Gun Shy(10)

“Good behavior,” Martinez says, rolling his eyes. “Good one, Bentley. You sure fooled them.”

I grip the envelope tightly in my hand. “Huh?”

Martinez lifts his chin towards the envelope in my hand. “Early release for good behavior. You got somewhere to go, boy?” It’s ironic that he calls me a boy, because I’m twenty-five years old now, and I haven’t been a boy for a very long time. Hard time makes you grow up. If you’re not a man when you enter prison, you’ll sure as hell be one by the time you get out.

“Uh…” I can’t string a sentence together. I feel like I’ve just had the shit knocked out of me. As I tear the letter open and scan down the print, I can barely understand what it says. It could be written in Chinese, for all I know. Not because I can’t read—I was a straight-A student in high school, even though I was a little prick to my teachers—but because I can’t believe what Martinez has just said.

I’m finally leaving this shithole.

I’ve been granted parole.

Cassie. For a moment, I imagine seeing her again. Kissing her. Fucking her in the backseat of my car, sucking on her neck as she made those little sighs of pleasure beneath me. The way her eyes used to light up whenever she saw me.

Then I remember her in the hospital, the last time I saw her before they arrested me and dumped my sorry ass in jail. Her eyes didn’t light up for me as our gazes met over her comatose mother. Jesus, Cassie, if you knew how fucking sorry I was, for everything.



Saturday, I’m out of here. In three days.

Part of me feels like I’m not ready. Even though I want out of this hellhole, the problem is where I’m going after this. I’m almost considering stabbing somebody in here just so I don’t have to go back to Gun Creek and face Cassie and Sheriff King.

Guard Ramsay is sitting across from me, a fifty-something weed of a guy with thick glasses perched on his nose and liver spots on his hands. He looks as bad as I feel, and that’s saying something.

This place’ll break you if you let it, or if they keep you here for long enough. My sentence for felony DUI causing injury was nineteen years, so the fact they’re paroling me now is a fucking miracle. I haven’t even served half my sentence.

As far as luck goes, I’m pretty much all out, but the one glimmer of hope in my case was the fact that, even though my dumb, drugged-out ass plowed off the road and into the creek at high speed, with an unrestrained passenger, I had a clean record. No priors.

Sheriff King pushed and pushed the courts to give me the maximum sentence, and I don’t blame the guy. Technically I killed his wife, but she’s still locked in some vegetative state where she can’t eat or speak or do anything. She can’t even kill herself to escape what I did to her. She’s just a bag of bones now, bedsores and bedpans, because I was dumb enough to get behind the wheel, drunk and high, and fly down the highway.

Guard Ramsay clears his throat, looking at me over the Coke-bottle-thick glasses he’s wearing as he takes a bite of his sandwich and chews. “You got something on your mind, boy?”

I shake my head. “No, sir.”

He leans back in his chair and takes his glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looks dead tired. He’s old for his age. Old and worn out from being in a place like this. His sandwich smells like greasy, old lunchmeat.

“Have you read through the conditions of your parole?” he asks.

I nod, scrubbing my hand across my face. The razors in here are always fucking blunt. There’s no point shaving when you’re still left with a five-o-clock shadow, but by the same token, if you don’t shave every day you end up with a bushy fucking beard on your face. Nobody wants any more hair than absolutely necessary here. I’ve seen guys with pieces of scalp missing because they wouldn’t give up their cigarettes and someone decided to rip their hair out of their skull.

“You go home. You get a job. You check in with the sheriff’s department every week. And if you don’t, son, your ass is gonna be back in that cell so damn fast, you’ll think you dreamed getting out of this shithole.”

I nod, clenching and unclenching my fist.

“Most people in your position would be a damn sight more excited right about now,” Ramsay says.

I shrug. “Most people didn’t kill the Sheriff’s wife.”

The blood drains from Ramsay’s face as he glances down at the papers in front of him. “Says here you’re in for DUI and bodily harm. Not murder.”

“Wasn’t murder. And she’s not dead. Not yet, anyway.”

“What the hell kind of statement is that, boy? You threatening that she might die if you go home? You got a grudge against this woman?”

I sigh, scuffing my sneaker along the worn linoleum floor. Somebody has written RAMSAY IS A CUNT on the floor in marker. Obviously, he didn’t read my files to know what happened with Cassie’s mom. Nobody ever reads the files.

“No threats, sir. She’s in a delicate state, is all.”

Ramsay flips a manila folder open and reads something in front of him. I turn my head to try and see, but he closes it. “A persistent vegetable state,” he says.

“Vegetative,” I correct him before I can think.

He glares at me over his glasses. “That’s what I said. You got ears full of wax, boy?”