Killer Move - Michael Marshall [2]
An officer escorts him down a set of stairs and into an open courtyard adjacent to the yard where he has taken his four hours of outside time per week. They walk across this space to a gate. The gate is unlocked for him.
He walks through it.
The world.
A cab is waiting forty yards down the road. The other prisoners released today will be ferried away in the back of a van. This man wanted real life to start right at the gate, however. He walks straight over to the car and gets in without looking back.
“Where to?” the driver asks.
Hunter names a nearby town. He rests back in the seat and stares through the windshield as the driver starts the car and begins the journey away from this place. He appears in no hurry to converse, and neither does he turn the radio on. For both of these facts, his passenger is grateful—though he has no need to mentally rehearse what he is going to do next, or the broad strokes of how this first day is going to be spent. He has done that already, and so it’s done. Hunter knows how important it is to keep his concerns and aspirations driving forward, leaving every yesterday behind. The past is the past, and inviolable as such. The only thing it can do in the present is drag you back.
Almost nothing that happened within the high walls now receding in the rearview mirror will be allowed to escape: the beatings; the early nights of abject horror; the two attempts, in the first month, to kill himself; later, the decisions over who to program with and how much or little to get involved in the prison’s interior worlds in order to avoid being either called upon to do other people’s time or winding up on some gang’s Bad News list—an effective death sentence of infinite jurisdiction. That was then, and in there.
This is now. Out here.
The single thing he has brought with him, the knowledge that has sustained him throughout the years but that also cast shadows over his darkest nights and hours, is this: that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Ninety percent of men in prison make this claim, and pretty much all of them are lying.
This man, however, was not.
He didn’t do it.
There are details still to be worked out—what to eat first, where to pick up some clothes that don’t stink of confinement, where to stay the first night. The main business, however, is already laid out in his mind.
He is going to get hold of a gun.
And then he’s going to start using it.
PART I
IMPERFECT CONTINUOUS
Every day, in every way,
I’m getting better and better.
—ÉMILE COUÉ
CHAPTER ONE
As I pulled around The Breakers’ inner circle I saw that Karren White’s car was already tucked into the better of the two Shore Realty slots—the one that gets shade in the afternoon and stops your vehicle from feeling like an oven turned to BURN when you climb into it at the end of the working day. She had parked with characteristic accuracy, the sides of her sporty little BMW exactly parallel to the lines, as if she’d put the car in position first and then sweet-talked Big Walter the handyman into painting the parking space around her (which, knowing her charm and forcefulness, was not entirely out of the question). I parked my own vehicle in the remaining space, with not dissimilar skill, and glanced at the clock in the dashboard. Eight twelve.
Hmm.
I logged the time in a utility on my iPhone. I’m not OCD about these things, you should know. The point of logging is merely to develop positive habits, reproducible patterns of behavior that can later