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“No, man. This is about not murdering.”

“Okay. I got ya. I know how to spin it. But considering on how things might go, it could make it that much more difficult to get through.”

There was a side door to Kershaw and Associates. Mel had been in and out of the building over the past few days and had put together a plan for us to enter unnoticed. That particular side door had no camera on it, and he had fixed the lock so that it only appeared to work properly.

We made our way in and up to the eighth floor. There we jimmied the locks of the offices of Myer, Myer, and Goldfarb. I couldn’t tell by their walls or desks what business MM&G were in, but it didn’t much matter. The eighth stage of the Kershaw building was halfway between the eighth and ninth floors of the building that housed Treacher Admitting.

I had brought a go bag with all the tools a burglar might need. We had to completely remove the unused window that looked out onto the slender divide between the two buildings. I had two crowbars for that job. We wedged a metal chair between our window and Treacher’s wall. From there, one after another, we crawled up high enough to make it through the hospital room window. We had to break the lock, but Mel put it back together well enough that it looked okay if you didn’t inspect it too closely.

Then we used a half-chewed piece of gum to attach a tiny transmitter under the hospital bed and made our way back down to MM&G.

That was our time to wait.

We had a tiny speaker receiving a continuous feed from the transmitter in the room. When something happened there, we would hear it.

So for the next three hours we sat in darkness and silence.

It was a fairly simple plan. The note hidden in the tampon, printed in block letters culled from the Internet, told A Free Man that if he wanted to be free he should take the powder folded in a small cellophane envelope that accompanied the note, at any time between 11:00 at night and 2:00 in the morning. This would give him abdominal pains and a fever. He should call a guard at the first signs of these symptoms and that’s all he had to do.

We waited. I don’t believe either of us uttered a word in that time.

But even though I didn’t chatter, my mind was filled with excitement, fear, and even some remorse.

I was not an extortionist-rapist even though I had had sex with the woman calling herself Nathali Malcolm. A Free Man was not a murderer even though he had shot and killed the two policemen who had betrayed their oaths and tried to murder him. We were both mostly innocent men slated to take the fall for the real criminals. We would never receive justice from law enforcement or the courts, and so the only thing that could be done was to take the law into our own hands.

This decision frightened me. Taking these steps brought me to a place I had never been, a place that I had always thought was wrong. And it was wrong. My demon friend and I were executing an honest-to-God prison break.

For a man with my history, that was just about as bad as you could get.

There were butterflies all through my body. I felt as if I were damned. But still I knew that this was the only course left open to me.

“Bring him in here!” a woman commanded over the small speaker on the desk between us.

The time was 1:57 a.m.

There were sounds of squeaky rubber wheels on the linoleum floor and the squealing of metal frames moving and sometimes bumping into other objects.

“Put him on the bed,” the woman said.

“Lift!” a man said.

Then we heard the less definable sounds of a body being hefted and moved, probably from a gurney to the bed.

“You don’t need to restrain him,” the woman complained. “He has a fever of one oh three.”

“Ma’am, this here is a convicted cop killer. As far as I’m concerned we could have let him die in his cell. But as long as he’s here he will be chained to this bed.”

There were more sounds and some conversation. Mel and I were on high alert. I no longer worried about right and wrong because it was a time for action.

“He has all the symptoms of appendicitis, but that’s not what I’m seeing,” the woman said.

“Should we take him back?” a man I had not heard before asked.

“No,” the woman doctor said. “I want to observe him for twenty-four hours at least. If this is some kind of communicable infection I’d like to isolate it before it spreads through your jail.”

“You mean we could catch this?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to see what happens.”