Chapter 6 - Rikers Island
The transfer to Rikers Island happened in the dead of night.
Daniel was handcuffed and shackled at the ankles, loaded into the back of an armored Department of Correction bus alongside twenty-four hardened felons. He had tried to tell the intake guards that he was a corporate executive, that his bail application was pending, that this was all a monstrous civil misunderstanding.
A guard had simply shoved him against the concrete wall, searched his cavities with rubber-gloved rough efficiency, and handed him two scratchy brown blankets and a pair of rubber sandals.
"Cell 4B," the guard barked. "Upper tier."
The George R. Vierno Center on Rikers was a concrete labyrinth of shouting, metallic clanging, and endless, ambient menace. As Daniel shuffled down the catwalk in his leg irons, prisoners hanging from the bars jeered and catcalled, smelling his fear like wolves smelling an open wound.
He was thrown into a eight-by-ten cell with a man whose arms were covered in gang tattoos from knuckles to throat. The man didn't look up from his bunk; he simply looked Daniel up and down, spat on the concrete floor, and said, "You breathe loud, pretty boy, and I take your teeth."
Daniel spent the entire night curled into a fetal position in the corner of the floor, shivering on the damp concrete, too terrified to even close his eyes. Every time he heard a footstep, every time an iron gate slammed shut, his heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Seven years of penthouse suites. Seven years of private helicopters to the Hamptons. Seven years of sneering down from five-star balconies at the working people of the world. All of it had been an illusion paid for by the woman whose back he had shredded with a leather whip.
At 7:00 AM, a guard banged a wooden baton against the cell door.
"Vance! Legal visit. Get up."
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Daniel scrambled to his feet so fast he tripped over his own oversized jumpsuit, scraping his knees against the floor. "Yes! Yes, thank God! My lawyer is here!"
He rushed out of the cell, practically running down the corridor ahead of the guard, desperate for the salvation of an expensive defense attorney who would tell him that the Hale family had agreed to settle out of court.
