The Patel Prison
“Well, what do you think? No one can tell that it’s me in this disguise, right?” Rachel looked Quintin up
and down. She could only tell that it was him because Quintin had been working with her for years.
Those who didn’t know him that well would fail to recognize Quintin in his disguise. “It is hard to tell it is
you,” Rachel said as she tried to sound upbeat, especially in the face of difficulty. “Come on now. Laugh
out loud.”
Quintin could sense the ridicule in Rachel’s tone. He cleared his throat, touched his nose, and
complained, “Those guys are really petty. It’s been a long time since it happened. Yet, they still couldn’t
move on from it. Every time I come back, they send someone to take me to the police station for
questioning.” Rachel burst into laughter. Her eyes were laughing, too. Seeing Rachel’s reaction, Quintin
let out a sigh of relief.
When he first saw Rachel, he couldn’t believe that the woman in front of him was actually Sheila. And to
this day, he still couldn’t believe it! It was only when he heard her call out his name did he realize that the
woman was Sheila, his boss. He also noticed then that she looked troubled and disturbed. It looked that
something weighed heavily on her heart. He wanted to make her laugh. He wanted to see her smile.
“Oh, I remember it.
I told you to stop but you wouldn’t listen. So, you continued with what you were going. You broke into
their firewall and played fireworks on their computers.” “That was a long time ago, five years ago!”
Quintin said, raising his voice in anger. I didn’t do anything that bad. It was a mischievous little joke,
right? At any rate, it was just fireworks.
“Even then, you should be grateful that they didn’t arrest you. You could have ended up in prison.”
Rachel was right. He could have been gone to jail. So, Quintin stopped complaining. The view outside
the window showed the dawn had broken and sunlight was starting to spread across the sky. “Quintin, do
you really know where Abby is?” Rachel changed the subject. “After confirming her general location, I
checked the surveillance videos of the two nearby prisons.
I studied the staff mobilizations of these prisons. I have been doing this for the past two months.” Quintin
took out his smartphone to show Rachel a photo of a woman. “She is the person who checks all the
boxes as you’ve said.” The woman in the photo was getting out of a car. Rachel tightened her grip on the
phone and said, “It is Abby. Where is she now?”
“At the Patel prison.” “The Patel Prison?’ Rachel tried to scan her brain for the familiarity of the place.
She had never heard of it. “Where is the Patel Prison?” “It is located on the Patel Island. It was originally
a reef, which was filled with soil to make a small island. It is not that far from Apliaria, about two to three
hours to get there by ship.
The place was being developed into a tourist attraction until the government found the temperature there
to be low so the project was shelved. The government then built a prison there for felons sentenced for
heavy crimes,” Quintin explained. Heavy crimes? So, the prisoners there had been involved in violent
crimes.
Rachel started to worry about Abby being in the company of hard-core felons. Looking straight into
Quintin’s eyes, she implored, “We need to get her out of that place without being noticed! And we should
do it fast!”
The nightmare had shaken Rachel that she woke up feeling distressed. And now, she felt all the worse
knowing where Abby was. Meanwhile, at the Patel Island The gate was opened. A prison guard walked
in and opened the door to the second to the last cell.
He tapped the prison door with his baton and yelled, “No. 1227, No. 1618, you both know that you are
going to clear out the weeds today, right? So come out now. Come with me!” The prison guard called out
the prison numbers of Abby and Sasha.
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