Shawn’s gaze swept over Leon like a searchlight, trying to read him down to the bone.
An ordinary Asian prison guard.
Not particularly tall.
A hint of something almost bookish in his face.
What gave a guy like that the right to say what he’d just said?
“Worse than death?”
Shawn’s voice dropped low.
“You know what you’re saying, kid?”
The other guards were keeping their distance, but they’d picked up on the tension.
Curious glances.
Wary ones.
The kind people throw when they don’t want to get too close but can’t look away.
Leon didn’t flinch.
He met Shawn’s stare directly, and let a perfectly calibrated look of sympathy settle onto his face.
“Of course I do.”
“Officer Walsh, I’m not a cop — but I’m part of this system.
I watch these pieces of garbage eat, sleep, and breathe in here every single day, three meals and a warm bed courtesy of the taxpayer.
And meanwhile, good men like your partner are lying in a hospital bed because of what they did.”
Each word landed exactly where he aimed it.
The fire in Shawn’s chest didn’t cool.
It burned hotter.
But the suspicion in his eyes shifted , softened, just slightly , into something that looked more like recognition.
Like he’d found someone on the same side of a line he’d drawn a long time ago.
“So what do you actually want?”
“I said — to help you.” Leon spread his hands.
“And to help myself.
I don’t enjoy watching trash like that living comfortably any more than you do.”
“That’s it?” Shawn didn’t buy it.
Nobody does anything for nothing.
Not in this world.
Leon saw the doubt and didn’t push against it.
He knew exactly what he was dealing with.
A veteran cop who’d spent years reading people on the street wasn’t going to be moved by something as thin as righteousness.
He leaned forward slightly, dropped his voice another notch, and let the conversation shift into territory that men like Shawn understood instinctively.
“Not entirely,” Leon admitted, with a relaxed smile.
“I’m a prison guard.
The pay’s not great.
Georgia’s not cheap.” A small pause.
“I need some extra income.”
That landed differently.
That landed like something real.
The tension in Shawn’s jaw eased.
He looked Leon over again , the scrutiny still there, but edged now with something almost like amusement.
So it’s about money.
Good.
Money, he could work with.
Problems that money solves aren’t really problems at all.
“Hah.” A short, low laugh.
“So that’s how it is.
How much are you looking at?”
“The money’s secondary.” Leon waved it off, careful not to sound eager.
“What I really want is the connection.
A friend who has pull at the King County Sheriff’s Office — that’s worth more to me than a one-time payout.”
That was the sentence that did it.
Shawn’s last wall came down.
This Asian kid wasn’t just angling for a quick score.
He was thinking long-term.
He wanted money and leverage.
That was exactly how a smart, realistic person thought , not like the self-righteous types who moaned about justice and then folded the moment things got hard.
“You’re interesting, Leon.”
He pulled out his wallet, counted out a few hundreds, then thought about it and added more.
Five hundred total.
He shoved the stack into the breast pocket of Leon’s uniform, rough and direct, no ceremony.
“Five hundred.
Consider it a deposit.” His eyes said the rest: don’t screw this up.
“I don’t care how you do it.
I want the result.”
Leon didn’t refuse.
He pressed his fingers lightly against the pocket, feeling the weight of the bills through the fabric.
In the apocalypse, that paper would be worthless.
But the apocalypse wasn’t here yet.
Right now, money still bought things.
Weapons.
Canned goods.
Medicine.
Every dollar was a brick in a wall he was quietly building.
“The result will satisfy you,” Leon said.
“How would I know that?”
“I’ll show you.” Leon smiled, just slightly.
“Give me a private email address — something secure.
When it’s done, I’ll send you the video myself.
His confession.
On his knees.”
The word video hit Shawn like a shot of adrenaline.
He could already see it.
That bastard on camera, breaking, begging, crying.
After everything Rick had been put through.
After all of it.
The rage that had been sitting like a stone in his chest suddenly had somewhere to go.
“Done.”
He didn’t hesitate again.
He yanked a notepad from his jacket pocket, scrawled an email address, and handed it over.
“Private account.
Just me.” A hard look.
“Send me your terms.
If I can live with them, you’ll hear from me.”
“Pleasure doing business, Shawn.” Leon took the paper and pocketed it.
