“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 Norte?o 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 Norte?o in the barbed-wire fenced exercise area.
Every inmate who was there knew different, but who’d say it aloud?