He couldn’t imagine staying in a windy, rugged place where the sun glared down and wild animals roamed. Where the air smelled of things he could not identify.
Sure, he’d spent five years in Wyoming, but that had been behind bars, in a controlled environment. Now he was being driven into the wilds of nowheresville.
He wasn’t sure whether it would end up being a dream or a nightmare, but his alternative would be to head back to Denver. There, he could pick up the threads of his old life, which were selling and buying and dealing cocaine.
He could also go back to the tattoo parlor on the east end of Colfax and have his Maori-styled tattoos of circles and half-triangles freshened. Maybe get a new one, a band of barbed wire on his upper left arm to mark the memory of his time in Wyoming Correctional.
He should have done his nickel stint in Denver County Jail, but the overcrowding, and the fact that the other gang in thedisastrous drug deal gone wrong were also incarcerated in the Denver County Jail and had already squeezed out the message that Bede was a dead man at their very first opportunity—all of this meant he’d been outsourced to Wyoming Correctional almost as soon as he’d been judged guilty.
He could barely remember the bus ride from Denver County Jail to Wyoming Correctional, still bleeding on the inside from the shock of the shootout that not only had cut short his amazing criminal career, but had taken his beloved Winston from him.
Winston had been more than the love of his life. Winston had been the core of him. He’d burrowed his way into Bede’s heart and stayed there, loving Bede, making him feel strong. Ten feet tall. Powerful as a king.
There was no getting over something like his relationship with Winston. He might never get over it, and during his time in prison, the clawing feeling snuck up on him often, dragging him into the undertow.
Bede mentally shook his head. There was no time for that now. He needed to pay attention to his surroundings, the blindingly bright midsummer day, the spill of mountains to the west, tumbling laths of granite rock and dark green evergreens. The shimmer of river among flat panels of grasses waving in the warm breeze.
“Fuck, there’s nothing out here,” muttered Toby as he glared out the windows.
One of Bede’s mad skills was the ability to quickly get a read on people, even those he’d only just met, which had come in handy when making drug deals.
He had met Toby a few times at Wyoming correction, both in the dining hall and in the yard. However, he’d never seen Toby in the library or computer room, because Toby was one of those guys who sneered at books and walked around with his fists clenched, ready for a fight.
Owen, the smarter of the two men, had been the guy keeping Toby out of unnecessary fights.
At any rate, what Toby seemed to want was someone to look out those windows with him and agree that there was nothing to see there.
Bede looked where Toby was looking, just to be a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy, at least for a minute or two.
Behind bars, he’d been unable to imagine staying in Wyoming a second longer than he had to. But now, in a sudden dash of reality right in his face, he could not disagree with Toby more.
There was atonto look at. Miles of blue sky with small puffy clouds, their tails wisping in the breeze. Rolls of brown and green hills, stark outjuts of granite rock and, from time to time, a long dirt driveway leading to some unseen farmstead or ranch house. A small herd of what might be deer or antelope.
Two broad-winged birds circled in the warm air overhead. Might be falcons. Could be eagles. The idea of being able to find out—to know—what kind of birds those were stirred something inside of him.
None of this mattered to Toby. Toby just wanted to be pissed about something.
For the sake of keeping things quiet, Bede frowned and looked out the windows and shook his head.
“A whole lot of nothin’,” he said, because he could say it even if he couldn’t believe that any longer.
“We can always leave, kid,” said Owen. “Just light out and do our parole elsewhere.”
From the way he said it, Bede imagined that Owen already had a plan in mind.
Toby grunted like he didn’t care. He probably didn’t. Didn’t care about anything, even about the consequences of being one half of a housebreaking duo with Owen.
Bede back settled in his seat, looked at the passing landscape, and contemplated the consequences of his choices. That of filling out the paperwork for the Farthingdale Valley Fresh Start Program, and of being on a Zoom call with a guy called Leland Tate, who ran the program and, according to the prison grapevine, a whole lot else besides.
All three members of the parole board spoke in glowing terms about Tate, how much good he’d done in the area. Underneath that it was easy to see that Tate was a man of power. Nobody you’d want to fuck with.
Bede didn’t plan to. Though how he was going to manage in Farthingale Valley was beyond him.
The reason he’d applied for the valley program, theonlyreason, was Kell, his ex-cellie.
Kell Dodson was a slip of a kid who’d been thrown into the slammer for ninety days on account of he’d dared to trespass across land owned by the BNSF rail company. With a bundle of stolen food, no less.
That Kell had good reason to be hopping trains, being on the run, stealing food from garbage bins and, when he could or had to, from convenience store shelves, hadn’t mattered at all to the cops. They could have let him go with a warning, but instead had cuffed him, fingerprinted him, and thrown him in jail.
