Convict Island Page 2

  I walked over to Chris. “Give me the gun.”

  He stared blankly at me, the gun dangling from his limp hand and his eyes wide but absent of rational thought. I reached down and took the gun. His lips quivered, and to this day I’m not sure if it was because he ended another man’s life or because he thought of the years he was about to lose with his children. I knew I couldn’t take away the guilt, but I realized I could give him the years.

  “Just sit on the curb,” I told him. “We’ll be fine. It was self-defense.”

  I didn’t even convince myself. The other guy hadn’t fired a shot, and there was no evidence he even had a weapon. The cops would pull up, find a corpse—a white corpse—with the two of us by it. And me covered in blood that didn’t belong to me.

  The sirens intensified.

  I wiped Chris’ gun clear of his prints then put my own on it and threw it onto the sidewalk. “What are you…” Chris started, his question trailing off in confusion.

  “I’m taking the fall,” I said flatly.

  He furrowed his brow.

  “Life without a dad sucks,” I explained. “I want you to be there for your kids. I’ll plead self-defense and try to get off.”

  “No. I—”

  “Yes,” I insisted. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. I’m a minor that’ll be sent to juvie for a few years. You’ll be sent to the big house with real criminals. How you gonna be a dad behind bars? What’ll that do to your family?”

  “You’re my family, too.” Tears pooled at the bottom of his eyes.

  I took a deep breath. “That’s why I’m doing this, Chris. I need to know that you understand.”

  Red and blue lights flashed onto the scene. Things were happening too fast for Chris to keep up. It was then that I realized he was going to allow me to do it. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I wanted him to let me. Finally, he nodded.

  “Let’s kneel and put our hands up,” I told him. He was still in shock—either on account of me taking the hit, or because of everything that’d happened. “Kneel so they don’t shoot us,” I repeated, tapping his elbow.

  The cops arrived with their weapons drawn. There was a lot of yelling before they handcuffed us. Chris stared stupidly at me, then an officer wrenched him to his feet and shoved him into a car. I went into another. As they pushed my head down and I squirmed into the backseat, I saw the black car slowly drive by in another alley. The window was down, and the white man in sunglasses pushed his face towards the opening. He smiled, and the car slowly pulled away.

  Chapter 3

  There wasn’t anything of significance in the combined three months of trials and prison time—although the trial seemed to go rather quickly. I always thought they took forever, but this was clearly a special case for some reason. As far as my prison time…well, if you’ve ever watched any prison show or movie, you can make assumptions on what my days looked like, and your assumptions will most likely be fairly accurate. Bad food. Cramped quarters. Terrifying bad guys. You know—that kind of stuff.

  On November 26th, I was summoned to the visiting area. Scattered throughout the room were round tables that had probably been white at one time, but were now faded with chipped edges and peeling surfaces. Most were filled with prisoners that’d been granted a short visit—I couldn’t help but think back to how obsessed my friends were with their phones, happy to trade face-to-face conversations for stilted, emoji-filled banter. Prison has a way of making you appreciate the freedom to have conversations you didn’t care about before.

  Anyway. Sitting on the uncomfortably hard chair, I heard my lawyer making her way down the hall, heels clicking like a horse on concrete. She sat across from me, making a show of putting her bright burgundy briefcase on the table and pulling out documents. “I’m going through an appeals process,” she said. “Keep your hope alive. That’s important.”

  “What’s the appeal for? I confessed.”

  “Them trying you as an adult.” Her tight ponytail bounced as she shook her head. “While your sentence is typical for murder in New York—”

  “Twenty-four years,” I interrupted. The number was engraved in my mind. Two-hundred and eighty-eight months. Eight-thousand seven-hundred and sixty days. Over 210,000 hours.

  “But less with good behavior,” she encouraged. “Which you’ll get.” She gestured to my hand, which was wrapped because of my most recent run-in with Mitch—my newest best friend and roommate. “Please tell me you didn’t start a fight.”

  I gave her an “are you kidding me” look. “Am I stupid? Do you really think I’d pick a fight with a grown man? In prison?”

