Read Death Row Breakout for Free Online Page A

steel cables. He was dark-skinned, but his features were more Arabic than African: hooked nose, thin lips, sharp cheekbones. Booker had talked to him in the bullpen while waiting for court. “How ya doin’, Book?” he asked. “Tell me about it.”
    “You tell me. You know it.”
    “Jus’ wait a minute and they’ll come for us.”
    It was only seconds. The door beside the gun cage opened. A man in prison guard uniform entered. He had a lieutenant’s bars on his shirt collar. Hawk made a sound of distaste. “Whitehead.”
    “Who’s Whitehead?”
    “That’s him… an’ he’s a dirty –”
    Beside Whitehead appeared the sheriff’s deputy. Together they counted heads and signed a receipt. The prison guard carried a cane, the bottom six inches of which was tipped with lead. He banged it on the floor. “When I call your name, come forward. Who’s Johnson?”
    Booker raised his hand. “Right here.”
    “You stay where you are.” He began calling names. As each man hobbled to the door, a prison guard put handcuffs on him – and then the sheriff’s deputies removed the leg-irons and dropped them in a pile; property of Los Angeles County. The men now belonged to the State of California. They disappeared through the door. Booker watched Lieutenant Whitehead, a big man with rolls of flesh up his neck from his shirt collar to his cap. God had made him a physical bull, but at forty-one, rotgut Prohibition booze had added eight inches around the waist since he was twenty-two. His lead-tipped cane was draped over his wrist.
    When the railroad car was empty, Lieutenant Whitehead beckoned for Booker. As Booker hobbled down the aisle, the lieutenant wore a sneer. Booker expected him to say something, but at the last moment the lieutenant turned and went out. The waiting guard put the handcuffs on him. Instead of removing the leg-irons, the deputy motioned him out.
    At the steps, Booker saw why the leg-irons were removed. It was too big a step to the ground. Ahead of him, the other men were being loaded onto two buses. Around them were prison guards and deputy sheriffs. The sun was up, turning the Bay into a lake of molten pewter. Booker wondered why a prison had been built on such a beautiful piece of real estate.
    Booker hesitated. How could he get down? Using both handcuffed hands, he grabbed the vertical rail and swung himself down. When he dropped to the ground, it was sloped and sent him sprawling into Lieutenant Whitehead, whose back was to him. Both of them crashed into the ground, Booker on top.
    “Get off me, Sambo! Goddamnit!”
    Guards arrived instantly, hauling Booker up, then helping the lieutenant to his feet. He brushed himself off, glaring with a red face, his embarrassment doubled by the snickers of the watching convicts. “Smart ass, nigger, are you?”
    “It was an accident, cap’n. Swear it!” Booker felt sickly in his stomach. He’d hoped to fade into the multitude of numbered men. In the county jail an ex-con had told him that, among nearly five thousand convicts, it was easy to go unnoticed. With such a minor sentence, he would be gone before the guards got to know his name. That hope was threatened at the outset.
    “Swear it!” ranted Lieutenant Whitehead. “I’ll be a sonofabitch… a convict that
swears
it. I’ve heard it all now.”
    The two buses moved along the road toward the prison reservation. San Quentin occupied fifty-three acres behind the walls, and several times that on the reservation. To the left was water, and there were low rolling hills on the other side. To the right was a low-rise building; the prison road ran beside it. The buses rounded a curve and the prison was visible – a long cell-house angling left, and on a ridge on the right were a row of big houses. Their big front windows looked down over the prison walls into San Quentin.
    No rain fell at the moment, but the ground was dark and wet, and the rolling clouds, black and gray, announced that rain would fall