The Ascent

by Adam Plantinga

Genres: Action & Adventure; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

When a high security prison fails, a down-on-his luck cop and the governor’s daughter are going to have to team up if they’re going to escape in this "jaw-dropping, authentic, and absolutely gripping" (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) debut thriller from Adam Plantinga, whose first nonfiction book Lee Child praised as “truly excellent.”

Kurt Argento, an ex-Detroit street cop who can’t let injustice go—and who has the fighting skills to back up his idealism.

If he sees a young girl being dragged into an alley, he's going to rescue her and cause some damage. 

When he does just that in a small corrupt Missouri town, he’s brutally beaten and thrown into a maximum-security prison.

Julie Wakefield, a grad student who happens to be the governor's daughter, is about to take a tour of the prison. But when a malfunction in the security system releases a horde of prisoners, a fierce struggle for survival ensues.  

Argento must help a small band of staff and civilians, including Julie and her two state trooper handlers, make their way from the bottom floor to the roof to safety. 

All that stands in their way are six floors of the most dangerous convicts in Missouri.  

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Officer Kurt Argento parked in the station lot of Precinct Nine and hoisted his off-duty bag over his shoulder as he walked to the back entrance. Someone had snapped the antennas off two of the parked patrol cars and scrawled red graffiti on a third that read Fuk Police. The fact that the c in Fuck was missing made it more insulting somehow. It was par for the course at the Ninth Precinct, which was an outpost deep in hostile territory. Last week, someone had taken a wet shit on the roof of the lieutenant’s personal SUV, although Argento wouldn’t have been surprised if the culprit been another cop—station morale had been ebbing for some time.

When Argento got to the locker room, he took hold of his padlock before he realized he couldn’t remember the combination. It wasn’t a new lock. He’d had it for years. But the numbers to open it were lost in the fog. He stared at his locker. The bumper sticker that said Sig Sauer Firearms: To Hell and Back Reliability. The takeout menu for a local Italian joint on red-and-white paper. A photo of a thirty-five-pound Chinook salmon he’d caught on a fishing trip in Canada years back, during better times. Giving up, he went downstairs to the station keeper’s office and grabbed a pair of bolt cutters. Like his gun, the tool felt right in his hands. The keeper was asleep in a chair, a TV remote on his chest. Argento slammed the cutters on the counter and the keeper jolted awake.

“Morning,” Argento said.

The keeper pinched his forehead, irritated at being woken. “Make sure you sign those out,” he said. He was a fleshy guy named Sweeney, with a pronounced chin and a sprig of hair plastered across his forehead like a mollusk, working inside because he was no good for the street. Seemed to be more and more of those types these days. Some were on a deserved reprieve from an injury or a traumatic incident in the field. Others were just wasting space. They didn’t quit, they didn’t get fired, they just lingered, cops in name only, doing the same job a civilian could do for less pay. Argento stared at Sweeney until the other man looked away and busied himself with paperwork.

Back upstairs, Argento snipped his lock off. He opened his locker and removed his boots from the top shelf. He hadn’t polished them in a while and it showed. But no one in the department, other than the command staff, polished their boots. No one would give him any grief about it. It was a hotter-than-normal summer in inner-city Detroit, which meant the shootings and street rips were stacking; the bosses were just happy you showed up to work at all.

He ran through his gear: handgun with two mags, knife, pepper spray, radio, backup piece, flashlight, collapsible baton, badge, two pairs of cuffs because not all criminals traveled solo, leather gloves to guard against razors and syringes, a vial of Narcan to revive junkies, and a police whistle that he had never once found cause to use. He had been a cop for twenty-one years and had done this inventory thousands of times, but he ran through it again, just to be sure. If he couldn’t remember his locker combination, he could easily forget something else. Wander into the field with no cuffs and a fucking turkey sandwich jammed into the ring where his nightstick should be.

