CHAPTER ONE

      They come at him, just as they always do—at least six men, wearing the striped uniform of inmates. Harry Fallon can’t see their faces, and even if he could, it’s not like he knows these hardened lifers. He doesn’t even remember the name of the prison where he has been sentenced. Joliet? Yuma? Jefferson City? Huntsville? Detroit? Alcatraz? Cañon City? Laramie? Deer Lodge? But a bad memory is the least of his problems right now.

      He stands with his back against the door of six-inch cold iron, no bars, just a slit for a peek hole so the guards can check in every now and then. Ahead of him, to his left, are the cells on the fifth floor. Hands extend between the bars and rattle tin cups against the iron. The doors remain shut. Inside, prisoners chant some dirge or hum, mixed with curses and laughter, but all that proves hard to understand with the racket the cups make against the rough iron. To his right, there’s a metal rail about waist-high, and beyond that, the emptiness for thirty yards to the other row of cell blocks. Five stories below, the stone floor of this hellhole called a prison. And just in front of him, the six men, faces masked, but intentions clear. The knives they have—fashioned from the metal shop, or the broom factory, or the farms where they work—wave in hands roughened by a life of crime, followed by life sentences.

      “Hey!” Fallon shouts through the slit in iron, but dares not look through the opening. He can’t take his eyes off the six killers. By now, they are less than ten feet from him.

      “Hey!”

      Nothing.

      The big brute in the center of the gang laughs.

      Of course, there’s no guard here. Not now. Fallon has been behind the iron long enough to know that guards and prisoners have the ability to make a few deals when it comes to taking care of prisoners neither guards nor convicts like. A guard decides to head to the privy at a predetermined time, a trip that’ll take a good long while, and it just happens to coincide with other guards needing to find a cigarette, or a toilet, or happening to be escorting another inmate to see the warden.

      Handy.

      Right now, there’s probably not a guard anywhere in this particular house.

      So six cons, armed with shivs, start to smile.

      If only Fallon could recall where he is, what he’s in for, why these men want to kill him. If only Fallon could remember anything.

      My God, he thinks, has he been sent to prisons so many times his brain has become addled? Has he been hit on the head, suffered . . . what is it they call that . . . amnesia? Yeah. Amnesia. All right, at least he can remember some things.

      He remembers something else, too.

      Because one of the faceless men before him whispers a growling, “Take him,” and the thug on Fallon’s right charges, laughing, slashing with the blade, and Fallon leaps back, against the cold stone of the wall, feeling and hearing the tearing of cloth but not of flesh. His intestines aren’t spilling out of his belly—yet.

      The remaining five killers merely laugh.

      The big fellow, eyes black, face pale, almost not even a face at all, pivots, cuts up with the blade, but Fallon uses his left forearm to knock hand and knife away. The man’s face, or what passes for a face, seems surprised. A moment later, Fallon is driving his right hand, flattened, hard against the killer’s throat. The crack is almost deafening. The man’s eyes bulge in shock, and the blow drives him back, back, back, till he slams against the iron railing at the corner, the end of the passageway. Fallon tries to grab the knife, but both of the man’s arms start waving as he tries to regain his balance, as he tries to remember how to breathe.

      But he can’t. Spittle comes between his lips. He’s like a whirlwind now, and the other five men outside of the cells watch in fascination and amusement. Even those still inside their cells are transfixed. All they do is hold their tin cups outside the bars. Fingers grip other bars as they watch, laugh, hiss, joke, and pray.

      The man moves farther over the rails. He opens his mouth as if to scream, but he can’t scream. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but die. Fallon has learned several things in prison, including how to crush an attacker’s larynx.

      The shiv drops over the side. Damn. Fallon could have used that to defend himself against the other five killers.

      The arms stop waving, and then the faceless man starts to slip over. His mouth opens as though to scream, but he cannot scream, either. A second later, and he’s suspended in the air, prison brogans pointing toward the hard ceiling, and then there is nothing.

      A long silence follows, stretching toward infinity, before the sickening crunch of a body seems to shake the prison house to its very foundation.

      Fallon’s heart races. He wets his lips, turns back toward the five other men. The shuddering of the passageway ends, and the man in the center, who might have a mustache and beard, although that appears to be against the prison policy—whatever house of corrections Fallon is in—walks to the edge, puts his hand on the rail, peers over. He spits saliva, which drops toward the corpse, broken and bloody, and stares sightlessly toward the impenetrable ceiling.

      Fallon knows because somehow he, too, has moved to the railing, to see the man he has just killed, another kill for a onetime lawman turned killer. The man’s dead eyes seem to follow Fallon as he turns back to the five men. The leader spits again, wipes his mouth, and slowly turns to stare at Fallon.

      As though on cue, the tin cups resume their metallic serenade. The grinding has now been picked up across the chasm. Prisoners there have likewise resumed raking cups against the bars. And so have the prisoners on the floors below. The noise intensifies. Surely the warden can hear this from wherever his office or house is. Fallon can hear nothing else but the grinding, pounding, insane bedlam of hell.

      The noise becomes deafening. Fallon breathes in deeply, watches the five men now back to staring at him. They could rush him, should rush him, for there’s no room for Fallon to move, and he can’t take down five men when they have knives and he has nothing but . . .

      He takes a chance, steps forward quickly, and as a tin cup rattles from one bar to another, Fallon strikes hard with his left hand against the wrist. The damned fool should have kept his hand and cup inside his cell. He thinks