He looked at the officer again, then leaned in closer to the mesh wall. “Watch yourself, MacNally. Evil lives here, always has… There’s a reason why these guys are on The Rock.”
“One inmate, he called it Hellcatraz,” the other trustee said from across the room. “Seems about right to me. The boredom, day after day, the same routine.” He nodded slowly. “You’ll see.”
“Enough.” The officer grasped MacNally’s left arm. “Let’s go.”
MacNally looked the guard over as he led him out of the room, then up the mint green metal staircase to the main cellhouse. He wore a charcoal double-breasted suit, baby blue shirt and red tie, with a matching gray pentagonal policeman’s hat. A silver badge was pinned to the front of his cap-but otherwise, there were no nametags or other designations on the uniform.
“What’s your name?” MacNally asked.
The officer gave his arm another yank, leading him up the steps. “What do you care?”
“Just two people talking.”
“You ever kill anyone? ’Cause if you did, this conversation’s over. I’m the CO and you’re the convict, you do what I say, and that’s that.”
MacNally stopped. The officer did, too-and he quickly swung his head toward his prisoner to see if he was going to have a problem.
“No. Never killed anyone.”
The man nodded slowly, examining MacNally’s eyes. Then he said, “Name’s Jack Taylor. Call me Officer Taylor, or officer or Mr. Taylor. Never Jack. You got that?”
“Got it,” MacNally said.
Taylor led him up the steps and through another locked gate beneath the West Gun Gallery at B-Block. “Over there’s the dining hall,” he said, tilting his head to the right at the gated room. An officer was sitting at a duty desk a few feet away.
“Hallway here’s Times Square,” Taylor said, “because of Big Ben up there.” He motioned MacNally along. “On your right, that metal door there goes to the rec yard. You get two and a half hours Saturday and Sunday. Softball, handball, shuffleboard, weights. If you sit up on the top of the stairs, you get a view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. What 1161 was talking about in processing.”
MacNally said, “1161?”
“The inmate. That’s who gave you your stuff.” He led MacNally down a main corridor between the cell blocks. The floors were spit-shine clean and glossy, and the area was unusually quiet save for the hacking cough of a man who was lying on the bed of his ground-floor cell.
“This is Broadway,” Taylor said with a nod of his head. “Next block over to the right, Seedy Street and Park Avenue. To the left is Michigan Avenue.”
“Seedy?”
“It’s where C and D blocks are. C, D…Seedy.”
“The cells are locked during the day?” MacNally asked. At Leavenworth, the doors remained open, allowing prisoners freedom to roam the cellhouse.
“Unless you’ve got a work detail, that’s where you spend twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Don’t wanna go stir crazy, get yourself a job. Otherwise, those cold, shark-infested waters will look mighty inviting after a few months.”
As they continued down Broadway, MacNally glanced into each of the cells. Along the bottom, a dark green stripe served as a baseboard. Gloomy mint paint extended halfway up the wall, and white finished it off, up to and including the ceiling.
Some cells were stark, with no personalized décor-just a white towel, a shaving kit, a toilet paper roll, and a chocolate brown wool blanket thrown across the bed. Each cell had two small metal shelves, mounted in tandem one above the other, placed opposite the mattress, with another two above the toilet, which sat beside a compact porcelain sink and a cross-hatched air vent opening in the cement wall.
“Are all these singles?” MacNally asked.
“That’s all we got here. Some think having your own cell’s better than a place like Leavenworth where you always got five or ten cellies living with you. Others think it’s more lonely.”
MacNally knew which he preferred. If he’d had a single at Leavenworth, things may’ve turned out differently for him. And he would not now be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, over a mile from land in a place known for its cold, foggy, and windy weather. An institution considered the last stop, living amongst the most incorrigible, most dangerous, and most unruly criminals the United States’ criminal justice system possessed.
As MacNally walked past a few more cells that were unoccupied, he slowed as his eyes locked with a man sitting on his bed.
John Anglin.
MacNally did not know if he should acknowledge him-if Anglin had been a model prisoner at The Rock during his brief tenure, associating with him would be a positive; but if he had been a troublemaker, the opposite would be true. He decided on a gentle lift of his chin, then brought his eyes forward and continued walking beside his escort toward the far wall.
They hung a right and came upon another series of cells. “Welcome to C-Block and Park Avenue. Your new neighborhood.”
“That a library?” MacNally asked, gesturing ahead and to the right.
“Off limits. You want a book? A trustee’ll bring by a push cart filled with ’em. You can have three in your cell at a time. Well, three and a Bible. Magazines, too. Popular Mechanics, Time, Life, Popular Science, that kind of stuff. You want, you can buy a subscription.”
“You said this was Seedy Street. C- and D-Blocks. This is C. Where’s D?”
“Glad you asked.” Taylor grinned. “D’s in the room next door. Our Treatment Unit.”
“Hospital?”
“Hospital’s upstairs, above the dining hall. No, Treatment Unit’s solitary confinement. Segregation. The Hole.” Taylor stopped in front of C-156. “Best you stay out of there, MacNally. Trust me on that one.” The officer leaned back and faced another guard, who was standing a hundred or so feet away, at the end of the cell block. “Rack ’em, 156!”
A moment later, the officer pulled out keys and appeared to be accessing what MacNally assumed was some sort of control box. The man reached inside and after a series of arm gyrations-he pulled down, then up, then grabbed something else-a click sounded above the barred door for C-156. A loud clunk echoed, followed by the gate in front of him sliding to the right.
“In,” Taylor said. “Morning gong’s at 6:33. At 6:50, second gong goes off. Stand right here, by your bars, fully dressed, facing out. At the whistle, the lieutenants and cellhouse guards do a standing count. Next whistle’s at seven sharp. That’s when you’ll be turned out to the dining hall for chow. Rest of the daily schedule’s in your book. Page four and five. Oh-and pay attention to the diagram on page eight.”