Read The Monarch for Free Online

At the same time, Lew looked at the roof of the cafeteria and saw the shiv he’d thrown up there. Man, you can’t trust anyone .
    â€œWe do?” Lew said, feigning ignorance.
    â€œAh, that’s not right,” Quinn said, backing up and sitting in his chair without taking his eyes off the set. “Do their faces look yellow to you?”
    â€œHard to tell from this angle,” Lew said, straining against his bindings. Quinn seemed to notice his cuffs and chains for the first time.
    â€œGordon!” Quinn called out into the hallway to his secretary. Gordon showed up in his door a moment later. “Gordon, whose idea was this?”
    â€œI don’t know, sir. Mr. Dupont, I think,” Gordon said.
    â€œNo, no, no,” Quinn said, shaking his hand in the air. “We don’t need these. Get the key.”
    A few minutes later Lew was unlocked and Gordon was jingling out of the office.
    â€œClose the door behind you, Gordon. And tell Rory I’ll want to see him next,” Quinn said, coming around and sitting on the edge of the desk holding a remote control that looked as big as a loaf of bread.
    â€œYou’re not going to hit me with that thing, are you?” Lew said. He was going for lighthearted, but the warden’s tight-­lipped smile gave him a creepy feeling.
    â€œNot the way you think.” He hit a button on the remote and the picture changed from a game show to a grainy black and white image. Lew thought he was watching an old black and white movie until he recognized himself at the top of the screen. He watched himself walk around the corner of the cafeteria and out of frame, where he’d gone a few hours ago to stall the assistant warden.
    â€œThis is the good part,” Quinn said. “Very realistic.”
    Lew watched Mickey King’s “death” take place in front of his eyes. Almost as soon as Mickey hit the dirt, the prison doctor ran over and waved the assistant warden off, obviously saying King was dead. Even with the circumstances, Lew felt slightly sickened by having to watch it go down.
    â€œBut this is by far my favorite scene,” Quinn said. He hit some more buttons on his remote and the picture zoomed in on King’s dead body. “And now . . .” Lew rolled his eyes.
    The supposedly dead King sneezed before going still again.
    What the hell’s going on here?
    At the least, Mickey and Delroy should be in solitary, the doc should be up on charges, and Lew knew he should be back in those chains.
    â€œI have to tell you, Lewis, the worst part of all this—­the part that really pisses me off—­isn’t the deception. The worst part is all of you thinking I’m so gullible that a see-­through charade like this would work. Did you really think the morgue wagon would just drive out of here unchecked? Or that one of my charges could be killed right beneath my window and I wouldn’t get involved? It’s insulting,” he said, tossing the brick remote onto his desk, papers and pens shooting off onto the floor on the other side. “Only a moron would be fooled by that!”
    â€œUh, yeah,” Lew said, feeling his face flush. Lew wanted to tell the warden the whole story, but he didn’t see the point. It would just sound like prisoner whining. Not to mention make him look like a gullible ass.
    Quinn picked up the fallen papers and put them back on his desk. He pulled up his chair and then took a file out of his drawer.
    â€œLewis Katchbrow,” he said flipping through the pages. “What are you doing in here, Lewis?”
    â€œAnother three months until today. Now, well, that’s kind of up to you.”
    â€œYou know that’s not what I meant. What were you doing pulling an armed robbery in southern Mississippi in the first place? And alone, no less.
    â€œI see how you handle yourself in the yard. Who you talk to and who you avoid. How you spend most