Fight Dirty Page 22

  “Who better to protect them than Morgan?”

  “I don’t like it. What if the killer figures out she isn’t who she says she is?”

  She blew her breath out. More exasperated and tired of arguing than agreeing with him. “We’d only blow her cover if we went tonight anyway. But,” she continued when he started to interrupt, “we’ll go first thing in the morning and get her out. Happy?”

  No. But it was the best he could do for now.

  “What’s Iso?” Morgan whispered to Micah as Nelson and a second Red Shirt led them down a corridor of empty classrooms. Several of the rooms were strewn with gym mats and blankets—the so-called dorms?

  “Isolation,” Micah whispered back. “Observation is more like it. Lights on twenty-four-seven, someone sitting in the door watching you every second, but no talking. You’re not allowed to do anything except meditate on your sins.”

  Last thing Morgan needed was someone watching her that closely. She needed privacy to break out of the locked wing and reach the computer files. She’d considered skipping getting the files, except she was curious about what Bree said that had Greene so worried. And it would be nice to get enough hard evidence to bring Reverend Benjamin, that cheesy administrator Sean Chapman, Deidre, and her Red Shirts down.

  “So Iso, it’s the worst punishment?” she asked a little louder, hoping Nelson would hear and follow Deidre’s instructions. But he was too far ahead of them.

  Micah shook his head. “Worst is the Hole. Locked up, no contact, total darkness.” His face grew pale. “Don’t worry, Iso isn’t so bad. Just find someplace in your mind and go there. I paint. Bree composed music—began humming it so loud that Deidre heard and let her out that first night.” A wistful smile crossed his face. “Things weren’t so bad when Bree was here with her music.”

  They came to a row of rooms, smaller than classrooms or offices, smaller even than a jail cell—maybe storage closets? They had no doors, no furniture except for a single gym mat on the floor, no pillow, no blanket, bare walls—not even a ReNew logo. Across from each doorway there were comfortable-looking office chairs. Where the guards sat to watch their prisoners.

  Nelson shoved Micah inside the first tiny room. “Stand in the corner until you’re given permission to move.”

  Micah gave Morgan an encouraging smile, then did as he was told, settling into a position with his hands above his head, elbows out wide, touching the wall, as if this was a familiar routine. The second Red Shirt positioned one of the office chairs opposite Micah’s doorway and slung his weight into it, acting as if he was already bored with his guard duty.

  Nelson shoved Morgan forward to the next room. She resisted at first, digging her heels in. He chuckled as if amused that a girl half his size would even try to disobey. He pushed harder. Morgan used her momentum against him, letting him push her far enough away that she had room to spin around and punch him in the groin so hard that he doubled over. She darted past him and ran back down the hall.

  “No!” she screamed. “I’m not going in there. Don’t make me go in there!”

  “Get her!” Nelson yelled to the guard at Micah’s doorway. The Red Shirt leapt to his feet and lunged for Morgan as she tried to zigzag past him.

  She could have escaped, but that wasn’t her plan. Micah almost ruined things by emerging from his cell just as the Red Shirt caught her in a crushing bear hug.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Micah cried out, raising a fist.

  Nelson tackled Micah from behind and sent him sprawling against the wall. “You get back inside there, or we’ll do more than hurt her.”

  Micah whirled, ready to fight. Morgan caught his eye and shook her head. Nelson was facing away from her, so she risked a wink. Micah looked confused but lowered his fists. That didn’t stop Nelson from punching him in the gut.

  Morgan kept up her act, kicking and screaming and clawing the air as the second Red Shirt lifted her off her feet.

  “Take her to the Hole,” Nelson ordered. “Let her see what happens to troublemakers.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The Hole was a janitor’s closet around the corner from the Iso rooms. The door was solid wood, no window, making it ideal for Morgan’s needs—just the fact that it was one of the few rooms left with a door in this damn place made it worth any potential discomfort she suffered for the short time she’d be imprisoned there.

