Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) Read Free Page B

started working at the prison. She wondered what was wrong this time.
    A white male, average height, with muscles gone to flab and thick coarse dirty-blond hair, Cole hadn’t adjusted well to incarceration. He had multiple medical complaints, some genuine, others imaginary.
    His kite was dated today, but had already made its way to the top of her stack of papers. With the fight in the yard she was surprised that any kites had been processed at all.
    How had Hansen managed that? Better still, why had the guards allowed it?
    Before Frankie worked for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, she had heard the saying that prisons were actually run by the inmates.
    She’d scoffed at the idea. But now, ten months on the job, she understood the truth of it. And the idea chilled her to the bone because it upset the normal hierarchy of captor and captive that the outside world believed in. The reality was the inmates did run the prison.
    Frankie looked up from the kite and glanced into the ward through the plexiglass windows of her office. The nurses, Harry and Mike, and the fill-in doctor – old Doc Vincent – worked at various ends of the clinic. The many empty beds in the ward were a good sign that the trauma was passing.
    She returned her attention to Cole Hansen’s kite for medical services. She sensed an unusual urgency in his words, a hint of panic. The kite had been marked critical by administration.
    Frankie had become familiar with Cole’s requests over the months, and this one was odd, desperate-sounding. Was it just jitters from the yard murder? Or something more? A complaint not related to his health?
    Cole Hansen was the type of parolee who had fallen through the cracks. With virtually no skills, he was a high school dropout, who’d failed the GED exam twice.
    He just wasn’t very bright, which is probably how he got himself in trouble in the first place. With almost no hope for success in the outside world, Frankie estimated he’d end up back in prison within a year of release.
    Even so, what on earth did Cole Hansen think Frankie could do for him, and why was his kite marked critical by prison administration?

 
     
    Chapter 6
     
    A request from the shot caller was absolute – a command inside the prison hierarchy that no inmate refused. Unless Cole Hansen wanted the same fate as the hapless Norteño with the crudely slit throat who’d died in the prison yard, he had no choice but to confess to prison admin that, yeah, he was the doer.
    He was the one who had murdered the Norteño in the barbed-wire fenced exercise area.
    Every inmate who was there knew different, but who’d say it aloud?
    Now, Cole’s life consisted of twenty-two and a half hours a day inside a SHU cell, facing a concrete wall and listening to other inmates beating off in the cages around him. No sense in trying to recant on his admission or snitch out Griff.
    Unless he was willing to drop out – debrief in prison authority parlance – and spend the rest of his sentence in the SNY – special needs yard, which was a fancy way of saying protective custody for snitchers and child molesters – he was stuck here. With a murder rap and the alleged strong gang affiliation, who knew for how many years?
    Maybe the rest of his life.
    Dropping out, snitching, however, would be a death ticket. Cole would be forced to write down everything he knew about gang activities, finger other gang members, betray their movements and plans, their orders to the outside.
    It wasn't even like he was a real Lords of Death gang member. He grimaced at the wry irony of it. He just shuffled along the perimeter of other white inmates, praying that he wouldn’t get caught up in a gang war with browns or blacks.
    He'd ganged up on the inside his second day at Pelican Bay, where the choice was get a crew or get brutalized, but Cole’s heart wasn't in it. He actually liked the blacks and the Mexicans better than the whites, but in prison you weren’t safe