Undercover Prison King novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Debt

In C-block his cellmate explains the commissary debt that turns men into couriers, and a pill is pressed into his hand. At 2 a.m. a laundry cart leaves the infirmary wing with a shape under the sheets.

The doctor held the form at arm's length.

"I didn't sign this," she said.

Captain Hargis smiled with half his mouth.

"It's in your file, Doctor. Your signature, your license number, same as the last nine."

"The last nine?"

Sawyer heard the question and filed it away.

"Then you'd better stop saying you didn't," Hargis said. "People get confused about what they sign."

She stood slowly, small beside him, and did not give the paper back.

She folded it once and put it in the pocket of her white coat.

"I'll write my own report," she said. "Nobody else's."

For a moment Hargis only looked at her, and the whole hall watched his baton hand.

Then a trolley rolled in, and two orderlies lifted the dead man onto it and wheeled him through the red-cross door.

They did not cover his face.

The doctor followed them without a backward look.

Hargis turned his smile on Sawyer.

"You, the hero. Get up."

Sawyer got up, his wrist dripping on the tile.

"Broke a state rail bracket," Hargis said. "Hit an officer."

"I hit a collar. I never saw an officer."

"Funny." Hargis tapped the baton against his palm.

"The warden likes funny. You can go to the hole, or you can go to C-block and make yourself useful."

"What's useful?"

"Whatever the block tells you."

It was the smoothest threat Sawyer had ever been handed, and he took the second option.

C-block was three tiers of cells around an open floor, with a catwalk at the top and a bolted steel table in the middle.

Two hundred and eighty men looked down at the new meat from the railings.

Nobody shouted.

That was the first thing that felt wrong, because a block that size should have been loud.

He was walked to cell 14 on the second tier and the door slid shut behind him on its track.

An old man sat on the lower bunk with a library book open on his knee.

He was thin, stooped, with cropped white hair, bushy grey eyebrows and reading glasses taped at one hinge.

A lanyard around his neck read LIBRARY.

"You're bleeding on my floor," the old man said, without looking up.

"I'll clean it."

"You'll do it with this." He tossed a cloth. "I'm Wicks. Thirty-one years. Top bunk's yours, if you can stand a snorer."

"Cole Maitland."

"That's what the paper says."

Sawyer wrapped his wrist and kept his face easy.

Wicks turned a page, but his eyes stayed on Sawyer over the rim of the glasses.

"I heard about the intake," he said. "You gave Dellis forty breaths."

"His name was Dellis?"

"Danny Dellis. Twenty-five. Nine months into a three-year bit for stealing a truck." Wicks closed the book. "Good boy. Owed too much."

"Owed who?"

"Everybody starts the same here, Maitland."

Wicks held up a finger for each item.

"Soap, stamps, a phone card, and a pack of noodles. Welcome pack. It's on credit."

"I didn't ask for a pack."

"You got one anyway. It's on your account by morning, and the interest doubles every Friday."

Sawyer sat on the bunk across from him.

"And when I can't pay?"

"Then you work it off in the laundry. Everyone does."

"Doing what?"

Wicks glanced at the cell door, then at the camera dome above the catwalk.

He dropped his voice to a whisper that carried no further than the bunk.

"Don't ask what, Maitland. Not in here. Ask when."

The footsteps came an hour later.

A broad man in orange stopped outside the door and nodded to Wicks with tired respect.

Then he held a hand out to Sawyer through the slot.

In his palm sat one plain white pill, the size of an aspirin.

"Welcome to C," the man said. "Vitamins. Take it with dinner, you'll feel better about your debt."

"I'm fine."

"Everyone's fine." The man's eyes were flat. "Take it, or I come back with someone who isn't me."

Sawyer closed his hand around it.

The pill was pale and chalky, and it was stamped with a tiny M.

He knew that mark.

It was the stamp of a counterfeit oxycodone, the kind pressed from fentanyl and chalk.

He had watched soldiers bury friends who took them.

He held it up to the light long enough to be sure.

Then he slid it into the seam of his mattress.

"Smart," Wicks whispered.

"You've seen it?"

"I've seen what it does."

The lights went out at ten, and the block settled into a hollow quiet, one cough at a time.

Sawyer lay awake on the top bunk watching the catwalk lights.

At two in the morning, he heard wheels.

He leaned out over the rail and looked down the long dark corridor that ran toward the infirmary wing.

A white laundry cart was rolling out of the red-cross door, pushed by two guards in grey.

A heap of sheets had been piled in it, and under the sheets was a long, heavy shape that did not move.

One sheet slipped as the cart passed under a light.

For half a second, a pale hand hung out over the edge of the cart, a swallow tattooed on the wrist.

Then the sheet fell back, and the cart went on into the dark.

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