THE THOUSAND DOLLAR BREAKOUT: Colt Ryder Uncovers A Deadly Fight Club At San Quentin State Prison . . . Will He Escape With His Life?

by J. T. Brannan

  “So what do you have in mind?”

  “This is your lucky day, Mr. Delaney. I’m fast-tracking your move to general population.”

  There were some looks of surprise on the faces of some of the guards, and I was equally astonished – normally inmates spent weeks, if not months, here at reception. I’d been here just over a week, and already I was making the move.

  “When do I go?” I asked.

  In reply, Gordon put his notebook away, stood, and adjusted his tie before looking at me again. “This afternoon,” he said. “No point waiting, is there? I would say, ‘I hope we don’t see each other again’, but I have a feeling that we will, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I think we just might.”

  The next morning, I made my way to the shower block, just one in a line of men, guards monitoring us as we walked down the otherwise empty corridor.

  I was now in South Block, the largest block at San Quentin; my tiny cell was on the third tier of five, in a housing unit which must have contained hundreds of identical cells, a wall of seething, caged humanity. The place was a mess, trash strewn everywhere, caught on the barbed wire that faced our little homes, along with torn uniforms, toilet paper, and who knew what the hell else. I thought there’d been a riot or something, but my new cellmate assured me that this wasn’t the case – that’s just how it looked, on a pretty much permanent basis. The prisoners would throw all their shit out onto the walkways to disrespect the guards, the place would eventually get cleaned up, and then the whole situation would repeat itself.

  My new cellmate was alright, but I swear they’d found the biggest bastard they possibly could, just to make my life more uncomfortable. He must have been six feet five, weighing in at well over the three-hundred-pound mark, almost all of it fat. He was in here for hacking offences, and wasn’t related to a gang, as far as I could tell; but then again, I’d thought that about Billy Wade, and look how that turned out. I was quickly figuring out that, in here, you couldn’t trust anyone.

  I’d survived my first night in South Block though, but I figured that might just be because the place was just so damn big, the right people hadn’t managed to find out where I was. I supposed I could just hide, but that wasn’t what I was here for; I was in this place to find answers, and hiding just wasn’t an option.

  It was just after six in the morning, and the people making up the line that made its way to the showers was slow and lumbering. I was looking forward to it though, as I wanted to wash away the dirt of the cellblock.

  I was still a little unsure as to Warden Gordon’s plans for me. Why had he fast-tracked me over here from the Reception Center? I knew there had to be a reason.

  Was it because this place was so much bigger? Maybe the guards could get away with more here; some of the inmates, too.

  Gordon was white; did he have links with the AB himself? Maybe Mankell reported on what I’d done to the brotherhood’s godfathers, and they’d requested the transfer?

  Anything was possible here, I knew that now. There was something going on, but was it any different in any other prison? I assumed that gangs held sway throughout the US penal system; they had a lot of money, and the guards got paid next to nothing. Corruption was probably a way of life in these institutions. Was San Quentin any worse than the next place?

  There were only twenty shower stalls, and so we did it in relays – five minutes for the first twenty, five for the next, and so on, a guard blowing a whistle for each transition. Five minutes wasn’t a lot, but – again – it was better than what I’d experienced in basic training. There, you had five minutes to race to the shower block, get changed, washed, changed again, and back on parade. This would be luxury – when we finally made it inside.

  After an eternity, my group was finally next to go; and as the twenty men showered before us, the guards told us to strip. We peeled off our orange jumpsuits, laid them on the floor, and waited for the whistle blast with our towels and our soap.

  The signal came, and we moved into the stalls, out of sight; we were on our own now, the guards leaving us to our own devices – and I wasn’t sure if I was in more danger now, or safer without them.

  I headed away from my cellmate, wanting some space to move; he was so big, he’d take up two shower heads, and I pitied whoever was left to wash next to him. He’d probably just pick them up and use them as a flannel.

