Prior Bad Acts

7

KARL DAHL WAS a watcher. He never had much to say. He never had any friends. People didn’t notice him, as a rule. He had learned long ago to melt into the background.

Over the years different people had given him the nickname “Ghost.” He had always been pale, with a sort of a strange gray cast to him. His eyes were gray. His skin had a certain grayness to it.

Different people in his growing-up years had suggested he had maybe gotten lead poisoning or mercury poisoning or some other kind of poisoning. Karl had always figured none of that was the case, else he would have been dead or sickly.

He’d been in jail before. A few times. Jail was not a place to draw attention. Especially not for men with certain proclivities. After his first brutal experience, he had managed to more or less stay out of harm’s way the next time, and the next. But he couldn’t be anonymous this time.

This time everyone in the jail knew who he was and what he had been accused of doing. Everyone in the place hated him. Guards and hardened criminals alike hated him enough to want to hurt him, kill him. Other inmates spat at him when they got the chance. Some shouted threats. It had been made clear that if he fell into the hands of the general population, he wouldn’t come out alive.

Today had been worse than most. Judge Moore had ruled on his “prior bad acts,” as the lawyers called them. News of her ruling had gone through the place like wildfire. The prosecution wouldn’t be allowed to talk about anything he’d been accused or convicted of prior to the Haas murders. That would be a good thing for him, except he didn’t believe a jury would acquit him, no matter what. One of the guards called him Dead Man Walking, and Karl figured that was about right if he stayed in jail.

He had his own cell on the suicide-watch row. Still, he didn’t feel safe. Jail was only meant to keep the common folk safe from criminals. On the inside, nobody gave a shit if a man lived or died, especially a man like Karl himself.

At least he had an attorney who was trying to do a good job for him. Knowing his lawyer would come from a pool of public defenders, Karl had expected the worst-to get some bored and bitter underachiever who would so hate the idea of defending him that he would all but hand him over to the Department of Corrections.

Kenny Scott was a decent enough guy. Karl thought Scott almost wanted to believe he was innocent.

A guard with a buzz cut and no neck opened the door to the interview room. “Time’s up, Dahl. Let’s go.”

Karl thanked his attorney, shook his hand, and rose from his chair. Scott had come to fill him in on the particulars of Judge Moore’s ruling and what would happen next.

“Let’s go,” the guard said in a stronger tone.

Karl shuffled out into the hall, his gaze on the floor so as to avoid eye contact. Like wild predators, the guards took eye contact as a sign of aggression and retaliated accordingly.

“You know, it’s not gonna make any difference,” the guard said. “You got lucky pulling Judge Moore, but no jury in this state is gonna let you off.”

Karl said nothing so he couldn’t be accused of giving lip.

“It’s just a damn shame we don’t have the death penalty,” the guard went on. “Bunch of goddamn liberals in the state government. You go outside the Twin Cities and ask the average person on the street, they’re gonna say you should be hanged in public. And you should be tortured first. Let Wayne Haas have an hour with you in a locked room.”

The guard punched a code into a security panel beside the door that led them back into the cells. A loud buzzer sounded. A red light flashed. The steel door unlatched with an audible clank. The guard opened it and Karl walked through ahead of him. The eyes of the inmates were on him instantly.

“Hey, you sick fuck!” one of them shouted.

“Put him in here with us, Bull! We’ll deal with that piece of shit,” said the cell mate, an angry-looking black man with a hundred zigzag braids in his hair. The rolled-up sleeves of his jail-issue jumpsuit revealed numerous gang tattoos up and down his arms.

Another inmate was walking ahead of Karl, being escorted to his cell by another guard. He walked with a swagger, even in shackles his head held high, defiant, arrogant. He was tall and heavy, a white guy with a tattoo of a snake crawling up the back of his bald head. A biker. He glanced back over his shoulder at Karl. A swastika had been inked onto his cheekbone. Prison tat. Aryan Nation.

“Hey, you Nazi limp-dick!” Zigzag called. “Here’s your honey. A chil’ rapist, just like you, you fuckin’ pervert. Master race, my ass! Why don’t y’all just fuck each other!”

Snake looked at the inmate but said nothing. He never even broke stride. In the next step, he swung his hands sideways, caught his guard just under the chin, and clotheslined him, the blow yanking him off his feet and knocking him backward into Bull. Bull stumbled back into the bars of a cell, and a roar went through the place. The inmates were cheering and shouting.

Karl froze for a precious instant as Snake came at him, eyes bugging, chains rattling. Too late, he turned to try to lunge toward the door.

Snake’s clenched fists came down before his eyes, arms closing on either side of his neck. The links of the handcuffs caught Karl just above his Adam’s apple, and he made a raw, retching sound as Snake yanked him backward off his feet.

Black lace crept in on the edge of Karl Dahl’s vision. He couldn’t breathe. As he tried to raise his hands to claw at the hold on his throat, Snake slammed him sideways into the bars of Zigzag’s cell. His temple cracked against the iron once, twice, three times, and blood ran down through his right eye.

The black gangster spat in his face. Karl could no longer hear the shouting, only a loud, whooshing roar inside his head. He seemed to have no command of his arms or legs, flailing like the limbs of a rag doll in the mouth of a rabid dog. His body was nothing but limp weight, hanging him on the bracelets of his killer.

He was vaguely conscious of the red light flashing over the door to the outside hall, the door swinging open.

Snake beat his head against the bars again and again.

The guard called Bull was coming at him, swinging a baton.

Blood sprayed through the air as the baton connected with something-someone.

Karl fell to the floor, tangled in the arms and legs of his attacker, still choking.

The last thing he remembered thinking was that his father would have just stood there and shaken his head and said he should have done it himself years ago.