Warden Riley knew well enough the factions that made a prison, each kings of their domain, from the captains to the guards to the inmates. Each had a hierarchy, and though it was his name alone at the highest peak, he didn’t labor under the illusion that he ever had full control.
So when Blackjack filed his report, Warden Riley knew it would not have been Joseph Macauley that started the trouble, but the report also stated clear enough that it was Joseph that ended it. Riley saw to it that the bigger man, Mick Hannigan, would be transferred once he left the infirmary. The boy, White, it was a first offense, so he’d do a month in solitary, then move back into general population, where the Brand would punish him worse than Riley ever could. And as for Joseph, Riley took a little pleasure in taking back his access to death row, and in turn their access to the library, as if he had foreseen this long before.
“I take no pleasure in this,” he said.
Patch stood.
“You watch yourself,” Riley said. “And you know why I say that.”
“Yes, sir.”
Blackjack walked him back and handed over the sack of books removed from the lifers’ cells.
It was only as Patch returned to the library and began shelving the returns that he felt it.
In a beaten copy of Janie Crawford’s story that had lain in Marty Tooms’s hands.
Patch removed a single envelope hidden well enough.
He stared at it, Tooms’s handwriting a beautiful sweep of cursive so archaic that for a moment Patch did not register the name on the front of the letter.
And how he knew it.