Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1)
Read Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) Online
Authors: Jo Robertson
Without Malice
A Thriller-Suspense Novel
by
Jo Robertson
Copyright @ 2015 Jo Robertson
McKay Lewis Publishers
Dedication
This book is dedicated to all people who suffer from diabetes, including my wonderful son-in-law, Michael D. Love you, Mikey!
Rosedale, California, Present Day
Parole Officer Santiago Cruz pulled a tee shirt over his head and adjusted his shoulder holster. A bagel clamped between his teeth, he slipped his feet into dependable size-twelve work shoes and laced them tightly.
In the small kitchen area he gulped down the last of his coffee and looked around the studio apartment, thinking for the hundredth time that he needed to get friendlier living quarters. For a six-foot four-inch former college quarterback, he felt like he was living in a box most of the time.
Cruz was tall, large, and dark – mixed race – white on his mother’s side, Native American and Mexican on his father’s side. His familiarity with street Spanish was probably why the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had hired him in the first place.
He patted himself down. Cuffs, keys, clipboard, jacket – check.
Another shift of chasing down his parolees, most of whom hung out at the weathered shelter
Jesus Saves
on Sheldon Avenue in Rosedale
.
This morning his first appointment – he grinned at the loose term for a meet with a parolee, his teeth flashing white in his bronzed face – was with parolee Dickey Hinchey.
Not only had Dickey missed his last check-in time, but he’d failed his pee test the week before. Dickey was about to be returned to jail.
Some people never learned, and Cruz was betting this guy was one of them.
He parked his jeep by the left side of the convenience store which fronted the shelter. Catching the parolee unaware was always a good tactic. They had a tendency to run, and although the injury that’d ended Cruz’s football career was a torn rotator cuff, he hated the running.
It was the principle of the thing. Running down ex-cons was embarrassing for a man his size. Like a huge tabby toying with a mouse.
He strolled into the convenience store, glanced around, and lingered over the coffee dispenser. Syed, the East Indian owner of the store, nodded courteously to Cruz, grateful for the presence of an officer of the law in the dicey neighborhood.
Ten seconds later all hell broke loose.
Although Santiago Cruz worked for the county, he wasn’t the kind of officer who dealt with the general public. Keeping up with his parolees was time-consuming enough.
But the instant the punk-ass kid walked into the store, Cruz recognized the signs. His eyes all hip-hoppy beneath the beanie pulled down to his eyebrows, he was someone high as a kite and ready to do something really stupid.
The next second the teenager pulled a knife from his jacket pocket and jabbed it at Syed as he stood behind the counter. “Gimme all the cash, mother-fucker!”
Clearly the kid didn’t see Cruz waiting beside the coffee dispenser. He outweighed the would-be thief by almost eighty pounds and had eight or nine inches in height over him. Cruz sighed heavily.
Damn!
Cruz stepped into the aisle, drawing the kid’s attention. The sixteen-if-he-was-a-day boy jerked his head back and forth, up and down, like a manic bobble head. If Cruz used a gun, the take-down would be quicker, but talking down a hopped-up meth addict with a knife took time.
Time Cruz didn’t appreciate taking for a job that local police had responsibility for.
Syed’s face remained impassive, not a twinge of alarm. He’d seen Cruz take down far more threatening targets than a skinny kid.
Cruz held his hands up in a non-threatening, gentling manner. “Okay, kid, just relax. Put down the knife and we can talk about this.”
“Shut up! No talking.” He turned back to Syed, swinging the knife closer to the owner’s throat. “Get the money! Hurry up.”
“This is not a good idea,” Syed said to the thief. “It will end badly.”
“Shut the fuck up, old man!” His pupils dilated and his forehead sweaty, the kid swung the knife back and forth between Cruz and Syed.
“Look, dude, you can still get out of this,” Cruz cajoled, taking one step forward. “Just put the knife down and you can walk away.”
“You think I’m afraid of you?” the kid yelled. “I’m the one’s got the knife.”
Cruz shook his head slowly, a resigned look on his face. “No, man, I think you’re a stupid kid who doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into.”
The take-down was pathetically easy. The boy didn’t stand a chance and the victory felt hollow and annoying. Cruz subdued and cuffed the thief, and called local police for a pickup for attempted armed robbery.
Dumb jackass.
Cruz would probably have him as a parolee in another five years or so.
The confrontation put him behind schedule by several hours. After a patrol car picked up the suspect – one Joey Johnson, sixteen, of Sacramento – Cruz made his way out of the store.
“You just can’t stay out of police business, can you,
San-tee-AG-o?”
Detective Andrew Flood emerged from his department-issued unmarked car. He was a detective who’d made his way through the ranks the hard way, and for no good reason, hated Cruz’s guts. He looked for the worst in people and usually found it.
