Death Row Breakout

by Edward Bunker

  The catwalk guard opened the tiny sallyport gate, and the other guard entered. As he walked down the tier, locking individual cells, the armed guard on the catwalk walked beside him, giving him armed backup.

  When he was sure each cell was locked individually, he signaled to the guard at the lever. The security bar was raised again. The guard on the tier unlocked the next to last cell, went inside and looked around, tossing the mattress and turning his flashlight beam into the vent at the rear. It was routine and fast; how long does it take to examine a bare concrete cage four and a half feet wide and eleven feet long?

  He flashed the light down the tier. It was time to bring in the resident.

  Roger, still encumbered by cuffs and waist restraint, carried his bedding down the tier. Two guards walked with him, and the gun-rail guard walked along beside them. Sergeant Blair waited at the front by the lever to the security bar.

  As Roger walked, he looked at the faces of the doomed men in the cages. Some ignored him, others looked out with hard faces and the flat eyes of the cold-blooded killer, others with the fiery eyes of madmen. He would learn their names and their crimes as weeks went by, but for now he recognized just a few. For a moment he looked into the black eyes of Richard Romero, the “Hollywood Monster”, the most notorious serial killer of the decade. He’d committed crimes so bestial and heinous that the press refused to print the details. A man who’d been in jail with Romero told Roger that the Monster had sodomized a year-old baby while cutting its throat.

  Two cells from Romero a slender man stood at the bars with a grin. It was Jimmy Rube, half chicano member of the Mexican Mafia. Roger remembered Jimmy Rube as a handsome young man with wavy dark hair. Now the hair was thinning and grey, although the body was still slender and the face youthful. He’d served twenty-two years, and then, twenty-two days after being paroled, he and Big Strunk killed a store manager in West LA.

  “Where’s Big Strunk?” Roger asked as he passed Jimmy.

  “Right here, man,” called a voice ahead. Seconds later, Roger passed the squat black man whose powerful torso and immense arms were covered with blue, India Ink tattoos, the kind that denote jail just as surely as a missing finger on a Japanese denotes Yakuza.

  Goddamn, there seemed to be a lot of mean-looking young niggers on Death Row.

  The guard ahead held the cell gate open. Roger stepped inside. The gate closed; the security bar dropped in place; the key turned in the big door lock.

  “Back up here,” one ordered, then reached through and unfastened the waist chains. They rattled as they dropped to the floor.

  Roger held his hands up to the bars and the handcuffs were removed. The other guards departed, but Sergeant Blair remained.

  “Look, Harper, I don’t expect trouble from you, but I’ll tell you what I tell everyone.

  “You know me and I think you know I try to treat everybody right. As long as you don’t give me any grief, I’ll do whatever I can to make things easy on you up here. God knows you’ve got enough troubles already.

  “I make sure the food is hot when it gets here. They used to load the cart two hours before it came up the elevator.

  “I make sure the library sends up the law books and, if they don’t have them here, we get them from the State law library.

  “I got authorization to let inmates out on the tier together if they can get along. So instead of getting half an hour every other day, most of you get a couple hours everyday.”

  Sergeant Blair leaned closer and lowered his voice, not wanting to be heard in the adjacent cells. “Have you got any enemies up here? Somebody you don’t get along with?”

  “No.” Roger shook his head, his cheeks burning. It was true that he had no enemies – except that he loathed the Hollywood Monster – but even if he had a deadly enemy, he would never ask the man to keep him in his cell. That was one step from ratting on someone. He would have denied the fact if a mortal enemy was here. Of course, if it was two or three – with shivs…

  “The tier tender will bring blankets and… uh… an earphone for the radio and TV. Take it easy.” He patted the bars as a gesture of goodbye and turned away. The clang of the gate marked his leaving the cell area.

