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 Norte?o 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 Norte?o. 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 Norte?o 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.