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Alcatraz Island

Alcatraz Island, 1.5 miles across the bay from San Francisco, was named for the pelicans that originally colonized it. Most locals referred to it as “the Rock.” Humans first used it as a military fortress, housing prisoners there as early as the Civil War. The lonely and impassive concrete cell block that now defined the island was completed in 1912. In 1933, the US Department of Justice acquired the land and turned it into a storage facility for prisoners who caused too much trouble to be housed anywhere else.

The first batch of the worst of the worst arrived on August 11, 1934. The legendary prison held the likes of Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, James “Whitey” Bulgur, and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. Agent Clancy Johnson didn’t particularly care for criminal name-­dropping. He just knew the old prison gave him the willies. It was a haunted house of cinderblock windows and industrial cells straight out of a Russian gulag flick.

Alcatraz had officially closed its prison doors in 1963 on order from then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. It cost $10 a day to house criminals there, compared to $3 anywhere else. That, and the prisoners and guards and their families were dumping all their sewage into the Bay. It was floating onshore.

The prisoners were moved to Illinois that same year.

Clancy figured they hadn’t gotten it any easier.

In 1969 the Native Americans took over the Rock, calling Indians from as far away as Minneapolis to occupy the island for nearly two years. The Indians protested all the land and rights the US government had stolen from them over the centuries. It worked—Nixon rescinded the Indian Termination Policy in 1971 as a direct result of the Alcatraz occupation. Somehow, Clancy suspected Gina Hayes would avoid that page in the history books when she delivered her speech.

Hayes was arriving tomorrow to speak about prison reform, an area where Clancy happened to agree with her wholeheartedly. Sometime during Clancy’s tenure with the FBI, prisons had turned into a for-profit business, and that didn’t sit well with him. It was simple math: if you made more money the more criminals you had, you were invested in creating more criminals, and there was no more efficient criminal factory than a prison.

You maybe went in stupid—knocked over a convenience store for a pack of smokes, broke a cop’s window on a dare—but you came out hard, and you brought that back to your community like an infection. Crimes in the US were dropping, but prison numbers were increasing to the tune of $25,000 a year for each of the 2.5 million incarcerated, billed directly to American taxpayers. And much of it was sliding into the pockets of the prison-owning tycoons, thank you very much. Clancy wasn’t a hippie, nor was he a philosopher, but his father had raised a practical man, and he didn’t like those numbers.

Hayes and Clancy parted ways from that point on, politically speaking.

Clancy wasn’t sure if the Hermitage had pulled strings to assign him to dry clean the island the evening before Hayes’s historic speech and in advance of the Secret Service’s sweep tomorrow, or if it was legitimately part of his FBI assignment. He figured the latter, because Stone was here too. Clancy knew for a fact that the Hermitage had arranged his own shift on the island tomorrow, though. He had a job to do for them.

Personally, the island gave Clancy the creeps. It resembled one of those raised pieces in the Game of Life, the green plastic bluffs with a road carved through them, only on Alcatraz, the road was carved around the edges, and it was a walking path with a bunch of haunted old buildings sprinkled in the middle. A red handprint marked the door of the prison. Inside, the floor was bomb scarred. Clancy was fine keeping this search cursory. Stone was going to town, though, checking every nook and cranny on the weird old prison as if he could locate a gun that someone genuinely wanted hidden.

As if anyone who really wanted Hayes dead would stuff the gun on the island in advance, rather than contract with someone who was not only allowed to bring a gun with him but was required to do so when working.

Clancy stared through a barred sliver of window, watching Stone sprint up the stone steps of the old recreation yard, the shadow of the rickety water tower concealing his partner for a moment. No way could Clancy do that, even on a good day. His bones were the same age as the rest of him—seventy-two. That’s when he wondered if he was up for this job. The money sure would be nice. He and Jenny could retire to the Caribbean.

He chuckled, and it turned into a smoker’s cough, a habit he’d given up five years earlier but which still rattled around his lungs. Who the hell was he fooling? If he had all the time and money in the world, the first thing he’d do was leave her.

Maybe he’d take up fishing. Buy a hut somewhere, gawk at the tourist girls. Drink beer.

Yeah, he liked the feel of that on his back.

He patted his gun and strolled back into the sunshine.