Chapter 1
Bede
As the white prison van trundled along the dirt road that rolled itself out like a ribbon of dust, Bede thought, not for the first time, that the driver had taken a wrong turn. But he didn’t say anything, because in his line of work, the one he’d been arrested for, the less you said, the better.
Besides, saying something to irritate the driver, who was already tight around the neck, a vein jumping in his temple, was a guarantee that you’d get hauled up and smacked back down.
Bede could withstand the blow, sure. What would make his heart race would be the uncertainty of what might follow. That the driver would turn around and take them all back to Wyoming Correctional in Torrington. That he would be thrown back in the slammer.
Bede put his concern down to the fact that five years before, when he’d been a very cocky young man of twenty-eight years, he was his own driver, with his hands on the wheel of a very nice, spicy fast, two-seater BMW convertible. Blue with sparkles in the paint job.
He’d been his own man then, only now his life was at risk because of the driver who, barreling through the countryside,barren, blue-skied, dusty and windy, didn’t appear to be taking safety into consideration.
Bede was on the verge of having a headache. And he never got headaches.
As for his van-mates, Toby and Owen, they were wide eyed and looking to him for direction.
Toby, with dirty dishwater hair and skinny shoulders, was the younger, the low man in a two-man pair.
In contrast, Owen, dark-haired and flash-eyed, seemed to have more swagger. Maybe he was older than Bede’s thirty-two years, or maybe it was prison or a decades-long smoking habit that had scored lines into his forehead, deep curves on either side of his mouth.
Bede didn’t want to be responsible for the two low-life, dumb-as-rocks housebreakers, but yet he was, because who knew what would happen to them if the driver turned around.
“I think this road curves south and turns into pavement,” Bede said, keeping his voice low and slow.
“What?” asked the driver with a snap, his eyes seeking Bede’s in the rearview mirror. “What’d you say?”
In the back of Bede’s mind, he knew he did not control the universe, barely had control of his little corner of it. But it was a mild conceit that he could manage the outcome of this little drive that he’d never wanted to be on in the first place.
Bede stood on top of a cliff, about to dive into freefall. It could go either way. The driver either would turn the van around or keep going, depending on Bede’s answer.
“Ah,” Bede said, again low and slow. “Got curious. Looked at a map. I’m pretty sure you’re going in exactly the right direction.”
Whether or not the driver—Lenny? Bernard?—believed him, Bede felt the tension in the van go down a notch. And he wasn’t lying. Curious as to his final destination, he’d checked out twentyminutes on the slow-cranking computer in the prison library and pulled up Google maps.
Highway 211 was the only way to get to Farthing and, from there, to Farthingdale Valley. But rather than go all the way down I-25 to Cheyenne, the driver had gone over to Chugwater and taken the back-road from there. Maybe to make up for lost time, since they had been an hour behind schedule when the drive began. Maybe to get the drive over with and go back to the break room and his pals at the prison.
Bede had no idea what was going on in the driver’s head. All he knew was that the driver was going too fast around corners, barreling down the corduroy road with enough force to raise tornados of dust in the van’s wake.
Yet, Bede’s attempt to calm him, the driver—Lenny!—seemed to make Lenny slow down, and he appeared to start taking in the conditions of the road, and the fact that he had three ex-cons buckled into the bench seat behind him. That if he got into an accident and killed everyone in the van, including himself, it would be his own damn fault.
Then, lo and behold, around a sharp corner, a red-roofed farmhouse hove into view, and the dirt road turned into blacktop.
Letting out a slow breath, Bede settled back into the seat, his hand gripped the buckle of the seatbelt. Beside him, Toby and Owen did the same, looking at each other like they had found the only bulwark in a storm.
Bede knew full and well what it was like to have a bulwark. He could remember that feeling of solidness around him, though Winston was long gone from his life.
In Winston’s place had come various cellmates—cellies, they were called inside of Wyoming Correctional, including Ellis, who was now with his forever partner somewhere in the Farthing area, and Kell.
It was Kell who, through charm and pure love, had talked Bede into applying for the Farthingdale Valley Fresh Start Program.
He still wasn’t sure why he’d been accepted into the program.
Of the parole board, only Mr. Webber had been supportive of the idea. The other two board members had judged Bede as soon as they’d looked at him, and expressed their concerns over his exodus from prison.You’re not suitable for the environment,they had said, almost together, heads nodding.
Bede might have agreed with them. The wilds of Wyoming were most certainlynotthe environment he was suited for.
He was a city boy since birth, having grown up with paved streets and scraggly city trees and the constant grind and hum of cars and trucks. The smell of exhaust, and odors from the dog food plant when the wind came from the east, that had been his world.
