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“Can you …”Strap groaned. The police officer pinning his arm to his back, tightened his grip, digging fingernails into his skin. “Keep doing that, and you’re going to break my fucking arm.”
“Keep quiet if you know what’s good for you.”
Rolling his eyes, Strap offered little resistance as the wall of police officers that enclosed him escorted him out of the museum. Squinting his eyes, he gawked at the countless police cars that flashed irritating lights.
The evening sky looked particularly soothing that night. Strap found himself focusing on the hues splotched above, somewhat dissociating from the events around him.
This can’t be happening to me.This isn’t real. And where’s Mick? Did they catch him too?
A few moments later, he received his answer.
A small crowd of people gathered in front of the museum, some of them civilians and some of them journalists, who rushed there at the sound of a breaking news story.
Beyond that, Strap’s eyes fixed on a man in a beige trench coat and sunglasses. He wore the same sunglasses Strap had worn when he told Mick that he was a senile old man with no family.
You don’t even have a family to put first. Those were his harrowing words.
“Fuck,” Strap whispered. His body went slack, which made it easy for the police officer to shove him into the back of the car as if he were a useless rag.
Mick set me up, he concluded. His eyes never left the man in the trench coat. And as he took his sunglasses off, the situation was made even more clear.
He’s taking off with the loot. Strap stared straight into Mick’s ice-blue gaze.And he’s letting me take the fall.
ONE
STRAP
Five years into his fifty-year prison sentence at the Supermax facility felt like an eternity. At that point, Strap looked at the rest of the world with a jaded gaze.
There was no hope of ever being released from prison, so what was the point of anything anymore? He had considered suicide more times than he’d like to admit, but there were times when the sun baked into his skin and gave him some strength to live a little while longer.
This was one of those times. Lying on the ground with his limbs outstretched on either side, he stared at the skies and remembered how life used to be. Things used to begoodbefore he fucked everything up.
He soared through the clouds as a condor, and nothing could stop him. As a panther, he sprinted through forests, feeling the bushes graze against his coat and slicing his claws through the earth as he picked up speed.
It had been so long since he had last shifted. Sometimes, he dreamed of what it would be like to be in his animal form again. The moment he arrived at Supermax, they implanted a chip into his nape that prevented him from shifting.
They stole a vital piece of his identity, but he had no one to blame other than himself. And Mick, of course. A day never went by that Strap didn’t think about the traitorous bastard. To think that Strap once considered the man a father figure was bewildering to the stoic and changed shifter.
Family was his apparent priority, Strap mused bitterly.And he sold me out, even though he supposedly thought of me as a son. Where’s the logic in that?
With hindsight, Strap acknowledged that he would have done a lot of things differently if he’d had the chance. For one, he would not have devoted his life to grand theft. He would have done something more useful with his time.
Maybe, he would have worked harder to find the parents who abandoned him when he was young. Looking at the state of his life, Strap felt appreciative that he didn’t have a father and mother waiting somewhere for him. Why would he want two sets of disapproving eyes admonishing him for the way his life turned out?
If they were around, things wouldn’t be like this.Strap wiped at his nose and sighed. Nothing he could do about it anymore.
In retrospect, living as a thief was hell. Constantly running from the law, never being able to settle and enjoy life, and having to watch your back against other thieves who wanted what you had. What a tiring, miserable existence.
Strap wasn’t sure how much longer he could’ve taken living like that.
Suddenly, a boot knocked him in the head. Then, two pairs of arms tugged him upright and dragged him away.
“What the hell?” Strap mumbled, but he didn’t fight their hold. “Where are you taking me to? A room to get waterboarded and maimed?”
These were General Nydia’s guards who gave him a less-than-comfortable escort. He assumed he had erred somehow to get treated like this. He hadn’t insulted an authority figure nor incited a prison brawl. Those were activities of the past, so he didn’t know what was happening.
