Page 88 of Backtrack

“I guess it is,” he said.

“Very well.” Judge Skidmore cleared his throat. “Richard Lee Pink, it was my decision to have you stand trial for your crimes as an adult. The heinous nature of your actions and your continued violent spree with Mr. Duvall after the initial robbery make me stand firm in that decision—”

Pink raised his hands, still shackled to the chain around his waist. “Hang on, sir … Are you not even going to try and find out who took the diamonds?”

“That’ll do, Mr. Pink,” Skidmore continued on without missing a beat. “I suspect you know exactly where the diamonds are—”

Pink slammed his shackled fists against the table, knocking over the water pitcher. “But I don’t know! That’s what I’m trying to tell you, if you’d just listen!”

“Counsel!” Skidmore snapped. “Control your client.” The judge looked directly at Pink, then screwed his face into an iron scowl. Cutter made a mental note not to ever make the man angry with him.

“Though you have been tried as an adult,” Skidmore said, “in considering your sentence, the court is mindful that you are only fifteen years old. The court fully recognizes that it would certainly better serve justice to give you the same sentence that I gave your partner in crime, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to send a teenager to the electric chair. Your outbursts of temper suggest to me that it is very likely you will be killed in prison while you are still a young man. Mr. Pink, there is always someone bigger, faster, meaner. I urge you, sir, to get this temper of yours under control. Perhaps the laws will one day change, long after I am gone, and you will hobble out of the prison gate as a very old man—but barring that, you will die inside those walls.” The judge sat very still for a long moment, studying Pink, before he looked down at his notes.“To that end …” Again, Skidmore read the names of victims. “It is the judgment of this court that you be remanded to the custody of the Texas Department of Corrections for six consecutive sentences, each of those sentences being for the term of your natural life. May God have mercy on you, Mr. Pink. The death penalty would certainly be more humane.”

“Whatever,” Pink said. He turned to look directly at Cutter, rattling his handcuffs and belly chain, gathering himself up as if to jump across the wooden partition. Cutter, Johnson, and Sheriff Langford all shot to their feet. Two uniformed bailiffs swooped in and grabbed the prisoner by his arms. He shook them off like fleas. The judge banged his gavel. Duvall stayed in his seat, laughing hysterically.

“D Wayne Cutter, you gutless bastard!” Pink roared. “I know for a fact you took the diamonds. But guess what? I don’t give a shit about the jewels. You killed my friend! You’re gonna pay for that. I don’t know how, or when, but someday you will—and when you do, it’s gonna be bloody!”

CHAPTER 39

Seattle, Washington

PRESENT DAY

Shayna Hanford reached across the table at the Dough Zone Dumpling House near Sea-Tac Airport and stroked the back of her boyfriend’s hand, hoping against hope it would soothe him. She’d been drawn to dangerous men for as long as she could remember, especially if they had muscles.

Twenty-eight years older than her and a full foot taller, Ricky Pink hunched over the table with one arm wrapped around his plate. He’d eaten like that since she’d first met him, like he was afraid she might steal a hunk of his steamed dough. Massive shoulders shook. His upper lip pulled back into a snarl. The server, a spaghetti-thin girl with blue hair and a ring through one eyebrow, smiled when he fumbled with his chopsticks. He thought she was laughing at him. The poor kid hadn’t meant anything by it, but that was the way with Ricky. He could be the nicest guy in the whole world and then, if he thought you’d slighted him, plot your bloody murder.

“It’s okay, honeybunch,” Shayna said. “She can bring you a fork.”

“I would appreciate that,” Ricky said. It sounded scripted, like something a prison therapist had told him to say during anger management classes.

The server wisely scampered off, probably to tell the cook aboutthe crazy white-haired giant scarfing down soup dumplings with his fingers.

Ricky never did dawdle over his meals. Shayna thought it was probably another prison thing.

“We should be in Ketchikan,” he said around a mouthful of soup dumpling. “Her ship gets in early tomorrow.”

Shayna checked her phone. “Our plane’s still running on time. We’ll get there by nine o’clock tonight. It’s better that way. Believe me.”

“You have to understand,” he said, sounding half civilized. “This is all new to me.”

“I get it.” Shayna rubbed his arm. “But a guy like you walks around causing your own solar eclipse. You’re not exactly easy to miss. The longer you stay out of sight, the better for all of us.”

The server came back with the fork and an extra round of dumplings on the house, making everything right with the world.

Ricky wasn’t a good man, but he was good to Shayna. And having access to fifteen million in diamonds, well, that made him superhot. Shayna had inherited a little money from her grandpa, over six hundred grand after the lawyers took their cut. It was enough to finance this trip, but they were burning through it amazingly fast. That was the trouble with having what wasalmosta lot of money. You got used to it, and then it ran out, and then you had to go back to working double shifts at the convenience store.

No, Ricky Pink wasn’t good, but he was a good investment.

Pink popped the last of the magical dumplings in his mouth. Amazing. The inmates pulling kitchen duty in the Wainwright Unit did a passable job of making Salisbury steak, but even the best of them never tried to put soup inside a doughball.

Pink took a couple of deep breaths, like the prison shrink told him to do when he got stressed. After forty-five years of smelling little but flatulence and floor cleaner, the sounds and odors of the outside world could overwhelm his senses. Life wasn’t better on the inside, but some days it sure as hell seemed easier.

His cellie when he first went in was an old man whose name was Simon, but everybody called him Grunt. Grunt was doing life forstrangling a supervisor to death at the body shop where he’d worked. He didn’t talk much, and as long as Pink sat down on the cell’s toilet to pee, brushed his teeth with his mouth closed, and kept the rest of his living space tidy, the old man had taken him under his wing. Pink laughed about it now. He’d thought Grunt was an old man at the time, but he’d died in a yard fight at fifty-one—a youngster.

Pink had seen riots, escapes—some of them successful for a short time—and the rash of stabbings. The eighties were a rough decade. When he was just twenty-two, prisoners in the wing next to his shorted the electrical system and gained control of the cells, holding a guard hostage until the tactical goons swooped in and beat their asses to a pulp.

The Eastham Unit gained such a reputation Texas Department of Corrections eventually changed its name to Wainwright. No matter what the goons called it, Pink would always think of it as the Ham. He’d been there from the beginning of his sentence, a know-nothing boy of fifteen picking cotton on what had to be the most violent plantation in the country. Over the next forty years, Ricky had dropped his middle name and turned into an old man. He’d had a front-row seat whenNewsweekmagazine did their article about the toughest prison in America and was still there decades later when the Ham became a working cattle ranch and chicken farm.