  Roger looked around. The cell was identical to those on the mainline, four and a half feet wide, eleven feet long. The only differences were that it had one bunk instead of two, and the wall between cells extended out an extra foot so it was impossible to reach out of the bars and pass things by hand. The cell was so narrow that he could sit on the bunk with his back resting on one wall and his feet propped on the other. This would be his home for a decade or so, while he ran through the appeals process. First came the direct appeal, followed by a Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the United States Supreme Court. If the conviction and sentence were affirmed on the trial record, he still had the remedy of the Great Writ, habeas corpus, which he had to start in the State courts. He had to exhaust State remedies before the Federal District Court had jurisdiction. He could appeal from there to the United States Court of Appeal for the 9th Circuit and, finally, one last shot at the United States Supreme Court. When he reached there, they would be strapping him in the chair. The thought made him smile, but deep inside was a knot of fear.

  From the clutter of sound, voices down the tier, gates opening and a typewriter’s rattle on the other side, a closer voice called out, “Hey, Roger baby!”

  “Is that you, Big Strunk?”

  “That’s me. Jimmy Rube says he’s gonna send you some cigarettes and magazine and coffee when Fast Eddie comes in.”

  “Who’s Fast Eddie?”

  “The tier tender – old white dude with tattoos up the ass.”

  From a cell too distant for easy conversation, Jimmy Rube yelled, “I’ll see you tomorrow when I come out to shower.”

  “I’ll be right here, man.”

  “If you ain’t, the count’s gonna be fucked up.”

  Roger spent the rest of the day getting the feel of Death Row. He watched the little he could see through the cell bars, and listened to sounds and voices. The dinging bell brought the elevator, heralding the prison’s Chief Nurse, a woman of fifty nicknamed Madam Chickenshit. She passed out medications, everything from aspirin to Thorazine, and cold pills to sleeping pills. The Chief Medical Officer was liberal with seconal. He hoped the guy killed himself. It saved the victim’s family added pain. It saved money. It rid the world of someone who didn’t deserve to live.

  Madam Chickenshit stopped at Roger’s cell and asked him if he had any medical problems. No. Then the doctor would give him a physical next week.

  The dinging bell also brought the Watch Lieutenant, making a routine survey and signing a log. Everything had to be according to the book on Death Row. The bell also heralded the rattle and bang of the food cart. Death Row got two meals a day, one about eight-thirty in the morning, the other at three in the afternoon. Everything had to be locked tight from 4:00pm to 8:00am. It was absurd to serve three meals in eight hours to be finished before 4:00pm. Everything was locked at the beginning of the third watch. Instead they got a bologna sandwich and an orange for a late-night snack and the third meal guaranteed by law.

  Besides the dinging bell announcing the elevator, he usually heard the tier gate when someone entered. The angle on the mesh and bars of the gun-walk was such that he could see only a moving shadow until the gun guard was directly in front of his cell.

  After 4:00pm, the bell rang no more. The key to the outer door was taken off Death Row and kept in Wall Post #2, the gun tower over the Big Yard gate. If someone had to enter Death Row, the key was lowered in a bucket. At midnight it came down for the shift change.

  At 6:00pm, the television sets, one for each three cells, were turned on. The speakers had been cut off and the sound was delivered by tiny earphones, through wire too thin to hang oneself. Each of the three cells controlled the remote channel changer for a week at a time. Roger didn’t give a rat’s ass what they watched. He normally wa
tched little television, but would watch more now. He’d been a reader since juvenile hall. Now he would read more, watch more TV… jack off more often, and think. What else was there to do on Death Row? At least it wasn’t like the old days in France, where you never knew when they would come for you.

  He turned off the cell light and lay in the semi-darkness. The runway lights, and floodlights on the roof of the immense cell-house, entered the cell after being sliced into linear shadows by cell bars, runway bars and wire, window bars, layer after layer of barrier to the outside night. It was air-tight. Escape crossed his mind. It always crossed his mind in a new cage. Here, however, a cursory catalogue of the security measures brought swift certainty that odds of escape were worse than rescue by the Second Coming. More likely America would have a revolution than he would escape from here.

  He knew the obstacles from the years on the mainline. He’d thought about it then. The North Cell-house rotunda and the elevator were the only places where you weren’t directly “under the gun” of an armed guard, looking down your throat. Before leaving the cell, you did the strip-search dance for the bulls, watching through the bars. They watched you put on the jumpsuit and hold your hands up to the bars so they could be cuffed in steel. The bulls barely put their fingers in until the handcuffs closed. Finally, you backed up and were wrapped in chains fastened to the cuffs and run up between your legs. If you made any kind of too-fast move, a jerk would throw you on your face. Because of the cuffs and chains you couldn’t stop the collision with concrete. No, it was unlikely that the killer could overpower three bulls in the elevator. Bull – tough bulls – with clubs, pepper spray and radios to summon immediate help. That was the weak spot. As he thought it, he snorted a laugh.

