Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

cop when he got back in. He said, “They’ve got a room in the barn for us.” Registered, the way a CCTV camera records something that happened so that it can be played back later.

When the Ford pulled into a driveway up in the woods, I was awake and alert. The sign out front read ‘Port Morris Correctional Facility’. It was a big sign planted into a flower bed. But it was a little late in the season for flowers, and too dark to appreciate them even if they had been in bloom. The Port Morris Correctional Facility was all corrugated cladding and painted red, which accounted for what the detective had called it, ‘the barn’.

When the older guy opened the door for me, I got out. The detective was wearing a pancake holster clipped into a brown leather belt. It was a full-size Glock 22 in .40 caliber. No fancy grip, no tricked-out barrel modification. A plain vanilla standard law enforcement weapon. My hands were cuffed in front of me.

As I stepped out of the Ford, I visualized how I would take his weapon, kill him, and then the younger cop. Then I could take their vehicle. I estimated the task could be completed inside of a minute. Between fifteen and thirteen seconds, give or take. Closer to the upper estimate if I verified the kills, lower if I was content with a double tap and no verification.

But I was innocent, and innocent men don’t pull those kinds of stunts. I stood outside of the car, looking down at the detective’s puffy face. His hair was combed neatly in a side-part. He eyes were watery blue and his fleeting glance wanted desperately to stay out of trouble.

The detective said, “You’ll spend the night here. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

If this had been Chicago, or LA, they would have put me in the box immediately, looking for that confession. But this was not Chicago, LA, or Detroit, it was Port Morris, Alaska, and the cops were tired. I said nothing. Just looked at him.

He looked away, coughed once and said, “Oh, so you’re a tough guy huh?” He jerked his head to the red building. “Wait’ll you try that with those fellas in there. You won’t be so tough after that, buddy.”

I said nothing.

The younger cop came around the vehicle. He verified that my hands were cuffed before daring to speak to his colleague. “Guy giving you a headache, Jim?”

The older guy shook his head. “Thousand-yard stare is all.”

The younger guy looked at me. I looked at him and he looked away quickly, like he’d seen something forbidden. They walked me into the processing area, handed me over and left. Then I was alone with a room full of prison guards. I wondered if they were planning to make me breakfast. I was getting hungry.

Sixteen

I counted four corrections officers.

All four were staring at me. Not smiling. Not staring at me because they thought I was a famous actor. Two of them were young, two of them were not. None of them carried firearms, but each had a yellow Taser gun clipped alongside a radio to the front of a stab vest. Radio handset up high at the collar, opposite the dominant hand. Taser centered above the solar plexus, a chunk of yellow plastic, butt oriented to the same hand. The two young guys were clean cut and eager. One had black hair, the other was blond. Eager like they had a shot at going up the ranks, maybe competing to become warden one day. The other two looked faded and gray, like they’d given up on that idea a long time ago, like the concept of ambition was a distant memory.

The young black haired guy was in charge. He was preparing the paperwork at a clean white desk. He turned his arm to look at a wristwatch, scowled. Looked over at the blond young guy, who was standing there looking at me, hands crossed in front of him, with a fresh brush hair cut. The blond guy shook his head. The one in charge shook his head, it was contagious. Something was not right. I figured it was me.

I was wrong.

The door banged open and two more guards came into the processing room. New to the room, but not new. They were veterans, like the other two older guys. But these two looked worse. Worse in the sense that they looked like they’d never had any ambition to go up the ranks, because they had never intended to play by the rules. They looked like bad apples.

One of the bad apples was around forty and unnaturally jacked for his age. Which meant a diet of steroids with his Wheaties. His sleeves were rolled up, prominently displaying tattoos down the forearms. One side was a killer whale, the other a shark. Very original. I figured him for an ex-fisherman who either couldn’t hack it anymore or had become persona non grata on the fleet for some reason. The other guy was slim with a goatee. He wore a uniform that was a couple of sizes too large.

The clean-cut young guy in charge looked up at them. “About time, don’t you think, Gavin? Shift starts at one in the a.m.” He looked at his watch demonstratively. “It is now two a.m. and two minutes.”

The slim guy with the goatee must have been Gavin, and Gavin was the leader of the two. He said, “Sorry lieutenant, we got stuck in traffic.”

This was such a ridiculous claim that the lieutenant kind of gagged at it. He was about to say something, but one look at the smirking officers was enough to stop him. The young lieutenant just shook his head and looked away. The slim, smirking guy smirked harder and looked at his friend.

The clean-cut guys walked me through processing. They put my jacket, loose change, wallet and the laptop backpack in a cardboard box. They took my finger prints and photograph, and put a