Sanctuary (2 page)

I started to hang up the phone but only got as far as the first twitch of my bicep when the breathing became a low, thick voice that short-circuited the nerves in my arm.

“I know about you, Renee.” Another breath. And then, “The priest is going to die.”

Click
. The phone in my fist went dead. The room began to spin.

My full meltdown began then, when I first learned that Danny was going to die.

AT THE PRECISE
moment that Renee Gilmore heard those fateful words, Danny Hansen sat in a waiting room outside the warden’s office in the Basal Institute of Corrections and Rehabilitation, southeast of Wrightwood, just west of Interstate 15. The transfer from Ironwood State Prison had started at 2:00 a.m. and taken seven hours, fewer than three of which were spent in the transport van, or “the chain” as some called it.

He’d followed instructions without misstep as he always did. He was polite, spoke only when spoken to, stayed to himself, and arrived a few hours earlier in relatively good spirits. Three years of incarceration in the overcrowded California prison had convinced him that he truly was an outlaw, on the inside as much as on the outside. He would do his time as required by the law, but in his heart he still lived beyond any law that conflicted with the greater truth.

The system liked to say that an inmate had the choice of doing either hard time or smooth time. Danny had done neither. He was doing
his
time. Nothing more, nothing less.

They said that in prison it’s better to fight and gain respect than to run and lose your dignity. They said that steering clear of trouble has a price. That the fight picks you—you don’t pick the fight.

All true, of course, but Danny didn’t care about the injustice inflicted upon him and didn’t try to change the convict code that administered it. He took his abuse in stride, like a concrete wall, without retaliating and without suffering more than one shallow wound from a shank in his side. Compared to the physical and mental wounds he’d suffered in the Bosnian War, the abuse at Ironwood had been wholly tolerable.

The suffering of
other
inmates preyed upon by the hustlers and gangbangers who ran the prison, however, had been much more difficult to stomach.

And even more, his separation from the one person he loved more than his own freedom tore through his heart like a strand of barbed wire. In so many ways, Renee was his life. Concrete walls stood between them, but they lived together as one in his mind. Her voice whispered in his ears without end.

If something bothered Renee, it bothered Danny. If bedbugs were overtaking her world, they were consuming his. If she preferred grapefruit over oranges, he wanted two of them, no matter how bitter they tasted. If she wondered why the world was upside down, so did he, always with a gentle reply and a nudge toward a less fretful analysis, but he could never simply dismiss her concerns. They were her truth.

She could not know how desperately he missed her, how her safety and happiness consumed him, how deep the sorrow of their separation ran through him. If she knew the full extent of his concern for her, she would only suffer more than she already did, because Renee loved him more than she knew how to love herself.

She paced through his heart every waking moment, occupied with inconsequential concerns that meant nothing to him except that they were hers. The rest of him was doing time in a society called prison, hidden away from the rest of the world. A totally self-contained culture, as alien as Mars to those who lived on the outside; a universe unto itself with a whole different set of rules and values. As members of this subculture, inmates became a new kind of creature. But what kind?

Ninety percent of all those incarcerated would reenter society, as they should. If all those incarcerated were kept behind bars, a full half of America’s population would be in prison. The real question was, in what condition would a person released from prison emerge? Would he be a properly punished and reformed person ready to tackle life’s challenges while following the rules, or an embittered, hardened person armed with new, more violent survival skills?

The puppies, as Danny sometimes thought of those called newbies, worried him the most. You could slap a puppy for jumping up on your leg and peeing on your foot in their exuberance to experience life, much like you could slap an eighteen-year-old for possession of pot. But put the puppy in a cage with raging bulldogs for a few years and they would come out far less playful and far more apt to bite.

In the American prison system, the weak were often forced to become strong to survive the preying wolves, too often becoming wolves themselves. Nonviolent offenders often learned violence; young prisoners who had been caught on the wrong side of their pursuit of pleasure often learned that aggression and anger were required to survive. Some called the American prison system a monster factory, an environment that far too often fractured those who entered it.