  The door was secured by a simple hasp with a long padlock dangling from it, hanging open. Morgan wondered who had the key—was glad she didn’t need to worry as she had an alternate exit strategy.

  Nelson opened the door. The room was small, about six by six, naked walls and floors, no comfy gym mat here, and the only things inside were a large janitor’s sink and a fluorescent light fixture suspended from the ceiling. Morgan focused on the sink; it was too low to the ground for her to be able to stand on it and reach the ceiling, but there was a thick pipe secured to the wall leading from the sink to the ceiling. Perfect.

  She made a show of resisting Nelson. “Please, I’m afraid of the dark. Please, no, don’t turn the lights off,” she cried after he pried her fingers from the door and threw her inside. He closed the door, and she pounded on it as he flicked the lights on and off from outside, laughing.

  The lights went off, and she shrieked, an unnerving sound despite the solid door between them. “Shut up!” he yelled, but the lights came back on and stayed on.

  Morgan leaned against the door and smiled. Time to get out of this place.

  She climbed onto the janitor’s sink. A quick shimmy up the pipe and she was at the ceiling. She pushed one of the tiles aside and raised her head up to assess the crawl space.

  Typical suspended ceiling on a flimsy metal grid held by wire ties. Useless except for access. What she was looking for were the stronger elements that could bear her weight: the interior metal two-by-fours that framed each room she could balance on, the heavy-duty sprinkler pipe she could hang from, the overhead trusses she could use as guides.

  Finding her way to the intake room’s fire doors would mean a zigzag route following the exterior room elements with at least one monkey crawl along the pipes to cross a corridor, but as long as she didn’t get lost, she could make it. Only problem was the lack of light.

  She pulled herself the rest of the way out through the ceiling and perched on one of the two-by-fours that framed the wall that held the pipe. Hanging on to the pipe with one hand, she reached out, pushing as many ceiling tiles as she could reach out of their supports, dropping them to the floor below. They made some noise, but no one came to investigate. Most importantly, they released a swath of light into the crawl space, enough to get her across the corridor where she could hopefully find another empty room and repeat the process.

  The roof trusses in this part of the building ran parallel to her path, so it was fairly easy to use them to brace herself with as she toed across the two-by-fours like a gymnast crossing a balance beam. Stray nail heads and bits of metal scratched at her bare feet, but she ignored the pain.

  She made it to the corridor wall. Leaving the security of the truss behind, she slowly edged along the top of the wall until she could reach the sprinkler pipe that crossed the corridor. The light was almost nonexistent, but she knew it had to be the corridor and not another room by the row of light fixtures dropping down through the suspended ceiling.

  Too risky to knock out tiles above a well-traveled corridor. She’d have to wait until she reached the other side and hope she found an unoccupied room that she could pull ceiling tiles from and steal more light. Then she could proceed to a room far enough away from where the guards sat keeping watch over Micah that she could drop down through and make her final escape. Which meant, she closed her eyes, building a map inside her mind, going to the left along the two-by-four studs, then turning right, heading to the empty rooms across from the commons room.

 
Hanging on to the pipe like a monkey, her ankles crossed above it, she pulled herself across the corridor. She could barely make out the gleam of the steel studs that marked the top of the opposite wall. She lowered her feet to balance on the framing element, hung on to the pipe with one hand, and leaned forward as far as she could to raise the corner of a ceiling tile. The room below had its lights on, but she heard no noise.

  She pulled the ceiling tile up higher and lowered her head to scout below it. The movement released a stray piece of metal bracing that had rested on the tile. Before she could catch it, it fell through the opening, landing with a clatter on the linoleum floor.

  Shit. Morgan eased the ceiling tile back into place and froze, listening. Her toes cramped with the effort of curling around the narrow metal stud, but she held her position.

  Footsteps came down the hall. The door below her opened. More footsteps inside the room.

  “What was it?” someone called from the hallway.

