“I don’t want to be free.” I shrugged.
“But you have a kid that’s growing up without you!” He threw up his hands. “How could you not want to be with her?”
“She’s better off without me.” I felt sick to my stomach when I thought about my daughter, Bossy, and what I was missing.
“Well, too fuckin’ bad,” Apollo grumbled. “You’ll be free. And you’ll participate in life. You’ll be happy, and you’ll have a fuckin’ dog, and maybe raise your fuckin’ kid!”
“No wife?” I drawled.
“I doubt anyone would have you willingly with that attitude.” Apollo shrugged.
He had a point.
“I don’t deserve to be out,” I stated. “And, more importantly, I have nowhere else to go.”
“You leave that nowhere else to go thing up to me,” he said. “I’m deleting you from the system as we speak. This time tomorrow, you’re going to be escorted to the sick bay. Once there, you’re going to be carried out in a body bag. From there, you’ll be taken to the morgue. From the morgue, you’ll catch a ride to a safe house where you’ll stay long enough to grow a beard out. Get rid of the Jonathan Taylor Thomas look. You’ll be easy enough to hide.”
“Who the fuck is Jonathan Taylor Thomas?” I asked.
Apollo’s lips quirked up at the edges. “He’s a nineties heartthrob who used to star on the hit TV show, Home Improvement. You look like you’re the much manlier, adult version of him.”
I just shook my head, unable to come up with a follow-up to that unhinged comment.
“You’ll be living in Montana. I hope you like the mountains, snow, and more snow.”
“I’ve never been in snow in my life,” I said. “I’ve lived in Miami since I was a tiny baby. Trust me when I say, I can’t live in Montana. Just leave me here, man.”
“Sorry, no can do,” he said as he flipped something around to show me. “This is your new ID. And I went ahead and had your lineman status reinstated. Don’t die on the job while you try to navigate the snow. It’d make me feel awful.”
I tried to argue, but Apollo got up and left me in the room, unable to tell him I wouldn’t do it.
Oh, well.
I’d let him know the next time I saw him…
Only the next time I saw him, I was waking up from a temple punch, already broken out of prison, and lying in an unzipped body bag.
“There you are.” He smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
I tried to shake my head, but when I did, a wave of dizziness assaulted me.
“What the fuck?”
“I went ahead and sedated you while I was at it. Just to get you out.”
“I’ll go back in,” I grumbled. “They’ll take me back.”
“They would,” he agreed. “But then you wouldn’t get this opportunity.”
I frowned. “What opportunity?”
“The one where I give you access to a man currently inside the same prison as Sonny Gibbons’s prison.” He smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. It was dark and deadly. “A guard. One that hates child predators as much as we do.”
“Can he kill him?” I asked.
“Where would be the fun in that?”
There was that smile again.
