Page 3 of Captured By the Convict

And so is the back of Connie’s little cookie-truck.

This is my chance.

A chance that’s a gift from the gods.

Without hesitating I slide my long body out of the shaft, hang for a moment from the edge by my fingertips, then drop silently to the floor. I’m barefoot, and although my tattooed body is heavily muscled from pumping iron like a beast in here, I still have the controlled grace of a tiger, allowing me to land silent like a cat, move swift like a panther through the open back shutter of what appears to be a pink delivery truck with built-in metal shelves stacked neatly with pink-and-turquoise boxes marked with a logo that reads, “Connie’s Confections.”

There’s a large dropcloth towards the back of the truck, and within moments I’m stowed away beneath it, my hard body flat against the truck-bed, the dropcloth thankfully covering every inch of my tall frame.

Less than a minute later I heard the truck shutter come down, followed by the driver’s-side door opening and closing. The engine starts. The truck begins to move, picks up speed, then stops again.

We’re at the prison gates.

This is it.

The final frontier.

The last obstacle between me and freedom.

They’ll check the back of the truck, of course. Standard procedure to make sure nobody’s doing exactly what I’m fucking doing right now.

But the beauty about “standard” procedures is that they become mundane, habitual. After a lifetime of checking delivery trucks and not finding a single stowaway convict, these prison guards have to be getting sloppy, can’t possibly be expecting that this one truck out of thousands they’ve checked over the years has my tattooed murderous ass cuddled beneath the covers inside.

“Please, God,” I mutter under my breath as I hear Connie’s perky voice greet the gate-guards. “I know I’m never getting into heaven, but at least get me out of this hell, will ya?”

The prayer feels strangely heartfelt, the warm aroma of cookies and muffins adding a surreal sense of safety to this whole scene. It’s like being taken back to childhood, maybe even infancy, all swaddled in cloth, the comforting smells of a warm kitchen surrounding me.

Then the truck’s shutter screeches open for the guards to do their check, and I remember with cold suddenness that those aren’t memories of my childhood. I didn’t have a fucking childhood—certainly not one where I was swaddled in safety and surrounded by love.

But still that surreal feeling lingers, and when I hear Connie’s infectiously upbeat voice engaging the surly prison guard in happy conversation, her sparkly personality distracting him with genuine curiosity about his life, his wife, his kids, his dog, I wonder if maybe God was listening to my prayers after all.

Yeah, I think now as the truck-shutter slams down and the engines start up and the little pink cookie-truck rumbles past the threshold towards freedom, God was definitely listening.

Because He sent an angel to rescue me from hell.

2

CONNIE

My life is hell.

The painfully sweet smile fades from my face as the prison gates fade into the rearview mirror and then disappear as I take a left turn and get onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. Glancing at the long side-mirrors of my soon-to-be-repossessed delivery truck, I merge into early morning traffic heading towards Boston. A pick-up truck honks at me because I’ve cut in front of him and am going way too slow, forcing him to brake. He swerves out of my lane, roars past me, is about to flip me off when he sees my sickeningly sweet smile that’s totally fake but seems to fool everyone around me, making them actually believe I’m this sparkly shiny sweetheart whose life is sunshine and rainbows when really I’m a sad loner living in a hellish pit I dug for myself.

“Follow your dreams, they say,” I grumble after holding my sweet smile long enough that the pick-up driver’s anger fades and he grins and waves instead of flipping me off and running me off the road. “Follow your passion and you can’t go wrong! Do something you love, and you’ll succeed even if you fail!”

Well, they—whoever the fuck “they” are—were wrong.

It sucks when you follow your passion and fail.

It hurts when you follow your dream and it’s a nightmare.

Four years in business, and I’m barely afloat.

All the money from selling Mama's old house is gone.

Or will be, once the new rent kicks in for my Boston store.

“Like they say: easy come, easy go,” I say out loud in a sing-song voice, adding an Irish lilt to my tone even though I’venever stepped foot in the Land of Éire, don’t like Guinness beer, and never wear green because it reminds me how much I hate spinach. “OK, can we stop talking aboutthem, whoever they are? Don’t you have anything original to say, you dumb hussy?”

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