Death Row Breakout (16 page)

As they entered the big yard and turned left to walk along the length of the North Cell-house, Roger looked out across the yard, half of which was under a high weather shed, like a giant hay shed, and was always shaded and cool. The sun shone bright on the other half, and there were clusters of pigeons and several seagulls.

Convicts were few; none he knew. They stood expressionless as the retinue passed through.

At the North Cell-block entrance, the gun-rail ended. They stepped into the rotunda. An open door led into the cell-house; noise came out at them. Across the rotunda was a locked steel door. That way led to the elevator landing and a green steel door. Beyond that door were the overnight condemned cells, where the doomed were moved for the last night. Next to the cells was another door, beyond which was the green, octagon-shaped gas chamber. It was four steps from the overnight cells to oblivion. Last
mile
, my ass…

The sound of the elevator turned Roger’s thoughts away from the green door. One of the escorts pulled the elevator door open. They got aboard and it rattled upward – to the floor above the North Cell-house.

They stepped onto a landing. A face peered through a tiny window in a door and identified them. Then came the sound of a big key being turned: the door opened. Beyond, waited a half circle of two correctional officers and a Sergeant, plus an armed guard in a gun cage providing backup.

Roger knew the Sergeant. His name was Blair and he’d worked in San Quentin for thirty years without writing a single disciplinary report. He had the seamed face of a happy old boozer. He looked at Roger and shook his head. “Sorry to see you like this, Harper. I thought you might make it out there.”

Roger shrugged. “I fucked up.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” said Blair.

While the Sergeant examined the paperwork, Roger looked through a small, double-gate sallyport onto a tier. Half a dozen condemned men were out of their cells. Two paced up and down, side-by-side, while the other four played bridge on the floor at the far end, using a blanket for a card table. Death Row was the only place in the prison that allowed card playing.

Roger recognized one of the walking men, Jellico by name. He had been a key clerk in the prison hospital who never caused any trouble. It was a complete surprise when he was paroled and went on a murder spree through Frisco’s gay community. Using his last victim’s credit cards, he went to Las Vegas and partied for over a week, until the credit cards led the police directly to him. They found a taped confession. When caught, he said, “Fine, I want the gas chamber. I’ll do it again if you don’t execute me.” The jury obliged.

Roger recalled reading that Jellico had an execution date. As he had not read anything for over a month, the execution had to be imminent. The law required the death warrant to be executed between sixty and ninety days.

“Better lock ’em up while we run him in,” Sergeant Blair said.

A guard banged a big key on a pipe. The sound rang out. “Okay, grab a hole in there.”

The other guard unlocked a heavy padlock on a simple hydraulic handle. He pulled the lever, raising the heavy security bar above the tops of the gates. Each inmate pulled his gate open, stepped inside and shut it. When the tier was clear, the guard dropped the security bar. When the bar was down, the gates were blocked shut. Each gate also had its individual lock.

The catwalk guard opened the tiny sallyport gate, and the other guard entered. As he walked down the tier, locking individual cells, the armed guard on the catwalk walked beside him, giving him armed backup.

When he was sure each cell was locked individually, he signaled to the guard at the lever. The security bar was raised again. The guard on the tier unlocked the next to last cell, went inside and looked around, tossing the mattress and turning his flashlight beam into the vent at the rear. It was routine and fast; how long does it take to examine a bare concrete cage four and a half feet wide and eleven feet long?

He flashed the light down the tier. It was time to bring in the resident.

Roger, still encumbered by cuffs and waist restraint, carried his bedding down the tier. Two guards walked with him, and the gun-rail guard walked along beside them. Sergeant Blair waited at the front by the lever to the security bar.

As Roger walked, he looked at the faces of the doomed men in the cages. Some ignored him, others looked out with hard faces and the flat eyes of the cold-blooded killer, others with the fiery eyes of madmen. He would learn their names and their crimes as weeks went by, but for now he recognized just a few. For a moment he looked into the black eyes of Richard Romero, the “Hollywood Monster”, the most notorious serial killer of the decade. He’d committed crimes so bestial and heinous that the press refused to print the details. A man who’d been in jail with Romero told Roger that the Monster had sodomized a year-old baby while cutting its throat.