He held his duty gun in his hand. A Glock .40 with rubber grips and night sights. He hefted the weight. It felt right. Guns made sense. They were something he could count on. If he squeezed the trigger, a bullet would come out. He pictured going somewhere quiet and still, pushing the barrel into his mouth, angling it up, and shooting himself through the brain. Pictured the finality of it. The relief it would bring. He’d be leaving a world he was no longer at home in. But it was an idle thought. He knew he wouldn’t do it. Suicide was quitting, and he wasn’t much for quitting. The cleanup and aftermath would be a headache for his coworkers. Plus, he wasn’t going to kill himself today because he hadn’t killed himself yesterday. It was habit, nothing more. He was in the habit of living. He holstered up, the gun settling in with a familiar metallic whisper.

He allowed himself a look at her photo before he closed the locker. Long, tangled brown hair. Slightly crooked grin. Oversized Red Wings T-shirt, even though she had never shared Argento’s interest in hockey. I want to look tough, she said. Something bottomless opened in the center of his chest and the weight of it made him want to take a knee. Last night he had eaten dinner alone at home and used the good plates, the ceramic ones they’d gotten as a wedding gift a decade before. When he was done, he dropped them one by one until the floor was covered in shards.

Downstairs, he walked past officers without a word. He checked the daily lineup on the bulletin board. He was assigned to work with a patrol sergeant instead of another officer, which was unusual. Meant the lieutenant wanted to check up on him and was sending a sergeant to be his eyes. Maybe the lieutenant had heard things about Argento’s recent work performance. His trouble focusing. His anger issues. Multiple citizen complaints of excessive force, although those boiled down to suspects starting fights with Argento and then immediately wishing they hadn’t. The sergeant’s name was Pendelton, a rawboned guy on his second Filipino wife. He was halfway competent but had a reputation for playing it too safe.

“I’m sorry about Emily,” Pendelton said when they got in the squad car.

Argento nodded and stayed silent. It had been two months and he still didn’t know how to respond to condolences. He was still trying to come up with his locker combination. If he could retrieve it from the fog, then maybe he could build off that. He’d have more clarity.

Their first assignment was a cold burglary at a new condo complex that had sprung up on the edge of gangland turf. A laptop and a bicycle had been stolen. The condo carried the odor of lemon and weed. The homeowner, a young guy with bro-stubble and shiny track pants, followed them around the house like he thought they were going to steal something themselves.

“The bike was a Cervelo R5, fifty-four centimeters, with Dura-Ace 9000 brakes and a Quark Elsa crankset power meter. It had a zero-setback seat post.”

“Okay,” Argento said. He had a mountain bike of his own, and neighborhood kids would come to him when their bikes broke down because he liked to tinker, but none of them had Quark meters. They had whatever they could find at garage sales or from shops going out of business. One of the kids, a scrawny fifth grader with big ears, wouldn’t tell Argento his real name, going only by “Tincan.” He was loud and funny, insisting that the only thing he knew about white people was they had the money to ride horses, and not even on a ranch, but for fun. Tincan was prone to asking hard questions about the job and why cops were the way they were. Sometimes Argento had the answer. Sometimes he didn’t. Regardless, Tincan was easily Argento’s favorite out of the bunch.

“It had a Fizik Antares saddle. Are you writing all this down?”

“You’re describing a bicycle, right?” Pendelton asked. “Sounds like a spaceship.”

“Yeah, it’s a bike. Bike that probably costs more than you make in a year.”

The radio crackled with a report of a fight in progress. Six to eight male suspects, dark skin, late teens to early twenties, were jumping on the hoods of cars and trying to pull out the occupants at an intersection three blocks from the burglary. They left the condo without a word. Pendelton hit the lights and siren and pulled up short of the scene. Argento activated the body camera mounted on his chest plate by pressing the center button twice in rapid succession.

He saw the problem numbered more like twelve. A local street gang called Tre-9 had claimed the turf, and it didn’t take much to set them off. It looked like their regular crew: tattooed young men, white T-shirts, low-slung pants, the usual. They had taken over the intersection and were trampolining parked cars and throwing glass bottles at passing motorists. Next to a Volvo with its driver’s side door open, three men huddled over a fourth man, who was prone on the ground. One of the men reared back and kicked the fourth man in the head. His body twitched. The Volvo had a Wayne State University bumper sticker. Maybe the guy took a wrong turn after visiting his kid on campus. Now he was being beaten half to death in public by strangers.

Summer in Motown.

“There’s too fucking many. We’ll wait for some more cars to clear them out,” Pendelton said.