  “Nothing. Probably a bird flew into the window.”

  The lights clicked off, and the door slammed shut. The footsteps headed back down the hall and faded away.

  Morgan remained still, making sure no one was returning. She’d planned to use the concealment of the crawl space to get her all the way past the Red Shirts over to the commons room, but without any light it was too risky. And since they’d just cleared the room below her, odds were, they wouldn’t be back.

  She hoped.

  She pried the ceiling tile loose once more, slid it up to lie across the suspension grid, gingerly lowered her weight onto the door frame, then dropped down onto the floor below. The only sound was a soft thud.

  Her shoulders and feet ached with pain, but she immediately rolled onto her feet and waited behind the door, listening once more. No one came.

  She cracked the door open. The corridor was empty. All the rooms were dark. Moving as silently as possible, knowing that Micah’s guards were just behind her and around the corner, she crept toward the commons room. She looked back once, chagrined to see smears of blood from a cut on the bottom of her foot. They were small and in the shadows where the wall met the floor, but . . . she pulled her top over her head and used it to mop up the blood and apply pressure to her foot until the bleeding was stopped, then pulled her shirt back on and retraced her path.

  One more turn and a short length of corridor. Unfortunately it was the corridor with the rooms where the kids slept—rooms with no doorways.

  She came to the turn and snuck a peek around the corner. Two Red Shirts coming down the hall. Hide? Or take them out?

  No weapons but also nowhere to hide—she’d never make it back to the last room she’d passed in time. Okay, if they didn’t pass, she’d try to bluff her way through.

  Flattening herself against the wall, she waited. But then the lights overhead began to flicker. “Lights out!” the Red Shirts cried. “Lights out!”

  Kids streamed from the rooms where they’d been congregated, all segregated by their levels, toward the sleeping rooms—exactly the direction Morgan needed to go. She smoothed her top down and joined a group, passing the boys’ room, then the girls’, following two Red Shirts as if she had been ordered to go with them—only they never spotted her dogging their footsteps.

  The Red Shirts turned down a hall, away from the commons room, and she moved into the doorway, glancing through the window to make sure the room was empty. No strange prayer circles or mop handle tortures tonight, she was pleased to see. She ran through the first door, sprinted across the room to the doors leading into the intake room, and was home free.

  Except for the locked door across from her. Hoping that no one was monitoring the camera in the clock, she crossed the room and crouched down below the clock, where she and Micah had talked earlier. It was only nine o’clock—but if Deidre had kept them up all last night, she guessed the ReNewers deserved an early bedtime. Better for her that they were out of the way as well.

  She peeled back one edge of the theatrical putty that created her fake appendectomy scar and slid out the thin wire and flat sliver of metal that were her lock picks.

  Easy-peasy, she thought as she worked the lock. She’d get what she wanted from the files and be home sleeping in her comfy bed before Deidre and her Red Shirts even knew she was gone.

  She thought of Micah suffering a sleepless night in Iso because of her, but promised herself he wouldn’t mind. Not when she was able to close this place down for good.

  CHAPTER 41

  The administrative wing was quiet, but it didn’t feel empty, so Morgan took her time as she edged her way down the hall. Since she hadn’t seen any signs of computers or a file room near the entrance this morning, she turned to explore the rest of the area behind the main offices.

  These rooms were smaller than the classrooms. Probably meant to be administrative staff offices, she thought, given that they were on an interior corridor and had no windows. The first was furnished with a desk and chairs, giving off a distinct vibe of guidance counselor.

  The second surprised her. Behind its door was a man’s bedroom. The bed, with its rumpled sheets that from the smell hadn’t been washed in quite a while, took up most of the space, leaving room for only a small dresser and a clothing rack with several suits dangling from it. A door opened onto a single-stall bathroom strewn with dirty towels and shaving gear.

