CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At that exact same time nearly three miles away Danny Floyd sat in the day room staring raptly at the television elevated seven feet off the floor. He was watching a rerun of the John Travis concert he had seen several times already. And again he was glassy eyed, believing the singer would die as did the cop Short; slowly and painfully. And as did his grubby parents. True he would die for killing the cop, like he was some deity or something! Hell, Danny thought gritting his teeth, he was just a man! A weak, crying, trembling man when he was looking down the barrel of the .45 in front of Danny.
Danny smiled through his tears remembering how Short had sank to his knees, pissed his pants, and began to cry, begging for his life; he had three little girls at home who needed him! His wife had run off with one of his best friends two years earlier and he hadn’t heard from her since. His girls would be orphans!
“Even that would be better than having a piece of shit father like you, Officer Short!” Danny had told him.
Danny had then made him drop his pants and take it up the ass before he’d shot him is the back of the head while Danny was unloading inside him. Danny had laughed like a maniac as Short had slid to the floor and off his still hard penis. “Now for Travis!” he’d whispered, leaving the dead man in the dark corner of the parking garage beside his car.
“I can’t believe you would want to kill John Travis!” an inmate called Cool Freddie said, taking a seat beside him on the bench and dragging him back from his reverie.
“He took everything from me that mattered! I didn’t have nothin’ to lose; I’d already killed my folks and the cop. So what was a semi-famous singer?”
“Hell, you had everything to lose!” Cool Freddie stated. “You had your life, man!”
Danny turned and looked at the tall, slim, golden skinned, black man from Dallas. He knew that Cool Freddie had already been given a life sentence in the state prison for dealing drugs. Now he was about to get another one in Austin. Hell, Danny thought, you had nothing to lose, ‘crack-head!’ He turned back to the TV without comment. After a moment he stood and went back to his cell.
For the next hour he lay on his bunk, staring at the bottom of the top bunk wondering what death would be like. Wouldn’t be playing the guitar or singing country music he didn’t imagine. Probably be hard-rock, or ‘head-banging’, maybe even screaming rap, or just for kicks hard rock religious! That would really suck! Big time!
Since he was pending the death penalty he was housed in a cell house where the staff could walk all around the cells and stay safely out of range of any stabbing device and extended arm. So, when the Sheriff’s deputy came around, inserted a large brass key into the door lock, turned it with a loud clang, jerked the door open and yelled “Floyd!” at the top of his lungs, Danny was not surprised or startled. Instead he stood slowly, after all he was in no hurry, and walked calmly out of his cell and onto the catwalk between the cells and the dayroom, which was separated by bars, and yelled right: back at the top of his lungs, “What!”
“You Floyd?” the jailer asked in a smart-ass tone of voice.
“Hell no,” Danny replied just as saucily, “I’m his fuckin ghost!”
“Smart-ass,” the jailer stated angrily. “Come on out!”
“What for, gonna get your licks in, too?”
“You got a lawyer visit,” the jailer said. “Be better to plead for life,” he added.
“How would you know?” Danny asked seriously. “You been dead before?”
“Hey, life is alive death is dead. Get the picture?”
Danny looked at him stupidly and said, “Really? Damn, I musta missed that in Biology class.”
“Alright, turn around and cuff up,” the jailer said producing a set of wrist manacles from a black leather pouch on his belt.
“I know,” Danny said. “Jailhouse rules!”
“Damn right it is!” the jailer replied with a smirk on his lips, as if he had said something incredibly profound.
Danny turned his back to the bars and stuck one wrist through. When the cuff was secured he pulled his wrist back and stuck the other through the same bars and the other was affixed to his wrist. Only then did the deputy unlock the outer door and allow him to step out.
“Face against the wall, Floyd!” he said, slamming Danny up against the wall and kicking his legs wide apart. He then did an aggressive ‘pat-down’ search with one hand then the other.
“Heard you went ‘up in’ Officer Short before you shot him in the back of the head,” the deputy stated. “What’d ya use, this?” he added, slamming his right wrist up into Danny’s groin with a grunt.