It didn’t take long for them to be spotted. Half the pack broke and ran toward them. Pendelton tried to throw the squad in reverse, but he wasn’t fast enough. The pack surrounded them and Pendelton locked the doors. One of the bangers stood on their hood.

“Come out, bitches,” the guy on the hood said.

“Stay in the car, Kurt,” Pendelton said. “We ain’t gonna win this one.”

Argento took his baton out. It was heavy and he was strong. In his hands, it did more damage than most men could do with a sledgehammer. Argento was good at fighting. He liked to fight. And now with Emily gone, there was nothing to hold him back. Nothing at all.

“Kurt, stay in the car. I ain’t trying to… that’s an order.” Sweat had popped on Pendelton’s brow, and his eyes darted as he looked for an escape route. Tactically, he was probably right. But he was weak. They were all weak.

The three men were still standing around the fourth man, who was still motionless. One of them stomped on his head, which made the man’s toupee fall off. The group found this funny. One of them scooped up the hairpiece and put it on his own head at a jaunty angle. The guy on the hood was now pissing on the windshield. Argento hit the wipers, looking for guns in waistbands. He didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. He unlocked his door.

“Goddamn it, Kurt, stay in the… What are you doing?”

What was he doing? When he signed on to be a cop, he agreed to put himself in harm’s way. He agreed to protect the good people of Detroit from violent predators without delay. It was insulting that the bangers thought they could beat a man near death in front of his marked squad car without reprisal. And he was looking for a brawl. There were twelve-odd suspects. Argento wanted more. Forty. Four hundred. Send the whole city.

“Stay in the fucking car!” Pendelton rasped.

Argento got out of the car.

His Ford F-350 pickup had a hundred thousand miles on it, and he figured it had another hundred thousand left before it was through. He drove west, through the flatlands until the skies darkened. Their cinnamon-colored Chow-Shepherd mix, named Hudson after Argento’s favorite character in Aliens, occupied the back seat. Argento reached back and scratched his head occasionally as they drove. He stopped at a rundown place with a sign that read Gas & Food. He liked that. Anonymous, just like him. He ordered coffee and two burgers, fed Hudson from a bag of gourmet dog food, and looked at a discarded newspaper as he ate. The Detroit Tigers were languishing in last place. They couldn’t get any runs. “All slumber, no lumber,” the columnist wrote. The front page had an article on a cyberterrorism group that had hacked into state government mainframes nationwide and stolen Social Security numbers and building blueprints. Argento didn’t know anything about cybercrime and didn’t care to; he’d take a meat-and-potatoes violent felony any day. The paper’s entertainment section ran a picture of a famous model who was celebrating her nine-month anniversary with her boyfriend. “Turning Heads in Thigh-High Boots,” the headline said. In the photo, the boyfriend had complicated hair and wore a smirk on his face like he’d won something. Argento tilted his coffee cup toward the picture and let the drops spatter the newsprint until the couple’s faces disappeared in a wet blur.

After dinner, he drove a few more hours in darkness until he crossed the Missouri state line, finding a roadside motel that looked in his price range. Emily was far from a debutante, but she preferred to stay in places that were three stars and up. This place looked like a solid one star; the lobby carpet was patchy and stained, and Argento could smell the booze on the night clerk’s breath.

“What’s the name of this town?” Argento asked.

“Rocker.”

“How is it here?”

“It sucks, dude,” the clerk said. He had shoulder-length hair and a pierced nose, which made Argento resent him for no particularly good reason. The clerk handed him his room key.

Argento didn’t ask about the pet policy. Hudson was a welcome addition to any motel no matter what the rules said. He walked to his truck, liberated Hudson from the back seat, and the two of them went to the room, which smelled like cigarettes and feet. He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his unshaven jaw. He didn’t have to follow department grooming protocol anymore and could grow a beard down to the floor now if he wanted. He had noticed a liquor store a block down the street, but he wasn’t going to drink, not tonight. He had cut down markedly on the booze after he married Emily, and he hadn’t been drunk in years. And he knew if he started now, he’d never stop. He’d be well on his way to becoming one of the alley rummies from his old patrol sector, the ones with grimy faces and plastic cups they rattled in the hope that you’d put coins in them. The bottle killed more cops than bullets ever would.

