clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Some of the rules may seem pointless. I would advise you to follow them all to the letter. They’re in place to help you learn obedience, regardless of the nature of that obedience. Any infraction will be grounds for swift disciplinary action in a manner I see fitting. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He pressed the button on an intercom to his right. “Shari, please send Bostich in to transfer our new member to the commons.”
He returned his attention to Danny. “As I’m sure you know, priests on the inside are often misjudged by others. They will see you as scum, an understandable sentiment. One of our members, a lifer named Bruce Randell, has a particular dislike of your kind for good reason and will try to make your life complicated. He’s not a kind man. I assume you will stay clear of him?”
“I will do my best.”
“I doubt your best will be good enough. Randell is a violent man.”
“And yet he’s in your prison.”
The warden smiled. “Yes, well, I do make exceptions to the rules when it suits our collective goal. A wolf or two in the sheep pen keeps everyone on their toes.”
Danny had kept his former occupation to himself at Ironwood, because a priest in prison was too quickly suspected as a sex offender, the worst possible classification among prisoners. Even the most hardened criminals refused to tolerate rapists and pedophiles.
It was senseless that a murderer could so harshly judge a rapist, but the society called prison had its own code, as unflinching as any law.
It was ironic that Danny’s first victim had been a sexual predator.
The latch on the door hummed and snapped open. Bostich stepped in and looked at Danny. The man was in his thirties and wore a buzz cut, black slacks, and a black short-sleeved shirt. His hair was bleached, if Danny was right. Yellowish brows hung over dark eyes, which were an oddity in his pale, blotchy face. The man was average height, but strong, with thick fingers.
His eyes skirted to the warden. “Sir.”
“Take our priest to his quarters,” Pape said.
“Yes, sir.”
Danny stood and walked to the door. He knew nothing about Bostich other than that he was likely the primary enforcer at Basal. Already, he didn’t like the man. But this was his old judgmental nature rising. He set his disfavor aside and offered Bostich a nod, which was returned by an unflinching stare.
“Oh, and Danny…”
He turned to face the warden.
“There’s a rapist in our sanctuary who continues to insist on his innocence. A dense young man named Peter Manning. I want you to see to him, help him understand his true wretchedness, the first step toward rehabilitation. Can you do that?”
Danny hesitated. “I will do my best.”
Pape tapped his fingertips on the desk and smiled. “Surely you know how to handle people who harbor dark secrets. How you handle Peter may very well determine how it goes for you in Basal. Hell is a miserable place, Danny. Take care not to join Peter there.”
3
AS I SAID, my meltdown really began with that first breathy phone call.
Danny. He was talking about Danny. I stood rigid for a count of three and then I was flying toward my bedroom. My first thought was of the nine-millimeter—the gun in the back of my closet, the one I hadn’t touched in three years. But my determination never to touch it again was already halfway out the window, because the nine-millimeter was the only thing I had that could blow a hole through the head of the man who’d just spoken to me on the phone. I wouldn’t hesitate if it meant protecting Danny.
I made it to the edge of the bed before my mind caught up. I didn’t need a gun; I needed Danny. And Danny was in prison.
I spun around and hurried back to the phone, thinking that Danny was probably already in transit to Basal. The images of that overturned transport van winked on, then off. Too neurotic. Impossible.
The phone was harping its disconnect alert when I snatched it off the counter. I got a dial tone and with a shaking finger dialed the all-too-familiar phone number for Ironwood State Prison, whispering reason to myself.
The line began to ring. I scanned the walls of my condo for holes and a peeping eye. But I would have noticed; I was too observant in my own environment to miss something so obvious. Who would want to watch me? One of Danny’s old enemies. Or mine. Ghosts from the past, that’s who.
“Ironwood State Prison.”
“Yes, can you connect me with the warden?”
A pause. I sounded like a frantic girlfriend or wife. The prison probably got them all the time.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
I calmed my voice as best I could. “Renee Gilmore.”
The phone clicked, then began to ring through to the warden’s office. In prison, the warden might be God, but to get through to God you had to get through his secretary who, in this case, went by the name Susan Johnson.
“Warden’s office.”
“Thank God, thank God.” Still way too hyper. “I’m sorry, this is Renee Gilmore and my…a friend of mine is incarcerated there. Danny Hansen. FX49565. He was scheduled to be transferred today.”
“What can I do for you, Ms. Gilmore?” Her tone was flat, the kind you might expect from someone trying to cope in a prison stuffed with twice as many inmates as the two thousand or so it was built to hold.
“I need to find Danny.”
“I’m sorry—”
“I know you can’t just put me through, but I just received a threat on his life and if anything happens to him, I swear…You’ve got to get a message to him.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“At least put him into segregation.”
“Calm down. If you’d let me get a word in edgewise I’d tell you that my records show that he was taken out at four this morning.”
“Four? He’s gone?”
“Try Basal, Mrs. Hansen.”
“Gilmore,” I said, barely hearing myself, and hung up.
I’d never been to Basal—no reason to. But I’d looked it up a few days earlier and printed out a map when Danny told me he was being transferred. There was no helpful information on the Internet, only a sentence saying that it was an experimental state facility geared toward rehabilitation for three hundred inmates. The prison system in California was stressed beyond capacity, in large part due to the fact that half of the prisoners who served their time came out of prison more jacked up than when they went in. The state had the highest recidivism rate in the country.
The state aimed to change that and was searching for answers. Basal had gone live three years ago as part of that effort. As far as I was concerned, that much was good news. A prison devoted to rehabilitation had to be better than the overcrowded gangland called Ironwood.
Then again, that was all I knew about Basal. All the other prisons in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had websites that provided at least a peek into their mysterious worlds.
