Chapter 16. Mike Larson stomped through the corridors of the Don Jail as fast as his feet could

carry his ample form. Larson was a thick-necked red-faced prison guard and made no apologies for it or for much else.

The Don was nobody's idea of a palace, but Larson was king of this particular castle. Not in the warden's office,

maybe, not before a review board, but among the hundreds of tough, sharpsters, gangsters,

and would-be master criminals that called the dawn home, Mike Larson and his guards were the law.

But not today. Today there was a strange energy throughout the entire building. You could feel it in the

yard where most of the jail's population whiled away another day of captivity. You could feel it in

the dining hall in the lockdown cages. It was a strange, quiet energy, a dreadful note of preparation,

full of hostility yet based in fear.

An aggressive sort of hush that a pack of jackals might settle into when they sensed the

presence of a tiger.

Mike Larson could feel it too, and it made his job more difficult.

He had no idea if the inmates had somehow sensed the Don's most important guests, or if the prison

grapevine had outdone itself again, but the silent dread that hung over the 500 men

housed within the walls of the jail made this anything but a typical day, which made it

that much more difficult to pretend that it was. Larson's boots rang out in heavy clumsy peals as he closed in on the isolation wing.

Here prisoners were kept away from the general throng, sometimes for their own safety,

sometimes for that of the assorted cutthroats and murderers that might try their luck against the worst of the worst.

And it was here, on this day of all days, that his most important guests were

holding court.

Larson fumbled with the keys on his belt, the coiled terror of the prisoners throughout the building,

the eerie pretense of calm they exuded.

...