“Just the two of us now, Hud,” he said.

Hudson padded over and lay down next to him, making a sound that almost seemed like a sigh. Hudson keyed into emotions as much as any human, and he knew Emily was gone. It made him sad, and it made him sad that Argento was sad. Argento once had a court case where an eleven-year-old girl named Isabela had been severely beaten by her father and was terrified to testify against him. Argento formed a bond with the girl and had subsequently gotten the judge’s approval to bring Hudson to the stand with her. She testified, with a low voice that picked up strength as she went, looking directly at her father, one hand rubbing Hudson’s thick cinnamon coat. When it was over, Isabela gave Hudson a kiss and held him tight.

“I’m sorry,” Argento said. “I miss her, too.” He rubbed Hudson’s head, then closed his eyes and thought back to how it had all ended a week before. He’d disobeyed a direct order from his sergeant, and it had led to four broken bones and three concussions. None of the injuries were his, but one of the concussions was Pendelton’s, who had reluctantly followed Argento out of the car and promptly taken a glass bottle to the dome. It had also resulted in multiple felony arrests, including the man that assaulted Pendelton. The motorist with the toupee had survived.

But the police commission hadn’t cared about any of that. They cared about Argento’s insubordination. They cared about his recent history of unlawful force complaints, which meant he was on a short leash. They cared about what it looked like to the public to have a white cop free-swinging a baton at multiple young males of color in a department with a long history of racism that was under federal consent decree and supposedly focusing on de-escalation. They thought he should have stayed in the car, too.

He was given a choice. Resign from the only job he was fit for or face a termination hearing on multiple administrative charges, including insubordination. The man presenting him with this choice was a doughy police commander who had a habit of looking away when he talked to you. Argento knew from a credible source that this man had once abandoned his partner and fled from a bar fight when he was two years into his career and had been called Captain Cluck behind his back ever since.

“I’ll resign,” Argento said. “But not to you. Send a real cop in here.”

They did, calling in a deputy chief whom Argento had worked with before and respected. And then that was the end of it, after twenty-one years on the job. No gold watch, no plaque, just a plastic bin to put his uniforms and equipment in, some paperwork to sign, and a partial pension. Twenty-one years of running toward screaming and gunfire, a few thousand arrests, a stint on SWAT and Street Crimes, and three commendations for valor. He had been in two shootings, one of them fatal, and had once safely caught a baby that a man with orange hair high on bath salts had flung off a roof. He hadn’t always gotten the job right, but he never took a cheap shot at a suspect or lied on the stand.

Last Christmas, he had given a shivering seventeen-year-old prostitute a few hundred dollars and put her on a bus home to Chicago. Then he had found the girl’s pimp, a gap-toothed parolee with the street name of Muppet, and broke his jaw when he resisted arrest. Twenty-one years. It was the family business, law enforcement. His uncle had been on the job in Detroit, as had his father, who once came face-to-face with a convenience store robber, with a gun in hand. Argento’s father let loose with the shotgun at close range, spattering the man’s brain and skin all over his own face and mouth. He’d cemented his legend when, after he’d wiped off some of the gore, he’d casually asked the clerk if he had a toothpick to get out the rest.

Argento could have tried to stay on the force. Could have gotten a lawyer from the police union, appealed to an arbitrator. But times were changing on the job, and he wasn’t changing along with them. They wanted guidance counselors these days, not lawmen. They wanted the police to take resisting felons into custody using only soothing words, although the viral videos of cops roughing up compliant suspects had left him disgusted at their lack of honor. Even if he won and stayed employed, they would have made him wish he hadn’t, by shipping him off to some meaningless assignment processing parking permit requests or tracking shoplifting complaints on a digital map.