  Sean Chapman, the administrator she’d met earlier, had mentioned something to Greene about living on-site. Providing the children with therapeutic guidance day or night, he’d put it. As director, he’d have access to the files. Definitely no room for them here, though.

  She tried the next door. This room was a living area, probably also for Sean, given the large-screen TV, gaming console, leather recliner with a well-worn butt dent, and empty beer bottles on the floor. It appeared as if it was originally meant to be the staff lounge with its small kitchenette at the back of the room. She crept inside, scanning the area for any signs of a laptop or other computer equipment.

  A man’s voice sounded from the hallway. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Morgan spun. The door was closed; he hadn’t seen her. Yet.

  “No. He can wait. We need to talk.”

  There was nowhere to hide—no closets, no large piece of furniture to duck behind, no room between the refrigerator and the wall. Last resort. She opened the bottom cabinets below the countertop between the sink and the refrigerator. Most people filled the top ones first—easier to reach than squatting down low—and she didn’t expect Sean to have a lot of dishes to store.

  Bingo. The cabinet was empty except for a few empty plastic food containers, tossed randomly onto the shelf. Morgan slid inside, folding and flattening her body along the bottom shelf, closing the cabinet doors just as the room’s door opened.

  “Get in there.” She peered through the crack between the hinges. Sean Chapman, still in his suit, shoved Deidre inside. She stood, facing away from him, shoulders slumped, as if waiting orders. He entered behind her and closed the door. “Look at me.”

  Deidre slowly raised her head and turned to face him.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he shouted, mere inches from her ear. Deidre took a step back, but he grabbed her shoulder and held her in place. “That stunt with the new girl? I told you a thousand times you need to back off.”

  “You needed her to confess.” Deidre’s tone was meek. “She confessed.”

  Sean made a noise of frustration and raised one hand. Morgan thought he was going to hit her, but instead he pushed her away and ran his fingers through his hair. “When are you going to get it through your thick skull? Bad intel is worse than no intel.”

  He spoke as if ReNew was in the business of interrogating prisoners of war. Morgan blinked, realizing that was exactly what their business was. They weren’t satisfied with just raking in the dough they made
off their exorbitant tuitions, even though they spent no money on actually teaching the kids exiled here. They also used the secrets divulged by the kids during their Purge and so-called counseling sessions to blackmail their parents.

  After that, no matter what the kids reported about how awful their stay had been, no way would the parents take action.

  That’s why Micah said no one was released until they broke—except Bree. She hadn’t broken. At least not here, not until she’d gone back home.

  So what was the data in the files Robert Greene wanted her to destroy?

  “My job is saving souls.” Deidre’s voice was soft, but from her expression, it was clear she understood that her words were an act of defiance. “The good Reverend Doctor says—”

  “Your good Reverend Doctor is about to turn us out on the street if you don’t get your shit together,” he snapped. “Any more complications and he’ll shut this place down and move on. Without either of us.”

  Deidre stepped back as if he had slapped her. “No. He’d never—I’m meant to be with him. He promised me.”

  “You’re no good to him, bringing lawyers and cops in to nose around. We barely survived that fiasco with the Greene girl. One more screwup and . . .”

  She spun away, arms flying around her chest as if hugging herself. “He can’t leave me. We belong together. If I can find the one, maybe this new girl—”

  Sean stared at her in disgust. “Don’t you see? Benjamin doesn’t love you. He’ll always be the one to leave you.”

  Then he surprised Morgan. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Deidre, pulling her into a tender embrace. “Not me. I’ll never leave you, Deidre,” he crooned in a low voice. “Never.”

  She burrowed her face into his chest.

  “We’ve got it good here, little sis,” he said, fingers combing through her hair. “Don’t screw it up.”

  Little sis? Morgan pressed her eye against the crack. There was a definite resemblance, although Sean was several years older than Deidre. But the way he touched her, talked to her, it wasn’t what she expected from a big brother protecting his little sister. More like a pimp convincing a reluctant whore to seduce a john.