PART VIII THE SECRET EMPIRE #2
His cackles echoed as we ran as fast as we could.
How do you assassinate someone in a prison known for its regular power outages and deadly riots?
You say the power failed, causing the locks to malfunction. Some prisoners got out and in the short-lived melee—at a time when Officer Higgins and the other two guards had unfortunately stepped away—the unlucky visitors were torn limb from limb.
The next question is how could the target of such an attempt get out of that prison when the guards weren’t going to help?
I knew the answer to that.
You didn’t get the guards to get you out.
You got someone else.
We reached the airlock at a sprint just as the first two prisoners from D Block did.
A huge Black prisoner and Curtis Wayne Gardner.
We’d needed to get in that airlock and close it, but they’d got there too quickly.
The huge Black guy had the name ‘robinson’ stencilled on his prison uniform.
‘Howdy, sweetheart!’ he yelled at Audrey.
‘Hi, Sam.’ Curtis Gardner glared at me. He gripped a shiv in one hand, a plastic toothbrush wickedly sharpened.
Beyond them, I saw two more prisoners emerge from their now-open cells.
In a minute, Audrey and I would be hopelessly outnumbered.
We had to seal the airlock.
Which meant overcoming Curtis Gardner and Mr Robinson.
Gardner rushed at me.
Robinson lunged at Audrey.
Gardner stabbed at me with his shiv, but I dodged the blow. Then he tackled me around my waist, slamming me against the wall, so I whipped off my jacket and wrapped it over his head. Then I rammed his head against the steel bars of the airlock and he slumped to the ground, unconscious.
I spun to help Audrey with Mr Robinson, only to see her grab a leg-iron from the wall and sling it like a whip, causing its heavy padlock to smash into Robinson’s face.
Blood sprayed.
Robinson fell out the door, landing back in the D Block corridor, clutching at his nose.
I slammed the barred door on the D Block side of the airlock, locking Robinson out, just as the other prisoners arrived there, shouting and yelling.
I spun and ran to close the door on the other side of the airlock, the one leading back to Death Row.
A giant figure already stood there.
Dwayne Folcomb Jr.
He glared at Audrey and me, trapped in the airlock.
And he smiled.
‘The Messenger of God has come for you.’
I stepped in front of Audrey, facing Folcomb.
He bent his head as he glared at me.
He gripped his crucifix in one of his massive hands and I saw that its base end was sharpened. A much bigger shiv than Gardner’s.
‘Are you ready to accept the Lord’s wrath in order to receive His grace?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
He charged at me, leading with the crucifix.
I dropped into a crouch, clasping his legs with mine in a tripping move and he fell face-first to the concrete floor.
I kicked his wrist, causing him to release the crucifix.
He roared and rose—
—as I reached for the crucifix—
—but he was too fast and grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall.
My feet dangled above the floor. Unlike the time Leroy Hertzenberger had done this to me, I didn’t have my spare gun with me. This time I was helpless.
Then Audrey flung her leg-irons at Folcomb like a whip, but he caught them and shoved her to the ground.
He pushed his face right up close to mine.
His breath reeked. ‘I’m gonna break you, tiny man, and make you watch as I unleash God’s wrath on her.’
There was nothing I could do.
I was pinned against the concrete wall, my feet high off the floor.
So with nothing else to call on, I yanked off my glasses, snapped off one of the ear-stalks and stabbed Folcomb in the left eye with it.
Folcomb howled.
And released me.
I dropped to the floor, gasping.
I got to my feet just as Folcomb yanked my ear-stalk out of his eye.
‘You little—’ he said a second before Audrey smacked him in the back of the head with the heavy padlock of her leg-irons and he dropped to the ground, knocked out.
I slammed the door leading back to Death Row, just as a few other prisoners emerged from their cells, curious.
At least ten prisoners from D Block were now gathered at its barred door, shouting and hollering at us.
Then I did what I needed to do.
I yanked down some ancient wires and using the sparks, I started a fire.
They came twenty minutes later.
Not guards.
Firefighters, six of them.
The guards at Angola were never going to come and rescue us, but the fire department had to.
The firefighters found us in the sealed airlock with Dwayne Folcomb and Curtis Gardner lying on the floor, trussed up in leg-irons.
We were escorted out of the prison.
