“Why is it that all the FNGs cause trouble?”
“Forgive me, Officer, but—”
“Shut up! Did I ask you a question?”
“Actually—”
“Shut up!”
In the space of ten seconds Danny knew he was being introduced to the way justice worked inside of Basal. Fair enough—his life wasn’t his own. Marshall Pape owned it.
“When another member asks you for a simple courtesy, you give him that courtesy, you hear? You don’t sit there like a wart. Now stand up and step away from the table.” The facilitator had produced a pair of handcuffs.
Danny did as instructed.
“Zero tolerance, get used to it. Turn around and place your hands behind your back.”
The facilitator cuffed him. Two other COs had arrived and stood to one side in a show of force. They needn’t have bothered. Danny had no intention of speaking, much less resisting.
There was no outcry from the other members, despite the obvious injustice of the event. Randell stood to one side, showing no emotion. Godfrey sat still, watching Danny, but he made no move to defend him. It was prohibited and would only invite more trouble. Still, it was strange. At Ironwood, inmates would invite trouble for the sake of solidarity. A few days in the hole was a small price to pay and even more, a sign of strength.
Not in Basal.
The facilitator gave him a nudge toward the door. “Let’s go. The rest of you, back to lunch.”
Two guards led him through the hub, past the security gate that led to the administration wing, and through another reinforced steel door with the words Meditation Floor stenciled in black above it. Not a word was spoken.
The concrete steps descending into the basement were bare and well worn. Caged incandescent bulbs lit the way down one flight, then a second, before opening into a long, dimly lit hall with cells running down the right side. The sound of whimpering echoed through the corridor.
The meditation floor. Fifty cells, according to Godfrey.
“Did I tell you to stop?”
Danny walked forward, past the cells. The doors were solid steel with small slats at waist level and similar openings near the floor, used to fasten or unfasten a member’s wrist and ankle irons as well as to deliver food and water.
The smell of urine and feces hung in the air. No light reached past the cracks in the steel doors. Other than the padding of their feet down the hall, the only sound came from the whimpering in one of the cells. It made Danny wonder how many inmates were being held in segregation.
When they drew abreast the cell of the whimpering man, the facilitator banged his stick against the steel door. “That’s another week, Perkins. Shut your foul mouth!”
The whimpering shriveled to a whisper. No due warning, no filing, no due process or hearing. A clear violation of the California penal protocol.
They passed eight additional cells before the guard stopped him. “Hold up.”
The facilitator unlocked the cell door and swung the door wide. Inside was a concrete room four feet wide and maybe eight feet deep. A raised slab of cement, three feet wide, formed a bed of sorts next to a sealed steel panel on the floor. A metal sink and toilet combo hugged the corner. That was it. No bedding. Nothing else.
“Take off your shoes, your socks, your pants, and your underwear.”
Still cuffed, Danny did as ordered.
“Inside.”
He stepped into the concrete box, immediately aware of the temperature drop. Behind him, the cell door clanked shut. A bolt was thrown and the upper slat door squealed open.
“Back up to the slat.”
The facilitator uncuffed him through the opening and withdrew the restraint, leaving Danny free to move his arms.
“Take off your shirt and pass it out.”
He unbuttoned the shirt, shrugged out of it, and passed it out.
“You can consider due process served. The warden will make his recommendation. If you’re lucky you’ll be out in a few days.”
The slat cover slammed shut, leaving Danny naked in the dark. The accommodations were poor. It was cold. There wasn’t a single soft surface in the small room. He stepped to the sink and turned the faucet. No water. It was likely on a timer or controlled manually from the outside, as was the water for the toilet.
It was rumored that some of the cells in the death-row segregation ward at San Quentin were set up similarly, although the inmates were allowed to wear their shorts. Cups had been banned because any vessel could be used to collect urine and feces to throw at an officer who opened the slat. Clothing and sheets could be used to commit suicide by way of strangulation. Mattresses could be torn apart or used to block entry into the cell.
But this wasn’t San Quentin. Danny wondered if anyone outside these walls knew the true nature of administrative segregation in the bowels of Basal.
The door at the end of the hall slammed shut, leaving the entire floor in an eerie calm.
Danny found the edge of the raised slab and eased down onto the bed. He lay back on the cold concrete, stared up into the darkness for a full minute, then shut his eyes and sought God, who is love.
Slowly, he let his mind still, seeking out the light between his thoughts and emotions. There, in simply being still, he found solace.
7
WEDNESDAY
KEITH HAMMOND, THE sheriff’s deputy who’d taken down Bruce Randell, wasn’t eager to be found. I might have just given up and gone to the authorities to find him if not for my own aversion to the law. Danny had done a good job steering me clear, and when my dedication finally paid off two days later, I was relieved to learn that Keith was no longer professionally tied to the law.
He lived in a condo on Acacia Avenue in Huntington Beach, a twenty-five-minute drive from my home in Long Beach without traffic. The neighborhood, only ten blocks from the ocean, was populated by free-spirited types who would rather head to the beach than to work. The condo was nice enough—white with green bushes along the base of the building and a bright green canopy leading up from the sidewalk. Several large palm trees in the back rose over the roof. But it wasn’t the neighborhood I cared about, it was the man who lived inside 1245 Acacia Street #3. I was now pinning my hopes on him. All of them.
I sat in my Corolla down and across the street, gently picking at my lower lip as I obsessed over how best to meet him. When to make my move. What to say. How to determine if I could trust him. Whether he would be willing to help. If he still had the mustache from his days in the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department, as pictured.
He didn’t have a Facebook profile, which was fine, because neither did I. He hadn’t made any news for a few years. Good enough—I hadn’t either, at least not for three years, and then only as an unidentified subject in a rather nasty slaying.
What he did have was a two-year history working as an attorney, and five years in the sheriff’s department before that. Best as I could fit the rather disconnected pieces together, Keith had joined the sheriff’s department right out of law school, served for five years, entered private practice, and then dropped off the scene altogether a year or two ago.
The Los Angeles Times had at least a dozen stories that included the name Keith Hammond in their archives, five of them about the bust and the high-profile trial of a meth cook and distributor, one Bruce Randell.
Bruce: the viper doing time in Basal who hated priests and was now going to kill Danny. Over my dead body. Likely both.
Keith spoke of his reason for leaving the sheriff’s department in an article about Martinez Boutros, the only client from his two years of law practice that I was able to identify. Boutros was a twenty-six-year-old Mexican immigrant who’d been charged with murder in a drug case. He was wrongfully accused, Hammond claimed, and then he was acquitted. And the Times came looking to find out why Keith had switched sides from drug buster to busting out druggies.