mouth. It was hard to believe she was perhaps once a little girl playing dress-up, sitting on her father’s knee, forming her cursive letters, cheering at a high school football game, dreaming about something other than one hundred and eighty months in a cage playing second fiddle to a bloated queen bee with the mental makeup of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Rose had visited Mace on the second day she’d been here and told her that Juanita was the messiah and what the messiah wanted, she got. When the cell door opened and the messiah appeared, she would like it. Those were the rules. That was just the way it was in Juanita Land. Mace had declined Juanita’s offer several times. And before things had truly gotten out of hand, Juanita had suddenly backed off. Mace thought she knew why but wasn’t sure. Yet it had led to two years of fighting for her life every day, using her wits, her street smarts, and her newly found muscle.
Mace trudged to Cell Block B and the doors slammed into place behind all of them at precisely seven p.m. So much for another exciting Sunday night. She sat on the steel bed with a mattress so thin laid over it that Mace could almost see right through the damn thing. Over the two years she’d slept on it her body had absorbed every buckle and bend in the old metal. She had three more days to go. Well, now really only two, if she made it through the night.
Juanita knew when Mace was getting out. That’s why she’d tripped her, tried to bait her. She didn’t want Mace to leave. So Mace sat in her cell, crouched into a hard, tight wedge in the corner. Her fists were clenched and there was something shiny and sharp in each one of them that she kept hidden in a place not even the guards could find. The darkness came and then strengthened into the time of night when you figured nothing much good was going to happen because the evil that was coming scared all the good away. And then she waited some more. Because she knew, at some point, her cell door would open as the guards on the night shift looked the other way in consideration for drugs or sex, or both.
And the messiah would appear with one goal in mind: to never again let Mace experience the light of a free day. For two years she’d been building herself up for this moment. Her buffed body waited with anticipation as adrenaline pumped with each exhalation of breath.
Three minutes later the cell door slid open, and there she was.
Only it wasn’t Juanita.
This visitor was tall too, over six feet with the one-inch polished boots she wore. And the uniform was not like that of the guards. She wore it well, not a baggy part or dirt stain to be seen. The hair was blond and smelled good in a way that no hair in here ever could.
The visitor took a step forward, and though it was dark, there was enough light coming from somewhere out there that Mace could see the four stars on each shoulder. There were eleven ranks in the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, and those four stars represented the highest one of them all.
Mace looked up, her hands still clenched, as the woman looked down.
“Hey, sis,” said the D.C. chief of police. “What say we get you the hell out of here?”
CHAPTER 4
ROY KINGMAN pump-faked once and then darted a bounce pass between his defender’s legs and into the paint, where a giant with rockets in his legs named Joachim stuffed it home, the top of his head almost above the rim.
“That’s twenty-one and I’m done,” said Roy, the sweat trickling down his face.
The ten young men collected their things and shuffled off to the showers. It was six-thirty in the morning and Roy had already gotten in three games of five-on-five full-court at his sports club in northwest D.C. It had been eight years since he’d suited up for the University of Virginia Cavaliers as their starting point guard. At “only” six-two without rockets in his legs, Roy had still led his team to an ACC championship his senior year through hard work, smart court sense, good fundamentals, and a bit of luck. That luck had run out in the quarters of the NCAA when they’d slammed headfirst into perennial power Kansas.