  “Then what—”

  “My cellmate doesn’t care for me. He seems a bit more interested in his hobbies—which include bruising my skin and breaking my bones, making me bleed—you know, that kind of stuff.”

  “Oh my god.” She stopped shuffling documents. “Are you okay?”

  “Well, the stitches came out three days ago, so that was a big day.” I held up my hand. “Then he broke three of my fingers because I ate my own dessert without asking him if he’d like to have it.”

  She looked down.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, guilty for making her feel bad.

  “Well,” she moved on, “while your sentence is typical for murder, I’m appealing that they should not have charged you as an adult.”

  Yeah. I’d like to make sure this goes on record: I really got screwed with that one—who knew that in the New York court system, seventeen is considered adult? It’s a fun fact that threw my plan of juvie out the window. When the lawyer first told me, I’d cried.

  I said, “You told me seventeen is an adult in our state court. I’m seventeen.”

  “And in high school.” She said this as if it negated my age somehow.

  “Like most seventeen-year-olds,” I answered, annoyance starting to creep into my tone.

  The tired argument puttered along, with her insistence I should’ve been sent to juvie. Despite her talk, I felt it was more of a show for my benefit than for actual change. She knew I was screwed and that I’d be stuck with the big boys until my time was up. I sent her away in frustration and went back to my cell.

  It’s important that it goes on record that after my lawyer started working on getting me out of prison that the rest of this went down. Thirty minutes after she left, I was startled by the clanging of a nightstick smacking between my cell bars. A clean-shaven guard with an ironed uniform held long chains. This was new.

  I assumed he was there for Mitch because I’d never done anything remotely close to causing a stir. If anything, I was a nuisance for requesting ibuprofen, cold compresses, and stitches. “Are you here to give me a new bed?” I asked the guard and grinned. “The springs on this one come through the mattress and jab me in the back.”

  “If you hadn’t killed someone, you’d be in your own bed at home.” He sounded like a teacher bored of arguing with a student.

  “Touché.”

  He came in and cuffed me, then hooked the chain to my wrists, leaving the rest to dangle at my feet. He gave me ankle cuffs and watched as I put them on, then threw another set to Mitch. Mitch didn’t move his beefy body, but instead just stared at him. “No.”

  The guard thumped him on the shoulder with the stick. Mitch could’ve rearranged the guard’s teeth if he wanted, but instead he cursed and locked his cuffs, then told me to connect the chains. When finished, Mitch looked at me. It was the first time I’d seen fear cross his eyes. Ever. That was when I realized that I should probably be nervous.

  “Move,” the guard demanded, pointing out of the cell.

  “These kinda make it a slow process,” I said.

  He looked hard at me.

  “Where we goin’?” Mitch asked.

  Another hard look. “Move,” the guard repeated.

  I huffed. “Thanks for the clarification.”

  My chains clinked on the solid slab of floor as I waddled along. We passed other
cells, then stopped at Deonte’s, interrupting his pushup regimen. He, too, asked the guard where we were going—though he used more expletives. The guard didn’t answer him either, though he responded a bit more politely. Deonte was…well-known. Best not to get on his bad side.

  I couldn’t understand my connection with the other two men. Unlike them, I was new to the prison world. I may have been convicted as a killer, but even the murder I pled guilty to was nothing like their history.

  We moved past other cells. When we got to a locked door that led outside, our guard knocked and a little rectangular panel slid open. Eyes peered in from the other side. “I have them,” our escort announced. The slot closed and the door cranked open loudly, piercing the silent hallway.

  Once outside, we walked on a slim sidewalk with weeds sneaking up through cracks across the surface. Two fenced-in prison yards surrounded us, topped with barbed wire coiled at the top. At the end of our path was a pale white bus with three blue stripes along the side. Its motor was running.

  I waited at the bottom of the bus steps as the guard unhooked me from my fellow convicts, then climbed in to find it empty. I sat on a bench seat alone. Nobody spoke. I looked out the window, away from the prison.

