Sean Black: Deadlock

Jalicia took another deep breath. ‘I know who you are.’

‘Good,’ said Reaper. ‘You get a special delivery over the last couple of days?’

‘This morning,’ Jalicia said, her eyes drawn back to the parchment of skin. ‘Pretty neat trick. Hand-delivering something when you’re in prison.’

There was a low, throaty chuckle from Reaper. ‘I heard it was on its way, is all. You know who it belongs to?’

Jalicia knew all right. The swastika tattoo had almost certainly been carved from the mutilated body of Ken Prager, an undercover ATF agent who’d infiltrated a white supremacist group the authorities believed was carrying out an assortment of criminal activities on behalf of the incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood leadership. ‘Yeah, I know.’

‘So, you and me,’ Reaper continued. ‘I think it’s about time we had a talk.’

‘About?’

‘Just make the arrangements. And make sure it stays on the down low. I ain’t gonna be any use to you dead.’

Twenty-four Hours Later

Pelican Bay Supermax Prison, Crescent City, California

The seven-hour drive from San Francisco to California’s highest-security prison had given Jalicia plenty of time to chew over Reaper’s request for a meeting, and what it might mean for her case against the Aryan Brotherhood.

In the administration building she was greeted by Warden Louis Marquez, a dapper Hispanic with a prosthetic left eye, his eyeball having been gouged out of its socket by a disgruntled female inmate early in his career as a correctional officer. Marquez got Jalicia to sign the prison’s standard release form, certifying that she understood that the prison operated a strict ‘No Hostages’ policy, then passed her on to a barrel-chested lieutenant by the name of Williams, who explained that he was in charge of monitoring gang activity among the prison’s three and a half thousand inmates. Williams had facilitated Reaper’s phone call to Jalicia, but beyond that he was equally in the dark as to what Reaper was so eager to discuss with her.

Williams led her into a white-walled meeting room tucked away from the prying eyes of other inmates. Jalicia took a seat, while Williams keyed his radio.

‘OK, you can bring him in now,’ he said.

A minute later the door opened, and Reaper was led into the room by two guards. A double set of handcuffs and leg restraints were linked by a heavy belly chain which looped around his midriff. A white spit shield covered his nose and mouth.

Reaper shuffled forward and was dumped into a chair opposite Jalicia by the two guards, who took up positions either side of him, hands poised, gun-slinger style, on their tasers. He sat there in silence for a moment.

Jalicia turned to Williams, who was standing behind her, arms folded. ‘Could we lose the mask?’ she asked, hoping that the request would go some way towards establishing trust between her and Reaper.

‘Hope you got all your vaccinations,’ Williams said to her, before nodding to one of the guards flanking Reaper to remove the spit shield.

Reaper smirked at Williams’s jibe.

When the shield was off he leaned back in his chair and scratched lazily at a set of SS lightning bolts tattooed across a bicep that was thicker than most men’s thighs. ‘You know, me just being here, talking to you, could get me killed.’

‘Then I guess you must have a pretty good reason for contacting me,’ Jalicia said.

Reaper’s mouth, partially obscured by the kind of walrus mustache usually reserved for the bad guy in an old Western, broke into a smile, but his eyes remained unblinking. In fact, ever since Reaper had walked into the visiting room with his two-guard escort, she’d felt him studying her, taking in every detail, scrutinizing her every reaction. It wasn’t so much the feeling of a man mentally undressing her, which she might have expected under the circumstances. No, this went deeper. Reaper’s gaze suggested a man staring into her soul.

‘This case you’re building against the Aryan Brotherhood,’ he said. ‘And these conspiracy charges you’re going to be bringing against them for that ATF agent and his family being snuffed.’

Jalicia took a breath, her mind flitting back to the contents of the envelope. ‘What about them?’

‘You’re gonna be seeking the death penalty for the suspects, aren’t you?’ he asked.

Jalicia settled for a nod of the head and a ‘That’s correct.’

Reaper stretched his arms up as far as his restraints would allow, and yawned. ‘But, hypothetically speaking, if someone who was, shall we say, associated with the Brotherhood were to cooperate with your office, this person wouldn’t be looking at Death Row. In fact, he might even be offered some kind of a deal.’

The truth was that, so far, Jalicia had enough evidence to bring the leadership of the gang to trial for ordering the murder of Ken Prager and his family. An intercepted, and subsequently decoded, note found in a prison cell right here in Pelican Bay proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Aryan Brotherhood had voted on and directly commissioned Prager’s death after he’d infiltrated a group which helped run the gang’s operations on the outside. But, whether she could persuade a judge and jury to sentence to death men who were already serving life without possibility of parole was another matter entirely. The one thing that would do that would be a star witness, someone on the inside of the organisation. Reaper more than fitted the bill.

‘If such a person were to come forward, we could certainly look at making some kind of an arrangement,’ Jalicia said. ‘You know, you might want to think about seeking an attorney to represent you.’

At this Reaper stiffened. His fingers interlocked, then steepled under his chin. ‘No. This stays between me and you.’

‘So you would testify against the other men being indicted?’

‘If you keep me off The Row, then yes, I would.’

‘What else would you want?’ Jalicia asked.

Reaper’s eyes swept the floor. Here it comes, thought Jalicia. She knew that cheating death wouldn’t be motivation enough for a man like Reaper.

‘Time off for good behaviour?’ Reaper suggested with a wry smile.

Jalicia matched his smile. Reaper was already serving three sentences of life without possibility of parole for a triple homicide, which included two young black girls, so any kind of early release wasn’t an option. ‘What is it that you want that I can actually deliver?’ she prompted.

Reaper leaned forward. ‘I’ve been in solitary confinement for the past five years. In my cell twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. Out only to shower on my own, or exercise in a tiny concrete box not much bigger than this room.’

‘We could arrange for you to be transferred to the THU,’ Jalicia suggested.

Lieutenant Williams nodded in agreement. ‘We could definitely do that.’

The Transitional Housing Unit was where former gang members lived together inside the prison. It lay, like purgatory, somewhere between the hell of solitary confinement (also known as the Secure Housing Unit, or SHU) and the relative freedom of the general housing units, where the majority of prisoners could move much more freely.

Reaper shook his head. ‘I want to be back on the mainline.’

Jalicia laughed. The mainline was the other name for the general housing units. ‘A federal witness on the mainline? You wouldn’t last two seconds.’

‘That all depends,’ Reaper said with another wry smile.

‘On what?’

‘Let’s just say I have some new friends now, friends who think the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood might have had its day.’

So that was what this was all about, thought Jalicia: a power play, with Reaper testifying against his old comrades and being rewarded by the new regime.