At Ironwood, Danny had expected nothing because little was offered. He’d learned to live in a quiet place deep in his mind, compromised only by the intense suffering of others whom he was powerless to help. Unlike most prison puppies, Danny had embraced his new life and learned to be reasonably content with his situation.

But after only a few hours at Basal, he wondered if his determination to be content with nothing might be compromised here. If Ironwood was a prison that offered nothing, Basal appeared to be one that offered everything.

Awareness of this hit him the moment he stepped from the van beyond the sally port and breathed his first lungful of mountain air. Having survived three deadly summers in stifling one-hundred-degree weather at Ironwood, he’d lost sight of how pleasurable clean, cool air could feel.

The lawn wasn’t brown or gray, but green. The building itself was constructed in the shape of a massive cross—four wings to accommodate the inner workings of the prison. The outer walls were formed of beautiful stone blocks, and steps that led up to an arched entry might have been mistaken for the welcoming gateway to a picturesque cathedral, if not for the words stamped above bolted black iron doors that identified it as a correctional facility. Ironic, he thought, a prison built like a cathedral.

A single motto embossed in the iron framework identified the prison’s ideology:
An Eye for an Eye.

“Let’s go.” The guard’s voice brought him down to earth, and he’d followed the man through the main entrance into Basal. The processing room was carpeted, and the furnishings were made of expensive wood with bowls of candies on the counter. The guards were dressed in smart black slacks and could have been mistaken for hotel concierges rather than trained security personnel overseeing hardened criminals.

As the only transfer that morning, he’d met no other prisoners. After an hour of waiting in the comfortably furnished reception room, he began to wonder if Basal was actually a facility for the mentally ill. A new kind of sanitarium. Perhaps he’d been admitted to test his sanity. Other than the fact that it was a new experimental prison with better accommodations, he knew little about Basal.

No one spoke to him other than to give him simple directions, another oddity compared to the constant orders of Ironwood guards. When he finally approached the counter and politely asked the woman if Basal was a maximum-​security prison, she’d simply informed him that the warden would explain everything when they met later that morning. Warden Marshall Pape personally saw to the welcoming and indoctrination of each new member, she said.

Member, not inmate or prisoner.

The entrance examination consisted of a thorough physical and a medical-history questionnaire administered by a white-coated physician in a small room that might be found in any doctor’s office. Basal’s version of a strip search.

Dressed in new blue slacks and a tan, short-sleeved button-front shirt they’d given him, Danny now sat in an upper level waiting area that would make a fine addition to any downtown Los Angeles attorney’s firm. The six chairs were padded, the brown carpet was new. There were brass lamps on both end tables, a bookcase full of law books, three
Ficus
plants in off-white ceramic pots, and two recent copies of
National Geographic
magazine on the oak coffee table. A guard sat in a chair by the door, reading a copy of
Sports
Illustrated
.

Danny could have easily rushed him and taken him out before other guards responded, if he were predisposed to do so. They hadn’t taken the typical precautions of placing him in chained ankle or wrist restraints.

Odd. Why?

There were at least half a dozen objects in the room that someone with Danny’s training and skill could fashion into a weapon. The ceramic pots could be shattered and a shard used as a shank; the heavy wire harp used to support either lamp shade could be used as a lethal whip or a spike; the globe on two overhead dome lights as well as the glass from any of the incandescent bulbs would be as effective as razor blades in the right hands. His, for example.

From what he’d seen so far, the only clear indicators that Basal was a high-security facility were the series of locked doors that separated the administrative wing from the rest of the prison, the twin heavy-gauge doors at the entrance, and the three impassable perimeter fences around the entire compound.

The warden’s door opened. A tall man with a balding head, dressed in dark brown slacks and a white shirt, filled the frame and stared at Danny with drooping blue eyes. This was the warden. Marshall Pape.

Danny stood. The man’s cheekbones were high, hardening his long face, but otherwise he looked like any middle-aged executive who might be seen entering or leaving a bank.

