My feeble attempt at humor seemed to relax Neil. An echo of a smile thinned his mouth. “You haven’t changed at all.”

I bit my lower lip. “That’s probably bad, huh?”

“Not in the least.”

He left me wondering about his statement and went for coffee as I examined Reyes’s file, also known as the Holy Grail.

Chapter Twelve

Reyes Farrow.

Because perfection is a dirty job,

but someone has to do it.

—CHARLOTTE JEAN DAVIDSON

“You knew him?” Neil asked me over an hour later. I’d been reading. We’d been chatting. Garrett called. I ignored.

And I learned. Approximately one month earlier, a fight broke out in the yard, and the prison immediately went into lockdown. Everyone was supposed to get on the ground. When one of the inmates, a large childlike man Reyes had befriended, got confused and didn’t go down, a guard in one of the towers prepared to fire a warning shot. Reyes saw this and tackled his friend to get him down, thinking the guard was going to shoot him. Instead of burrowing harmlessly in the dirt as intended, the bullet found Reyes’s skull and pierced his frontal lobe. He’d been in a coma since.

I glanced up and refocused on Neil’s question. “Just from that one incident when I was in high school,” I said. I’d told him about the night I first saw Reyes, the physical abuse he’d suffered at the hands of the man he supposedly killed. Neil didn’t seem surprised. I closed the file and looked into his gray eyes. “Just between us,” I said, leaning forward to make the statement more intimate, “between old friends,” I elaborated, “what did you know about him? What did you think of him?” I tapped the file with my fingertips. “What’s not here?”

Neil sat back in his chair, adjusted his collar, and dragged in a long, deep breath. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

That was promising. “Bet I would,” I said with a wink.

He stared at me a good minute before he spoke. And when he did speak, it was with a reluctance I understood all too well. He truly doubted I would believe him. If he only knew …

“Something strange happened when Farrow first got here, about a week after he’d been released into gen-pop,” he said, glancing down to study the clasp on his watch. “South Side sent three of their soldiers to kill him. Why, I don’t know, but when South Side attacks, people die. Period.”

My chest tightened and I ground my teeth together, trying hard not to react, not to show what the thought of Reyes in that position did to me.

“It ended almost the minute it began,” he continued, his face growing dark as he reconstructed his memories, pieced together what he knew. “I was just a guard then, fresh out of training, positive I was hot shit. I almost pissed my pants when I saw those men heading toward Farrow, not that I knew who he was at the time. I called for backup, but before I even finished the request, three South Side members lay on the ground in pools of their own blood with this twenty-year-old kid … I don’t know … crouched on a table, ready to spring at anyone else who came near him, eyeing the inmates with absolutely no emotion, no fear whatsoever.”

I sat stone still, barely breathing as I watched the events unfold in my mind.

Neil shook his head and looked up at me, his expression a mixture of relief and reverence. “He wasn’t any more winded than I am now. I just barely caught a glimpse of what happened, but…”

“But?” I nudged, barely able to contain my curiosity.

“But … he didn’t move like a normal man moves, Charley. He was a blur, so fast it was impossible for my eyes to follow him. Then he was crouched on the table like an animal, powerful, dangerous.” Neil shook his head again, as if still not believing his own eyes. “That’s how he got his name.”

“His name?” I asked, even more intrigued.

“No one ever touched him again,” he continued. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a legend to these men, almost godlike.”

I scooted closer to his desk, almost drooling. “You mentioned a name?”

“Right,” he said, snapping to attention. “They call him El Aliento del Diablo.”

“The devil’s breath,” I echoed in English.

“Told you it’d be hard to believe,” he said with a heavy sigh, clearly expecting me to balk at his story.

“Neil, I don’t doubt a single word you’ve said.” When his expression turned to one of surprise, I added, “I saw something similar the night I met him as well. The way he moved. The way he walked.”

“Exactly,” Neil said, pointing at me repeatedly. “Not quite … not quite…”

“… human,” I finished for him.

He glanced at the file in my hands. “I guess he’s human enough, though.”

I couldn’t help but hug the file to me, to hold on to every nuance that was Reyes Alexander Farrow. “I guess.” He was such an enigma, surreal and mystical.

“You know, I never really liked you in high school,” Neil said, pulling me back to the present.

Um, okay. Least he was being honest. “I know,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t really like you either.”

“You didn’t?” He seemed shocked.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too. I used to think you were such a nutcase.”