Page 95 of Nightshade

“Monika, check the other cell,” Stilwell ordered. “Gaston is in there. Go!”

Juarez stepped over to the other cell and immediately brought a hand up to her mouth to stifle a scream. There was a cinder-block wall between the two cells, and Stilwell couldn’t see what she saw.

“What?” he said.

“He’s… he’s dead,” she said. “I think.”

Stilwell leaped to his feet and left the first cell to join her. He looked through the bars into the second cell. Henry Gaston was no doubt dead. He was sitting on the cell’s steel toilet, his head back, exposing a gaping neck wound and a cascade of blood down the front of his shirt. He had nearly been decapitated.

“What is happening?” Juarez shouted in a panicked voice.

“Listen to me,” Stilwell said calmly. “I need you to leave the sub and go to the fire station next door. Tell them you have an officer down and he needs medical attention.”

Juarez didn’t move.

“Monika!” Stilwell shouted. “Go next door and get the EMTs. Now!”

Juarez seemed to snap out of it. Her eyes focused on Stilwell’s and she nodded.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m going.”

She left, and Stilwell pulled his phone. He called the sheriff’s comms center on the mainland to report a homicide and an officer down. He requested that Captain Corum and the homicide unit be alerted and dispatched to Catalina.

As soon as Stilwell ended the call he heard another groan from the first cell. He went back to Esquivel and found him trying to get up off the floor.

“Hold on, Eddie,” he said. “Stay down. We have help coming. Let the EMTs look at you before you try to get up.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Esquivel said.

“That’s okay, that’s okay. It probably means you’re in shock.Stay down and stay calm, and turn your head to the side. Help is on the way.”

“Okay. All right.”

“Do you remember what happened, Eddie?”

“Uh, I got hit.”

“Who hit you? Was it Spivak?”

“Yeah, Spivak. He hit me. He was screaming about something, so I came to see what was happening, and I got too close. He grabbed my shirt. He pulled me into the bars and I hit my head. And then… that’s all I remember.”

“Okay. It will come back. Just take it easy. Help’s coming.”

“Did he get away? I think he took my keys.”

“Yeah, he’s gone.”

Stilwell thought about Spivak’s escape. He checked his watch. The last ferry to the mainland had left forty-five minutes before. Esquivel was actively bleeding from fresh wounds, so Stilwell guessed that the attack and escape had occurred recently, after the ferry’s departure. That meant Spivak was still on the island—or he’d left on a boat he’d had stashed away somewhere. Stilwell assumed it was the latter. His instincts told him that this had been a setup from the start. That Spivak had engineered his placement in the jail so he could take out Gaston should he surrender or be arrested.

His phone buzzed. It was Captain Corum calling.

“Stil, what the hell’s going on over there?”

“It’s a mess, Captain. We’ve got a deputy down but alive, a prisoner dead, and another prisoner who escaped.”

“Can you lock down the island?”

“I think it’s too late. This was a planned assassination and most likely the escape was part of the plan.”