Slocum's Breakout - Jake Logan [66]
“You look silly,” Atencio said.
“So do you. Let’s hope we don’t die laughing.”
Slocum returned to the door and peered out into the holding pen. Four guards had come in, all armed with their sticks but no guns. He considered taking them, but the sound would bring other guards running.
He took the bull by the horns.
“Where’s the sarge?” Slocum bellowed. “I gotta talk to him.”
“How’s that?”
“Wilkinson, you dimwit. Where’s Sergeant Wilkinson? I heard there’s a tunnel being dug outta here.”
“Who the hell cares about a tunnel? We have a riot and jailbreak on our hands,” one guard said.
“He’ll want to know. Them that’s not got away already can escape in the tunnel.”
The guards exchanged puzzled looks.
“Get on down to solitary and see if I’m not right. At the far end, out through a cell wall. Looks like they’re making a beeline north.”
The four grumbled but vanished down stairs Slocum hadn’t even noticed before. He went to the top of the stairs and saw a door open. From below he heard the cries of prisoners in solitary, begging for food or warmth or to be let out or just to die.
Slocum grabbed the door and pulled it shut but could not lock it without a key.
“They’ll be back up here in a minute or two. We have to be long gone.”
“They are bringing in the prisoners they recaptured. Where can we hide?”
“With the guards, that’s where. Keep your face down and hope none of the prisoners rats you out.”
Just then the doors opened and the prisoners crowded through, herded by the guards with their truncheons whacking asses and heads and any other slow-moving portion of their jailbirds’ anatomy. Slocum shouted and shoved the prisoners along, stooping to pick up a truncheon he saw lying on the floor.
Atencio lowered his face, muttered under his breath, and tried to duplicate everything Slocum did. Their act was unconvincing, but the confusion of returning so many prisoners to their cells kept them from being noticed.
As they passed a corridor leading away into the heart of the cell block, Slocum shoved Atencio from the crowd.
“We cannot do this,” Atencio whispered as he walked shoulder to shoulder with Slocum. “This is the office of the warden. We will be found quickly!”
Slocum didn’t bother answering. He needed some advantage and thought this might pay off for them. The door with the name plate WARDEN HARRIMAN was locked, but he forced it with his knife. He didn’t care if the warden noticed the sprung lock or not.
“This is such a fine place, no?” Atencio went to a table and pulled the cork from a bottle of wine. He upended it and drained what remained in the bottle in a single gulp. “I have lived so long without wine. This is good. Where is there more?”
“Don’t get drunk,” Slocum said as he dropped into the chair behind the warden’s desk. The drawers were locked but yielded to his thick-bladed knife. He rummaged through hunting for something—anything—useful and found nothing but papers.
“Why not? Never will we escape this accursed place.” Atencio found a second bottle, this one full, and worried the cork out of the neck with his teeth. Before he could get down to the serious work of draining the bottle, sounds in the corridor alerted them.
Slocum pointed to a spot behind the door. Atencio took up his post there, the empty wine bottle gripped hard to use as a club.
“I don’t care what it costs. I want them all back in their cells by midnight!” Warden Harriman stormed into his office, then stopped, hands still on the doorknob as it slowly penetrated something was wrong.
Slocum leaned back in the warden’s chair and said nothing.
“Get out of my chair,” Harriman snapped. “You can’t—wait! The lock’s broken. You’re not going to steal anything from my office!”
Slocum nodded and Atencio kicked the door shut, sending Harriman staggering. Then Atencio pressed hard to hold the office door shut against anyone trying to follow the warden.
Slocum drew his six-gun and aimed it at the warden as the man went for a small hideout pistol.
“You don’t want