The day got busy really fast. Charlie Cox, the garrulous terminally-ill patient, had seized in the afternoon, and despite their efforts to revive him, he’d passed, not with a whimper, but a bang, she thought, recalling the famous poem. She sighed and called the time of death, pulling the sheet over his emaciated form.
She’d liked Charlie Cox. She realized as she perused the final notes documenting his symptoms and the COD, along with his long medical history in Pelican Bay, that the man he’d been when he first entered prison wasn’t the man who’d just died in front of her.
Prison changed them all. Some for the worse, but many, many more for the better. Having no sound religious faith herself, she wondered why, but accepted the simple faith these men often clung to in spite of devastating circumstances.
Sitting at her desk, drained and exhausted from the battle to save Charlie’s life, she gnawed on the end of her pen, and swiveled her chair gently from side to side. She recalled what Charlie had been saying right before he seized.
“It’s a tricky path you’re on, Doc,” he said between coughs that were more like carving out something large and malignant from the lungs. “Very tricky.”
He closed his eyes and rested a moment, and she’d thought he was finished when he opened his eyes and reached for her hand, clutching it with surprising strength. “Be careful. This is a dangerous place for innocents like you.”
“What?” She thought his mind had wandered into the past.
His faded eyes widened and he glanced over her shoulder. She involuntarily followed his gaze, but no one was there.
“You don’t know what you know, Frankie.” He never called her anything but “doc” or “girl,” and she was mildly surprised that he knew her first name. “You oughter get outta here.” He inhaled sharply, struggling for breath.
“Charlie, relax, you need to calm down. This talking isn’t good for you.”
“Never mind me!” he exclaimed with more ferocity than she’d thought he had left in him. “It’s you that needs to worry.” He sighed and closed his eyes briefly.
“I know you won’t leave,” he murmured at last, the words labored and halting, “but watch your back. There’s those would not like you meddling in prison affairs.” He gestured feebly with one hand. “Look around you, girl. They’re all murderers, rapists, thieves, liars – the lot of them.” He glowered darkly. “And I don’t mean just the inmates.”
Then he’d closed his eyes right before his poor ragged heart had seized, his body convulsing, and neither CPR, the paddles, or epinephrine injection had been sufficient to revive him.
And what the hell was she supposed to do with those last words from a dying inmate who’d been on his own personal death row for decades? He couldn’t possibly have known about the message Cole Hansen had slipped her in the examination room, he couldn’t understand what had really happened in the prison yard the day of the murder Cole had confessed to, and he absolutely couldn’t have figured out her personal stake in the whole affair.
Chapter 17
Cole Hansen spent his first night of freedom in a flea-bitten hotel off Washington Street, in downtown Rosedale. The kind of place that rented rooms by the hour, the dump was all he could afford. For a while, he amused himself watching the hookers come in and out, doing their business, briefly and efficiently.
After the long bus ride from Crescent City, he still had about sixty dollars left from the money he’d paroled with. When it ran out, he didn’t know what he’d do, but he’d be damned if he would spend his first night of freedom huddled against a building in a dark alley.
He’d gotten fast food and spent thirty bucks on this sorry excuse for a rented room. He lay on top of a worn bedspread, not wanting to think about what crap was crusted into the thin fabric. No matter, he’d had worse before, both inside and outside of prison or jail.
As long as he was alive, he could survive anything.
Staying alive, avoiding blowback from prison debriefing, was the important goal.
He had expected to serve out the last six months of his original sentence in special needs, but admin had fast-tracked him through the system, gotten him out of harm’s. He figured that move had saved his life.
Anson Stark would be wanting major retaliation.
Now he just had to stay alive long enough to finish parole or disappear.
People thought Cole was dumb, and he admitted he wasn’t very smart. He had trouble in school all his life and dropped out at the age of fifteen. He didn’t read well – the letters and figures on the page looked all twisted around and backwards, but teachers, and even his own parents, seemed to think he was just lazy, not trying hard enough.
He knew there was something wrong with him, in his head, but he wasn’t as stupid as people thought. If he was, he’d be dead already. Right now he knew enough to realize he was in deep shit with little chance of getting out of it no matter who reached out to him.
There were precious few giving a hand to a no-good ex-con like him.