  Unless he managed to go out to a County Jail somewhere and from there escape – that was within the realm of possibility – this was where he would make his stand. Would he die like a man?

  Again the terror flashed through him. He fought it, made himself breathe more quietly. Death came to everyone. His life expectancy was a minimum of six years. How many people would give everything for six more years – even in a cell?

  Florence and her husband, the couple he’d kidnapped, came to mind. He could see them in the mirror again. It made him breathless. He would die for their murder. He would be willing to die if it could bring them back. No, that was a lie. But he would cut off an arm – and he goddamn sure would have surrendered, if he’d imagined his failing to do so would have cost their lives. He was legally responsible, and morally too – and yet… Maybe it was God’s justice on him for killing his ex-partner, Mad Dog. That crazy thought also made him snort a laugh.

  As if his laugh was a cue, a chorus of laughs issued along the tier. The murderers laughed. What the fuck was going on? Were they mocking him? Then he realized that they were all watching the same TV show and had laughed at what they’d seen.

  A conversation from the cells near the front had been going on below the threshold of his attention, but suddenly he found himself plugging in.

  “Nigger be akin’ ovah in South Africa. Wish I was there man? ’stead’a this motherfucker.”

  “Yeah, man… If I was there, man, I be killin’ soft-ass white motherfuckers… call themselves Africaners… like they be some parta Africa. Bullshit!”

  “Yeah, dig up them that’s dead and kill ’em again.”

  “When I raise from this muffucker, I’m goin’ to Africa, man. No bullshit, man. I wanna get away from white people, man. I don’t like ’em, man. I don’t like their white skin, like dead white fish. Look at this beautiful brown skin…”

  When I look at whitey, man, I think, how could sissy-ass muffucker like this conquer the muffuckin’ world, man. Y’know what I mean, nigger? Muffuckers can’ bust a muffuckin’ grape. They can’ fight a lick. When a niggah run down on ’em dey be so scared…”

  “Yeah, I can dig on that, man. It be fuckin’ weird, man.”

  Roger closed his eyes, thinking, Oh god, do I gotta listen to these idiots for a decade? Should I say something? He managed an inner smile; he was sure they’d never heard a white man murder mouth like he would if he got started.

  But the gates were locked. This was Death Row. It would be like animals in separate cages in the zoo, screaming primordial rage. If he got into it, he would probably have a stroke. It was so stupid anyway. What had they done to be sentenced to die? They must have some notoriety somewhere.

  What about Big Strunk and Jimmy Rube? It was hard to conceive their allowing such Mau Mau bullshit for very long. Strunk was on Death Row for killing a stoolpigeon on a Department of Corrections bus. Strunk wrapped his chains around the man’s neck. Guards on both ends went crazy. The driver swerved the bus back and forth. The gun guard couldn’t use the shotgun. Nobody was escaping. Strunk wasn’t known to take a lot of bullshit. Nor was Jimmy Rube. Roger had seen Rube stick a black convict prizefighter – tough with his fists – but he screamed like a woman when Jimmy Rube stuck that shiv under his ribcage. The shiv cut part of his heart. Miraculously (and because he was in such excellent condition) the sucker lived. He stopped snitching, too.

  As if by telepathy, Roger heard Jimmy Rube’s voice, “Hey, Bro’, I’ll run it by you in the mañana when I exercise.”

  “I got it, homes,” he called back, and was quiet. Again he heard the chorus of laughter at the TV. The murderers had found something funny. Roseanne? Naw. Too near reality to be funny to convicts. Too ugly, too. They wanted to watch someone young and foxy swish around the screen.

  After the night on the highway and the day being processed into Death Row, Roger was tired. When he heard the sound of convicts moving across the Big Yard, their voices floating up through the night air, he could close his eyes and see them walking along the white lines, watched by riflemen on catwalks. Roger knew the scene because he’d attended night school to prepare for his GED. A lot of good it had done him. Sleep embraced him. If he dreamed, he had no memory of it.

