Sweet Dreams Boxed Set (169 page)

Ten seconds later all hell broke loose.

Although Santiago Cruz worked for the county, he wasn’t the kind of officer who dealt with the general public. Keeping up with his parolees was time-consuming enough.

But the instant the punk-ass kid walked into the store, Cruz recognized the signs. His eyes all hip-hoppy beneath the beanie pulled down to his eyebrows, he was someone high as a kite and ready to do something really stupid.

The next second the teenager pulled a knife from his jacket pocket and jabbed it at Syed as he stood behind the counter. “Gimme all the cash, mother-fucker!”

Clearly the kid didn’t see Cruz waiting beside the coffee dispenser. He outweighed the would-be thief by almost eighty pounds and had eight or nine inches in height over him. Cruz sighed heavily.

Damn!

Cruz stepped into the aisle, drawing the kid’s attention. The sixteen-if-he-was-a-day boy jerked his head back and forth, up and down, like a manic bobble head. If Cruz used a gun, the take-down would be quicker, but talking down a hopped-up meth addict with a knife took time.

Time Cruz didn’t appreciate taking for a job that local police had responsibility for.

Syed’s face remained impassive, not a twinge of alarm. He’d seen Cruz take down far more threatening targets than a skinny kid.

Cruz held his hands up in a non-threatening, gentling manner. “Okay, kid, just relax. Put down the knife and we can talk about this.”

“Shut up! No talking.” He turned back to Syed, swinging the knife closer to the owner’s throat. “Get the money! Hurry up.”

“This is not a good idea,” Syed said to the thief. “It will end badly.”

“Shut the fuck up, old man!” His pupils dilated and his forehead sweaty, the kid swung the knife back and forth between Cruz and Syed.

“Look, dude, you can still get out of this,” Cruz cajoled, taking one step forward. “Just put the knife down and you can walk away.”

“You think I’m afraid of you?” the kid yelled. “I’m the one’s got the knife.”

Cruz shook his head slowly, a resigned look on his face. “No, man, I think you’re a stupid kid who doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into.”

The take-down was pathetically easy. The boy didn’t stand a chance and the victory felt hollow and annoying. Cruz subdued and cuffed the thief, and called local police for a pickup for attempted armed robbery.

Dumb jackass.
Cruz would probably have him as a parolee in another five years or so.

The confrontation put him behind schedule by several hours. After a patrol car picked up the suspect – one Joey Johnson, sixteen, of Sacramento – Cruz made his way out of the store.

“You just can’t stay out of police business, can you,
San-tee-AG-o?”
Detective Andrew Flood emerged from his department-issued unmarked car. He was a detective who’d made his way through the ranks the hard way, and for no good reason, hated Cruz’s guts. He looked for the worst in people and usually found it.

Cruz grinned at the taunt. “Just making your life easy, Flood. All part of the county service.”

Flood scowled. “One day someone’s gonna knock you off that cocky pedestal you put yourself on, Cruz.”

“Who? You?”

Flood entered the store and grabbed a Styrofoam cup of coffee – without paying, Cruz noticed through the window – and returned to his vehicle. “Later, Santiago. Us big boys have a homicide to go to.” He laughed as if investigating death was an honor.

Cruz headed for
Jesus Saves
, just around the corner. Dickey Hinchey had better show up. He was ready to unleash his already frayed temper on the parolee.

Chapter 2

Pelican Bay State Prison, Crescent City, California, Present Day

Anson Stark was a gray man.

From his receding hairline to his slight build, from his stooping shoulders to his soft, mild voice, the inmate was all shades and shadows. A ghost of a man. Hardly noticeable, although he’d been a college professor in the world outside of prison.

A man easily forgotten. For all his precise language and polite manners, he was the picture of mediocrity. But one look into his pale, unearthly eyes and every officer in the Security Housing Unit knew why Anson Stark was the white shot caller at Pelican Bay State Prison.

The
Lords of Death,
the white gang called themselves, and their leader was “The Professor” – Anson Stark. In Correctional Officer Luca Jimenez’s opinion the
Lords
and Anson Stark were as deadly as all the other gangs put together.