“Don’t disappoint me, Leon.”
Shawn clapped him on the shoulder.
Hard.
The kind of grip that sat somewhere between a warning and a handshake.
Then he turned, pulled open the car door, dropped into the driver’s seat, and started the engine.
The cruiser’s engine growled.
The car rolled away and was gone, swallowed by the flat Georgia road stretching away from the prison gates.
The crowd around them thinned out.
Guards drifted back to their posts in clusters of two and three.
The yard noise settled back into its usual drone.
Leon didn’t go straight back to his patrol route.
He took a longer path, looping around toward the administration building.
This was the clerical side of the facility , quieter, cleaner, removed from the smell and noise of the cell blocks.
At three in the afternoon, with inmates in the yard and guards stretched thin across the compound, the admin hallways were almost empty.
He moved through them without drawing attention, turning into a small utility room tucked beside the records office.
The room was crowded with broken chairs, outdated filing equipment, and forgotten things nobody had bothered to throw away.
In the corner, an old desktop computer sat collecting dust, its monitor filmed with gray.
Leon locked the door behind him, settled into the chair, and woke the machine.
The tower wheezed and clattered like an old engine turning over on a cold morning.
He didn’t care.
He wouldn’t need it much longer.
He listened for sounds in the hallway while his fingers moved across the keyboard, opening an encrypted browser and pulling up a new email.
He entered the address Shawn had given him.
Subject line, two words: Price.
No preamble in the body.
No pleasantries.
Just a list.
A menu from hell.
[Service Option A: Permanent Lesson.
Comminuted fractures, all four limbs.
Guaranteed wheelchair for life.
Price: $10,000.]
[Service Option B: Living Dead.
High-level paraplegia , no sensation from the neck down.
Just a pair of eyes staring at the ceiling until he dies in a bed.
Price: $30,000.]
[Service Option C: Final Solution.
An accident.
A cardiac event.
An unfortunate “suicide.” Clean, quiet, untraceable.]
After Option C, he left the price field blank.
Instead, a single line:
[Price: To be discussed.]
He sent it.
Then he wiped the browser history, cleared the temp files, and left no trace.
He leaned back against the wall, lit a cigarette, and waited.
He’d read Shawn right.
The man was a raw nerve right now, grief and fury wound so tight that almost anything could set him off.
All it needed was the right trigger.
Less than five minutes later, his phone buzzed.
He didn’t check the prison computer.
He used his phone, his own account, nothing that touched the facility’s network.
He opened the email.
The sender was Shawn.
The message was shorter than he’d expected.
And nastier.
“C!
I want fucking C!
Name your price!”
No wasted words.
No deliberation.
Not even a complete sentence.
Just that capital letter, hammered home like a fist on a table.
Leon looked at the screen for a moment.
Then he smiled.
Exactly what I needed.
He didn’t write back.
He stubbed out the cigarette, pocketed the phone, and walked out of the utility room at a calm, unhurried pace.
Back on the floor, he ran his patrol like nothing had changed.
He nodded to the guards he passed.
He stopped to dress down two inmates he caught trying to swap contraband in a blind corner of the yard , sharp tone, no hesitation, completely routine.
Everything looked normal.
Only he knew the first piece had just moved into place.
Half an hour later, he found a quiet stretch of corridor with no cameras pointed his way and took out his phone.
He typed one line in reply.
“One hundred thousand dollars.”
He’d thought through the number carefully.
A hundred grand was real money , enough to sting, enough to make a cop stop and breathe hard.
But it wasn’t fantasy money.
Cops had channels.
Everyone in law enforcement had ways to earn outside the badge.
It was a number Shawn could reach if he wanted to badly enough.
The point wasn’t just the sum.
The point was the weight behind it.
He sent it and waited.
This time, the silence stretched longer.
Leon could picture it easily , Shawn staring at the screen, maybe pacing, maybe swearing under his breath at the walls.
The reply came in about ten minutes.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?
A hundred grand?
Why don’t you just rob a bank?”
Predictable.
Leon typed back without rushing.
“Officer Walsh, this isn’t a farmer’s market.”
“This is a human life.
And my career.
And every year of freedom I have left.”
“A hundred thousand dollars buys you a result that lets you sleep at night — and gives your partner the justice he deserves.
