Two months later, Leper’s Gate Penal Colony, Dolphin Island
Hank Wyatt believed in nothing.Because he’d never had anything. Well, much of anything. He’d had a mother once.
When he was five, she took him to a foundling home. “Smile, Henry James, and be a good boy,” she had said. “Someone will want you.”
Then she’d turned and walked out the door. As if he didn’t exist.
But he did exist, and he spent the next thirty-five years making sure that everyone knew it. And no one forgot it.
No one at Leper’s Gate forgot Henry James Wyatt existed.
He was an American, a product of the Pittsburgh slums. He was trouble, but he was a survivor. A fast learner. He had to be. Life hadn’t dealt him aces. It dealt him deuces.
But he had aces up his sleeve and the instincts to know when to slip those cards into play. He knew when to cheat, when to lie, and when to run like hell.
He learned his lessons the hard way, learned early that a code of ethics wasn’t for him. No turning the other cheek. None of that do-unto-others crap. He did unto others before they damn well did unto him.
He was wrongly condemned to Leper’s Gate. A mistake. And he’d fought like hell when they’d locked him away. He spent the end of his first week confined in solitary: a three-foot-by-six-and-half-foot wooden box buried in the dirt. In the tropical sun. They gave him water once a day. No food. Food wasn’t for prisoners like Hank. They needed to be broken.
For the next four years they tried to break him. They were still trying.
He’d been standing in the sun for two days, his hands and feet tied to two log stakes that had been hammered into the ground. His hair stuck to his head in black sweaty clumps that had whips of silver gray tangled through it, its once-dark color worn like the leather straps of an overworked cat-o’-nine-tails.
The corners of his eyes were creased with wrinkles—nature’s scars for every hard year of the forty he had survived. Hank Wyatt had resolute, determined eyes. They were gray, a carbonic iron color. Like a wall of steel those eyes reflected only the light that shone at them, giving no clue as to what went on behind them, but he was thinking. He had to think to survive.
His skin was brown, fried by a sun so hot it would blister the skin off the new prisoners. His jaw was ruthlessly square, stubborn, and covered with a dark shadow of a beard that was uneven from trying to shave with a piece of metal scavenged from the dark corner of a stone cell block.
He was tall, solid but lean. He had powerful, athletic arms made stronger from years of slinging a sledgehammer at the prison quarry. His legs were long and just as muscular. The weight of a chain gang either made men stronger or broke them.
But now, Hank’s legs were stiff from standing. He refused to bend them. His bound hands were numb. His mind was not. His breath was shallow—a trick he’d mastered to fool the guards into thinking he was closer to passing out than he was.
To stay alert, he concentrated with the sharpened ears of one who was desperate. He listened to the hone of tropical flies. They buzzed around him as if he were garbage. He heard the defeated cry of another prisoner’s punishment. He vowed no one would hear that sound from his throat.
He listened to the rattle of chains and ankle cuffs, the constant, monotonous ringing of prisoners’ hammers smashing against rock in the quarry compounds. That sound could drive the mind from a weaker man.
In the distance he could hear the haunting call of the sea—the waves pounding away at the island. And every so often, the caw of a seagull flying free.
Sounds as far away as another lifetime. As close as madness.
He’d been staked before. But this time he’d laid the groundwork so he would never be staked again. He listened to everything. To anything. Hell, to survive Hank would listen to himself sweat.
* * *
It tooktwo moredays for them to think he was dead, or think him close enough to it. They cut the rope that kept his hands and feet tied to the stakes, dragged him to the center of the compound, then dropped him.
No sound came from his lips. No movement. Nothing. They hit him with bucket after bucket of water. Fresh water. Drinking water. No staked prisoner had ever been able to resist licking at it or finally cracking and gulping the water after being so long without it.
Only the dead lay unflinching. And Hank.
“He’s dead.”
Silence ticked by as it had for the past few days in minutes that seemed to take longer than a life sentence.
“Kick him just to make certain.”
Hank heard the shuffle of the guard’s boots. Near his head. He steeled himself for the blow.
“Not there!” came a sharp command. “Here!” The bastard kicked him in the crotch.