After reclaiming my backpack from the visitor area, I put on my spare pair of glasses, and as we passed Officer Higgins on the way out, I saw him speaking into a cell phone.
Outside in the parking lot, Audrey and I got into our Kombi van.
Audrey said, ‘Well, that was unpleasant. What do we do now?’
‘It’s a good bet that guard, Higgins, was talking to someone in the Kingman clan. They’re gonna be coming after us again. But first . . .’
I pulled my laptop from my backpack and brought up a photo.
It was the photo I’d taken surreptitiously inside Tad Kingman Sr’s office at his mansion in Victorville, the photo of his family tree.
Audrey asked, ‘The Kingman family tree? What’s that got to do with all this?’
‘Everything. It explains why they took four young women approximately every twenty-five years. Prostitutes like LaToya Martyn. It also explains why the pattern isn’t perfect.’
‘How does it explain it?’
‘Look at the dates on this family tree: specifically, look at the dates of each firstborn child.’
I drew some dates on the side of the image:
‘I still don’t see it,’ Audrey said. ‘Your missing-women dates don’t match. They’re a year out each time.’
‘Correct.’ I nodded. ‘And never an exact year either.’
I added some arrows.
‘The missing prostitutes,’ I explained, ‘all went missing about nine or ten months before the birth of a new Kingman son.’
‘So?’
I said, ‘What usually happens about nine or ten months after a young couple gets married?’
‘They have a child.’
‘Right, run with me here,’ I said. ‘We know the prostitutes from 1877 were hired for a bachelor party.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m thinking all of these groups of sex workers were hired for bachelor parties. If we use 1877 as our starting point, we see that shortly before every firstborn Kingman male got married, he had a bachelor party, and for that bachelor party, four prostitutes were procured.
‘Presumably, they were hired for the standard sexual services, but then, each time, the Kingman son in question kept the four women as his slaves. Nine or ten months later—as happens after young men get married—he had his first legitimate child with his wife, which the family tree shows.’
Audrey was silent as she took this all in.
‘You’re saying it’s a tradition? A sick generational tradition?’ she said.
‘Exactly. From 1877 in Florida and every 25 or 30 years since, as each firstborn Kingman male prepared to get married, he had a bachelor party at which he abducted four Black women. That’s why the years aren’t regular: some of these men got married -earlier and some later in life.’
‘And your girl, LaToya?’
‘Same thing. She was hired in 2018 for a debauched bachelor party. This was “Bubba’s party”, as Cyrus put it, the bachelor party for Tad Kingman Jr, known as Bubba to his family.
‘And after Tad Jr hired LaToya, he kept her as his slave. Who knows how many children she bore him over the last seven years who themselves became slaves.’
‘Okay,’ Audrey said, ‘but what about these men’s genteel Southern wives? They just tolerate this?’
‘Like genteel Southern wives always have,’ I said. ‘As long as the wives have their legitimate white children, they don’t care what their men do with their slave women. They’re toys, playthings.
‘But then.’ I held up a finger. ‘Then, a few weeks ago, LaToya had this child—the stillborn one which she put in the doll and released down Dead Man’s Creek during the storm.
‘Do you remember the original paternal DNA results that I saw at the Lake Charles morgue? Before someone changed the records to make Eli Gage the father of the baby, there was no DNA match for the father because he—Tad Jr—has no criminal record. The stillborn baby in the doll was Tad Jr’s child with his slave. ’
For a while, Audrey said nothing.
‘This is just truly awful,’ she said.
‘That’s why we have to go there,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, we have to finish this. We go back to where it all started: Dead Man’s Creek.
We went up it before, but because of their trick with Eli Gage, we didn’t go far enough.
We need to go back to Dead Man’s Creek and follow it all the way to its source to truly find out what happened to LaToya Martyn. ’
‘I hear you,’ Audrey said, ‘but Sam, Victorville is their home base. It’s gonna be crawling with Kingman people. You heard Cyrus: they own the whole state, including the police. This would literally be going into the lion’s den.’
‘Which is why we wait a couple nights. Today’s Wednesday. We go in on Friday night, when they’ll be otherwise occupied.’
‘Occupied?’
‘Their big week of wedding events will have started,’ I said. ‘Hopefully the Kingmans’ security team will be busy managing all their important guests and visitors, on Friday night in particular. That’s the night of their rehearsal dinner. That’s when we go in, while they’re celebrating.’