by Brenda Novak
SHU inmates fashioned any kind of weapon out of any kind of material. And why not? What else did they have to do in their twenty-two-and-a-half hours a day of isolation in an eight by ten foot cell with no window?
Stare at the concrete wall opposite them through the metal barrier filled with nickel-sized holes so the control guard could see inside, observe them in their cells. Never see a single soul except the Kevlar-vested CO’s that brought meals or ushered them to the shower or the dog run.
The smart inmates took advantage of the solitude, kept themselves occupied with exercise or reading. The stupid ones went loco. Either way, they were considered the most lethal inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison.
As his fellow officer turned the lock to open Anson Stark’s food port, Luca half expected a projectile made from tightly rolled paper, a staple straightened out to a sharp point, and elastic from an underwear waistband – the currently favored type of weapon – to fly through the opening. The corridor was unusually quiet today and prickles of expectation jabbed the CO’s spine like poisoned darts.
Nothing happened.
Sweat trickled down Luca’s temples as he inserted the tray through the port. A second later his companion secured the padlock. Luca couldn’t hold back a sigh. Seven more to go in this pod and he could take his break. Moving to the next cell, Luca glanced back at Stark’s immobile face through the perforated steel door.
The Professor stared back with pale, blank eyes. He never spoke to the guards, but his eyes unnerved Luca Jimenez more than any heckling could’ve done. Luca blinked first and lowered his eyes.
“Yo! Jimenez!”
The shout came from two cells down, occupied by a burly Norteño. The Northern Mexicans were currently at war with the blacks. Hatchet Juarez made an obscene gesture with his hand at his crotch.
Hatchet always tried to get a rise out of the guards. “You too pretty to work this shift, hermano.”
Luca had learned not to respond or engage with the inmates.
In spite of his height and muscles, a result of years working on the New Mexico farm, his baby face betrayed him. The verbal attacks were nothing personal, just the natural psychosis of the caged beast.
Even so, he breathed easier when he walked through the pod gate, controlled by the single, armed officer who managed the six pods of eight cells each from the high enclosure of the X-shaped area.
The row of grated red doors stood like a line of entrances to hell.
Chapter 3
Frankie Jones, MD, first heard the loud commotion as she bent over an HIV-infected patient in the SHU’s hospital wing. She knew immediately that something serious was going on.
Something that would require her medical skills. And from the direction of the noise, something in the prison’s exercise yard where most beat-downs took place.
The inmate she was attending, Charlie Cox, coughed and stared at her calm face, the lift of both dark, shapely brows the only expression that she knew a ruckus was going on.
An excited gleam showed in Charlie’s faded blue eyes. “Know what that is, Doc?”
“I can imagine,” Frankie replied, placing the stethoscope on another area of the shrunken chest.
He rasped out what might’ve been a snort. “Nah, you can’t. There’ll be wooden blocks flying like bricks. It’s the velocity, you see, that makes them dangerous. Hard as hell and hurt like bejeesus. Can kill you if you get hit in the right spot, the temple or the windpipe.”
He got caught up in a spasm of coughing that lasted long moments while Frankie waited patiently for him to recover.
“Well, don’t worry about what’s going on in the exercise yard,” she advised. “You need to focus on putting some weight on those bones of yours.”
Charlie continued as if he hadn’t heard. “If a guard gets attacked, it won’t be no wood blocks, neither. No sir, it’ll be the Mini-14’s. They don’t fu – fool around if one of their own goes down. Don’t matter who gets killed then. Everybody’s a target.”
“Hmm.” Frankie straightened and adjusted the man’s IV bag, ignoring the urge to turn around to see the reaction of her male duty nurses to the noise.
Charlie’s eyes focused intently on her. Saw the strength in her pretty face, glanced at the empty ring finger of her left hand, wondered why some lucky bastard hadn’t already grabbed her up and made her his own. “We’re all disposable, you know.”
How do you respond to the odd truth of that kind of statement? Frankie cleared her throat. “How’s the pain level, Charlie?”
He shook his head and snorted lightly. “Oh, you know, it’s just ... there. Kinda like a bad guest you can’t get rid of after dinner.”
She smiled, patted his hand. “I can increase the pain meds if you need it.”
Charlie attempted to return the smile. “You’re a good woman, doc. If I was thirty – no make that a hunnert – years younger ... ” His words trailed off and ended in a sharp pain which took a minute to recover from.
“Not long now,” he muttered, almost to himself.
Charlie looked at the doctor, let himself drown a little in those soft, dove gray eyes that were both no-nonsense and oddly comforting. Kinda like the mother he’d never had, but always dreamed about.
Today Doc Jones had her chestnut hair down, a rare thing, and it tumbled in wild curls around her shoulders, several strands blowing across her pale cheeks and forehead. He tried to return the pressure on her hand, but suddenly felt overwhelmingly weak ... and sad, like a party that’d ended too soon.
Yeah, Doc deserved better than bein’ surrounded by old scum-bags like him.
