The Best Laid Plans

On a dry, dusty afternoon, two men stood inside the exit gate at the California Men’s Prison in Corcoran, California, a large, foreboding complex surrounded by high, chain-link fencing with bands of concertina wire at its apex. Ominous-looking concrete silos, with Plexiglas guard shacks manned by rifle-toting guards, stood like silent sentinels around the complex’s perimeter.

One of the men, a prison guard supervisor, was a short, thick Hispanic in his late thirties with a high-and-tight military haircut, pressed khaki shirt, black tie, mirrored sunglasses and forest green trousers with a razor-sharp crease. Squinting into the bright sunlight next to him was a tall, muscular black man with a shaved head and thick mustache. He was dressed in an ill-fitting, standard-issue, civilian blue shirt, dark pants, white socks and tennis shoes.

The second man was Billy De Wine, but everyone in the prison yard and on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles knew him by his nickname “High Time.” He’d just finished three years of a five-year sentence for armed robbery, and the state prison board had granted him his release with a two-year parole.

Just before the supervisor signaled for the gate to open, he turned to Billy.