  In the morning, after breakfast and cleanup, Sergeant Blair could be heard coming down the tier and calling out to someone, “Shower and exercise,” and when he passed Roger without stopping, Roger called him back. “Sarge, what’s up? Am I on cell status?”

  “You gotta be classified. I don’t know who to let you out with.”

  “Let me out with anybody.”

  “We don’t do it that way – too much trouble. You’ll probably be with Strunk and Rube and that kid.”

  Roger heard Sergeant Blair turn the key on one cell gate. As soon as he left the tier, the security bar went up.

  A cell gate opened and closed.

  A moment later, Richard Romero slithered past, flicking his eyes into each cell. He had a peculiar stride, with his ass under slung and his slippered feet sliding along the floor, that reminded Roger of a snake. Roger refused to acknowledge the maniac’s existence. He had no fear of such monsters. Invariably they were cowards if the victim wasn’t helpless. Fear was deeply involved in their crimes. They swam in it and derived great pleasure from inflicting it. If I could lay my hands on this motherfucker, Roger thought, envisioning smashing his fists into Romero’s face – or taking a claw hammer to his head. To avoid looking at the monster and working himself up, Roger put on the earphones and closed his eyes, listening to the music on the prison radio.

  Later, he heard a guard yell, “Romero, lock up.” He heard the cell gate shut and the security bar go down, followed by the guard coming in, locking the cell gate and unlocking three others. The gates were still shut until the guard went out and lifted the bar. Then, gates came open and clanked shut. Roger “saw” it all in the sounds, which he understood from a lifetime of hearing similar noises.

  Jimmy Rube and Strunk appeared outside the bars, both grinning. Strunk was shirtless and carried a towel and a soap dish. His skin was freckled, his chest immense, his arms gigantic. He had so many jailhouse tattoos that his body looked like a wall of graffiti. “Hey, my brother, I’m sorry to see your sorry o
ld ass – but I can’t talk to you right now. I gotta go shower. I’ll be back. Talk to Rube. He’s got shit to tell you.”

  “Okay, Muscles. See ya later. Rub oil on the fine body.”

  “Man, fuck you,” Strunk said, turning away. Then stopped. “I’ve got some magazines down there. A stack of New Yorkers. You want ’em?”

  “Yeah, sure, send ’em down.”

  Strunk nodded without turning, and went on down the tier.

  Rube stepped forward; his eyes had a brightness at odds with the situation. “Sorry you’re here, homeboy but… you wanna get out?”

  Roger wondered if he’d heard right. “Come again?”

  “Would you believe you got here in time to break out?”

  Roger’s heartbeat skipped as hope ignited – but a moment later the cynicism of reality made him dubious. “How’s that gonna happen?”

  Rube glanced over his shoulder to make sure the gun-walk guard was nowhere nearby. Rube lowered his voice. “We’ve cut the gun-walk bars and screen.”

  Could that be true? Yet even if it was true, where would they go? They were still on Death Row. “So what then?”

  “Oh man, don’t be so negative. It took us a motherfuckin’ year to do it. Now we’re about a week from cutting Strunk’s bars. We take it real slow – when the TVs are on and suckers are talking – muffle the sound in soap and rags.

  “Anyway, when Strunk can get out of his cell, we wait till the first watch, after midnight, he goes out there and snatches the gun-bull. The gun-bull can go through a gate out front. He grabs the Sergeant and the other bull.

  “Outside the tier, there’s that window on that side.” Rube gestured to indicate where he meant.

  “We cut the bars on the window and we’re on the roof.”

  Roger could see the scene. That high window was above an outdoor gun-rail, and 10 feet below the roof of a building that housed the bachelor officers’ quarters and radio room. On at least one occasion Roger knew of, a convict had climbed on the roof by the mess hall and then crawled right past this point. The roof here joined with the roof of the Custody Office and Inside Parole Office. At the corner, where the building ended, was a blind spot where the escaping convict got out unseen. But where then? They’d be captured trying to get across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a long shot. But give a guy a long shot who was facing certain death – and he’d take it.