"That piece of tail may make the difference between spending the rest of your life in the pig's pen, or living nice and easy on the outside."

"You call this nice and easy?" Vito retorted. "I'd take solitary before I'd stay in this dump for more than two days."

"Hold on, you guys," Cash intervened between the two men. "We gotta start thinkin' straight. Now Billy, when's the man comin'?"

Billy scratched his head and looked towards Cash and Pop sitting in broken down chairs on either side of Ellen. "We just sit here and wait. It should be soon from what I heard before we jumped the cage. That was a real smooth job. But remember, he can get us back in there as fast as we got out if we don't follow through with knockin' off the senator. We get plenty of loot for doin' it, so don't get all anxious, not yet anyway."

"That sounds real nice," Pop said, running his tongue across his lips in greedy anticipation. "We get the loot and just disappear."

"But politics is somethin' I don't fancy messin' with," Cash said, standing up from his chair. "They'll hang you fifty times for shootin' a senator, then fry your carcass in the chair."

"There are chances, but we been playing our cards right this far, and I say we make a go of it," Billy answered, asserting his authority once more.

He smiled at the three men in a superior manner as though he had mapped out the entire plan beforehand and had some information that he was withholding from the others. Ellen listened as he went on discussing the details of what now appeared to be an assassination plot. Her dazed mind was beginning to focus more clearly on what was going on around her, and she became more and more aware that this was no ordinary band of escaped criminals. Her own position as a hostage – and that surely was what she had become – now was quite obvious. Her hopes of freedom fell into the knowledge that the men not only intended to use her an object on which to vent their long pent-up lust, but they would hold her in case something went wrong with their murderous plans.