Walk (Gentry Boys)
Read Walk (Gentry Boys) Online
Authors: Cora Brent
WALK
(A Gentry Boys Story)
By Cora Brent
© 2016
All Rights Reserved
COPYRIGHT
Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarities to events or situations is also coincidental.
The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.
© 2016 by Cora Brent
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design: © L.J. Anderson, Mayhem Cover Creations
Cover Photo: MaeIDesign & Photography
Gentry Boys Series
WALK (May 2016)
EDGE (July 2016)
Savage Series
Book #2 (Fall 2016)
Book #3 (Fall 2016)
Defiant MC Series
Stand Alones
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HAVE YOU READ THE PREQUEL TO WALK???
Now available…
Two brothers...
And the girl next door.
A betrayal that severed the bonds of blood and loyalty.
A tragedy that ended one life and shattered the rest.
Everyone thought that because they knew how it ended they also knew how it started.
They didn't.
And neither do you.
This one is not like the other stories.
This one will hurt.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step.”
- Lao Tzu
“It was only a sunny smile and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
STONE
They all told me that no man sleeps the night before he walks.
They were right.
I’d been staring at the ceiling for hours, trying to calm the thud of my heart as Helio, my cellmate, rolled around and cursed through his dreams on the bunk below.
It seemed impossible that tomorrow night would be different than every other night for the past four years.
It seemed impossible that I would see life outside the prison walls.
It seemed impossible that I would, at last, be free.
“Strength in brothers,” I whispered.
Words from a vanished childhood, a lost innocence. I said them for Conway. My brother. My best friend. My better half. For four years I’d been faithfully sending him letters. He hadn’t answered a single one.
When I was sure the hour was past midnight I reached inside my pillow and withdrew a folded piece of notebook paper. Since a few months back there’d been a stabbing with one of the ballpoint pens issued from the commissary, the warden only allowed us to have crudely modified versions now. Mine was a plastic ink tube wrapped in surgical tubing. It served its purpose though.
Carefully I unfolded the paper and stared at all the marks. I could see them easily. Darkness was never absolute in here, not even in the middle of the night. Each one of the one thousand five hundred and twelve marks on that page was the tragic badge of a squandered day. I would take it with me tomorrow when they opened the front gate and allowed me to walk out of here. My new mark was made carefully so I wouldn’t rip the paper. It was important because it would be the last one, number one thousand five hundred and thirteen.
When I was finished I refolded the paper, returned it to the pillowcase, and went back to watching the ceiling. The minutes kept dropping, one by one, like the last handful of sand grains in an hourglass.
When I’d arrived here over four years ago the hourglass had been full of minutes and days and months and years. Now it was nearly empty. I would have another chance, a chance to live again.
More importantly, I would have a chance to make things right with my brother.
At some point my eyes had closed and my mind had stopped racing. The next sound I heard was the click of every cell in the pod unlocking. One of the day shift guards bellowed down the corridor.
“Breakfast!”
Artie Helio, who was serving a nine-month bit for strong-arm robbery at a Kingman liquor store, was instantly upright and bright-eyed as I jumped down from the top bunk. He beat me to the door and elbowed me out of the way.
“Don’t get cocky there, shorty,” he scolded, flashing two gold teeth in his grin.
Helio wasn’t a big man and I had him beat by a good six inches but he wasn’t calling me shorty to be ironic. Shorty or short timer was what you called a guy who was closing in on his release date.
“Ladies first,” I said wryly and let him pass while he chuckled.
Helio had been in and out of the system for two decades but he swore backwards and sideways that this was his last forced vacation. He told me his new wife had tits bigger than cantaloupes and that alone was worth staying straight for. I never doubted him. We all had plans for what life was going to be like on the outside.
As for me, I didn’t have any women waiting, big-titted or otherwise. What I did have was a brother to save and a painful debt to the universe that I needed to start repaying.
I also had a grave I needed to visit. Then I could ask the girl buried beneath the ground for whatever version of forgiveness the dead were willing to part with.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened as I went through the motions of the usual morning routine.
