Undercover Prison King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Intake
Sawyer Harlan enters his own prison as convict Cole Maitland, fights to save a dying man the guards will not help, and sees a death certificate pre-signed with the doctor's name.
The sign at the gate said HARLAN RIDGE CORRECTIONAL in letters taller than a man.
Sawyer Harlan read it through the grille of the transport van and kept his face blank.
His father had bolted that sign up thirty years ago, back when Sawyer still thought his last name was a gift.
Now the name sat on the wall of a place that was about to book him as Cole Maitland, number 40718.
The guard who unlocked his ankle chain smelled of cigarettes and mint gum.
"Move it, Maitland," he said. "Intake closes at four and I'm not staying for you."
Sawyer shuffled down the ramp in orange canvas shoes a size too small.
The high desert wind came through the fence and pushed grit against his teeth.
Inside, the intake hall was a long white room with a bolted bench down each wall.
Twenty new men sat in a line, cuffed to the rail, staring at nothing.
Sawyer counted exits.
One steel door led to the yard and one to the cell blocks.
The third had a red cross painted on it and two guards leaning against the frame.
He sat. He noticed the wall above the bench.
There were four pale rectangles on the paint, where something had hung for years and been taken down.
Under the nearest one, a faded sticker still said NALOXONE: EMERGENCY.
The boxes were gone.
His father's last letter had said it plainly. They will show you the lobby, and nothing else.
Sawyer looked at the white rectangles and began to understand how much nothing there was.
The man beside him made a small wet sound.
He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a shaved head and a swallow tattooed on one wrist.
His lips were the color of a bruise and his chin had dropped to his chest.
"Hey," Sawyer said quietly. "Hey, look at me."
The man's eyes rolled up and did not come back down.
His breathing had slowed to one ragged pull every few seconds.
Sawyer had seen that exact stillness in a Kandahar medical tent, over a boy who had taken something he should not have.
He stood so fast the rail jerked his cuffed wrist.
"Guard," he said, loud and flat. "This man is overdosing. I need the medical door open and I need naloxone."
The nearest guard did not move off the frame.
"Sit down, Maitland."
"He is not breathing."
"Sit down or you go to the hole before you ever get a bed."
Sawyer pulled against the cuff until the skin of his wrist split.
The bench was bolted to the floor, but the rail had a cheap bracket at the joint.
He drove his heel into the bracket twice, and the third time it snapped.
The room went still.
He dragged the young man off the bench onto the tile and tipped his head back.
Two fingers in the mouth cleared a smear of foam, and then he sealed his lips over the man's and breathed.
Nothing moved in the chest.
He breathed again and counted.
Behind him boots hit the floor, and a hand grabbed the back of his collar.
"Get off him!"
Sawyer drove an elbow back without looking and the hand let go.
He kept breathing for the man on the floor, one breath every five seconds, his split wrist smearing blood across the dying man's cheek.
"Open the damn door," he said between breaths. "Somebody get the doctor."
A woman's voice came from the red-cross door.
"Everyone back."
She came through the guards, a small woman in a white coat over navy scrubs.
Her black hair was scraped into a bun so tight it pulled her eyebrows up.
Round tortoiseshell glasses, a stethoscope around her neck, and a clear plastic box in her fist that she tore open as she ran.
She dropped to her knees on the other side of the body.
"I've got it," she said, and drove the nasal spray home.
She did not look at Sawyer.
"Keep the airway open. Don't stop."
They worked on him together, her hands, his breath, for four minutes by the clock above the door.
The young man's chest hitched once, a thin twitch.
Then it stopped and did not start again.
She pressed two fingers to his throat and held them there too long.
"Time," she said, and her voice cracked on the word. "Eleven-fifty."
Nobody in the room said a thing.
Sawyer sat back on his heels with the man's blood and his own on his hands.
A heavy shadow fell across them both.
The captain wore grey, with a crew cut, a pitted nose and a polished black baton on his hip.
His name tag said HARGIS.
He crouched beside the doctor like a friend and put a single sheet of paper in her hands.
"Cardiac arrest," he said pleasantly. "Just sign where it's marked, Dr. Neumann."
The doctor looked down at the form.
Sawyer looked too.
The cause of death was already typed in.
The signature line already held her name, dated twenty minutes before the man had stopped breathing.
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