The prospect of dying didn't frighten her unduly. What worried her was what she would leave behind.

If she had died today, Meg would be alone.

Not technically alone. Dan would take her. She would go back to Santa Barbara, back to the house in the hills where she had grown up. But Dan was too irresponsible, too wrapped up in himself to take much interest in raising his fifteen-year-old daughter. Meg would be left to fend for herself, and she wasn't ready for that. She was not as grown up as she liked to think.

Robin shook her head, brushing off these thoughts. Nothing had happened to her. There was no reason to worry. She was fine. Meg was fine. Everything was fine.

Sure it was.

Justin Gray lay on his bunk, gazing at the ceiling of his cell in the high-power ward of Twin Towers, where the K-10s were lodged. K-10sthe keep-away prisoners, the baddest of the bad. Some were bunking here for their own protection. They were the child rapists, the kid killers, the suspected snitches, all the ones marked for the big chill by their fellow inmates. Others were here because they were just plain old-fashioned dangerous motherfuckers, too damn scary to be put anywhere else.

Gray fit into both categories. He knew there were plenty of Twin Towers residents who would have been happy to slip a shiv between his shoulder blades. He also knew none of them would dare to try.

He didn't mind his K-10 status. It came with certain perks. A bright yellow jumpsuit, flashier than the standard orange duds worn by most inmates. And a private dormthe authorities couldn't bunk two K-10s together or one of them would end up dead.

The downside was that the guards watched you twenty-four fucking hours a day. Deputy Dawgs, Gray called them, in honor of the old-time cartoon character he'd watched in reruns when he was growing up. Goddamn screws never let you out of your cage, not even for exercise. Hell, the high-power ward didn't even have a recreation yard. No common room, either, which meant no poker games, no trades of candy and cigs, no socializing or casual bullshitting or swapping jokes. Showers were allowed once every other day. The tiny cell was bare of anything except a cot, a combination sink and toilet, a phone that allowed collect calls only, and a TV mounted in the wall. There was nothing to do but sit on your rack and watch the tube and stroke your dick whenever a nice set of jugs came on the screen.

There was one bitch in a car commercial who was so damn fine, she'd stiffened Gray's hog for a week. He'd gotten a regular love jones for that slut. Fucked her a million times in his dreams, missionary style, doggie style, in the mouth, up the ass, every which way but loose. Fun times.

Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, out in the real world she was giving lube jobs to TV producers, and he was stuck in a glass box feeling his own wood. He was twenty-eight years old, for Christ's sake. He ought to be out on the town, kissing the girls and making 'em cry, sowing all those wild oats of his. Instead his girlfriend was a thirty-second apparition on a picture tube. Life fucking sucked sometimes.

Still, it could be worse. Lockup in County was a vacation compared with a stay in a state pen. And a state pen, some maximum-security shithole like Pelican Bay, was where Gray should have been by now.

He'd been convicted four months ago. Once sentenced, inmates were typically transferred to the state system as fast as County could spit them out. Gray, however, was still enjoying the dubious delights of life in Second City, as the county jail system was called in reference to the sheer size of its population.

He was here for one reason only: Dr. Robin Cameron. She had been his ticket to an extended stay in County.

Gray swung down from the bunk and lowered himself to the floor, where he snapped off a half dozen one-armed push-ups. He didn't need the exercise, just wanted to use up some nervous energy. No exercise gear was allowed in his cell, but he'd learned to stay in shape with a daily regimen of sit-ups, push-ups, and isometric exercises.

Under the yellow jumpsuit he was all lean muscle and taut skin decorated with a half dozen tattoos. Three of themskull, scorpion, and spiderwebwere jailhouse tats, applied by his cellmate a few years ago, when he'd done a deuce upstate for auto theft. The prison tats were jet-black and crude as hell, but jailbirds couldn't be choosy.

Then there were the other three tattoos, larger, more detailed, and inked originally in full color, though with the passage of time they'd faded to a uniform blue. Those tats had been applied professionally by a guy named Ernesto at a tat shop called Wild Ink in Hollywood. Ernesto was a regular fucking artist, and he'd done some of his best work on Gray.

There was a big-ass crocodile swimming across Gray's shoulder blades, and a knife with a bloody blade on his left biceps, and the piece de friggin' resistance, a tombstone punched into the hard knobs of his abdominal muscles above the navel. The stone bore his own name, Justin Hanover Gray, and his date of birth, January 22, 1975, andwhat pleased him mosthis date of death. Ernesto had selected March 15, 2001, saying, "Beware the Ides of March, vato," in a theatrical whisper.

Well, Gray was still here, more than two years after his personal doomsday.

He wondered how much more time he would have before he checked out. Years, probably. He'd never been one of those live-fast-die-young dudes. He intended to stick around.

The tats weren't the only form of body art he'd indulged in. Over the past twelve years, starting at age sixteen, he'd pierced his earlobes, lower lip, chin, and navel. The jewelry was all gone now, confiscated by the Dawgs, and some of the holes were closing up. But once he was out, he would get pretty again. He liked to look good for his ladies. And he liked the process of decorating his flesh, feeling the hot pain of the needle, seeing the deep purple bruise blossom against his pale, almost pasty skin. He had what the doctors called a high threshold of pain, and he enjoyed testing his limits, seeing how much he could take.

Maybe that was why he could handle the isolation and constant scrutiny of the high-power ward. It was another test of his strength, another initiation and rite of passage. He had proved he could take whatever the system could throw at him. He could survive, even in this shit palace. Even in the Reptile House.

That was his private name for the place. Twin Towers was the official designation for this newest correctional facility of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, situated in downtown LA, across the street from Men's Central Jail. Because Men's Central was old and prone to overcrowding, Twin Towers had been built to take in the excess prisoners. It was named for the two eight-story buildings that housed four thousand homeboys, druggies, and skanks who'd run afoul of the boys in blue.

But to him, it would always be the Reptile House. That was how he'd thought of it since his arrival. He remembered emerging from the elevator, flanked by deputy sheriffs, trudging through the PODprisoners on displayarea. To his left, the smoky, tinted windows of the POD control booth; to his right, his new neighborsgang pachucos and syndicate greaseballs and mass killers, all on display in their separate cages. No iron bars here, only sheets of reinforced, soundproofed, impact-resistant glass. Behind each transparent wall a man lay on his rack or paced in his cage or stared at the TV. Every face was blank, every eye glazed.

Seeing those cages from the outside, Gray was reminded of childhood trips to the zoo. His favorite part of those trips had been the submersion in the cool darkness of the reptile house.