Breakfast. Shower. Rec yard.
I stayed on the benches and just watched instead of heading for the weights like I usually did. There were all types in here; dealers and murderers and white collar embezzlers. The worst ones would usually get taken out of general population and locked up in a separate unit without privileges until they learned some manners. Still, there were always some rotten pieces of humanity floating around freely and even though I was one of the bigger guys around I knew I had to keep my head down to avoid getting fucked with.
My gaze strayed to the fences. The first set of fences surrounded the rec yard. Surrounding them were the electrified perimeter fences of the Central State Penitentiary. And beyond that was the town of Emblem where I’d spent the first eighteen years of my life.
Technically, I’d still been in Emblem over these last four years, but being involuntarily locked behind gates and fences kind of changes one’s perspective a bit. From here I could see the brown lump of ancient earth that had always been referred to by locals as ‘the butte’. Con and I had been scaling the butte on our own since we were about seven or eight. Back then it had seemed massive, colossal. Now it just looked like an ugly hill. I remembered being a child, standing on the summit and peering down at the sprawling prison below. The boy who’d made that climb would never have guessed that someday he’d be down there in the yard wearing an orange jumpsuit.
There was no point in grumbling about that now. It was done. I was getting out.
“GENTRY!”
One of the guards was beckoning. It was Correctional Officer Paris, also knows as Chris Paris, the kid who shit his pants in third grade at Emblem Elementary. I knew this because I’d been there. Just like a fair amount of Emblem residents, he’d started working for the Central State Penitentiary right out of high school. Prison was big business in Emblem.
Paris looked impatient as I trotted over.
“Come on,” he scowled. “Show some fucking hustle.”
I caught the gleam in his eye as he watched me. We weren’t friendly as kids and we sure as hell weren’t friendly now.
“Yes sir,” I answered, gritting my teeth but keeping my voice even. I had nothing to gain and everything to lose by getting into some trivial battle with a power hungry half-wit. I wouldn’t do it.
“It’s time,” Paris said in a bored way, like he was telling me dinner was served, not that it was time for me to walk out of captivity after four long years.
As I was led back to my cell for one final trip I passed a few convicts who gave me a dull wave. I saluted back, remembering all the times I’d said a terse farewell to a man on his way back to the world. Now it was my turn.
I was given a plastic bag to collect the few belongings I wanted to keep. There wasn’t much. Some books, a few personal effects. Since the street clothes I’d come in with years ago had been splattered with blood they’d been discarded. Instead I was handed a pair of jeans that were too big and a yellow t-shirt that was too small. It didn’t matter. They could have handed me a fucking fig leaf and a paper crown to wear and I wouldn’t have cared.
The guard who showed up to escort me out to the gate was a better sort than Paris. His last name was Carson and I knew he was a nephew of Benji Carson, who owned Carson’s Garage on Main Street. Once upon a time, my brother Conway had worked at Carson’s Garage.
That was how things went in a place like Emblem. Not enough degrees of separation.
Emblem was just too small a town with too many ghosts. Even if I’d wanted to stay there was really nowhere for me to go. My brother was long gone. He’d left the night of the accident. As far as I knew, he’d never returned. My mother, who’d never once visited me in prison, had reportedly taken off to Florida and married a car salesman.
The rest of my family, the Gentry family, had once populated a decrepit swath of desert around outer Emblem but aside from a few hermits they’d all died or escaped to better places. I was damn fortunate that my cousins had stayed in the picture. Deck and Chase especially had kept in close touch these past four years. They were much older so we’d never been close while Con and I were growing up but that hardly mattered now. They’d jumped right into the fire when all hell broke loose in our lives.
Chase was one third of the infamous Gentry triplets, the sons of my father’s cousin. They’d been serious local bad asses in their day, but they’d left that history behind and now lived respectable lives with the happy families they’d created. He visited a lot. Chase’s brothers, Cord and Creed, had also driven down from the Phoenix area a few times while I’d been inside. Their wives had been kind enough to send a steady stream of cheerful letters and I always found myself getting a little emotional every time I received one. When you were in lockup it was easy to forget that there might be people in the world who gave a shit about you.
