If Stone had been a Triple Six and was good enough to take out both Simpson and Gray all these years later, Knox wasn’t sure he wanted to run into the gent. Yet those sorts of encounters just came with the territory. And Knox was still standing.

But so, apparently, was Oliver Stone.

Dangerous times indeed.

Retirement was looking better and better. If only he could survive that long.

Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

GREYHOUND DIDN’T TRAVEL to the vicinity of Divine, Virginia. Yet a rusting bus on wobbly wheels with the name “Larry’s Tours” crudely hand-stenciled on the side did. Stone and Danny sat in the back, next to a man who had a chicken in a crate on which he was resting his bare, swollen feet, and a woman who gave Stone far more attention than he would have liked, which included telling him her life story, all seventy-odd years of it. Fortunately, she got off before they did and was picked up by a man driving an ancient station wagon that was missing two of its doors.

They were finally let out at what Stone could only describe as the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It made the one-horse stop Amtrak had dropped them at resemble a glittery metropolis on full throttle.

“Now what?” said Stone, shouldering his duffel while Danny clutched his small suitcase.

“Now we walk and thumb. Maybe we get lucky, maybe we don’t.”

Though it was not yet two in the morning they did get lucky and rode into Divine in the back of a pickup truck, with what the driver told them was a prizewinning hog named Luther who kept pushing his pink snout in Stone’s crotch.

In the distance Stone saw the silhouette of some massive facility. Narrow towers and three-story buildings rose into the dark sky. In the weak moonlight something glinted along the perimeter of the place.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing.

“Some place you never want to end up. Dead Rock. Supermax prison.”

“Why do they call it Dead Rock?”

“It’s built on the site of an old coal mine where about thirty years ago twenty-eight miners lost their lives in a cave-in. Their bodies are still in there somewhere ’cause they could never get to them. So they just sealed it up. They send the scum of the scum to Dead Rock. Least that’s the official story. Hell on earth.”

“You know somebody in that place?”

Danny looked away without answering.

Stone continued to stare at the complex until they rounded a curve and it disappeared from his view. He realized that the glint he’d seen must’ve come from the moonlight bouncing off the slash-your-ass wire that surrounded the place.