Undercover Prison King novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Laundry

On the fourth morning, Hargis put him on laundry.

"Friday came," the captain said, flipping a card in his fingers.

"Your welcome pack doubled. You're deep in debt, Maitland. The laundry will dig you out."

Sawyer said nothing and followed the guard across the yard.

The laundry was a long brick building with a roof of corrugated tin.

Inside it was steam, noise and the stink of hot bleach.

Eight industrial washers roared along one wall, and a row of presses hissed along the other.

Between them ran a table sixty feet long, and forty men in orange stood at it folding sheets.

Every one of them kept his eyes on his hands.

That was how Sawyer knew.

A thin, stooped man stood at the head of the table.

He had a tally book open in front of him and reading glasses taped at the hinge.

"Wicks?"

"Folding table's mine," the old man said, without raising his head. "Thirty-one years, and someone has to count."

"Count what?"

"Sheets." Wicks's pencil tapped the page. "Come here, Maitland. Watch."

He took a hospital sheet off the pile and snapped it flat.

At the hem, under a strip of heavy tape, was a seam the width of a finger.

With two fingers, Wicks slid something small and white into it, smoothed the tape back down, and folded the sheet in three.

It looked like an ordinary clean sheet.

Sawyer's stomach went cold.

Two hundred pills to a sheet, maybe, on this table alone, and forty sheets at a time.

The laundry served the county hospital, three nursing homes and a chain of hotels.

Each van that left the gate carried the linen out under a paper seal.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Undercover Prison King from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.