Deck Gentry was another cousin and if everything I’d ever heard about him was true, then he could be one scary son of a bitch when he wanted to be. Leather-clad, tattooed and dripping with dangerous charisma, there were probably good reasons his name was spoken in hushed whispers by those who respected and feared him.
These days Deck had left the rough side of life behind. He’d married a nice girl, owned a tattoo parlor with Cord, and was now a brand new father. I’d gotten a few hints on the inside that Deck Gentry might be the reason I didn’t get knocked around by the tough guys who were always on the lookout for fresh blood. A few times when he came to visit I tried to awkwardly thank him but he would just impatiently change the subject. Deck was the kind of guy who did what he did for his own reasons and never wanted to make a fuss about it.
“You got people out there, Gentry?” Carson asked quietly.
“Yeah. My cousins said they’d be waiting.”
“Good,” Carson nodded. “That’s good.”
He glanced around before he said anything else. After all, I was still a prisoner at this point and the other guards would give him shit if he was seen chatting up an inmate.
“I hope,” he said haltingly, “that things go right for you now, Stone. You’ve paid your dues and you deserve a second chance.”
There wasn’t much point in getting into a philosophical debate over whether I’d even made a dent in paying my dues or if I deserved anything at all. So instead I just nodded and said, “Thanks.”
“Open sallyport,” Carson barked into this handheld radio.
There was a short buzz and a click. Carson pushed the gate open and led me past it. From there it was a short walk to the perimeter gate but only if you measure in terms of distance. To me every step was already a memory and no man had ever taken a longer walk.
“Open perimeter,” demanded Carson and after a breathless second the outer gate of the prison clicked.
Carson held it open and waited for me to step through the threshold to the wide world. I thought I heard him say something to me but it didn’t register. I was only aware of those first surreal steps of freedom. I heard the gate shut at my back and that was it. For the first time in four years I was on the other side of the fence.
Two men waited behind a yellow line at the end of a concrete walkway that led to the parking lot. They waved. They called my name. A few seconds later my cousins had me locked in a tight embrace, the first gentle touch I’d received from another human being in a very long time.
“Damn boy, you collected some muscle,” Deck joked as he slapped me cheerfully on the back.
Deck didn’t have the blonde hair and blue eyes of most of the Gentrys. He looked more like his mother, who’d originally been from Mexico. But he was as muscular and powerfully built as his father, Chrome Gentry, had been.
“I’ll say,” Chase agreed, smiling from ear to ear. “In fact I would even guess that you give monstrous Creed a run for his money in that department.”
“Pumping iron, the international prison past time,” I said, flexing.
Even though I couldn’t stop smiling I also couldn’t help but look around to see if they’d brought anyone else with them. Somehow I’d half convinced myself that he’d be here, that despite all these years of silence my brother would be waiting for me.
Deck squeezed my shoulder. “It’s over,” he said earnestly. “Time to live again, kid.”
Guards were beginning to arrive for the next shift. Some of them I recognized, some of them I didn’t. They filtered past us with their heads down, just heading inside to another day on the job.
Chase was looking around, then jerked a thumb. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “By the way, who the hell dressed you for this red carpet event? You look like a circus performer.” He tossed a brown paper bag at me. “Here. You know Creed’s wife, Truly? She guessed that you’d be needing some new threads and took it upon herself to be your personal shopper.”
“Thank you,” I said sincerely.
“Well he can’t change in the parking lot,” Deck noted and nudged us toward a silver minivan parked nearby. “So let’s move.”
“Deck’s new car,” Chase explained. “He’s a successfully domesticated beast now.”
“Hush,” Deck warned but he was smiling as he pressed a button on his key ring to unlock the doors. “Get in.”
“I will generously allow Stone to have the shotgun spot,” Chase said cheerfully as he hopped in the back beside an empty pink car seat.
A twinge of alarm traveled down my spine as I closed the door. There was no big mystery over the reason why. The accident, never very far from my mind, seemed even more immediate as Deck started the engine.