  I looked quickly around the large, tiled room, trying to observe if anyone was paying me any undue attention – an AB thug sent to get their revenge, or else homeboys for the black gangs, trying to take out the new white face on the block. But everyone’s attention seemed focused on what they were doing, and eventually I turned the water on and started to soap myself.

  The water pressure was poor, but at least it wasn’t freezing cold – another memory of basic training – and as the seconds ticked by, I started to feel a little better.

  Big mistake.

  I saw the shadow on the tiled wall first, half-obscured by the falling shower water; I didn’t know what it was, but moved quickly anyway, dodging to one side and turning toward the movement. As I turned, I saw the shank go past me, held by a tall black guy; saw another man right next to him, slashing at my throat with a razorblade.

  I threw my soap into the second guy’s face, distracting him while I made a grab for the hand that held the razorblade. I latched onto his wrist with both hands and – as the first guy tried again to stab me with his makeshift knife – I whipped the wrist around, the razorblade slashing through my attacker’s pectoral muscle, blood spurting from his chest. I kicked out at his naked groin with my bare foot, the blow forcing the air out of him in a loud gasp; and then I headbutted the second man, stripped the razor blade out of his hand, and whipped it across the first man’s throat. Blood erupted everywhere, covering the stalls in a wide arcing spray.

  I turned back to the other attacker, ready to slash him too; but then I felt arms go around me in a bearhug, my own arms pinned to my sides, ribs being crushed as someone else punched me in the side of the head.

  I saw stars but held on, slamming my skull backwards into the face of the man holding me; saw another guy racing toward me with a metal pick and pushed myself off the floor – still in the embrace of the man behind me – and kicked the incoming attacker straight in the face. I then used gravity to come back down hard onto the man holding me, stamping down onto the small bones at the top of his foot, before bouncing my heel back up into his balls. His grip loosened and – as some of the other inmates watched on, while others ran in panic – I twisted around and smashed a reverse elbow across his jaw.

  Then I realized I still had the razor blade in my hand and whipped it toward him, missing his neck but catching him across one of his eyes; the lid was sliced clean open, the eyeball a black, bloody mess underneath. He screamed and dropped to the ground, clutching his face, but the battle wasn’t over yet – the man I’d kicked in the face was recovered now, his grip tight on the ice pick, and he rushed toward me once again.

  I dodged to one side and slashed down with the razor at the man’s arm, but lost my footing on the slippery blood beneath us and missed completely, off-balance and exposed. The guy switched directions and stabbed down at me with the pick, but I put one hand on the floor for stability and slammed a sidekick hard into his thigh, knocking him back.

  He came for me again though, and I threw the razorblade at his face, causing him to flinch, to jerk backwards as he blinked, disoriented; and in that same movement, I picked up the shank that the first guy had dropped and plunged it deep into his ribs.

  There was a slow sigh, a groan, and the sound of escaping gas and air as his lungs were punctured, blood quickly starting to froth and bubble from his mouth. I tried to pull the blade out, but it was stuck in there tight; and then he fell to the ground and started to spasm and I moved away, joining the others who’d stood there watching, trying desperately to wash the blood off my naked body before the guards arrived.
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br />   But they soon came pouring in, guns and batons out, screaming and shouting at us to get down on the floor.

  “What the hell happened here?” one of the men asked, looking at the dead and injured bodies in horror. “What the fuck happened?”

  “They just started fighting each other,” my huge cellmate said, halfway down to the floor. “The four of them, they just started fighting, going crazy.”

  There were muttered agreements from the other cons, and as I slipped down to the bloody floor, I smiled across at the big guy.

  I owe you one, pal.

  “Yeah?” one of the guards said, aiming his handgun at us. “Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we? I guess we’ll just see about that. We’ll find out what happened here, don’t worry.”

  But I was worried. I’d been a target in reception, and now I was a target here.

