Free The Payback Man by Carolyn McSparren

they’d had any sort of personal encounter.
    “Be my guest.” She pulled a folded-up sheaf of lined yellow pages out of her jacket pocket and dropped it on the desk. “Can I bring you some lunch? The walk up to the cafeteria is going to be painful.”
    He shook his head. “Cheeseburgers alone down here?Against the rules. Don’t worry. I’ll make it. I’m already feeling better.”
    “I’m only an animal doctor, so I can’t prescribe for human beings, but I can offer some horse liniment that might help, so long as it’s our little secret. I use it myself for aches.”
    “Thanks.”
    She picked up the computer and placed it on the desk. “Good luck.”
    “Right.”
    He sat behind the desk and watched her walk out of the room, back straight, hair swinging. Sweet Daddy would call her “fine”—if he called her anything printable. Fine she was, and not only her sleek body. There was a directness, an honesty about her that he found disarming even as it worried him. That very directness might be her downfall. He wouldn’t be able to watch his back and hers, too, not if he got out of here safely.
    Somebody had to look out for her, that was for certain.
    At the door she turned. “You said not to forget you’re just like them. I can’t believe that.”
    As she turned and walked out of sight, he said softly, “One difference. I’m innocent.”
     
    E LEANOR HAD NO IDEA whether Steve had intended her to hear his comment or not. But she had heard, and now she wondered….
    At eleven-thirty Raoul Torres’s dusty white minivan pulled up by the barn. She hurried toward it and opened the passenger-side door.
    “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Just dump that stuff in the back.”
    She scooped up a stuffed bear, a plastic dinosaur, six CDs for children, and a stack of books and papers and laid them on the seat behind, next to a pink child’s seat. She climbed in and fastened her seat belt.
    “Where to?”
    “Anywhere as long as it’s out of here,” Eleanor said as they headed down the driveway toward the open gates at the front of the farm.
    “Rough morning?”
    She ran a hand over her hair and leaned back against the headrest. “You might say that. Lard Ass Newman beat up on one of my guys last night, and the victim won’t let me say anything.”
    “He’s right.”
    “Why?” She turned in her seat so that she could see Raoul’s profile. “Why is everybody so afraid of rocking the boat? There are rules against that sort of thing.”
    “You ever have a really bad teacher?”
    “Of course. Most people have at least one.”
    “But they go on teaching every year because the rules and regulations they serve under require such meticulous documentation to do anything about them, and they have such power to pass or fail you that you just endure it.”
    She shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”
    “Ratchet that power up to about a million, and that’s how much power the COs have. The pay is lousy, the hours suck, certainly the ambiance, if you can call it that, is one step lower than the sewers of New York, and the people they are supposed to guard are dangerous. They have to have leeway to protect themselves. They have to be able to count on the support of the warden and administrators. Most of the people who work here are decent people trying to do a decent job. But sometimes even the good ones can be corrupted.”
    “Power corrupts, I know.”
    “Yeah, and these guys have almost absolute power. It’s a battle between good and evil, and mostly evil wins.”
    “Can I avoid corruption?”
    He grinned at her. “I don’t know. Can you?” He pulled into a second-rate strip mall and parked. “You like Tex-Mex?”
    She nodded.
    “Then let’s go stuff ourselves.”
    When they were settled in Texas Pete’s and busily scooping up salsa on tortilla chips, she said, “I think I need to know the criminal records of my team.”
    “Not a good idea.”
    “I already know about Slow Rise. I can’t believe it, but I know it.