by Brenda Novak
Scrambling to get out of the way, John cursed. Each time he dealt with this punk, John swore it would be the last, but with spousal support and child support and his new truck, which he’d bought when his marriage fell apart, he couldn’t get ahead.
Heavy metal blasted into the small clearing as Cooley, a kid of maybe eighteen, left the motor running and got out. The little prick knew better than to come charging in here with his stereo turned up so loud. John had asked him a number of times to be more discreet, but Cooley wanted to come off as too much of a badass to care whether or not he attracted attention. His cockiness was reflected even in the car he drove. That old Corvette wasn’t worth more than a few thousand dollars, not these days, but he raced around in it as proudly as though it were fresh off the lot.
“What’s up, man?” Tall and skinny, with long greasy hair, Cooley wore an MMA T-shirt with tight rocker jeans and Vans on his feet. He looked more like a skater dude than a gangbanger. He had the usual tats, of course, but tats were so common these days they no longer signified anything. Too many wannabes inked up. Cooley strove for a tough image, talked like he’d spent a few years in prison, but John knew the truth. He was just a foot soldier, recruited by Weston Jager, his older brother.
“What the hell took you so long?” John growled, relieved when the car door slammed, muting the discordant music.
Cooley shot him a dark look. “That’s the first thing you say to me? What’s your problem, dude?”
What did he think? John risked a lot coming out here. If he was caught doing business with the Hells Fury he’d go to prison himself. “Nothing. Just give me what you owe me so I can be on my way.”
Cooley dangled a thick envelope in front of him, but when John tried to take it, he yanked it out of reach. “My brother’s got another job for you. If you’re man enough to handle it.”
“I was man enough to handle the last one, wasn’t I?” They’d wanted Bentley Riggs and he’d delivered him. He’d even kicked the bastard when the presence of other C.O.s forced him to break off the attack before Weston was finished.
Cooley made a tsking sound. “I heard you got yourself in trouble with that one.”
“See the risks I take?”
“That shouldn’t have been a risk. You didn’t sell it right. Westy said you came in late.”
Because he’d almost chickened out. “All’s well that ends well,” he said to cover his embarrassment. “That’s a happy ending?” Cooley cracked a smile.
“He was sent to the infirmary with a broken skull, wasn’t he?”
“I’m talking about what’s happening to you, man.”
John didn’t want to go into it. It was too upsetting. But curiosity compelled him to find out what the Hells Fury had to say about him. They thought they were so tough, but he was the one who’d done the bulk of the damage that day. “How do you know what’s happening to me?”
“Word has it you’re gonna be suspended.”
News traveled fast in prison, especially bad news.
“And that’s just for jumping in at the end,” Cooley added. “If they knew it was because of you Westy got to that faggot in the first place, they’d fire your ass.”
“They’re not going to fire me. I’ll get through this.”
“Too bad you have to worry about it. That’s what’s wrong with the system. We’re only trying to take out the trash, you know? Cleanse the world. Creeps like Bentley Riggs don’t deserve to live.”
John heard that all day, every day. If the Hells Fury weren’t pressuring him to smuggle cell phones, cigarettes or crank into the prison, or to provide privileges they didn’t deserve, they were asking him to serve up chomos—or child molesters—so they could exact retribution on behalf of the innocent victims who’d been harmed. Which was pretty damn ironic considering all the innocent victims they’d harmed. But John didn’t mind the irony. He hated chomos as much as they did. “We can’t snuff them all out. And I’m done doing favors for your brother. At least for a while.”
Cooley pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. “What do you mean by that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’ve been written up. I need to lie low.”
With a wave of his hand he suggested John was too concerned. “Stop worrying. My brother’s got your back.”
John wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. “There’s nothing Weston can do. ISU has already given me notice. My suspension got the rubber stamp from everyone, all the way up to the chief deputy warden.” Who should’ve shown more loyalty…
“That chief deputy…shee-it.” Drawing out the word, he punctuated it with a whistle. “She’s a mighty fine piece of ass, isn’t she?” Peyton was attractive. No denying that. In the beginning John had liked her. When he’d first started having problems in his marriage, he’d even harbored some hope that Peyton might like him in return. That if he lost Marguerite, he’d take a step up. But he didn’t care for her anymore. He preferred women who acted like women, not some ballbuster ice queen like Adams. She made him feel…inadequate. “She’s okay, I guess.”
“She’s more than okay, dude. She’s hot! What my brother wouldn’t pay for five minutes alone with her…” He made a thrusting motion with his hips. “I might even be willing to serve a nickel for some of that action, you hear what I’m sayin’?”
John backed away. “Listen, if that’s what Weston has in mind, tell him to forget it. I might need a few aces here and there to cover expenses, but I’m not crazy.”
“Chill out. You think we’re stupid? That would bring down the whole place, which would interfere with business. There’s no need for that.”
Detric Whitehead, the leader of the Hells Fury, would probably kill them both if they did.
“Westy has a message he wants you to deliver, that’s all,” Cooley said as he exhaled a fresh stream of smoke.
Communication work paid well and was the safest way to augment his income. Even if he was caught passing a written message, what convicts called a “kite,” he could claim he’d confiscated it. But right now…he was too concerned about the added scrutiny he was under.
“I’d do it, but I’m already in enough shit. I need to stay aboveboard for a while.”
“I told you, my bro’s handling your problem.”
“There’s nothing he can do.”
“Where’s your faith, man? We run the place. You know that.”
His arrogance annoyed John. The war wasn’t over yet. Peyton and the warden were doing all they could to weed out dirty C.O.s. They had Rosenburg working overtime, investigating anything that smelled remotely suspicious. But with so many inmates wanting so many things, there were simply too many ways to earn a buck and too many ways to spend the extra dough. He wasn’t the only one to sell out.
“Yeah, well, I’ll believe it when I see it.” John was pretty sure the administration had won this battle. It was too late for anyone to fix, even Weston Jager. Or Detric Whitehead himself. “You going to give me the money or not?”
As soon as Cooley handed over the envelope, John counted through the stack of money. It was all there—two thousand bucks for making sure Bentley got his ass kicked and for smuggling in a cell phone. It would’ve been a nice financial boost if he hadn’t gotten busted. As it was, he’d lose more than that due to the suspension.
“We’re even,” he muttered, and turned away.
Cooley remained where he was. “That’s it, then?” he called after him. “I should tell Westy it’s a no? Deech won’t like that.”
“Deech” was Detric Whitehead’s nickname. They all had one. Even the general. “I can’t,” John said, but he was already calculating up his financial obligations, knew he’d be broke again in a few days. How would he survive the coming weeks?
He’d figure out what was going on with Rick Wallace and that stranger, that was how. News of what they were doing had to be worth more than the petty amounts he’d earned in the past—maybe even enough to finally get him out of the red.
Driving forward, John lowered his window.
Cooley took a final puff on his cigarette and ground it into the dirt. “Change your mind already? You are so predictable.”
“Shut up,” John snapped. “Just tell me what Weston wants me to do and how much he’s offering.”
21
Eleven guard towers surrounded the maximum-security facility erected on land carved out of the surrounding forest. Shifting, Virgil tried to take in as much as he could while the two officers who’d picked him up at Peyton’s house—Nance and Parquet—turned into the main entrance. Pelican Bay sprawled over two hundred and seventy-five acres, ten miles south of the Oregon border. If it wasn’t for the three fences that established the perimeter, two topped with razor wire, the middle one electrified, the white two-story concrete buildings would’ve looked as innocuous as an industrial park.
Another of the many ironies he’d noted since coming here, Virgil thought. Half the men living at this “industrial park” were lifers, which gave them little to lose. And thanks to the overcrowding in California prisons, as many as three hundred inmates were, at times, supervised by only two guards.