Luca shook his head in bewilderment.
Dios!
Six months on the job, and gang politics inside the prison still baffled him. The white shot caller looked like an accountant or a teacher. In fact, he’d been an unknown, untenured community college teacher who earned less money than Luca did.

Despite wild speculation, no one knew the crime that had landed Stark in prison. Some said he’d embezzled college funds or dealt drugs to his students. Others, that he’d slept with underage pupils. Others whispered that he’d murdered his wife of twenty years.

Luca Jimenez only knew that within five years at Pelican Bay, the Professor had organized one of the tightest prison gangs in the state, ousting the
Inland Empires
and the
White Supremacists
in the power hierarchy of white gangs. The prison brass figured he ran a gang of over three thousand members outside the prison, along with his efficient minions inside northern California prisons.

‘Effing crazy, especially in the mind of a poor Mexican immigrant like Luca. But his job with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was hella good, with benefits and hazard pay for working in the SHU – the Security Housing Unit – which housed the deadliest of Pelican Bay’s inmates.

Even though he felt like he entered a war zone during each twelve-hour shift, he wouldn’t complain.

Meal time was the most dangerous part of a SHU correctional officer’s job. Twice a day he had to open the metal compartments of the cells and insert the food trays through the portals. An inmate could toss anything through the ten-inch-wide food port – urine they’d saved up, even feces, or worse, a hand-made dart dipped in shit.

SHU inmates fashioned any kind of weapon out of any kind of material. And why not? What else did they have to do in their twenty-two-and-a-half hours a day of isolation in an eight by ten foot cell with no window?

Stare at the concrete wall opposite them through the metal barrier filled with nickel-sized holes so the control guard could see inside, observe them in their cells. Never see a single soul except the Kevlar-vested CO’s that brought meals or ushered them to the shower or the dog run.

The smart inmates took advantage of the solitude, kept themselves occupied with exercise or reading. The stupid ones went
loco.
Either way, they were considered the most lethal inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison.

As his fellow officer turned the lock to open Anson Stark’s food port, Luca half expected a projectile made from tightly rolled paper, a staple straightened out to a sharp point, and elastic from an underwear waistband – the currently favored type of weapon – to fly through the opening. The corridor was unusually quiet today and prickles of expectation jabbed the CO’s spine like poisoned darts.

Nothing happened.

Sweat trickled down Luca’s temples as he inserted the tray through the port. A second later his companion secured the padlock. Luca couldn’t hold back a sigh. Seven more to go in this pod and he could take his break. Moving to the next cell, Luca glanced back at Stark’s immobile face through the perforated steel door.

The Professor stared back with pale, blank eyes. He never spoke to the guards, but his eyes unnerved Luca Jimenez more than any heckling could’ve done. Luca blinked first and lowered his eyes.

“Yo! Jimenez!”

The shout came from two cells down, occupied by a burly
Norteño.
The Northern Mexicans were currently at war with the blacks. Hatchet Juarez made an obscene gesture with his hand at his crotch.

Hatchet always tried to get a rise out of the guards. “You too pretty to work this shift,
hermano.”

Luca had learned not to respond or engage with the inmates.

In spite of his height and muscles, a result of years working on the New Mexico farm, his baby face betrayed him. The verbal attacks were nothing personal, just the natural psychosis of the caged beast.

Even so, he breathed easier when he walked through the pod gate, controlled by the single, armed officer who managed the six pods of eight cells each from the high enclosure of the X-shaped area.

The row of grated red doors stood like a line of entrances to hell.

Chapter 3

Frankie Jones, MD, first heard the loud commotion as she bent over an HIV-infected patient in the SHU’s hospital wing. She knew immediately that something serious was going on.

Something that would require her medical skills. And from the direction of the noise, something in the prison’s exercise yard where most beat-downs took place.

The inmate she was attending, Charlie Cox, coughed and stared at her calm face, the lift of both dark, shapely brows the only expression that she knew a ruckus was going on.

An excited gleam showed in Charlie’s faded blue eyes. “Know what that is, Doc?”

“I can imagine,” Frankie replied, placing the stethoscope on another area of the shrunken chest.

