Deadlock

7

‘Roll it up, Reaper.’

Reaper hopped off the top bunk in his cell in the Secure Housing Unit. He raised his arms above his head and stretched out his back. Usually there were at least four officers present when he went anywhere, now there were only two. Reaper took it as a good sign.

‘Where am I going?’ he asked Lieutenant Williams. As cops went, Williams was OK. He didn’t yank anyone’s chain unless they yanked his. And, rarely for a guard, he didn’t hold a grudge.

‘Just cuff up for me, would you?’ Williams said, ignoring the question.

Reaper folded his arms. ‘Sure. Once I know where I’m going.’

Williams ripped the top sheet from the stack of papers attached to the clipboard he was carrying and passed it through the food tray slot. Reaper bent his knees, crouched down and picked up the piece of paper. He scanned it and smiled before handing it back through the hatch.

‘Don’t know how you swung it with the warden, and I don’t wanna know,’ Williams said, making a show of putting the movement order back on his clipboard.

‘Haven’t you heard, Lieutenant? I’m a reformed character.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Williams chuckled. ‘You got all your stuff together?’

‘Can you give me a couple of minutes?’ Reaper asked.

‘Be back in two,’ Williams said, turning military-sharp on his heel.

Reaper listened as Williams and his fellow floor cop exited the electronically controlled door at the end of the corridor. Once it had clanked shut, he set to work gathering his belongings, which mostly consisted of books. Being locked inside a cell on your own for twenty-three hours a day, you had to find something to occupy your mind or you went crazy.

He’d thought about this day for a long time, five years in fact, but he never truly thought he’d see it. Not with his record of behaviour. Since being moved to Pelican Bay from San Quentin, Reaper had twice shared a cell. On both occasions something his cellie had done — like coughing too loud, or talking too much, or snoring — had frayed his nerves to the point where he’d had no alternative but to dispatch them. It didn’t matter what colour their skin was either. He just didn’t play well with others.

There had been other homicides too. On the yard. In the showers. In the early days of Pelican Bay, back when they still fed the prisoners communally in chow halls, he’d strangled an elderly Hispanic inmate to death with his bare hands for serving him cold coffee. Some of the killings he’d got in trouble for, some he hadn’t. Getting into trouble didn’t really matter to him anyway. Not when you were serving three life sentences without the possibility of parole. What were they gonna do? Give you another twenty years? The guards and the police and the whole system must have thought so too because they labelled most murders inside prison as NHIs, which stood for ‘No Humans Involved’. Of course, kill an ATF agent, or order one to be killed, and that was different. Then they started talking about The Row, which had focused Reaper’s mind for the first time in a long while, and had gotten him thinking about the future.

Reaper could hear Williams coming back. He took one last look round the tiny cell, picked up his box of belongings and stepped out into the narrow corridor.

Leading the way, he marched to the end of the corridor and the door opened. Two more corridors, two more doors, and he was outside. He could actually feel a breath of breeze on his face. He was out of solitary.

That was the first step. In five more days, if everything went to plan, he’d be out of this place entirely. Then his mission could really begin.