Free Fear Me by Tim Curran Page B

gangs into a single entity.
    Jailhouse lawyers were also hated by the guards.
    Starvation rations were commonplace for so much as hinting at filing a writ. Country music was tolerated, but rap and hard rock would get your radio or boombox confiscated and particularly if the guards fancied having it for their own. Letters from home were stalled if you were considered a troublemaker and any outgoing mail was read before being posted. And any tidbits of a personal or intimate nature they could glean from your mail were used to harass you with.
    Such was life at Shaddock Valley.
    The DOC liked to talk prison reform, but it was yet to be seen at Shaddock. And like old sores that have never been properly treated, only allowed to scab over, the bile and poison built up until it contaminated every nerve ending and strand of muscle, made the blood run toxic, and the entire diseased body of the prison was filled with infection.
    And it was only a matter of time before somebody lanced it.

22
    It was a bad night.
    There were never any truly good nights at Shaddock when you didn’t have a prisoner going after another or vomiting in his cell or throwing piss at a passing guard, but some were just plain worse than others. And some guards just seemed to pull the worse duty night after night.
    Leo Comiskey was like that.
    He seemed to be on permanent duty down in the hole, watching the Ad-Seg prisoners, hearing their endless gripes and complaints, listening to them scream in the dark and beg for the lights to be turned on. Even through those iron doors, you could hear them…but muffled and tinny like a voice coming from a buried box, filtered by soil.
    There were seven guys in Ad-Seg at present and they were all nervous and scared. And the reason for this was that an eighth prisoner had been added: Danny Palmquist. Way they were acting, you would have thought he was maybe the Devil orthep t>
    Comiskey didn’t care for it.
    For he knew what was going on with Palmquist and it wasn’t just the cons that were afraid of him. The guards, even the warden…they all got a funny look about them when the kid’s name was mentioned, like maybe they needed to get sick and couldn’t find a good place.
    And what surely wasn’t helping anything was the yellow crime scene tape over the door to cell #3 where Tony Gordo had died. No, that didn’t help at all.
    Two of the cons down there were newbies, both had swallowed drugs it was suspected and both were on shit watch. And that was a real treat for any guard, having to check a con’s stools. Jesus.
    It was maybe midnight when the sounds started coming from Palmquist’s cell. Funny, high-pitched squealing sounds that went right up Comiskey’s spine and echoed around in the back of his head like screams heard in the dead of night.
    Comiskey called it in, went over to the door to #14 where the kid was.
    He reached up for the bolt that would open the little security port. But like Jorgensen days before, that’s about as far as his hand got…because something inside him was hearing those sounds in there and it had literally pulled his hand back. Like a man taking a swan dive off a ten-story building, it wanted him to think very carefully about what it was he was doing here. Because there were things in life, you did them or you saw them, there was no going back.
    So Comiskey stood there, shivering like something yanked from a deep-freeze, remembering with an almost vibrant clarity the stories the other guards were telling about what they’d heard and—in the case of a few unlucky correctional officers—had actually seen.
    There are some things in life , Sergeant Warres had told his guards in an ominous whisper, that you get in your craw and they don’t never leave you. Things that’ll turn your hair fucking white and make you sleep with the lights on. You boys seen what I saw, you got a look at it and had that smell rubbed in your face, you got all you can do not to stick your service pistol in