“You better go see what the ruckus is,” he advised. “Likely they’ll need your help. Bound to be lots of wounded inmates. Maybe even a dead body or two.” He jutted with his chin toward the double doors at the end of the ward. “Go on, then. I’m fine.”
Fine was something that Charlie Cox would never be, but Frankie gave his shoulder one last gentle squeeze and turned to the next patient. However, before she could even glance at the chart, several burly correctional officers slammed through the doors, dragging a bleeding man between them.
“Hurry, goddammit!”
“Fuck you, Schwartz!” the smaller of the two giants retorted. “Who gives a damn if this mother-fucker bleeds out or not? Animals, all of them!”
Schwartz flashed a warning glance when he caught the eye of Dr. Jones and lowered his voice. “Shut up, Benson.” All the officers knew the doc didn’t approve of rough language, and oddly enough, they respected her wishes and curbed their tongues in her presence.
“Here,” Frankie directed, pointing to the closest open bed, just as two more guards carried in another injured – or dead – inmate.
“How many more?” she asked as she bent over the first inmate, checking vitals. His carotid artery had been jaggedly savaged, and Frankie knew from a cursory examination and the amount of blood loss that the man was already dead.
Nurse Harry Lewis stood next to her, snapping on latex gloves.
“Call it,” Frankie said, “one-twenty-three p.m.,” and moved to the next patient.
This inmate was bleeding, too, a head wound, but she didn’t think it was life-threatening. “Start an IV and apply pressure,” she ordered and looked to another injured inmate.
The wounded and maimed dribbled in after that, most of them with concussions, contusions, and lacerations from the flying block-bullets. The next few hours flew by in a flurry of sutures, bandages, and IV’s.
The ward began to look like a battle-field hospital.
The only dead inmate was the Hispanic man with the severed carotid artery. Frankie had never seen him before. Mid-thirties, short, muscled. Without the ragged neck wound and cuts on his upper torso, she thought he might’ve once been considered handsome.
Chapter 4
Correctional Officer Luca Jimenez wasn’t the only person in Pelican Bay’s SHU who was intimidated by Anson Stark.
Early on, Stark had put
word out that he didn't want a roommate in his cell. When the guards ignored his “request,” he'd beaten the first cellie so bad his skull had fractured. The next one he’d strangled with his bare hands.
The Professor was serving life without parole, had avoided the death penalty on a technicality. He had nothing to lose by racking up more dead bodies. Administration decided if he didn't want a cellmate, he didn't get one. Plain as that.
Even from the highly secure, X-shaped housing unit of the SHU, Anson Stark ran the white supremacist Lords gang efficiently and ruthlessly.
The SHU housed criminals so violent they couldn't mix with other inmates – or those who were validated gang members with double-digit points on their record. Isolation and a little over an hour a day outside the cell. A shower twice a week – soap, shampoo, and toothpaste poured into paper cups.
Exercise in a concrete enclosed yard, fifteen feet long, called a “dog run.” A pull-up bar for exercising, a rubber ball for bouncing off the concrete walls.
Nothing else.
Most inmates paced like caged animals during their mandated exercise time and slept face down on their bunks the rest of the day. Not the Professor, though. From his solitary cell in the SHU, he operated the Lords of Death like a well-oiled machine.
After the prison yard murder, Cole Hansen learned first-hand the unique psychological torture of the SHU. Even with a short stay, his cell right next to Stark’s, Cole knew he’d been sent to a scary place.
He believed he wasn't as bad as most inmates in Pelican Bay. For one thing he didn't let rage simmer like a hot coal in his belly. He'd always been a mild sort of guy, and sometimes wondered how he'd ended up in prison with a bunch of psychos and deviants. He figured it was just one turn of bad luck after another.
In general population a white inmate named Bones Griff got pissed because some stupid-ass Norteño dissed him in the chow line. Next day in the yard, Griff retaliated by jabbing the man's neck with a four-inch sharpened shiv, going full metal jacket on the inmate.
Which would've been funny except there'd been no warning that Griff was planning payback, and the attack caught everyone off guard.
Metal was everywhere in prison, the bunk racks stacked three high in the gym, the lockers. Although nothing was plastic – too easy to make a weapon out of – it was surprisingly easy to wear down a chunk of metal.
A strong piece of bed sheet folded just so, saw that sucker back and forth, back and forth, hour after hour, day after day, and you could break off a good-sized piece of metal. Make a bad-ass weapon.
And what else did inmates have to do to pass the hours of boredom?
The metal shank that Griff had used was sharpened to a point more lethal than a scalpel, and he’d jabbed it straight into the carotid artery of the Norteño. Blood spurted like a geyser. Cole had been right there, seen it all.
A reluctant witness.
That’s how he’d gotten jammed up and landed in the SHU. He'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When the Norteño who'd heckled Griff in the chow line went down in the yard that same day, carved up like raw meat, Griff had shoved the bloody knife in Cole's hand, and the block bullets started flying, and they hurt like a mother-fucker especially if they whammed you in the face or balls, and the guards in the tower screamed, "Down, down, down," and Cole knew the next block had his name on it so he flung himself flat, arms over his head, still clutching the damning, blood-stained blade.
