Deadlock

2

Twenty-four Hours Later

Pelican Bay Supermax Prison, Crescent City, California

The seven-hour drive from San Francisco to California’s highest-security prison had given Jalicia plenty of time to chew over Reaper’s request for a meeting, and what it might mean for her case against the Aryan Brotherhood.

In the administration building she was greeted by Warden Louis Marquez, a dapper Hispanic with a prosthetic left eye, his eyeball having been gouged out of its socket by a disgruntled female inmate early in his career as a correctional officer. Marquez got Jalicia to sign the prison’s standard release form, certifying that she understood that the prison operated a strict ‘No Hostages’ policy, then passed her on to a barrel-chested lieutenant by the name of Williams, who explained that he was in charge of monitoring gang activity among the prison’s three and a half thousand inmates. Williams had facilitated Reaper’s phone call to Jalicia, but beyond that he was equally in the dark as to what Reaper was so eager to discuss with her.

Williams led her into a white-walled meeting room tucked away from the prying eyes of other inmates. Jalicia took a seat, while Williams keyed his radio.

‘OK, you can bring him in now,’ he said.

A minute later the door opened, and Reaper was led into the room by two guards. A double set of handcuffs and leg restraints were linked by a heavy belly chain which looped around his midriff. A white spit shield covered his nose and mouth.

Reaper shuffled forward and was dumped into a chair opposite Jalicia by the two guards, who took up positions either side of him, hands poised, gun-slinger style, on their tasers. He sat there in silence for a moment.

Jalicia turned to Williams, who was standing behind her, arms folded. ‘Could we lose the mask?’ she asked, hoping that the request would go some way towards establishing trust between her and Reaper.

‘Hope you got all your vaccinations,’ Williams said to her, before nodding to one of the guards flanking Reaper to remove the spit shield.

Reaper smirked at Williams’s jibe.

When the shield was off he leaned back in his chair and scratched lazily at a set of SS lightning bolts tattooed across a bicep that was thicker than most men’s thighs. ‘You know, me just being here, talking to you, could get me killed.’

‘Then I guess you must have a pretty good reason for contacting me,’ Jalicia said.

Reaper’s mouth, partially obscured by the kind of walrus mustache usually reserved for the bad guy in an old Western, broke into a smile, but his eyes remained unblinking. In fact, ever since Reaper had walked into the visiting room with his two-guard escort, she’d felt him studying her, taking in every detail, scrutinizing her every reaction. It wasn’t so much the feeling of a man mentally undressing her, which she might have expected under the circumstances. No, this went deeper. Reaper’s gaze suggested a man staring into her soul.

‘This case you’re building against the Aryan Brotherhood,’ he said. ‘And these conspiracy charges you’re going to be bringing against them for that ATF agent and his family being snuffed.’

Jalicia took a breath, her mind flitting back to the contents of the envelope. ‘What about them?’

‘You’re gonna be seeking the death penalty for the suspects, aren’t you?’ he asked.

Jalicia settled for a nod of the head and a ‘That’s correct.’

Reaper stretched his arms up as far as his restraints would allow, and yawned. ‘But, hypothetically speaking, if someone who was, shall we say, associated with the Brotherhood were to cooperate with your office, this person wouldn’t be looking at Death Row. In fact, he might even be offered some kind of a deal.’

The truth was that, so far, Jalicia had enough evidence to bring the leadership of the gang to trial for ordering the murder of Ken Prager and his family. An intercepted, and subsequently decoded, note found in a prison cell right here in Pelican Bay proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Aryan Brotherhood had voted on and directly commissioned Prager’s death after he’d infiltrated a group which helped run the gang’s operations on the outside. But, whether she could persuade a judge and jury to sentence to death men who were already serving life without possibility of parole was another matter entirely. The one thing that would do that would be a star witness, someone on the inside of the organisation. Reaper more than fitted the bill.

‘If such a person were to come forward, we could certainly look at making some kind of an arrangement,’ Jalicia said. ‘You know, you might want to think about seeking an attorney to represent you.’

At this Reaper stiffened. His fingers interlocked, then steepled under his chin. ‘No. This stays between me and you.’

‘So you would testify against the other men being indicted?’

‘If you keep me off The Row, then yes, I would.’

‘What else would you want?’ Jalicia asked.

Reaper’s eyes swept the floor. Here it comes, thought Jalicia. She knew that cheating death wouldn’t be motivation enough for a man like Reaper.

‘Time off for good behaviour?’ Reaper suggested with a wry smile.