He rasped out what might’ve been a snort. “Nah, you can’t. There’ll be wooden blocks flying like bricks. It’s the velocity, you see, that makes them dangerous. Hard as hell and hurt like bejeesus. Can kill you if you get hit in the right spot, the temple or the windpipe.”

He got caught up in a spasm of coughing that lasted long moments while Frankie waited patiently for him to recover.

“Well, don’t worry about what’s going on in the exercise yard,” she advised. “You need to focus on putting some weight on those bones of yours.”

Charlie continued as if he hadn’t heard. “If a guard gets attacked, it won’t be no wood blocks, neither. No sir, it’ll be the Mini-14’s. They don’t fu – fool around if one of their own goes down. Don’t matter who gets killed then. Everybody’s a target.”

“Hmm.” Frankie straightened and adjusted the man’s IV bag, ignoring the urge to turn around to see the reaction of her male duty nurses to the noise.

Charlie’s eyes focused intently on her. Saw the strength in her pretty face, glanced at the empty ring finger of her left hand, wondered why some lucky bastard hadn’t already grabbed her up and made her his own. “We’re all disposable, you know.”

How do you respond to the odd truth of that kind of statement?
Frankie cleared her throat. “How’s the pain level, Charlie?”

He shook his head and snorted lightly. “Oh, you know, it’s just ... there. Kinda like a bad guest you can’t get rid of after dinner.”

She smiled, patted his hand. “I can increase the pain meds if you need it.”

Charlie attempted to return the smile. “You’re a good woman, doc. If I was thirty – no make that a hunnert – years younger ... ” His words trailed off and ended in a sharp pain which took a minute to recover from.

“Not long now,” he muttered, almost to himself.

Charlie looked at the doctor, let himself drown a little in those soft, dove gray eyes that were both no-nonsense and oddly comforting. Kinda like the mother he’d never had, but always dreamed about.

Today Doc Jones had her chestnut hair down, a rare thing, and it tumbled in wild curls around her shoulders, several strands blowing across her pale cheeks and forehead. He tried to return the pressure on her hand, but suddenly felt overwhelmingly weak ... and sad, like a party that’d ended too soon.

Yeah, Doc deserved better than bein’ surrounded by old scum-bags like him.

“You better go see what the ruckus is,” he advised. “Likely they’ll need your help. Bound to be lots of wounded inmates. Maybe even a dead body or two.” He jutted with his chin toward the double doors at the end of the ward. “Go on, then. I’m fine.”

Fine
was something that Charlie Cox would never be, but Frankie gave his shoulder one last gentle squeeze and turned to the next patient. However, before she could even glance at the chart, several burly correctional officers slammed through the doors, dragging a bleeding man between them.

“Hurry, goddammit!”

“Fuck you, Schwartz!” the smaller of the two giants retorted. “Who gives a damn if this mother-fucker bleeds out or not? Animals, all of them!”

Schwartz flashed a warning glance when he caught the eye of Dr. Jones and lowered his voice. “Shut up, Benson.” All the officers knew the doc didn’t approve of rough language, and oddly enough, they respected her wishes and curbed their tongues in her presence.

“Here,” Frankie directed, pointing to the closest open bed, just as two more guards carried in another injured – or dead – inmate.

“How many more?” she asked as she bent over the first inmate, checking vitals. His carotid artery had been jaggedly savaged, and Frankie knew from a cursory examination and the amount of blood loss that the man was already dead.

Nurse Harry Lewis stood next to her, snapping on latex gloves.

“Call it,” Frankie said, “one-twenty-three p.m.,” and moved to the next patient.

This inmate was bleeding, too, a head wound, but she didn’t think it was life-threatening. “Start an IV and apply pressure,” she ordered and looked to another injured inmate.

The wounded and maimed dribbled in after that, most of them with concussions, contusions, and lacerations from the flying block-bullets. The next few hours flew by in a flurry of sutures, bandages, and IV’s.

The ward began to look like a battle-field hospital.

The only dead inmate was the Hispanic man with the severed carotid artery. Frankie had never seen him before. Mid-thirties, short, muscled. Without the ragged neck wound and cuts on his upper torso, she thought he might’ve once been considered handsome.