Two cells from Romero a slender man stood at the bars with a grin. It was Jimmy Rube, half
chicano
member of the Mexican Mafia. Roger remembered Jimmy Rube as a handsome young man with wavy dark hair. Now the hair was thinning and grey, although the body was still slender and the face youthful. He’d served twenty-two years, and then, twenty-two days after being paroled, he and Big Strunk killed a store manager in West LA.

“Where’s Big Strunk?” Roger asked as he passed Jimmy.

“Right here, man,” called a voice ahead. Seconds later, Roger passed the squat black man whose powerful torso and immense arms were covered with blue, India Ink tattoos, the kind that denote jail just as surely as a missing finger on a Japanese denotes Yakuza.

Goddamn, there seemed to be a lot of mean-looking young niggers on Death Row.

The guard ahead held the cell gate open. Roger stepped inside. The gate closed; the security bar dropped in place; the key turned in the big door lock.

“Back up here,” one ordered, then reached through and unfastened the waist chains. They rattled as they dropped to the floor.

Roger held his hands up to the bars and the handcuffs were removed. The other guards departed, but Sergeant Blair remained.

“Look, Harper, I don’t expect trouble from you, but I’ll tell you what I tell everyone.

“You know me and I think you know I try to treat everybody right. As long as you don’t give me any grief, I’ll do whatever I can to make things easy on you up here. God knows you’ve got enough troubles already.

“I make sure the food is hot when it gets here. They used to load the cart two hours before it came up the elevator.

“I make sure the library sends up the law books and, if they don’t have them here, we get them from the State law library.

“I got authorization to let inmates out on the tier together if they can get along. So instead of getting half an hour every other day, most of you get a couple hours everyday.”

Sergeant Blair leaned closer and lowered his voice, not wanting to be heard in the adjacent cells. “Have you got any enemies up here? Somebody you don’t get along with?”

“No.” Roger shook his head, his cheeks burning. It was true that he had no enemies – except that he loathed the Hollywood Monster – but even if he had a deadly enemy, he would never ask the man to keep him in his cell. That was one step from ratting on someone. He would have denied the fact if a mortal enemy was here. Of course, if it was two or three – with shivs…

“The tier tender will bring blankets and… uh… an earphone for the radio and TV. Take it easy.” He patted the bars as a gesture of goodbye and turned away. The clang of the gate marked his leaving the cell area.

Roger looked around. The cell was identical to those on the mainline, four and a half feet wide, eleven feet long. The only differences were that it had one bunk instead of two, and the wall between cells extended out an extra foot so it was impossible to reach out of the bars and pass things by hand. The cell was so narrow that he could sit on the bunk with his back resting on one wall and his feet propped on the other. This would be his home for a decade or so, while he ran through the appeals process. First came the direct appeal, followed by a
Petition for Writ of Certiorari
to the United States Supreme Court. If the conviction and sentence were affirmed on the trial record, he still had the remedy of the Great Writ,
habeas corpus
, which he had to start in the State courts. He had to exhaust State remedies before the Federal District Court had jurisdiction. He could appeal from there to the United States Court of Appeal for the 9
^th
Circuit and, finally, one last shot at the United States Supreme Court. When he reached there, they would be strapping him in the chair. The thought made him smile, but deep inside was a knot of fear.

From the clutter of sound, voices down the tier, gates opening and a typewriter’s rattle on the other side, a closer voice called out, “Hey, Roger baby!”

“Is that you, Big Strunk?”

“That’s me. Jimmy Rube says he’s gonna send you some cigarettes and magazine and coffee when Fast Eddie comes in.”

“Who’s Fast Eddie?”

“The tier tender – old white dude with tattoos up the ass.”

From a cell too distant for easy conversation, Jimmy Rube yelled, “I’ll see you tomorrow when I come out to shower.”

“I’ll be right here, man.”

“If you ain’t, the count’s gonna be fucked up.”

