Nick touched the plastic bag through his jacket again. Truth was, when the kid had first placed it gingerly on the dayroom table like it was some sort of irreplaceable Fabergé egg, Nick had thought it was a joke. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he’d taken the time to do a little research on the computer terminal in the cellblock library that he’d fully realized what he’d seen. And by then, of course, it had been too late—for the kid. All his heavy plans, his one shot at something monumental—gone because someone didn’t like the way he had mouthed off in the shower or neglected to wipe down a weight in the yard or forgotten to courtesy flush during his time on the john. Whatever the reason, big or small, the kid had gotten a shiv in the kidney while lining up in the chow hall at breakfast, and Nick was suddenly left with a decision.

Let it go, forget what the kid had shown him, go back to his routine, his hopeless life. He himself was only looking at another couple more months at Shirley before he was up for parole. He could have gone back to the mindless rote, day in, day out. Or he could try something new.

Take a chance. Stick his neck out for the first time in nine years and see where it led him.

627. 629. 631.

He stopped in front of the door, mentally checking the number against what had been written in the redheaded kid’s little notebook. Nick had found the notebook rolled up and jammed into the hollow aluminum leg of the kid’s bunk, along with what Nick now carried in the bag in his jacket pocket. Once Nick had made the decision to take that chance, it hadn’t been hard to follow through; bribing a screw to get into the kid’s cell during lunch hadn’t been difficult, and although they’d already bagged the kid’s belongings to send to his next of kin, nobody had done a thorough search yet, the kind of search that only a con could properly conduct. See, to a con, every item of furniture, every fixture, every bit of molding was a place to hide something. Nine years in, you could put a cell phone in a bar of soap or inside a biscuit from the canteen. Nick hadn’t known exactly where to look, but he’d known how to look.

And now here he was. He reached out to knock on door 633, his knuckles hitting wood more solidly than he’d meant—before he realized with a start that the keypad above the knob was hanging out of its mount by wires.

What the hell? But the door was already swinging inward.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four