Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) Page 2

  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 mother-fucker. 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 fucking 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.

  H
is 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.

  He was the one who had murdered the Norteño in the barbed-wire fenced exercise area.

  Every inmate who was there knew different, but who’d say it aloud?

  Now, Cole’s life consisted of twenty-two and a half hours a day inside a SHU cell, facing a concrete wall and listening to other inmates beating off in the cages around him. No sense in trying to recant on his admission or snitch out Griff.

  Unless he was willing to drop out – debrief in prison authority parlance – and spend the rest of his sentence in the SNY – special needs yard, which was a fancy way of saying protective custody for snitchers and child molesters – he was stuck here. With a murder rap and the alleged strong gang affiliation, who knew for how many years?

  Maybe the rest of his life.

  Dropping out, snitching, however, would be a death ticket. Cole would be forced to write down everything he knew about gang activities, finger other gang members, betray their movements and plans, their orders to the outside.

  It wasn't even like he was a real Lords of Death gang member. He grimaced at the wry irony of it. He just shuffled along the perimeter of other white inmates, praying that he wouldn’t get caught up in a gang war with browns or blacks.

  He'd ganged up on the inside his second day at Pelican Bay, where the choice was get a crew or get brutalized, but Cole’s heart wasn't in it. He actually liked the blacks and the Mexicans better than the whites, but in prison you weren’t safe without making alliances along race lines.

  Without the Lords’ protection, he’d have lasted less than a week inside.

  Right now Cole felt like a rat in a maze, trying desperately to find a way out, knowing there was no reward at the end, but hoping anyway. Weighing his options, analyzing the consequences, but trapped in a web he hadn’t spun.

  In some ways for a man like him it was easier to do the solitary time in the SHU. He didn’t mind being alone with his own thoughts. Sometimes the hustle and noise of gen pop, the infernal talk like a swarm of bees, made him edgy.

  And now that admin had put an offer on the table – not a spectacular offer, but a good one – he didn’t know what to do.

  Shame, though, because he only had six months left on his original sentence. Now, with the murder rap hanging on him, he'd probably die of old age in here. Or bang his head against the concrete wall until his brains were a bloody pulp.

  If he didn’t debrief.

  He sighed in resignation and did the first sensible thing that came to him. He sent a kite to the prison doc, requesting a medical appointment.

  Dr. Jones would know what he should do.

  Afterward, he unwisely dreamed about life on the outside, no cages, no sweat-filled rooms, no grunts and groans of ugliness. It might be worth a chat with the warden.

  It might be worth it to figure out what he’d get in exchange, like finish his six months in protective custody. He wondered how safe they could keep him in Special Needs.

  Not that he had anyone or anything waiting for him on the outside. Family had disowned him, but he had a sister who still had a soft spot for him. He’d caused her too much pain, he decided.

  The very next day, hope struggled in his chest like a wilting flower desperate for life. By accident he saw the folded note lying in the corridor between his cell and the one next to it – Anson Stark’s cell. The kite was attached loosely to a string as if a stiff wind would lift it up into the cloudy blue sky any second.

  Ridiculous thought, because Cole couldn’t even see that sky, couldn’t prove there were clouds or wind on the outside, above his concrete cage. But he knew this for certain:

  The kite was meant for Anson Stark.

  He didn’t know why he reached for it. A dangerously stupid move. He paused a moment before reeling it in, holding his breath, waiting to see what the man in the neighboring cell would do.

  When nothing happened, a thrill mingled with fear, jerked out of his throat in a strangled sob. The soft snore of Anson’s breathing thawed Cole’s frozen body and he reached for the string, stretched his arm as far as it’d go.

  His fingers eased it slowly toward him.

  He read it quickly, flushed the string down the toilet, and shoved the paper in his mouth, gagging as he tongued it deep in his cheek. The kite was a good thing, he told himself. It gave him a bizarre burst of determination, and he finally resolved not to have a future next door to gang psychos and predators anymore.

  He would debrief. Even if he didn’t, if he behaved himself and got transferred from the SHU back into general population in three or four years, he’d still be doing life without parole.

  No money on his books in the commissary. Not a single letter from the outside world. No one coming during visitations. A do-nothing life until he wasted away and died for a murder he didn’t commit.

  He was surprised how the injustice of it angered him.

  When he got word within a few hours that he could see Dr. Jones, a fierce whirl of nausea spun him breathless at the dizzying speed of it all.

  Chapter 7

  The homeless man lumbered to his knees, scattering the damp twigs and leaves. He spread out the old sleeping bag on top of the debris, making up his bed for the night. His nearly white beard and bedraggled clothing belied his age – fifty-five on his next birthday. At least he thought so, but sometimes his memory played tricks on him. January 15 or 16, he wasn’t sure.

  Shrugging carelessly, he ransacked his backpack for a cigarette, lighted it, and relaxed against the tree trunk. When the dark figure suddenly loomed over him, he peered up, surprised but not afraid. Not much scared the old man anymore.

  “No smoking in the park,” the voice growled.

  “Hey, I know, man. And I ain’t supposed to sleep here neither.” What a tight ass. A man couldn’t smoke nowhere anymore. Clearing his throat, he hawked up a huge lump of
mucous, spitting it carelessly in the direction of the creek.

  The interloper remained disapprovingly silent.

  The bum rolled the unfinished cigarette on the edge of his backpack, shrugged and squinted up at the sky through the striated leaves. Nearing dawn, he judged. “I’m leavin’ anyways,” he offered in the subservient tone that worked best in a situation like this.

  The figure raised an arm in a dismissive gesture. “Get up.” A flashlight beam pointed at the homeless man’s eyes, blinding him. “Get out.”

  Scrambling to gather his tattered sleeping bag from the ground, the hobo reached for his backpack.

  “Leave it,” the voice instructed, impatience a ragged edge in the silence.

  Confused, the man rose on unsteady feet. “Come on, man,” he whined. “I ain’t doin’ nothing wrong, just gettin’ a bit a’ shuteye. I won’t come back, I promise.”

  The residents of this one-way street, bordering the east side of the park, often patrolled the area after dark. City ordinances clearly prohibited entrance after sunset, and residents were possessive about their parks. His confronter could be one of them ... or anyone. “Please, man, gimme a break.”

  If the hobo heard the soft pleading in his own voice or wondered how he’d gotten to this point in his miserable life, he had no more than a moment to ponder the consequences of his years on the street.

  It happened in a flash.

  The knife struck deep into his gut, angled upward so that it bypassed the ribs and nicked the heart. The attacker pushed the blade deeper, a deadly gush of blood blanketing his hand. The bum felt only the weight of pressure and a faint surprise as he crumbled to the ground.

  In the distance, water from the creek babbled like a friendly child, the October wind ruffled the tree branches, and the killer mumbled low in his ear as the man’s life ebbed from his scrawny body. “A reminder not to sully the park.”

  After a few minutes of staring down at his victim, the killer stood straight, roused from his stupor as surprise then shock, replaced fury.