  We rode for about an hour before stopping in front of a small black building on the outskirts of the city. Nothing distinguished the building from its neighbors. No signs. No titles. Dark windows impossible to see through. A small parking lot with a scattering of black sedans.

  “Let’s go,” the guard demanded when the bus parked.

  None of us bothered to ask where we were. We got out, hooked together once again, then made our way towards the building. The sun was shining, but it was windy and smelled like rain. When we reached the building’s door, the guard pushed a red button below a small metal speaker on the wall. He looked up to the camera in the corner. There was a loud CLICK! and the guard pulled the door open. A breeze from the air-conditioned building swept out and cooled my sweaty skin.

  We were greeted by six guys in dark suits and power ties. A seventh dude looked like a bouncer—chiseled muscles popping out from beneath his all-black, skin-tight shirt that he must’ve bought from the children’s section. He had guns holstered to both thighs and a variety of police tools strapped to his black belt—mace, club, flashlight, cuffs.

  Nobody talked. The silence was annoying. And weird. And oddly intimidating. They escorted us to an austere room with poor lighting and a large rectangular mirror. Three plain metal chairs were in the middle of the room. We sat. The six suited guys walked past us silently and sat behind a table on an elevated floor. They looked down at us. One of them finally spoke. “You are being moved from the New York incarceration facility to a more private sector.”

  Excitement built as I naively imagined the sweet new digs—maybe they realized their mistake in sending someone my age to the barbaric prison and were rectifying it by shipping me to a more benevolent holding. But I looked to the convicts on either side of me. They weren’t deserving of—or in need of—a kinder home. So . . .

  The man continued. “You have been selected for Convict Island, where you will remain, joining felons already there.”

  “What the hell is Convict Island?” Mitch asked, reading my mind.

  The man glanced at the mirror, unsure how to answer. Someone was watching. Someone else was in charge, and this guy didn’t want to overstep his bounds and say something he shouldn’t. A more confident guy interceded. We’ll call him Suit #2. “Our incarceration numbers have increased exponentially over the last few years,” he explained. “We have been placing some felons on our secluded island to relieve the overcrowded prisons.”

  “An island prison? Like Alcatraz?” I asked.

  “Not quite,” he said. “There is no prison. The island is the prison. There are no guards. There will be no rations. No parole. No visits. No release. No—”

  “—Rules,” Mitch interrupted, smiling.

  Suit #2 grinned malevolently. “None that we will enforce. Or establish. Or care about.”

  My palms suddenly needed to be wiped on my orange pants to dry the sweat. No guards. No rules. I’m screwed, I thought. Such a place would be a dream come true for guys like Mitch and Deonte, but a hellish nightmare for someone like me—an innocent kid seen as a guilty felon, surrounded by grown murderers? “Woah, woah, woah!” Fear oozed out my pores along with the beads of sweat. “You just leave us on an island to die?”

  The original Suit looked coldly back at me. “No. We leave you. It’s on you whether you die or not. Good luck.”

  “I can’t even swim!” I yelled at him.

  “Swimming will be the least of your worries,” he said flippantly. “I assure you.”

  Mitch snorted. “Good luck,” he chuckled, echoing Suit #1’s indifference.

  Suit #3 decided to get involved. “You leave now. A ship will escort you to the destination.”

  All the Suits stood to leave.

  “Why us?” I asked.

  “We have our reasons,” Suit #3 said, giving us nothing more.

  Silence. I knew they weren’t going to elaborate. “I wanna see my brother,” I demanded. “I have rights. I only have twenty-four years, not life without parole! You can’t just send me away.”

  “We can,” Suit #4 said while the other Suits pushed chairs in, buttoning their jackets. “You no longer exist.”

  “Of course I exist. My brother’s gonna visit the prison. What are you gonna tell him?” I asked confidently.

  “Your brother is receiving word now that two weeks ago you were tragically killed in a prison riot.”

