The fourth book in the Zack Walker series, 2007

Miranda heard noises coming from the bottom of the stairs. They were back. If they find me here, she thought, I’ll end up dead, just like the others.

It had to be them, downstairs in the bar. It was after hours, after all. Everyone else had cleared out. The Kickstart had been closed, the girls had been sent home. They’d be coming upstairs any moment now to finish up their business. It would be quite the day for them. Sell some beer, some drugs on the side, get a bunch of guys laid, figure out what to do with three bodies.

Oh yeah, they’d kill her. Well, maybe not Leo. Chances were he wouldn’t kill her. Gary would be the one to actually kill her. But Leo, he wouldn’t do anything to stop it. He always let Gary take the lead in these things. I’ll end up as dead as the others, Miranda thought.

If I don’t get out of here right now.

The others hadn’t been dead long.

Only minutes, she guessed, although it seemed much longer. It was true what they said, Miranda thought, about things slowing down. Maybe that’s why, in the movies, when something terribly dramatic was happening, they ran it in slow motion. Not just because it was a neat effect, but because it was a reflection of human experience. Maybe your brain had to play tricks with time, give you a chance to absorb what the hell was happening so you could figure out how to deal with it.

Miranda felt as though she’d been in this room with the three dead men for some time now. But maybe it hadn’t even been minutes. Maybe it had only been a few seconds. She wasn’t sure. She wondered whether she might be slipping into shock.

All she knew for certain was that they were dead. All you had to do was look at them. Sprawled out across the floor, not stirring, their shirts and pants soaked with blood.

Payne, dead. Eldridge, dead. Zane, dead.

And only moments before, all alive.

Eldridge had been the last to die. He’d hung on long enough to look into her eyes and say, “ Gary…He’ll kill you…”

She hardly needed the warning.

Even as she’d heard Gary and Leo at the bottom of the stairs, she’d tried to pull herself together, to think. Focus, she thought. Focus.

For a moment, she wondered whether she could talk her way out of it. Tell Gary he didn’t have to worry about her, let her walk and she’d never breathe a word of the things he’d done, not even that he’d killed the only man she’d ever really loved.

Yeah, right. That was a plan.

She poked her head out the door and into the dingy hallway. To the left, the stairs. The smell of stale beer, human sweat, and cigarettes wafted up. To the right, at the end of the hallway, a window that opened onto the fire escape.

Miranda grabbed her bag and ran for the window, pushed up on it. It didn’t want to budge.

The voices were getting closer. Maybe halfway up. She could hear their footsteps. She pushed harder on the stuck window, and it rose an inch, just enough for her to slip her fingers under it. She put everything she had into lifting it, opened it wide enough to get one leg out and planted on the rusted metal grating. Then she swung her body through, her other leg.

She caught a glimpse of them entering the far end of the hallway as she pressed herself against the building’s cold brick wall. And then, as if willing herself to be weightless, she descended the metal stairs without a sound, and when she reached the bottom, ran off into the night.

She knew she’d have to get away and never come back. She couldn’t go to the police. They wouldn’t help, wouldn’t guarantee her safety. Gary always found a way.

She was on her own. She’d have to disappear. She’d have to make it so no one ever found her.

Because she knew he’d be looking. And she knew he’d never give up.

“YOU HAVE TO EMPTY all the change out of your pockets,” the uniformed woman told me. “And I need your wallet.”

For a second, I thought about making a joke. Maybe, under less stressful circumstances, I might have. A visit to a prison under normal conditions-does anyone visit a prison under normal conditions?-would have been stressful enough. But my reasons for being here were far from normal. And there wasn’t anything normal about the guy sitting in the pickup truck, out in the prison parking lot, waiting for me to do what I’d come here to do.

If I’d just been here doing a story for the Metropolitan, when the female guard asked for my wallet I might have said, What is this, a stickup? They don’t pay you enough? And then I would have laughed. Ha-ha.

But there was nothing to suggest that this woman, black, mid-forties, built like a safe, wearing a shiny black belt with a riot stick attached, was feeling all that jocular herself. Maybe working in a prison does that to you. You didn’t have to be an inmate to feel the oppressiveness of the place.

I’d already put my cell phone in the plastic tray she’d given me. “Okay, I can see how change would set off this thing,” I said, nodding at the security portal, like those ones they have at the airport, that I’d have to walk through to get any further into the prison. “But why do I have to give you my wallet?”

“You can’t take any money into the prison,” the woman said sternly. “You’re not allowed to give money to the inmates.” For just a moment, her hand rested on her riot stick. Honestly, I think it was an unconscious gesture, not intended to send a message, but I got one just the same. Don’t give me a hard time. That was the message I got.

I am not a big fan of getting whacked in the head with a riot stick. But at that moment, honestly, it’s hard to imagine how it could have made things any worse than they already were.

I’d never been in a prison before, let alone a women’s prison, and I’d only been at this one for about five minutes, and already I was pretty certain it was not a nice place to be. I got that impression as I approached the main entrance. I walked up to a ten-foot chain-link fence looped at the top with barbed wire, and pressed a button on a small speaker mounted next to the gate.

“Hello?”

A voice, no doubt coming from the building fifty feet beyond the gate, crackled, “Name?”

“Uh, Walker?” Like I wasn’t really sure. “Zack Walker?”

Then, nothing. I stood by the gate a good ten seconds, wondering whether I wasn’t on the list even though I’d phoned the lawyer-he was supposed to have pulled some strings, called in favors, name your cliché, to get me in here. But then there was a buzzing sound, which was my signal to push the gate wide. I glanced up at the surveillance cameras as I walked up to the main building, which, without the fencing and barbed wire, might have passed for a community college. Once inside, I approached the counter, where I encountered the humorless guard with the riot stick.

“So,” I said, trying to make conversation and forget how grave the situation was while I fumbled around for my wallet, seemingly forgetting that it was in my right back pocket, where it has been since I was fifteen, “is this where Martha Stewart did her time?”

Nothing.

Wallet out, I glanced into it, counted seven dollars, before dropping it into the tray with my cell phone. Seven dollars. Then, from the front pockets of my jeans, I dug out fifty-seven cents. How much would $7.57 buy in prison? How many smokes? Wasn’t that what everyone wanted money for in prison? Smokes?

The guard slapped a short, stubby key with a square of orange plastic at the end onto the counter, then pointed to a bank of airport-type lockers against the far wall. “You can put your stuff in there,” she said. I took my tray of belongings, found the locker that matched the number on the key, and stowed it. I had to print my name in a book, then sign next to it, put down the time of my arrival. They ran a wand over me after I stepped through the security door, making sure I wasn’t sneaking in with any weapons.