“Excuse me, I need some help,” I said, and strolled in nice and close. Wettekin had to step back. He gave me a nasty glare. “I’m missing an inmate, and I don’t want to walk this whole damned place for him. He’s in a wheelchair, so he shouldn’t be too hard to track down.”
Burnsdale glanced over her shoulder at me with what I thought was gratitude. She waved me over. “Come help me look at the feed. I need eyes.” Wettekin shifted closer to the screens, too. “I’ll cycle through the feeds. You boys watch, okay?” She pointed at the three monitors spread out on the desk in front of her. Her fingers flew over a few buttons on her keyboard.
Wettekin and I both nodded. This was something we did once in a while, but it was a bad day when I had to come in here to look for someone. Different shots of TFC popped up on the screens. The yard, the outside of the garages. “Camera in the fleet garage is out again,” she muttered with a sigh. “I’ll have to go fix that. Who keeps messing with it?” She didn’t get an answer and it was doubtful she expected one.
I grunted. “Oh, there,” I said, pointing to the screen on the right. There was an empty wheelchair outside of the classroom Brandon usually taught in during the day. It wasn’t far from us. “Where’s my con?”
Burnsdale smiled and wrinkled her nose. “Well, if he’s normally in the chair… he can’t have gotten far.”
I hung my head. “Right. I’ll go walk it. Wettekin, can you check E block while I’m out? People get antsy close to last call. Mine are all in. Just walk it and then do yours.”
He huffed. “You owe me.”
Winking at him, I walked backward toward the door. “I’ll buy you lunch later this week. On me. Anything.”
“Grill me some pineapple and pork?”
I pointed at him as I left the room, trying my best to be friendly. I didn’t like him, but it wouldn’t help to have him working against me, either. I ran on my way to the hallway between the library and the classroom, and by the time I arrived, sweat stuck my shirt to my back. I patted down my belt and grabbed my work phone out of the holder, the one that hooked directly into the systems at TFC. I doubted I’d find anything good.
As I approached the empty chair, the first thing I noticed was that the left wheel was busted. I shook my head, and my apprehension morphed into anger. Whoever had done this wasn’t just being a jerk to the new meat. This hadpersonal attackwritten all over it.
“Gaffin,” I called. My heart kicked up and I grasped the phone tighter. My stomach dropped when the heavy door to the dark classroom, already slightly ajar, swayed open a bit.
“Here” came a soft reply.
Holding my breath, I opened the door. He was sprawled inside on his back, holding his chest. The ceiling must be really interesting because he focused on that instead of me. Large purple splotches were already forming on his right jaw and around the same eye, and his lower lip was bloody. I crouched down next to him and ran my hands in the air over his body. The suit I’d admired was gone, replaced by gray sweats and a white T-shirt. My first impulse was always to touch in order to assess, and I’d had to train myself to look instead.
“What are your injuries? Should I move you?”
He leaned away from me, so I guessed they hadn’t made whatever was wrong with him too much worse. He didn’t answer.
“You have not been here long enough to make these kinds of friends.” I messaged the medical wing at top speed, letting them know where I was and that I needed the med extraction team.
He laughed, and the sound tore through the peaceful classroom like shattering glass. The shadowy desks reminded me of nightmares about high school. “Some old friends are in here.” He put a hand on his face, and I thought he was trying to wipe away some tears. Anger pounded through me. Yeah, I didn’t know his story, but no one deserved to be treated this way.
“Who was it? I can’t help if I don’t know.”
“No one.”
I slapped a hand to the floor. They’d trashed his fucking chair. They wanted him to suffer. “You’re going to die in here if they’re already doing this. Tell me what’s going on and who to look at. If you don’t report it, I can’t help.”
“Nothing and no one. Did it myself.”
I made plans to go back and check the cameras but waited until the med team came to scrape Gaffin off the floor. Bond, one of the doctors, had come out with the underlings, which was bad. Concern was etched on his face, pulling down his pink lips into a frown, which made his narrow nose seem sharper than usual. He shook his head, and his longish graying blond hair flopped in his eyes. Maybe Dr. Bond knew about whatever had Gaffin stuck in the chair. Could he be seriously injured?
Responsibility weighed heavily on me, even though I didn’t get paid to babysit each con individually. For whatever reason, Gaffin seemed even less settled with the med team here. His eyes flew wide and his chest heaved fast when they had him strapped on a gurney to transport him. I felt awful as my gaze caught his.
“I’ll come check on you in a bit.”
He looked away. “Why?”
“Because I love these stirring conversations of ours.”
He shot me a grin despite the bruised and bloody mess that had been made of his face. Not many people would have been capable of that. The disregard for his own pain made me pause and sent me into a freefall of old miseries. I watched as they pushed Gaffin down the hall away from me and made myself get going. He would be safe in the medical wing—probably.
When I got back to the guard station, passing three guards coming out on my way in, Burnsdale was already looking through the camera feeds, so I assumed she had watched everything that happened with the med team. I was glad Wettekin was nowhere in sight, and she flashed me a much more relaxed smile than the one I’d seen earlier. Maybe she agreed with my unspoken assessment of our shared jackassless situation.
“You catch anyone going in for the kill?” I tried to sound lighthearted but wanted to nail whoever had done this. Preying on men capable of fighting back was one thing, but this was a gross violation in my book.