“Welcome to hell,” Pape said.

His eyes held on Danny for a long beat before a smile brightened his face.

“So to speak. Please. Come in.”

Danny dipped his head and walked into the room. The door closed quietly behind him and an electric latch fell into place, sealing him off from any attempt to get out using the warden as a hostage.

Three red camera lights winked at them from the corners of the ceiling. Whoever had constructed this new facility had surely covered all the bases using less conventional and far more sophisticated measures than in older prisons. For all Danny knew, there was a gun trained on his head at that very moment, waiting for him to grab a pen on the warden’s cherrywood desk in an attempt to stab him.

The office was large and plush, with dark wood-paneled walls, bookcases, globes, several lamps, and two large family portraits. These showed a gray-haired woman, presumably the warden’s wife, and two adolescent children, a boy and a girl. A sheer lace curtain covered the room’s only window.

“Have a seat, Danny.” The warden’s voice was low and soothing. He indicated one of three high-backed leather chairs positioned opposite his desk. “Just so you know, this interview is being watched and recorded. Do you have a family?”

“No, sir.”

“No?” He looked at one of the family portraits. “That’s too bad. Everyone needs a family. There’s nothing more important in this world than loving and being loved by your family. It’s why I do what I do, you know. To keep families like mine safe. Society demands this from me, and I would give my life for it.”

Danny said nothing.

The warden slowly opened a file folder, studied Danny for a moment, then settled into his chair.

“Let’s start at the beginning, if you don’t mind. Do you know how many people in the United States are incarcerated, Mr. Hansen?”

“No.”

“According to the latest statistics, one out of every hundred adults in America is behind bars at any given time. Purely by the numbers, the average adult male in this country stands a fifteen percent chance of being imprisoned sometime during his life. Does that strike you as high?”

He’d heard it was ten percent. “It does.”

“Yes, it does. And thank you for being so direct in your responses. I appreciate that.”

Danny nodded.

“The sheer number of people imprisoned in this country becomes truly alarming when you consider that, although the Unites States makes up only five percent of the world’s population, it has twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. On average, our incarceration rate is five times the rest of the world. Per capita, we have six times the incarceration rate of Canada, twenty times that of Japan. That’s a seven hundred percent increase since 1970. Few realize it, but the United States is fast becoming a penal colony. Does this alarm you?”

“It does.”

“Bear with me, because I need you to understand where I’m headed with all of this. One out of every thirty-one men in the United States today is either in jail today or under the supervision of corrections. The recidivism rate in California is seventy percent. As you know, the gyms at Ironwood are no longer used for recreation but to house hundreds of bunk beds, an attempt to handle more than twice the number of prisoners the facility was designed to hold. And through it all you have to ask yourself one question: why? Why are so many people going to prison, Danny? And why are seventy percent of those released being dragged back into prison?”

It sounded like a rhetorical question, so Danny said nothing.

“Go ahead, take a stab at an answer.”

“Because they exit the system more hardened than when they entered it,” Danny said. “Survival in the system requires adaptation to the environment. It’s only human.”

“Only human, very good. It’s America’s biggest tragedy. We have these manufacturing plants called prisons that accept deviants, turn them into hardened criminals, and send them back out into the world to wreak havoc. It’s like boot camp for storm troopers.”

“Not everyone who comes out—”

“Shut up, Danny.”

The man’s tone surprised him. But then Pape smiled. “This is a nice prison, you’ll see that, but we have rules. One of those rules is that you will speak to me only when I ask you to. It may seem harsh, but it’s one of the ways we maintain order. Fair?”

“Fair.”

The warden continued. “Now, not all those who enter the monster factory come out as hardened criminals. But you, being a man of the cloth, surely realize that we are all monsters in need of help, don’t you?”

Danny remained silent, not sure if he was expected to respond.

“That was a question, Danny. You may respond.”

“I would say everyone needs help.”

“Because we are all monsters?”