The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(8)

…Murder, First Degree, one count

Racketeering, two counts

Criminal Conspiracy, four…

“No,” I whispered.

…Daniel Faust stands convicted on all counts and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

The page buckled in my hands. In the top corner, I read the date.

I hadn’t lost twelve hours of memory.

I’d lost four months.





4.




This wasn’t Chicago’s work. No, the Outfit had framed me for murder, pretty as a picture, but they couldn’t have wiped the memories of my trial. They didn’t have that kind of magical juice. And even if they could, why do it in the first place? The end result—getting me out of the picture while they laid siege to Las Vegas—was the same.

And where was my crew? There was no way they would have let me rot behind bars for four months. If the trial had been going that badly, Caitlin would have torn the county jail apart with her bare hands to get me out.

Assuming she wanted to, the traitor in the back of my mind piped up. The one who’d listened when Nadine told me that Caitlin was only using me. That once she was done with me, she’d throw me away.

No. No. I believed in Caitlin. And even in the worst-case scenario I could imagine, even if she’d turned her back on me, the rest of my family would still come to the rescue.

So where were they?

I struggled to think back, walking through the events of four months ago—or in my muddled mind, the last few days. There’d been the botched heist at Damien Ecko’s jewelry store, the underground poker tournament, then handing off that Aztec dagger and finding out my “client” was really a hostage in his own mansion. I’d flown home to Vegas and got the call from the Outfit’s rakshasa imitating Jennifer’s voice, and walked right into their—

Wait. Back it up.

The store robbery. We’d worn monster masks because it was mid-September and Halloween stores were sprouting up like weeds in strip malls across the suburbs. That would make it January now.

So why did it still feel like late summer when I got off the prison bus? A hot, dusty day. Not that we often got a white Christmas in the Mojave Desert, but there was still a difference between September and January temperatures. The weather felt exactly the way it had when I’d flown back to Vegas.

I stepped outside and glanced into the next cell. A human skeleton with a conga line of needle marks running down his arm slouched on his bunk, staring at a magazine.

“Hey,” I said, “you know what the date is?”

“Seventeenth,” he told me.

“Yeah, but what month?”

He arched an eyebrow at me. “September.”

I went back to my bunk.

I was busted in September. Sentenced four months later. But it was still September. Yesterday was the sixteenth. I’d flown home on the sixteenth. Gotten busted on the sixteenth. Then I spent four months in the legal system. In one day.

Sudden pain flared behind my eyes and inside my nostrils, a fire raging in my sinuses. I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose until it passed.

I read the date on the paperwork again. But now it wasn’t a date at all. It was a blur, a blob of ink that shifted and squirmed. A liar unmasked, its hold on my mind broken.

It was a con. None of it had happened. Somebody, somehow, had thrown me behind bars with a mix of bogus paperwork and magical mind-hacking. How, I didn’t know, but that was secondary to my real problem.

As far as the state was concerned, I would spend the rest of my life in this cell.

Unless I could prove otherwise. How far did the setup go? If I found the judge who supposedly oversaw my trial, would she remember sentencing me? Hell, all I had to do was match the trial transcript to my arrest report, and that would prove the trial couldn’t have possibly taken place. More than ever, I needed to get the ear of somebody in authority, somebody with the pull to—

“New guy.”

I looked up, jolted from my thoughts. I had a visitor. A visitor the size of a professional wrestler, showing off the kind of muscles you only get with vigorous and enthusiastic steroid abuse.

“I’m Simms,” he said, sounding friendly enough. There was something in his eyes, though, a predatory edge he couldn’t hide.

“Faust,” I told him.

“Thought I should introduce myself. See, I handle security for this tier.”

“Security,” I echoed, my voice flat.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s a prison, right? Lotta bad guys around here. Some of these lifers, they’ve got nothing to lose. They’ll take everything you’ve got and shank you just for kicks. You need a buddy, somebody to watch your back.”

“I thought that was Brisco’s job.”

He flinched just a little at the mention of Brisco’s name. Guess he hoped he’d catch the new guy before I learned the lay of the land. Didn’t slow down his sales pitch, though. He was too single-minded for that.

“Nah, forget him. Look, know how many whites are living on this level? Six. On the whole tier. If a riot pops off, you think Brisco and his boys are gonna run down from tier five and save you? Not happening. But me, I’m just two cells away.” He nodded to the left. “And I’ll take care of you.”

“For a price,” I said.