Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) Read Free

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.

 
     
    Chapter 4
     
    Correctional Officer Luca Jimenez wasn’t the only person in Pelican Bay’s SHU who was intimidated by Anson Stark.
    Early on, Stark had put word out that he didn't want a roommate in his cell. When the guards ignored his “request,” he'd beaten the first cellie so bad his skull had fractured. The next one he’d strangled with his bare hands.
    The Professor was serving life without parole, had avoided the death penalty on a technicality. He had nothing to lose by racking up more dead bodies. Administration decided if he didn't want a cellmate, he didn't get one. Plain as that.
    Even from the highly secure, X-shaped housing unit of the SHU, Anson Stark ran the white supremacist Lords gang efficiently and ruthlessly.
    The SHU housed criminals so violent they couldn't mix with other inmates – or those who were validated gang members with double-digit points on their record. Isolation and a little over an hour a day outside the cell. A shower twice a week – soap, shampoo, and toothpaste poured into paper cups.
    Exercise in a concrete enclosed yard, fifteen feet long, called a “dog run.” A pull-up bar for exercising, a rubber ball for bouncing off the concrete walls.
    Nothing else.
    Most inmates paced like caged animals during their mandated exercise time and slept face down on their bunks the rest of the day. Not the Professor, though. From his solitary cell in the SHU, he operated the Lords of Death like a well-oiled machine.
    After the prison yard murder, Cole Hansen learned first-hand the unique psychological torture of the SHU. Even with a short stay, his cell right next to Stark’s, Cole knew he’d been sent to a scary place.
    He believed he wasn't as bad as most inmates in Pelican Bay. For one thing he didn't let rage simmer like a hot coal in his belly. He'd always been a mild sort of guy, and sometimes wondered how he'd ended up in prison with a bunch of psychos and deviants. He figured it was just one turn of bad luck after another.
    In general population a white inmate named Bones Griff got pissed because some stupid-ass Norteño dissed him in the chow line. Next day in the yard, Griff retaliated by jabbing the man's neck with a four-inch sharpened shiv, going full metal jacket on the inmate.
    Which would've been funny except there'd been no warning that Griff was planning payback, and the attack caught everyone off guard.
    Metal was everywhere in prison, the bunk racks stacked three high in the gym, the lockers. Although nothing was plastic – too easy to make a weapon out of – it was surprisingly easy to wear down a chunk of metal.
    A strong piece of bed sheet folded just so, saw that sucker back and forth, back and forth, hour after hour, day after day, and you could break off a good-sized piece of metal. Make a bad-ass weapon.
    And what else did inmates have to do to pass the hours of boredom?
    The metal shank that Griff had used was sharpened to a point more lethal than a scalpel, and he’d jabbed it straight into the carotid artery of the Norteño. Blood spurted like a mother-fucker. Cole had been right there, seen it all.
    A reluctant witness.
    That’s how he’d gotten jammed up and landed in the SHU. He'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    When the Norteño who'd heckled Griff in the chow line went down in the yard that same day, carved up like raw meat, Griff had shoved the bloody knife in Cole's hand, and the block bullets started flying, and they hurt like a mother-fucker especially if they whammed you in the face or balls, and the guards in the tower screamed, "Down, down, down," and Cole knew the next block had his name on it so he flung himself flat, arms over his head, still clutching the