Despite wild speculation, no one knew the crime that had landed Stark in prison. Some said he’d embezzled college funds or dealt drugs to his students. Others, that he’d slept with underage pupils. Others whispered that he’d murdered his wife of twenty years.
Luca Jimenez only knew that within five years at Pelican Bay, the Professor had organized one of the tightest prison gangs in the state, ousting the Inland Empires and the White Supremacists in the power hierarchy of white gangs. The prison brass figured he ran a gang of over three thousand members outside the prison, along with his efficient minions inside northern California prisons.
‘Effing crazy, especially in the mind of a poor Mexican immigrant like Luca. But his job with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was hella good, with benefits and hazard pay for working in the SHU – the Security Housing Unit – which housed the deadliest of Pelican Bay’s inmates.
Even though he felt like he entered a war zone during each twelve-hour shift, he wouldn’t complain.
Meal time was the most dangerous part of a SHU correctional officer’s job. Twice a day he had to open the metal compartments of the cells and insert the food trays through the portals. An inmate could toss anything through the ten-inch-wide food port – urine they’d saved up, even feces, or worse, a hand-made dart dipped in shit.
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 Norte?o. 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.