Thank God, it wasn’t a correctional officer who’d got killed. Then real bullets would've been loaded into real guns – Mini-14’s – and taken a bunch of inmates out. Fuckers didn't mess around when a CO was attacked. As it was, a shit storm flew down on them loud as thunder and hard as icicles.
As leader of the Lords, Anson Stark had put out the word that Griff wasn't to go down for the attack in the prison yard. Stark wanted his second in command to stay in general population where he could control the inmates at large, and provide intel to and from the SHU, to and from the outside world.
Since Cole Hansen had the bad luck to be on the spot when the incident happened, and had the shiv in his fucking hand, for Christ’s sake, he was asked to take the fall. He now occupied a cell in the white shot caller’s pod, where the president and founder of the Lords of Death operated his gang from the cell right next to Cole.
Cole had no choice but to keep his trap shut and man up. That’s how a petty criminal who'd been serving a three-year sentence for burglary was now doing a term for murder and gang retaliation in security housing. Worst damn luck ever.
Chapter 5
Even though another doctor had been called in to assist in the medical wing, Frankie worked extra hours the day of the stabbing. She tried to catch a quick nap in her car, and finally, still groggy and tired, returned to the clinic.
The ward was much quieter now, housing only the seriously injured inmates, along with the regular terminal patients. The others had been dispatched to their cells.
As Frankie passed the security desk, she waited for the question she’d heard many times before.
“Hey, Jonsey.” Beefy Officer Quinn, who checked her through prison personnel security, squinted at her badge and rummaged through her personal cooler. “Why does a pretty gal like you wanna get ogled by these degenerates when you could have a lucrative private practice on the outside?”
Frankie never understood if the degenerates Quinn referred to were the prison workers or the inmates. She smiled blandly and turned away as he released the door’s lock, then waited another minute while the second security door’s entrance to the prison proper was released.
She sighed and squared her shoulders. Another shift in the trenches.
Making her way through the labyrinthine prison, security check after security check, to the SHU’s hospital and her tiny office at the front of the clinic, she considered Quinn’s tiresome question. Why had she chosen prison work instead of private practice?
The work was brutal, the patients surly, and her co-workers often disturbing. Although she repressed the reality when it threatened to take over her life, in her heart she knew why she worked here so tirelessly.
She saw her father’s shattered image in the face of every inmate who passed through the clinic doors.
Her two nurses, Harry and Mike – male and burly, and looking like inmates themselves – were already at work. Heaving another sigh, she removed her coat and sank into the desk chair in her office, reaching for the “kites” lying in her inbox.
Kites were inmate requests for services – medical, counseling, legal. There were a pile of them today, delayed after their request dates while being vetted by correctional personnel who determined their priority. These likely were further held up because of the yard incident earlier.
“Kites” actually referred to any form of prison communication. Literally a request for various services from inmates to staff, they’d also come to be a way for inmates to communicate with one another secretly – and illegally – inside the prison. A reversion to man’s most basic form of contact in a world where talking was a privilege, and whispering a defiance.
The kite lying on the top of the pile was from inmate Cole Hansen. Frankie had treated him more than a few times since she’d started working at the prison. She wondered what was wrong this time.
A white male, average height, with muscles gone to flab and thick coarse dirty-blond hair, Cole hadn’t adjusted well to incarceration. He had multiple medical complaints, some genuine, others imaginary.
His kite was dated today, but had already made its way to the top of her stack of papers. With the fight in the yard she was surprised that any kites had been processed at all.
How had Hansen managed that? Better still, why had the guards allowed it?
Before Frankie worked for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, she had heard the saying that prisons were actually run by the inmates.
She’d scoffed at the idea. But now, ten months on the job
, she understood the truth of it. And the idea chilled her to the bone because it upset the normal hierarchy of captor and captive that the outside world believed in. The reality was the inmates did run the prison.
Frankie looked up from the kite and glanced into the ward through the plexiglass windows of her office. The nurses, Harry and Mike, and the fill-in doctor – old Doc Vincent – worked at various ends of the clinic. The many empty beds in the ward were a good sign that the trauma was passing.
She returned her attention to Cole Hansen’s kite for medical services. She sensed an unusual urgency in his words, a hint of panic. The kite had been marked critical by administration.
Frankie had become familiar with Cole’s requests over the months, and this one was odd, desperate-sounding. Was it just jitters from the yard murder? Or something more? A complaint not related to his health?
Cole Hansen was the type of parolee who had fallen through the cracks. With virtually no skills, he was a high school dropout, who’d failed the GED exam twice.
He just wasn’t very bright, which is probably how he got himself in trouble in the first place. With almost no hope for success in the outside world, Frankie estimated he’d end up back in prison within a year of release.
Even so, what on earth did Cole Hansen think Frankie could do for him, and why was his kite marked critical by prison administration?
Chapter 6
A request from the shot caller was absolute – a command inside the prison hierarchy that no inmate refused. Unless Cole Hansen wanted the same fate as the hapless Norteño with the crudely slit throat who’d died in the prison yard, he had no choice but to confess to prison admin that, yeah, he was the doer.
