

  “You’re on, partner,” I said. “And don’t forget our dates. The girls.”

  “I just hope they still interested when this thing is finally over.”

  The elevator doors opened.

  “Let ’em have it,” I barked as the lights on the Crypt went black.

  The pitch dark Crypt lit up with a brilliant display of tracer rounds and red laser beam sites shooting and scooting in the both directions. It was like a series of rapid shooting stars and explosions. There was a kind of beauty to the exchange of gunfire, a kind of choreographed dance of hot red-white light and flashing bullets, the sound of sharp ricochets immediately followed by the spark and flash, and the satisfying pings of metal striking metal, and the thud of lead embedding itself into solid concrete block.

  But there was also the scream that came from Derrick Sweet as he charged the two open elevator doors, like a dough boy from a century ago who, having been too afraid even to aim his rifle at the enemy for fear of being exposed and cut down, had now by some miracle been transformed into a fearless man. A man who would sprint the length of no-man’s land without regard for his body, as if it were possible for him to retake an enemy trench all on his own. A man with not an ounce of common sense in his blood and bones at all, but only blind determination. And when I heard the last desperate shriek that seemed louder and higher pitched than the others that came before, I knew Derrick Sweet had finally met his maker in the form of a CO’s burst of automatic gunfire that struck him in the waist and nearly cut him in two.