Roger spent the rest of the day getting the feel of Death Row. He watched the little he could see through the cell bars, and listened to sounds and voices. The dinging bell brought the elevator, heralding the prison’s Chief Nurse, a woman of fifty nicknamed Madam Chickenshit. She passed out medications, everything from aspirin to Thorazine, and cold pills to sleeping pills. The Chief Medical Officer was liberal with seconal. He hoped the guy killed himself. It saved the victim’s family added pain. It saved money. It rid the world of someone who didn’t deserve to live.

Madam Chickenshit stopped at Roger’s cell and asked him if he had any medical problems. No. Then the doctor would give him a physical next week.

The dinging bell also brought the Watch Lieutenant, making a routine survey and signing a log. Everything had to be according to the book on Death Row. The bell also heralded the rattle and bang of the food cart. Death Row got two meals a day, one about eight-thirty in the morning, the other at three in the afternoon. Everything had to be locked tight from 4:00pm to 8:00am. It was absurd to serve three meals in eight hours to be finished before 4:00pm. Everything was locked at the beginning of the third watch. Instead they got a bologna sandwich and an orange for a late-night snack and the third meal guaranteed by law.

Besides the dinging bell announcing the elevator, he usually heard the tier gate when someone entered. The angle on the mesh and bars of the gun-walk was such that he could see only a moving shadow until the gun guard was directly in front of his cell.

After 4:00pm, the bell rang no more. The key to the outer door was taken off Death Row and kept in Wall Post #2, the gun tower over the Big Yard gate. If someone had to enter Death Row, the key was lowered in a bucket. At midnight it came down for the shift change.

At 6:00pm, the television sets, one for each three cells, were turned on. The speakers had been cut off and the sound was delivered by tiny earphones, through wire too thin to hang oneself. Each of the three cells controlled the remote channel changer for a week at a time. Roger didn’t give a rat’s ass what they watched. He normally watched little television, but would watch more now. He’d been a reader since juvenile hall. Now he would read more, watch more TV… jack off more often, and think. What else was there to do on Death Row? At least it wasn’t like the old days in France, where you never knew when they would come for you.

He turned off the cell light and lay in the semi-darkness. The runway lights, and floodlights on the roof of the immense cell-house, entered the cell after being sliced into linear shadows by cell bars, runway bars and wire, window bars, layer after layer of barrier to the outside night. It was air-tight. Escape crossed his mind. It always crossed his mind in a new cage. Here, however, a cursory catalogue of the security measures brought swift certainty that odds of escape were worse than rescue by the Second Coming. More likely America would have a revolution than he would escape from here.

He knew the obstacles from the years on the mainline. He’d thought about it then. The North Cell-house rotunda and the elevator were the only places where you weren’t directly “under the gun” of an armed guard, looking down your throat. Before leaving the cell, you did the strip-search dance for the bulls, watching through the bars. They watched you put on the jumpsuit and hold your hands up to the bars so they could be cuffed in steel. The bulls barely put their fingers in until the handcuffs closed. Finally, you backed up and were wrapped in chains fastened to the cuffs and run up between your legs. If you made any kind of too-fast move, a jerk would throw you on your face. Because of the cuffs and chains you couldn’t stop the collision with concrete. No, it was unlikely that the killer could overpower three bulls in the elevator. Bull – tough bulls – with clubs, pepper spray and radios to summon immediate help.
That
was the
weak
spot. As he thought it, he snorted a laugh.

Unless he managed to go out to a County Jail somewhere and from there escape – that was within the realm of possibility – this was where he would make his stand. Would he die like a man?

Again the terror flashed through him. He fought it, made himself breathe more quietly. Death came to everyone. His life expectancy was a minimum of six years. How many people would give everything for six more years – even in a cell?

Florence and her husband, the couple he’d kidnapped, came to mind. He could see them in the mirror again. It made him breathless. He would die for their murder. He would be willing to die if it could bring them back. No, that was a lie. But he would cut off an arm – and he goddamn sure would have surrendered, if he’d imagined his failing to do so would have cost their lives. He was legally responsible, and morally too – and yet… Maybe it was God’s justice on him for killing his ex-partner, Mad Dog. That crazy thought also made him snort a laugh.