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1
Avraam
Twenty-five years behind bars, and it rains the day I get out.
That bodes well.
I shrug the rain off my shoulders as I step into the gas station. I get a curious look from the cashier, a scrawny man who looks like he dabbles in meth after work. It’s like I escaped from prison instead of being released, and the looks I’ve been getting do nothing to ease that feeling.
Something about being out after all these years feels wrong. I’m clothed in newfound freedom, but it feels like wearing clothes that I stole from my brother. I haven’t seen that bastard since we parted ways at sixteen.
Even though I stick out like a wolf in a chicken coop, I retain some comfort from knowing that people in small towns are also twenty-five years behind. The slow-moving, disinterested energy in this town might as well lock its residents in a prison of monotony.
It’s a time capsule I’m eager to move on from.
I head straight for the bathroom, hoping that I won’t be pressured to buy anything in exchange for being allowed to take a piss. I’d sooner steal and get thrown back in prison than waste a penny of the fifty dollars of gate money I received upon release.
I need it to get to Montana.
Back to the treasure I buried.
Back to being filthy fucking rich and balls deep in good pussy.
I close the bathroom door and slide the lock in place. It smells like someone had a medical emergency in here, but I’ve experienced worse. When my cellmate of nine years was stabbed to death over a cigarette, they left his body on my bed for me to discover – blood, shit, and everything. I could smell it on my mattress for months, even though the guards supposedly swapped it out for a new one.
I doubt it. They don’t treat felons well in that prison, and I was no exception.
But I also wasn’t the worse.
Cop killers and molesters. Those get treated the foulest, but I managed to avoid that title despite the fact that I killed one of the boys in blue when I was nineteen. I didn’t get caught for that. Ironically, it was the murder of a career criminal that got me locked up, which is also why the judge handed me twenty-five years instead of a death sentence.
It does seem odd, however, that I was permitted to take a life and still keep mine.
What’s left of mine, anyway. When I look in the cracked and fogged bathroom mirror, I see a man with about forty years ahead of him if he’s lucky.
Forty years offreedom. No bedtime, no flavorless meals, and no prison guards searching where they shouldn’t.
No rules, either. The free world is just as lawless as when I left it, but that works in my favor. The only thing a man can really do once he’s spent the majority of his life around criminals is commit more crimes. It’s not like I’m going to waltz into a university at forty-five without a penny to my name and become an astrophysicist.
That opportunity came and went, but the years have made me sharper. I’ve gone over the mistakes I made last time, and I’m going to do things differently.
Patiently.
I shake my cock before tucking it back into my pants, using my foot to flush the toilet.
I’m not in a hurry to get locked up again, though I’ll admit it’s more comfortable in a cell than it is on the outside. Cleaner, too.
One thing about life behind bars is that you get so used to it that being outdoors feels more claustrophobic than being locked in a cell. It’s nice knowing what to expect from your environment, and being away from the predictability puts tension in my jaw and a chip on my shoulder.
I feel dirty and exposed, but I can’t afford to seek comfort.
Not yet. There will time for that later, if everything goes according to plan.
I may only have fifty dollars in my pocket but there’s a few hundred thousand waiting for me at the bottom of an old well in Montana. I hid what I could from the authorities before they caught me, and I just have to pray it’s all still there.
Finding it won’t be an issue, even after all these years. I retraced every single step in my mind a million times during my stint, and I could walk to that old well with my eyes closed if I needed to.
The well isn’t the big jackpot, though. I put most of the money under the basement floor of a house my company owned, but in order to get it back, I’ll need the money from the well first. Assuming it wasn’t bulldozed, I probably have enough to buy it back from whoever owns it now and retrieve what’s rightfully mine.
