Chapter 14

“Eight of us guards went for a drink last night,” Chega continued in his Whitney Pier accent, dulled somewhat by living most of his life in Dartmouth. “We’re a real close group. Normally, that includes Todd. Not last night…” He trailed off and his face started to go red again.
“Go on Caleb,” Smith said.
“I’m sorry, it just makes me so mad... I got pride for what we do here, you know? We’re all South Unit. With your hardened criminals. We share intelligence with eachother. We’re a real tight bunch. Common misery, eh?”
“You got that right, bud,” Smith said, laughing.
Chega and Smith talked with their heads very close together, likeold friends.
“Anyway’s, two weeks ago, two of the boys on day shift opened an incoming letter addressed to ‘Cock’ Spalding-“
Smith tilted his face slightly at the words “letter” and “Cock Spalding.” Evidence. He almost started salivating. “Can we get a copy of that?”
“Yeah, yeah, just listen for a minute. So, they scan all the mail in here and we pay strict attention to Spalding’s mail. We read every Jesus letter he gets. Anyways, he received a letter from an offender at a Quebec prison who said he was at his mandatory release date and he was willing to come and help Spalding with his problems. He wrote something like: ‘I’m getting out Monday. I hear about the fun down there, dada-dat-da, dee-deet-deet-dee, I’ll see about getting someone on the list.’”
Smith’s ears perked up again. “The ‘list?’ What list?”
“-Quit interrupting me, Bob. Jesus. The letter also referred to Todd Purcell by his inmate nickname. Toad or The Toad.”
Sgt. Digby interrupted this time. “-What Quebec offender? Was it anybody we know?”
She was seated on Spalding’s platform bed with her pen and notebook out.
“Yes. You’ll know the name. Joey Robichaud Junior,” Chega said, looking from face to face, making sure everybody registered the significance of the name.
Smith smiled to himself and shook his head. “Joe Junior. That makes perfect sense. We’ve seen him back in Halifax. I guess he served every day of his Jesus sentence. No parole.”
In Canada, every offender is entitled to parole after serving two-thirds of their sentence. The only way to not get paroled is if your case mangement team feels it’s a 100 per cent certainty you will commit a violent crime upon release.
Joe Junior was a Nova Scotia-born thug, who had been incarcerated in Quebec for the past few years for conspiracy to drug traffick, Digby knew.
He was transferred to Quebec from the maximum security Atlantic Institution in Renous, New Brunswick after allegedly forming a brutal prison gang there and badly disfiguring another inmate.
The story was well-known. For work detail, prisoners at Renous do body work on vehicles for the Canadian Armed Forces, like the Jeep ambulance.
After a shift in the workshop, all tools must be returned to a large peg board with the shape of each tool outlined on it and nobody is allowed to leave the shop until every tool is back in its rightful place. It’s a low-tech security system that had generally proven foolproof over the years.
Generally.
Joe Junior was said to have constructed a foldable replica of the hand-held circular grinder out of cardboard and a hairbrush. He hung the fake grinder on the pegboard and smuggled the real one back to his cell with the handle stuck in his ass.
The next morning, instead of lifting rust off a Jeep ambulance chassis, he lifted the face off a rival gang member.