  Two weeks. My hyperthymesia brain took me back to the riot on November 12th. It was a big one. There was even a fire that led to one of the blocks being turned to ash. Guards had hustled about, weapons drawn, ready to quell the rage of testosterone-filled murderers on a rampage. I hadn’t been down in the pit with the frenzy, but I realized with a start that all guards were focused on getting the riot under control. That meant my cellmate had free reign to do what he wanted. I could scream as loud as I wanted and nobody would come running. I leapt to get out, but Mitch had slid in front of the opening. He gave me a huge grin and then pounced.

  Two weeks after the riot, the stitches from my upper lip were removed, I could eat solid food, see out of my left eye, and walk without limping. Had that riot been staged for this? They could’ve easily gotten another prisoner to start it, affording them their current lie. It wouldn’t take much to bribe a prisoner—cigarettes could suffice for most of them.

  I forced myself back to the moment. “What about my body?” I asked. “They’ll wanna bury me. You don’t have a body.”

  “Sadly, the riot caused a large fire, burning Jhalon beyond recognition. We cremated the body.” Suit #2 dropped my name like I was already dead.

  Son of a bitch. I’d wondered how a prisoner could start a fire. They must’ve been given something. Or maybe a guard started it. My hope fizzled.

  “We will hand the ashes over so he and the family can grieve appropriately. Such a tragedy to lose someone so young,” Suit #1 said.

  They covered their tracks well. I was curious if they did this for all prisoners taken to Convict Island.

  “Jhalon could have turned his life around and gotten out on good behavior,” Suit #5 added as he stepped down. “So sad.”

  “Tragic,” Suit #6 responded as he walked towards the door, playing along in the sick drama they created.

  My mind shifted to my brother and how he’d react to the news. What it would do to him. The guilt that already ate away at his soul would multiply a hundredfold. He’d lose his mind knowing I was in prison to save him, and now believing I was dead because of it.

  “Are there any more questions?” Suit #1 asked when reaching the door.

  I was too stunned to respond. The Suits walked out. I stood without thinking, and the bouncer guard punched me in the kidney. I dropped to the chair.

  “You rise when I s
ay,” he told me.

  Mitch looked at me, appearing happy about the whole thing. “Relax,” he feigned encouragement. “It’ll be a beautiful island. Like a vacation.”

  “I can’t swim,” I said again through gritted teeth, wondering if I’d be pissing blood in the near future.

  “Then you better hope they drop us off on the island and not in the water.” He laughed again.

  Spoiler: they didn’t.

  Chapter 4

  I spent over a week below deck on a ship, vomiting from sea sickness. On the morning of December 6th, Mitch’s fake words of encouragement proved to be inaccurate—instead of being unloaded on a pristine beach loaded with hula girls awaiting my arrival, the sunlight blinded me as I stood on deck, squinting through watery eyes to see the island I figured would be my grave.

  The ship groaned as it slowed its forward trajectory and began turning awkwardly against the waves. It now sat parallel with the island a good hundred yards away. An officer talked while pacing in front of me, Deonte, and Mitch, but I didn’t comprehend his words. Fear had taken over. The only thing running through my mind was, “This can’t be happening.”

  He put a knife in my trembling hand. I shoved it in my pocket absentmindedly as if I’d been given spare change. The burly man in uniform stopped in front of me. “You listening, Jhalon?”

  I snapped out of my haze. Then I bent over and threw up again, but not from sea sickness. The vomit splattered on the deck, decorating the officer’s shoes. He gave me a disgusted look, then resumed pacing. “I said you and your two buddies aren’t the first deadbeats to be dropped off. Assuming the others haven’t killed each other by now, you may get to meet them.”

  He laughed with his subordinates. They clearly enjoyed drop-offs—like spectators watching gladiators. The officer cleared his throat. “We’re not wasting fuel to get closer for your convenience. You’re jumping overboard here.”

  Deadly scenarios had run through my mind while I was tied and gagged below deck for the last week. Being beaten to death by heartless men free to do what they wish. Getting devoured by a man-eating cat. But drowning before I even got to the island?