Surviving here wasn’t going to be easy, even if he managed to keep his purpose a secret….
“Big mother, isn’t it?” Dangling one hand over the wheel, Nance paused in the parking lot of the administration building located out front, turning around to gauge Virgil’s reaction.
Virgil didn’t answer, but he arched his eyebrows, awed in spite of himself.
“It’s a freakin’ city,” Parquet chimed in from the passenger seat. “Has its own fire department, water treatment facility, boiler plants and electrical generators. It even has a full medical department with hundreds of medical staff, and an education department with teachers and a school district superintendent.”
Nance gave the car some gas. “No wonder it takes one hundred and eighty million dollars a year just to keep it running.”
“With that kind of cash outlay, conditions here must be pretty good, right?” Virgil said.
Nance and Parquet both chuckled at his sarcasm. From the outside, the institution seemed clean and quiet, but it was a bit too sterile. Pelican Bay’s reputation, one of efficient brutality, was well-known. But there was no time for the police officers to respond to his remark. They’d reached the vehicle sallyport, which was surrounded by carefully groomed gardens.
More irony….
Lowering his window, Nance showed the proper paperwork and signed in.
Twenty-three if he was a day, the chubby, baby-faced sallyport officer squatted to positively identify everyone and get a better look at Virgil. “Heard this guy was comin’ in. You like to cause trouble, huh, buddy?”
Virgil didn’t dignify his question with a response. Obviously this guy was another “HACK”—horse’s ass carrying keys—like so many of the C.O.s he’d met over the years. Since the job didn’t require much more than a high school diploma, C.O.s weren’t always the brightest individuals society had to offer. Pelican Bay C.O.s had often been accused of being racist and cruel. They denied that, of course. And in recent years administration had worked hard to clean up the image. But Virgil had a difficult time believing those rumors were completely unfounded. Where there’s smoke…
Nance answered. “Trouble of the worst kind.”
“He’d better watch himself,” the guy said. “This is the end of the line for guys like him. We don’t put up with any shit.”
Officer Nance had been teasing—Virgil could tell by his tone—but the young man in the green uniform was dead serious. He sounded eager for the opportunity to conquer, to punish, and that tempted Virgil to prove the guy wasn’t half as strong, mentally or physically, as he pretended to be.
But a response like that didn’t make sense. Virgil was on the other side for a change. On the same side as this officer. Not that it sat well with him. There were moments, a lot of them, when he didn’t want to join forces with the law. He’d spent too many years hating those who’d oppressed him. Maybe the cons he’d associated with in prison weren’t pillars of the community, but they had a code and they adhered to it. That was something.
“You don’t have anything to say?” the guard prompted.
Eat shit and die came to mind, but that was his anger talking.
Closing his eyes, Virgil relegated this gatehouse asshole to the list of people not worth hassling. It wasn’t difficult to tell the kid was all talk. He’d run if Virgil ever confronted him one-on-one. Virgil had received similar comments from other C.O.s dozens of times. They acted tough when they had every advantage. But they were merely attempting to cover their own inadequacies.
“It’s probably better not to provoke some people,” Nance told him.
“He doesn’t scare me. We’ve got fourteen hundred of these hard-asses.” Wearing a self-satisfied grin, he searched the inside compartments and undercarriage of the car.
“What an idiot,” Nance grumbled as the kid waved them through the second gate.
Virgil ducked his head to gaze out at the prison ahead of them. Shaped like a giant X, the Security Housing Unit took up one side of the property. The regular maximum-security prison took up the other. It consisted of eight cell blocks radiating, like the spokes of a wheel, from a yard of at least three acres.
They parked next to a bus that had held other prisoners, judging by the crowded intake area and the C.O.s waiting there.
Parquet got out and opened Virgil’s door. “Welcome to twenty-first-century hell.”