Argento was in Rocker, Missouri, for no better reason than he had to be somewhere. He had an affinity for Detroit, even with all its problems, but at the moment there was nothing to hold him there. His parents had passed, and he had a sister who lived out of state that he didn’t speak to after she’d put a series of ACAB and “abolish the police” posts on social media. Emily’s family had never taken to him. They had always thought Emily could have done far better than a street cop with only a high school education. They had been quiet and bewildered at her funeral, looking at him as if he’d somehow brought this hell down on their only daughter. He had friends from the job, mostly hunting and fishing buddies, but the ones he’d been closest to had retired or moved away. When anyone else called him, he didn’t answer. He had been alone before he met her and now she was gone and he was returning to his natural state. He needed to be away from the things that reminded him of her, so he’d left home, gotten in his truck, and driven west. He’d never seen the Pacific Ocean. Neither had Hudson. Maybe they’d start there.

He liked the idea of being somewhere calm and warm. He’d oiled and stored his tools in the garage but left his cell phone on his nightstand because there was no one he wanted to talk to. He hadn’t bothered to put a stop to his mail or newspaper. He imagined both piling up in yellowing mounds.

He fell asleep on top of the bed still dressed, Hudson at his side.

He woke in the morning saying her name. He looked around the room and checked his watch. He had slept late. Hudson was awake, watching him serenely. The pain of her absence was inescapable. One more moment with her. That was all he asked for. One more moment, to hold, absorb, live in. He closed his eyes. He heard rustlings in the adjacent hotel room. The indeterminate hum of pipes and appliances. Faint sounds of traffic outside. He was a sinking ship, he thought. And when the ship is going down, you seal off the damaged compartment so the craft can stay afloat.

But the seal doesn’t always hold.

He opened the drawer next to his bed, where Gideons had placed a Bible. He took it out but didn’t open it. There were passages inside that he knew would help him, but he wasn’t in a place where he could hear them. For now, it was enough just to hold it. After Emily died, his lieutenant had observed somberly that God was dropping rocks on his head. But he wasn’t angry at God. He had suffered a crushing loss, but worse things had happened to better people than him. He needed whatever help he could get from above, for today and for whatever was to come.

He got back on the road but stopped when he saw a bright sign with an arrow advertising the Rocker Summer Festival. It seemed as dumb a place as any to get a late breakfast. It was midmorning but the temperature was already on its way to eighty. Maybe they’d have apple cider. Argento turned off the feeder road and parked his truck in a dirt lot, where it joined several others. He leashed Hudson and rubbed his head.

“Could be fun,” he told Hudson. “We’ll leave before you get too hot.”

The festival wasn’t much. There were a few farm exhibits, one of which described the varying qualities of hay. Games of chance and fried foods on sticks. A few carnie-operated rides, but no Ferris wheel. Some prize-winning pigs, although the fourth-place pig looked about the same as the first-place to him. He sat at a wooden table far enough away from the smell of animal dung and watched the crowd. Some middle schoolers walked by, chattering. A chubby girl of about twelve in glasses and a sequined shirt too tight for her brought up the rear of the group but stopped as the others kept going. She was sweating heavily as she eyed a frozen lemonade stand. She dug into her pocket for change. Argento could see her lips move as she counted it. There was a slowness about her.

A thin man with a widow’s peak and a sharp jaw was leaning against a tree nearby watching the girl. He wore a jean jacket and his pants were streaked with mud. He saw the girl look at the price of the lemonade, look at the few coins in her hand, and then put the money away. He waited a beat and then strode up to her. Something extra in his step. Something Argento didn’t like.

“You want one of those lemonades?”

The girl nodded.

“There’s another place nearby, sells ’em cheaper. I’ll take you there. Then I’ll take you back to your friends.” He began walking toward the edge of the fairgrounds and motioned for the girl to follow. She hesitated for just a moment.

“You know me, right? You’ve seen me around?”

The girl nodded again.

“Then let’s go.”

She fell in beside the man, who put one hand lightly on her shoulder to guide her off the fairgrounds. He looked behind him to see if anyone was following. Then the two of them disappeared from view around the back of a thick grove of trees.

Argento was in a bumfuck town where he didn’t know anyone, much less this girl. He wasn’t a cop anymore. He was an unemployed transient with a dead wife and few prospects.

But there were some things you don’t walk away from. His father had taught him that, long ago, when he was a boy. Shown him, too, on a few occasions, young Kurt watching from the safety of a doorway in awe as his father interrupted a strong-armed street robbery of an elderly man by tossing both twentysomething suspects into a dumpster and locking the lid.

