The Arbiter
Copyright© 2025 by James Girvan
Chapter 23
For the next three days we headed east. Mace’s French came in handy as I struggled along, barely managing a few halfhearted greetings and requests for ‘where’s the toilet?’.
When you don’t speak the language, it’s very isolating. I could only imagine how my great grandmother felt, immigrating from Poland and not speaking any English or French. No wonder she settled in the Polish ghetto. The place had been a shit-hole, but hey! at least she could afford the rent and speak with her neighbours.
It had been three days with only Mace to speak to me in English and I was going squirrelly. We’d already come upon another two prisons (medium security this time) that wouldn’t let us in due to ‘paperwork issues’. When we got back the next day the same disappearing act had happened on the Weapons that Mace had detected from a distance.
Once could be a coincidence, three in a week sure wasn’t.
We left, booked our room, signed in and left ‘for dinner’. Mace drove us to an airport where we boarded a small Cessna with some RCMP officers. They seemed to know where we were going and didn’t waste their time telling me. Turns out that Mace had been busy while I’d been striking out at the hotel bars trying to use bad French pickup lines I’d memorized from MeTube.
After about 40 minutes in the air, the little plane descended. After getting out, I found we were in the Kingstown airport.
Game on.
A series of black SUV’s picked us up about fifteen minutes later and we sped off to the maximum security jail we’d just visited about half a week ago. This time there be little or no warning.
Six giant blacked-out SUV’s pulling up to the security fence in the early evening was going to alarm the prison’s security department no matter what, so the surprise visit really turned into a surprise ‘invasion drill’.
The RCMP and a guy in a suit (a federal Justice, apparently) got out with full ceremony and walked to the gate, the Mounties standing behind the judge in an odd version of parade rest.
I couldn’t hear what happened, or what was said but the Justice obviously got a little heated at one point, passing over numerous large black and red envelopes. I glanced at Mace, who gave me a subtle nod in the direction of the Center block and the south wing with a small smile.
The whole parade was let in about an hour later, no doubt many minutes were spent shouting down a phone line or two. The cars we came in were searched, but besides the Mounties sidearms (held so securely in their odd fold-over ‘holsters’ as to be basically unusable in a surprise fight), we were unarmed.
Well, we were ‘unarmed’ if you didn’t know that half the support people (and three of the RCMP) were Weapons. Besides Mace and I, eight other men here could have a weapon in their hands in as much time as it took to think about it.
One guy had a goddamned Lance! It might have been 10-14 feet long, it was hard to tell in his inventory. I scored these guys as level 2-3 based solely on their inventory and Silver. Mace would know everything about them, but he was silently looking out to the South, seemingly ignoring everything around him.
The Warden was standing in front of his desk when we entered his office, the two RCMP officers on either side of him and two other CO’s I hadn’t seen before standing against the wall across the room.
Mace nodded towards the CO’s and I quickly stripped out both of them, amazed how little there was. The taller one had a Scimitar while the shorter (but way more muscular one) had a War Hammer. Both had Runes carved deeply into them. Shame I wouldn’t be able to rent these bad-boys out.
Mace spoke to the room in general. “I’m told we need to tour the place again, so can we start in the South block. Please.” He was basically giving an order here, but as the low-man on the totem pole here, he had to phrase it fairly carefully I guess.
Since it was later at night, there was no problem with prisoners being anywhere but in their cells. All three of the Weapons men were in the South guy block, in segregation cells that had nothing in them but a toilet and a hard bunk. Mace gave me the signal to strip out their weapons only (for some reason), but I also took a small bottle as well, it had the skull and crossbones on it and was titled ‘Poison’. No need to leave that one behind!
Mace took photographs of the barcodes on the cells and had me flash out the weapons in front of the cells labels. Not one of the cons tried to take back their weapon back as far as I could tell. (Wouldn’t matter if they did, just struck me as odd. Maybe they hadn’t noticed yet or were asleep).
“Back to the center block then, I want to see where they were really living.” Mace grunted. The two cowed CO’s simply glanced at each other and nervously lead the way.
The Center block had a few ‘apartments’ in it, locks on the opposite side of the door from a normal hotel room. Looking about, I decided that I’d lived in worse places myself. Given a choice between one of these and a cell in solitary or the South Block, it was a no-brainer.
We would later learn that the rooms were rented, like a hotel, for a fixed rate of Silver per night. For an extra two, the room might include a really nice meal and a few beers. For a few more it might include a girl. The prisoner/Weapons had been gladly entering the portal in the basement every ten days or so and handing over Silver for preferential treatment.
Eventually the press had a field day with the story. Only the fact that the Minister for Justice actually got in there and got his hands dirty on this one saved him from having to resign. Journalists descended upon the place but got no further than the parking lot. By then Mace and I were long gone. We’d actually been dismissed and put back on the plane that same night, and I had the unpleasant experience of trying to sleep during the day in a busy, mid-rate hotel.
It was our day off a bit later when Mace knocked on the door at about 2pm. I opened it; still squinting against the light that seeped in past the door. I was a bit hungover from the night before but I knew it was him before he knocked.
“Beer?” He asked, holding up some cans of foreign beer that I knew would have too much hops and not enough alcohol.
“Why the fuck not...” I shrugged, too dopy still to form a more coherent answer. Beer on an empty stomach is never a good idea, and by the time we’d finished the six pack of tall cans I was pleasantly buzzed, but totally bloated.
Eventually I got my stomach and bladder back under control. Mace still hadn’t said anything, he just silently got drunk in a hotel room at 3pm on a Wednesday.
Eventually with nothing else to do, he started talking.
“I drive by them, I drove by them both ... and ther ... there is nobody there who has a weapon anymore”
I tried various permutations of ‘them’ in my head, trying to make sense of the statement. After a long minute, it twigged.
“The other Jails?”
“Yeah. The jails...” he sighed. “ ... did you know that during a routine prisoner transfer last night, 6 medium security inmates and a driver were killed when an unknown group attacked the wagon that they were in? Witnesses claim they saw the truck stop when being waved down by what might have been another M.o.J. vehicle and then armed men poured out of that truck, attacking the first one. Apparently two of the attackers turned the whole truck over by themselves. The Minister of Justice is claiming it was a jail-break gone wrong.”
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