The belly chain connecting his handcuffs to the shackles on his ankles rattled as Virgil climbed out of the backseat and stood in the dwindling afternoon sunlight, squinting up at the edifice he’d call home. The chill wind whipping over the treeless grounds reminded him of how cold and sterile it could be in prison.
But he’d been to hell before. It didn’t scare him. At least Laurel and the children were safe. Besides, he was taking something with him this time that they couldn’t strip away—his memories of that night with Peyton, the hope of seeing her inside these concrete walls and the phone number she’d slipped him at breakfast.
Peyton stared out her office window at the empty yard and a section of blacktop where the inmates played basketball. She couldn’t see R & R—Receiving and Release—from the administration building, but she knew Virgil had arrived on the heels of the bus transporting thirty men from other prisons in the state. The C.O.s down there had called her, as requested.
Normally, new arrivals were given a Fish kit—underwear, sheets, a blanket and one change of clothes—and housed in a separate unit called the gym until staff could observe their behavior and determine where they should be placed. But the gym provided a home for those with a “bit” or short prison sentence, too, and was severely overcrowded at the moment. The whole prison was. Originally built for 2,280 inmates, it held a thousand more, and that gave her a good excuse to drop Virgil into gen pop. It was important to get him into regular circulation as soon as possible. She wouldn’t rest easy until he was out of this place and safely away. The 2002 riot, when blacks and Hispanics started stabbing one another in the exercise yard known as Facility B, had taken one hundred and twenty guards and thirty minutes to stop, and that was using everything from pepper spray, to tear gas, to rubber bullets, to wooden bullets, to two dozen .223-caliber rounds from Ruger Mini-14 rifles. The inmates wouldn’t quit fighting until someone was killed.
Although there was only one death, due to a rifle shot, many convicts were injured, mostly by other prisoners. Once it was all over, the staff found fifty makeshift weapons in the yard.
“Hey, you got a minute?”
Surprised that she had company, Peyton turned to find Lieutenant McCalley standing in the doorway. Shelley wasn’t at her
desk—probably out having a smoke—and Peyton had left the door open. She’d been too anxious to shut herself in, had wanted to hear and see everything going on around her, even though the administration building was beyond the electrified perimeter that enclosed all the level-four inmates. She’d never see or hear a disturbance involving Virgil from where she worked.
“Sure.” Concerned by the serious expression on McCalley’s face, she gestured that he should take a seat. “What’s wrong?”
He walked into the room and sat down but got right up again. “The disciplinary action we’re taking against John Hutchinson?” John again? “Yes? What about it?”
“A few more details have come to light.”
Finally able to forget, for a moment, that Virgil was entering the prison at this very moment, Peyton came around to sit on the edge of her desk. “What kind of details?”
“One of the C.O.s who helped break up the fight came to see me this morning.”
“Who—Ulnig?”
“No, Rathman.”
“And?”
“He’s changing his story.”
“Why do you think he’s doing that?”
McCalley began to circle the room but paused at the picture of her father, even though she knew he’d seen it many times before. “No clue. He says I misunderstood him. That he doesn’t believe Hutchinson over-reacted. He’s now claiming Riggs was trying to come after Hutchinson with a sharpened toothbrush. He said if Hutchinson hadn’t kicked Riggs, he would’ve been shanked.”
“But Riggs had no weapon. We already established that.”
The lieutenant ran a hand through his hair, mussing the only long part—the bangs he usually combed off his forehead. “Rathman produced the toothbrush Riggs supposedly had.”
“But it was Riggs who was jumped by Weston Jager. It’s also Weston who has a history of violence, both inside and outside the prison. Why would Riggs have a shank?”
“Rathman says he knew what was coming and wanted to be prepared. When it finally happened, he decided it was time to get himself out of gen pop and into the SHU, where he wouldn’t have to watch his back anymore. If that meant he had to stab a C.O., he was willing to stab a C.O.”
