Second Chance

Chapter 59

WE WENT THROUGH a long underground walkway accompanied by Estes and a club-toting head guard named O'Koren.

When we came to a stairway marked SHU-C, the warden led us up, waving at a security screen, then through a heavy compression door that opened into the ultramodern prison ward.

Along the way he filled me in. “Like most of our inmates, Weiscz came in from another facility. Folsom. He was the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood there, until he strangled a black guard. He's been isolated here for eighteen months now. Until we start sending people to the death house in this state, there's nothing more we can do to him.”

Jacobi leaned over and whispered, “You sure of what you're doing here, Lindsay?”

I wasn't sure. My heart was starting to gallop, and my palms had busted out in a nervous sweat. “That's why I brought you along.”

“Yeah, ”Jacobi muttered.

Pelican Bay's isolation unit was unlike anything I had ever seen. Everything was painted a dull, sterile white. Burly khaki-uniformed guards, of both sexes but uniformly white, manned glassed-in command posts.

Monitors and security cameras were everywhere. Everywhere. The unit was configured like a pod with ten cells, the compression-sealed doors tightly shut.

Warden Estes stopped in front of a metal door with a large window. “Welcome to ground zero of the human race,” he said.

A muscular, balding senior guard holding a face visor and some sort of Uzi-like taser gun came up. “Weiscz had to be extracted, Warden. I think he'll need a few moments to loosen up.”

I looked up at Estes. “Extracted?”

Estes sniffed. “You would think after being holed up a couple of months, he'd be happy to get out. Just so you know what's coming next, Weiscz was uncooperative. We had to send a team in to pretty him up for you.”

He nodded toward the window. “There's your man... ”

I stepped in front of the solid pressure-sealed door.

Strapped to a metal chair, his feet bound in irons, his hands cuffed from behind, hunched a hulking, muscular shape. His hair was long and oily and straggly and he wore a thin, unkempt goatee. He was dressed in an orange short-sleeved jumpsuit, open at the chest, revealing ornate tattoos covering his pumped-up arms and chest.

The warden said, “There'll be a guard in there with you and you'll be monitored at all times. Stay away from him. Don't get closer than five feet. If he as much as juts his chin in your direction, he'll be immobilized.”

“The guy's bound and chained,” I said.

“This sonofabitch eats chains,” Estes said. “Believe it.”

“Anything I can promise him?”

“Yeah.” Estes smirked. “A Happy Meal. You ready...?”

I winked at Jacobi, who widened his eyes in caution. My heart nearly stopped, like a skeet target exploded out of the sky.

“Bon voyage,” Estes muttered. Then he signaled the control booth. I heard a ka-shoosh as the heavy compression door unlocked.