Jalicia matched his smile. Reaper was already serving three sentences of life without possibility of parole for a triple homicide, which included two young black girls, so any kind of early release wasn’t an option. ‘What is it that you want that I can actually deliver?’ she prompted.

Reaper leaned forward. ‘I’ve been in solitary confinement for the past five years. In my cell twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. Out only to shower on my own, or exercise in a tiny concrete box not much bigger than this room.’

‘We could arrange for you to be transferred to the THU,’ Jalicia suggested.

Lieutenant Williams nodded in agreement. ‘We could definitely do that.’

The Transitional Housing Unit was where former gang members lived together inside the prison. It lay, like purgatory, somewhere between the hell of solitary confinement (also known as the Secure Housing Unit, or SHU) and the relative freedom of the general housing units, where the majority of prisoners could move much more freely.

Reaper shook his head. ‘I want to be back on the mainline.’

Jalicia laughed. The mainline was the other name for the general housing units. ‘A federal witness on the mainline? You wouldn’t last two seconds.’

‘That all depends,’ Reaper said with another wry smile.

‘On what?’

‘Let’s just say I have some new friends now, friends who think the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood might have had its day.’

So that was what this was all about, thought Jalicia: a power play, with Reaper testifying against his old comrades and being rewarded by the new regime.

‘Which “friends” are we talking about here?’ she asked. ‘The Nazi Low Riders? The Texas Circle?’

The Nazi Low Riders and the Texas Circle were both up-and-coming white supremacist prison groups who had long envied the Aryan Brotherhood’s stranglehold on the prison system’s drug and protection trade. If Jalicia and the Federal Prosecutor’s office took the Aryan Brotherhood down, it would create enough space for one of the other prison gangs to step in and take over a trade inside and outside the country’s prisons worth tens of millions of dollars.

Reaper looked up at the ceiling. ‘I can’t name names, but you know as well as I do that nature abhors a vacuum.’

‘So, you take the stand, testify against the Aryan Brotherhood, and in return I convince the prison authorities to let you back into general population.’

‘That’s right,’ said Reaper.

‘But the Aryan Brotherhood would come after you.’

‘I’m prepared to take that risk. Plus, like I said, I have new friends looking out for me.’

Jalicia knew that, in the normal course of things, a snitch was an automatic target on the mainline, fair game for everyone. But Reaper was different. Most prisoners would see his treachery as existing on a plane high enough that it wouldn’t be their job to intervene. In some ways it was akin to the kind of deals governments cut all the time with other nations when it served their purposes. It was realpolitik at its most base.

‘OK,’ she said finally. ‘We might be able to return you to general population, but only after you testify.’

Reaper’s smile disappeared. ‘No. I go back before then or you can forget me as a witness.’

Jalicia folded her arms. ‘Why the rush? You wait a couple of weeks, you give your testimony, we move you to the mainline — everyone’s happy.’

Reaper leaned forward, and once again Jalicia found herself mesmerized by the blackness of his eyes. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? I’ll be safer before I testify out on the mainline. In solitary, all it takes is someone to bribe a guard, a cell door being opened at the wrong time. At least out on the yard I can see them coming.’

Jalicia nodded slowly. Reaper was probably right. To an outsider, he might seem to be safer in solitary, but nowhere would be entirely free of risk.

Reaper rose slowly, indicating that he was done talking. ‘So, that’s my offer. I get my move, and I’ll give you the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood on a plate. Take it or leave it.’

And then he was gone, shuffling with his two-guard escort through a heavy metal door, leaving Jalicia still seated.

The deal Reaper was offering went like this: if he kept his end of the bargain, the death penalty for the six men who’d ordered Prager’s murder would be a slam-dunk, and her name would be right up there with Eliot Ness as the woman who had smashed a seemingly untouchable crime syndicate that operated from inside prison. After the trial, if the Aryan Brotherhood took their revenge on Reaper, that would be his problem.

Those few weeks before the trial, though — that was the problem. Especially the final five days, because five days before Reaper testified Jalicia would be obligated to reveal his identity to the defense lawyers representing the gang.

Five days. That was what it boiled down to. Keep Reaper alive for those five days after naming him and Jalicia would secure justice for Ken Prager and his family, and send a clear signal that if you ordered the execution of a federal agent, you paid with your life.

Jalicia unclenched her hands and tried to let go of some of the tension. There had to be a way to make this work. Some way of keeping Reaper alive during the critical period while he was on the mainline and before he took the witness stand. She just had to find it.