  How much longer would it be before one of these guys was successful, and took me out for good?

  Chapter Eight

  I was back in my cell, lying on my bunk and wondering what was going to happen next. We were on cell lockdown until an investigation had been carried out, and all we knew was that we’d be getting individual interviews about the “incident” in the shower block at some stage during the day.

  I got the top bunk in this cell, because Paul Higgins – my massive cellmate – was just too big to get up there. Hell, I was surprised the lower bunk was able to take his weight; when he lay back on his paper-thin mattress, I heard the bolts strain where they met the wall.

  “Why did you say that to the guards?” I asked him, genuinely curious. Other than sharing a cell for a few hours, he didn’t know me from Adam, and I wondered why he’d tried to protect me.

  “SOP here in the pen, buddy,” Higgins said, his deep voice filling the room. Standard Operating Procedure – but why? “It’s better for everyone if these things are tied up nicely,” he continued, as if reading my mind. “Better for us, less work for the guards.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, and there was just a snort of acknowledgement from below.

  Neither of us spoke for a while, and my mind started to drift; but then the big guy cleared his throat. “So, what’s everyone got against you, anyway?” he asked. “What you do?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said.

  “Don’t give me that crap, man,” said the voice from below. “I ain’t buyin’ it.”

  “Well,” I answered after a long pause, “I guess I might have pissed off the guards when I tackled one of them in the reception center foyer . . . And I probably pissed off the Aryan Brotherhood by smashing one of their guy’s heads off a table.” Higgins let out a low whistle at the news. “But the guys who came after me in the showers were black, and I’ve got no idea why they don’t like me.”

  Higgins laughed. “You’re white, man,” he said, as if it was the most obvious reason in the world to have people trying to stab you. “Maybe that was enough.”

  And yet despite his lighthearted view of the situation, I wasn’t so sure; there were lots of other white guys in the shower block that they could have targeted; what was so special about me?

  I was about to ask Higgins about the colored gangs here – who they were, who they were connected to – when there was a bang at the cell door. I turned, and saw a pair of guards opening it and looking up at me.

  “Delaney,” one of the men said. “It’s your turn to give your bullshit statement. Let’s go.”

  A few minutes later, we were away from the cells, the guards’ boots click-clacking down a tiled hallway. I had no idea where we were headed, just assumed that it would be some sort of office, or interview room. The prison was a big place.

  As we walked, I tried to figure out if I could use the situation to my advantage. I started by sorting out what I already knew.

  An inmate called Patrick Murphy had died here, potentially in suspicious circumstances; violence was on the up generally, possibly because of the new warden. From what I’d seen of the guards so far, they were pretty hands-on; but, bad though they were, I got the feeling that they weren’t particularly out of the ordinary at a place like this. I doubted other prisons would have it much better. Inmate violence was the same – it was bad, but no worse than I’d heard about on countless news reports over the years. The new boss, Warden Nathaniel Gordon, was a hard man to figure out; he seemed to have plans for me, but I didn’t know why. Did he suspect I wasn’t who I claimed to be?

  I sighed inwardly. If I was being honest with myself, I was getting nowhere. I had some names – Murphy, Mankell, Bush, Gordon. But did any of it mean anything? Not really.

  I wondered who would be leading the interview; would it be Gordon? If it was, I knew it was time to try and shake things up a bit. Maybe I’d drop Patrick Murphy’s name into the conversation, see if I could rattle something loose?

  We took a turn into another corridor, a much quieter section of the building, and I realized something was wrong a moment too late; we took the corner, and saw the welcoming committee.

  Six more guards, Officer Bush at the front, all waiting for me with their nightsticks.

  Chapter Nine

  “Do you like what you see?” Officer Bush asked me, as I sat watching from behind the steel mesh.

  The guards hadn’t beaten me as badly as I’d feared, just enough to get me to surrender to the cuffs and chains. Strangely, Bush had even shouted warnings at them not to hurt me too much.