Is that expensive?”
He let Rick’s name sit there in the subtext without writing it directly.
He didn’t need to.
Shawn’s reply came back within seconds.
“How do I even get it to you?
Drop a briefcase full of cash somewhere?
What is this, a movie?”
Leon read that and went still for a moment.
Here it was.
The moment everything turned.
He breathed in slowly.
Then he started typing , not fast, deliberately, choosing each line.
“No cash.”
“Cash doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“What I need, Officer Walsh, is for you to spend that hundred thousand on supplies.
For me.”
He sent it and put the phone in his pocket.
He could feel the silence from Shawn’s end like pressure in the air.
The man was confused now , more confused than angry, which was exactly where Leon needed him.
Not money.
Then what the hell does he want?
Five full minutes passed.
Then:
“Supplies.
What kind of supplies?
A car?
Gold?
Watches?”
Wary.
Baffled.
But still there.
Leon leaned against the wall and looked up at the overcast Georgia sky.
He wrote back in a tone that walked the line between casual and earnest.
“None of those.”
“Survival supplies.
Canned food , a lot of it.
Bottled water.
Antibiotics.
Painkillers.
Bandages, scalpels, sutures.”
“And weapons.
AR-15 mags, Glock 17 mags — as many as the money will cover.”
“Solar panels and battery packs.
If there’s anything left, a diesel generator and fuel to go with it.”
He sent the list in one message and waited.
Shawn’s response came back fast and loud.
“What the HELL are you doing???
Are you building a gun store AND a grocery warehouse???”
Leon smiled at the screen.
He knew exactly how this looked.
“Think of me as a madman if you want, Shawn.”
“I’m a prepper.
A serious one.
The kind who’s convinced the economy’s going to collapse, the government’s going to fail, and social order is going to come apart at the seams.
Always have been.”
He let that sit.
Then he built the rest of the story, layer by layer, the kind of thing that makes sense when it’s told the right way.
“I put everything I had into the market.
Every cent.
You’ve seen the news lately , you know how that went.”
“I’m broke.
But I’m not giving up on my plan.
I still need those supplies.
I still need a shelter that works when everything else stops working.”
“You’re the fastest way I could think of to get there.”
He read it back before sending.
Half true, half fabricated , but the seams didn’t show.
In America, this profile existed everywhere.
Preppers.
Doomsday believers.
People who’d drained their savings and spent weekends stockpiling freeze-dried food in basement bunkers, waiting for a collapse that everyone else thought was paranoia.
It was a far more believable story than I know what’s coming.
And it stitched everything together neatly , why he’d approached Shawn, why he needed the money in goods instead of cash, why a prison guard would take a risk this serious for supplies instead of a payout.
The line went quiet again.
Leon could imagine Shawn on the other end, arms crossed, working through it.
A cop , a man who built his whole life around maintaining order , faced with a guy who was absolutely certain that order was about to end.
It would feel strange.
Maybe absurd.
But it didn’t matter whether Shawn thought Leon was crazy.
What mattered was that this particular madman could solve his problem.
And buying supplies through a third party was a hell of a lot cleaner, legally speaking, than handing over cash for a hit.
It wasn’t a contract killing.
It was a commissioned shopping list.
The reply came.
“Send me the full list and a delivery location.”
No pushback.
No more questions.
“Once it’s done, the goods go to the address you give me.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
Leon typed his reply without hesitation.
“You will.”
“Because you need this outcome more than I do.”
Done.
He deleted every message in the chain , both sent and received , and slid the phone back into his pocket.
Then he raised his eyes to the high concrete walls running the perimeter of the facility, to the razor wire coiled along the top, catching the flat afternoon light.
Everyone else looked at this place and saw a prison.
Leon looked at it and saw a fortress.
He closed his hand into a fist at his side.
He wasn’t just going to survive what was coming.
He was going to come out of it on top.
And the first step , the one that was quietly falling into place right now , was making sure the man who’d put Rick in that hospital bed disappeared from the world completely and without a trace leading anywhere near him.
He already had the shape of a plan.
One that left him clean.
He turned and headed toward solitary confinement.
➤ Next: Set the Wolf Against the Tiger, Fanning the Flames