Danny gasped with the intense pain, then folded over and puked down the wall and onto floor. He sank slowly to his knees and moaned with his mouth wide open.
“Oh yeah, your lawyer, he called and said he’d be here at three o’clock so we have several hours to play, Floyd. Officer Short was my brother, in case you didn’t catch the resemblance. I’m not a cop or a deputy. I own, operate and participate in a ‘rough trade’ night club a few miles from here. In case you don’t know what that is, I really get off doing to young men, like you, what you done to my brother. But, the difference is, I’m gonna leave you alive to live with what happened to you until you die by lethal injection. So, you little bitch, your life just took a turn for the worse. If you can believe that! Oh, and you can call me Big Ralph.”
“Fuck you,” Danny gasped breathlessly, his heart beginning to pound in his temples with fear and dread. Ralph was a big sucker, everywhere, Danny noticed.
“Well, Sweetie, let’s get the show on the road. I’m anxious to see if you can take it like you can dish it out.”
Ralph easily dragged Danny down the metal, windowless hall way and to a storage room that he unlocked with a large brass key. He swung the heavy steel door open, dragged Danny inside and closed the door behind them. He locked it back with the big brass key and said, “Honnneeey, we’re home!” He laughed like a maniac, and began stripping out of his clothing.
Danny lay terrified on the floor staring up at the monster Ralph had become. His physique was like that of a professional body builder and every slab of muscle bulged and writhed under his golden skin.
“Damn, you look like a creature!” Danny said breathlessly, gauging Big Ralph’s intentions carefully. He watched the man like a mongoose watches a cobra.
Ralph took his time slipping out of his uniform pants and when he was naked he was very erect and ready. “Now, it’s your turn little rabbit,” he teased, stepping forward and reaching over for Danny’s coverall clad corpse.
As Ralph stepped forward and leaned over, Danny’s leg slammed upwards between the big man’s legs. His ankle connected solidly and Ralph crumpled to the floor in a fetal pile. In the same move Danny stood, jumped through the cuffs and slid around fluidly, grabbed the ring of heavy keys and slammed them, with all his strength, into the side of Ralph’s face. Ralph’s eyeball exploded in a spray of gelatin that splattered the wall and made the brass keys glisten. Ralph screamed with the intense pain.
“Like pain, do ya?” Danny asked breathlessly. “Good, ‘cause I got a load for you, bad boy!”
With his words Danny began to beat Ralph with the heavy keys until Ralph was no longer moving, begging, or breathing. Danny looked down at himself and realized for the first time that he was covered with the big man’s blood.
Danny quickly stripped out of the orange coveralls and into the police uniform. It was much too large for him, but, maybe it would work anyway. Cops weren’t very smart, from what he had seen.
He tried the keys in the lock until he found the key that worked, then stepped out into the hall and locked the door back. He started down the hallway toward where he knew the elevators to be. He hadn’t taken more than ten steps when alarms began to sound all up and down the hallway. The sound was deafening. He was quickly on the floor with his hands firmly over his ears and groaning in pain, wanting the intense piercing wail to stop.
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He was so concentrated on the sound and pain that he didn’t realize when it had stopped until rough hands were jerking him to his feet, cutting him out of the stolen police uniform and taking him back to his cage to await the Grim Reaper.
“We don’t know where you got the uniform Floyd, but we’d better not find a dead body missing one. If we do, you won’t need to worry about a lawyer, a trial, or a death sentence. We’ll kill you right here, right now!” the voice in the gas mask stated coldly in a mechanical voice.
Danny was thrown back into the five man tank as naked as the day he was born. The other prisoners laughed and jeered him until he was given another one. Until then he sat on the table in the day room and watched the rest of the John Travis concert. It was within moments of going off.
In one of the darkened cells an olive drab U.S. Army blanket was being sliced into straight three inch strips six feet long with a brand new razor blade. It was then slowly, tightly and precisely braided together to form a good strong rope.