Cruz grinned at the taunt. “Just making your life easy, Flood. All part of the county service.”
Flood scowled. “One day someone’s gonna knock you off that cocky pedestal you put yourself on, Cruz.”
“Who? You?”
Flood entered the store and grabbed a Styrofoam cup of coffee – without paying, Cruz noticed through the window – and returned to his vehicle. “Later, Santiago. Us big boys have a homicide to go to.” He laughed as if investigating death was an honor.
Cruz headed for
Jesus Saves
, just around the corner. Dickey Hinchey had better show up. He was ready to unleash his already frayed temper on the parolee.
Pelican Bay State Prison, Crescent City, California
Anson Stark was a gray man.
From his receding hairline to his slight build, from his stooping shoulders to his soft, mild voice, the inmate was all shades and shadows. A ghost of a man. Hardly noticeable, although he’d been a college professor in the world outside of prison.
A man easily forgotten. For all his precise language and polite manners, he was the picture of mediocrity. But one look into his pale, unearthly eyes and every officer in the Security Housing Unit knew why Anson Stark was the white shot caller at Pelican Bay State Prison.
The
Lords of Death,
the white gang called themselves, and their leader was “The Professor” – Anson Stark. In Correctional Officer Luca Jimenez’s opinion the
Lords
and Anson Stark were as deadly as all the other gangs put together.
Luca shook his head in bewilderment.
Dios!
Six months on the job, and gang politics inside the prison still baffled him. The white shot caller looked like an accountant or a teacher. In fact, he’d been an unknown, untenured community college teacher who earned less money than Luca did.
Despite wild speculation, no one knew the crime that had landed Stark in prison. Some said he’d embezzled college funds or dealt drugs to his students. Others, that he’d slept with underage pupils. Others whispered that he’d murdered his wife of twenty years.
Luca Jimenez only knew that within five years at Pelican Bay, the Professor had organized one of the tightest prison gangs in the state, ousting the
Inland Empires
and the
White Supremacists
in the power hierarchy of white gangs. The prison brass figured he ran a gang of over three thousand members outside the prison, along with his efficient minions inside northern California prisons.
‘Effing crazy, especially in the mind of a poor Mexican immigrant like Luca. But his job with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was hella good, with benefits and hazard pay for working in the SHU – the Security Housing Unit – which housed the deadliest of Pelican Bay’s inmates.
Even though he felt like he entered a war zone during each twelve-hour shift, he wouldn’t complain.
Meal time was the most dangerous part of a SHU correctional officer’s job. Twice a day he had to open the metal compartments of the cells and insert the food trays through the portals. An inmate could toss anything through the ten-inch-wide food port – urine they’d saved up, even feces, or worse, a hand-made dart dipped in shit.
SHU inmates fashioned any kind of weapon out of any kind of material. And why not? What else did they have to do in their twenty-two-and-a-half hours a day of isolation in an eight by ten foot cell with no window?
Stare at the concrete wall opposite them through the metal barrier filled with nickel-sized holes so the control guard could see inside, observe them in their cells. Never see a single soul except the Kevlar-vested CO’s that brought meals or ushered them to the shower or the dog run.
The smart inmates took advantage of the solitude, kept themselves occupied with exercise or reading. The stupid ones went
loco.
Either way, they were considered the most lethal inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison.
As his fellow officer turned the lock to open Anson Stark’s food port, Luca half expected a projectile made from tightly rolled paper, a staple straightened out to a sharp point, and elastic from an underwear waistband – the currently favored type of weapon – to fly through the opening. The corridor was unusually quiet today and prickles of expectation jabbed the CO’s spine like poisoned darts.
Nothing happened.
Sweat trickled down Luca’s temples as he inserted the tray through the port. A second later his companion secured the padlock. Luca couldn’t hold back a sigh. Seven more to go in this pod and he could take his break. Moving to the next cell, Luca glanced back at Stark’s immobile face through the perforated steel door.
The Professor stared back with pale, blank eyes. He never spoke to the guards, but his eyes unnerved Luca Jimenez more than any heckling could’ve done. Luca blinked first and lowered his eyes.
“Yo! Jimenez!”
The shout came from two cells down, occupied by a burly
Norteño.
The Northern Mexicans were currently at war with the blacks. Hatchet Juarez made an obscene gesture with his hand at his crotch.
Hatchet always tried to get a rise out of the guards. “You too pretty to work this shift,
hermano.”
Luca had learned not to respond or engage with the inmates.
In spite of his height and muscles, a result of years working on the New Mexico farm, his baby face betrayed him. The verbal attacks were nothing personal, just the natural psychosis of the caged beast.
Even so, he breathed easier when he walked through the pod gate, controlled by the single, armed officer who managed the six pods of eight cells each from the high enclosure of the X-shaped area.
The row of grated red doors stood like a line of entrances to hell.