In the back of my mind I always knew that no matter how careful I was, someday there was a possibility the shit I'd done would catch up with me in a very big way.
I knew that day had come when I found myself being led down a poorly lit concrete hallway wearing a scratchy orange jumpsuit, carrying an even scratchier blanket and pillow, into a cell much smaller than the new guest bathroom I'd just finished remodeling for Bee.
Inmates shouted over one another, their voices bouncing off the cement block walls of my cell, any one person indiscernible from the blended echoes of the masses. My eyes watered from the inescapable and overwhelming stench of backed up toilets and body odor.
Although my father had been dead over a year I could almost hear his 'I told you so's' from the grave.
Fuck you, Frank.
My mother, the eternal optimist when it came to me, used to tell me that the world expected great things from me, that my future held something terrific in it, and that someday I would realize my true potential. She usually gave me that speech while she was driving me home from the sheriff's station or from a stint in juvie.
She was sort of right all along. I'd realized my true potential a long time ago. There just wasn't anything terrific about it.
Horrific maybe. Terrific no.
I'm not glad she's dead, but I'm glad she would never see me caged up like the monster I was.
My father, Frank, never traveled on the same wavelength of thought my mother did. He always told me that my future held nothing more than a life behind the cold bars of a prison cell. It was laughable, because that drunken fuck might have been actually right for once.
The cell door slammed shut behind me. I set the blanket on the unmade top bunk. The guard locked my cage with one of the many keys on his retractable key chain attached to his belt.
"Welcome home, inmate," he said smugly, tipping up the brim of his baseball cap in mock salute, the cap read CORRECTIONS in big bold gold lettering across the front. The guard, whose brass nametag read ABBOT, sucked on his upper teeth with his tongue as if he'd just finished a big satisfying meal.
I wanted to fucking END him.
I leapt back to the cell door and grabbed a hold of the bars. Abbot gasped in surprise and fell back onto his boney ass. "You spook easy, don't ya, officer?" I growled, squatting down so we were eye to eye. His beady little eyes turned to black, the fear had caused his pupils to dilate.
I was very familiar with that look.
It was a look I quite enjoyed.
I wanted to do a hell of a lot more than just scare the little fucker. "It's so easy to be a smug little shit from the other side of the bars," I said coldly. "Why don't you come on in here with me, and say that sarcastic shit again?"
Even though Officer Abbot was obviously scared shitless, the truth of the matter was that he had the upper hand. I was securely locked into a windowless cage, and although he may have been on his ass, he was on his ass on the freedom side of the bars.
"Maybe I will, inmate." Abbot stood and brushed himself off. The cockiness in his tone wavered. Pointing at me with his nightstick, Abbot looked around to make sure no one had witnessed him almost pissing himself on the floor. "I'm watching you, inmate." He warned. "In here you an't nothin' more than a fucking number. You ain't even worthy of the name your mama gave ya, so if you choose act like a fucking animal, you're gonna be treated like a fucking animal."
With a final bucktoothed sneer, he walked off, dragging his night stick across the bars of my cell, then across all the other cells in the corridor, as he made his way to the only door at the end of the cell block. The inmates shouted obscenities at him as he passed without any sort of reaction from the guard. He signaled to another guard who sat on the other side of a glass partition. The red blinking light above the door temporarily turned green as he was buzzed through, disappearing from site, the door closed with a heavy click, the light above the door once again blinked red.
"Motherfucker," I mumbled, taking a long hard look at my new accommodations. I knew that doing what I'd done for as long as I'd done it, that I was possibly paving a path for myself that lead me right to a cell just like the one I found myself in.
In all honesty, it's a path I never truly thought I would ever be traveling.
If I had to bet money on how my life would end up, with either my early death, long before old age took hold, or a life behind bars, I would've placed my money on death every fucking time.
The DA, some nitwit named Sparrow, was seeking the death penalty, so I guess there was still time to win that bet after all.