When he found them behind a rusted trailer, the man in the jean jacket was unbuckling his pants with one hand and was using the other hand to force the girl to her knees. She looked at Argento, her eyes shot through with confusion.

“This isn’t what summer festivals are for,” Argento said. He tied Hudson to a tree, giving a sharp pull on the leash to make sure it would hold. The man sniffed, rubbed his mouth, and let the girl go. He took a buck knife out of a sheath on his belt. Hudson barked, seventy pounds of muscle straining at the leash.

“I got people,” the man said. “Let me walk.”

“If I do that,” Argento said, “you’ll just keep doing this.”

The man flipped the knife blade open. “Have it your way.”

Argento felt it then, the hum of physical expectation that shot through his arms and torso like an inflamed nerve. He peeled off his shirt and twisted it into a rope good for warding off a blade. It was bad business walking into a knife fight unarmed, but Argento didn’t mind. He had been here before. He walked toward the man, who seemed startled, but just for a second. He raised the knife.

“This is gonna hurt,” the man said.

You got that right, Argento thought.

Two Rocker County deputies arrived at about the same time the ambulance did. The first was a young, broad guy in sunglasses with a sunburned face and a name tag that said Ferraez. He looked at the girl, who was sitting on the grass with her legs crossed, eyes focused on nothing. He looked at the man in the jean jacket who was flat on his back, very still, his arms and legs at unnatural angles.

“Jesus,” Ferraez said. “Was this a car accident?”

“That’s Donny Rokus,” the second deputy said. He was an older man with long sideburns and a name tag that said Wells.

Ferraez tilted his sunglasses up off his face and surveyed the still form. “Sure is.”

The ambulance crew was a private contractor; the side of their rig was marked MedStar. They checked Rokus’s vitals. His breathing was shallow.

Wells turned to Argento. “What happened here?”

“He took the girl back here to sexually assault her. I stepped in. He drew a knife and we got to fighting.”

“And?”

“I’m better at fighting than he is,” Argento said. He turned to the ambulance crew. “You should C-spine him. He’s gonna have head injuries.”

“Where’s the knife?”

“I gave it back to him. It’s in his leg.”

“Check for that,” Ferraez told the ambulance crew. One of the EMTs stabilized Rokus’s head. Then they rolled Rokus to the side on a three-count, which revealed a streak of crimson and the hilt of a knife protruding from the meat of his upper thigh. “Yep,” the EMT said as he cut away Rokus’s pants leg with medical scissors to get a better look at the wound. “He’s gonna be a transport.”

“You need to get out of here,” Wells said.

“You want to take my statement at the station?”

Wells looked at Ferraez, who shook his head.

“Take my advice,” Wells said slowly. “Leave town as soon as you can. We’ll call you if we need you.”

“I’m a witness in an attempted sex crime against a minor. I stabbed this guy with his own knife and then I hit him in places that did some damage. Pretty sure you’ll need me.”

“Partner, let’s get this young lady reunited with the group she came with,” Wells said.

Ferraez nodded and took the girl by the hand. “C’mon, sweetheart.” She followed obediently, just as she had followed Rokus before. She cast a backward glance at Argento.

“Bye,” she said brightly.

Argento gave her a wave. “Get her a lemonade,” he told Ferraez. Then he turned to Wells. “You gonna interview her? Ask to see my ID? Take any pictures? Look for more witnesses? Do any cop stuff?”

“We got what we need.”

“Something special about Donny Rokus?”

Wells’s face grew tight, which was as much as a yes.

“This is the worst felony investigation that I’ve ever seen,” Argento said.

“Special circumstances. I’m trying to look out for you.”

The ambulance crew immobilized Rokus with a hard backboard and cervical collar, and secured his head to the board with tape and foam blocks. “We gotta go,” one of the EMTs said. “Right now. He might have a brain bleed.”

“I’ll follow you,” Wells said. He took his sunglasses off and perched them on top of his head. Then he looked Argento up and down. “You one of those martial arts guys?”

Argento gave a noncommittal shrug. He had been a regular in the Police-Fire boxing league and won not because he had an overly refined technique, but because he was a merciless hitter and could absorb blows himself w. . .