  And now we were here, down in the basements of South Block, in among the heating and ventilation machinery, an area off-limits to inmates. And in one corner, an area had been cordoned off by wire mesh; and inside, two men fought each other, bareknuckle.

  “What am I seeing?” I asked in response. “What the hell is this?”

  But I thought I had the answer already – Bush was running fights between the inmates. But why? There was nobody watching – except for a half-dozen armed guards – so what was he getting out of it? Some sort of perverse joy at watching men try and beat each other to death?

  “Auditions,” Bush said. “I had my eye on you when you came in here. Tackling me down like that, you got a brass set of balls, kid. You really do.”

  So, that was it – Bush was running fights, and more people were getting hurt than normal. Some might even have been dying, like Murphy. Made sense he would have been taking part – he’d been an MMA fighter before coming here.

  “You passed the little test in the shower block too,” Bush said with a grin. “Way I saw it, it was a win-win. They gut you, I’m happy. You beat ’em, I’m still happy. Maybe I’ve got one more fighter for my little stable, and maybe I can make some money from you.”

  Damn, Bush was a son of a bitch. But this whole scenario had me interested. How was he making money? He’d said this was an audition, did that mean that successful fighters went through to another stage? Maybe one where bets were made on the outcome. But who by? Members of prison staff? Privileged inmates? People from outside the prison altogether?

  I knew he wanted me to fight here, but the fear hadn’t hit me yet – maybe never would. I was too excited about finally learning something about what was going on here, happy to have something solid to go on.

  And the truth was, it wouldn’t be the first time that I’d fought this way.

  A long time ago, I’d been Sergeant Colt Ryder, US Rangers, Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment. Then Iraq had happened, I’d been involved in a gunfight I couldn’t win. I was in hospital for months, learning to walk again, to function again, and I was finally forced to take a medical discharge that left me with one hundred grand in severance. I gave it away to the widow of a friend I’d lost on that same mission; I’d promised Tom Collins I’d look after his family, and I was as good as my word. At the time, I’d not worried about money. I was a Ranger, I’d been awarded the Medal of Honor, surely there were people out there who would love to employ me, in one field or another?

  But the sad reality was that I was trained for one thi
ng, and one thing only – to kill my enemy. And there wasn’t really that much call for that skill-set in the civilian world. I tried to get private security work, but as soon as anyone found out about my medical discharge, and looked into my injuries, their initial interest evaporated completely.

  And so I’d been forced to work in one menial job after another. I washed cars, flipped burgers, worked as a bouncer; you name it, I did it. Until I found myself down in North Carolina, where I heard about a meatpacking factory out at Tar Heel, maybe the biggest processing plant in the world at the time. I heard they were hiring, and I got myself down there; they took me on, and for the first time in months, I had steady work.

  I’d been working there for a while when I found out that one of Tom Collins’ kids – Kyle, my godson – had leukemia. The family was living up in Alaska by then, and I was still sending them money to help out. Poor Kyle was only six years old, and I really wanted to help out more. I’d heard about the unlicensed pit-fights going on at the factory for a while by then – had even been asked to take part, but hadn’t had much interest in it – but the news changed things. I realized I needed the extra money, and I signed up the next day.

  Before my selection for the RRD, I’d been my unit’s unarmed combat instructor, mixing up the standard Gracie Jiujitsu syllabus with Muay Thai, boxing, wrestling and various other arts, many of which I’d studied since childhood. And then a friend of mine introduced me to the Filipino martial arts, and I began to incorporate Escrima into the system too, alongside some old-school Word War II methods.

  To say I was comfortable in hand-to-hand situations was something of an understatement.

  The fights were normally held within the confines of a small parking lot. It had served as the main lot in the early days of the factory, back when there’d been a lot less people working there. A newer, much larger lot had been built by then, and the smaller lot was kept more as a curiosity, although some people still parked there.