Death Row Breakout by Edward Bunker

Author:Edward Bunker [Bunker, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-05-08T02:45:50+00:00

Death of a Rat

A witness to the murder of the Soledad guard had been sent to San Quentin awaiting the trial. He was kept in the hospital’s third floor. To reach him, you had to get through the hospital entrance by showing an identification card, with mug photo, name and number. Those details got you into the hospital Infirmary Room, normally used for treating cuts and dispensing cold pills. At the other side of this first room was a gate of steel bars painted white. A guard stood behind it, checking passes and identification. He had a board affixed to the wall with a hundred and fifty-two name tags, inmates who worked somewhere in the hospital, from laundry room to surgical nurse, clerk to the prison psychiatrist and the chief medical officer’s clerk. Inmates who worked in the hospital wore green jumpers, which differentiated them from non-workers in blue chambray shirts.

A couple of weeks later the chief prison psychologist gave his clerk a list of men he wanted to see. The clerk dutifully typed up the list as a “request for interview”. He put it on the psychologist’s desk. It was signed and given back to the inmate clerk to be forwarded to the Custody Office, where the actual passes were made up and distributed throughout the cell-houses by the graveyard shift. This time, however, when the clerk got the signed list from his boss, he put it back in the Underwood and added two names and numbers, Clemens, B13566, and Buford, B14OO3. Both were young “fish”, aged nineteen and twenty-two, and neither had been a year in the House of Dracula, the nickname for San Quentin. Folsom was The Pit, and Soledad The Gladiator School. Neither would admit it, but both wanted to be the stuff of legend in the prison underworld. During the night a guard walked the cell-house tiers, putting passes (called ducats) on the cell bars of convicts who were wanted somewhere by someone. Clemens was wide awake and waiting when the guard passed his cell. Buford got his when he woke up. They met on the Big Yard after breakfast. Neither had any appetite. Instead of hunger, both felt the hollowness of fear deep in the stomach. Normally they would have joined some partners hanging out in the morning sunlight near the North cell-house until the mess halls cleared and the whistle blew for work. This morning they wanted to hang out quietly until it was time to take care of business.

“Is that fuckin’ whistle late this morning?” asked Buford.

Clemens shrugged. “I ain’ got no fuckin’ idea. I don’ even know what fuckin’ year it is.”

The work whistle blasted the morning, causing an explosion of pigeons and seagulls. The latter flew over the yard and dropped their shit on the cons, as if getting vengeance for the whistle’s blast. They were cursed in return. “Flying fuckin’ rats,” (in an attempt at retaliation, a few convicts would put Alka Seltzer tablets inside pieces of crushed up bread.

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