Page 1 of One Night Years Ago

Chapter 1

Hunter

Hunter Fowler woke up at five fifty-four, much as he had the last twelve years of his life. That gave him six minutes to steel himself for the day ahead. At precisely six a.m. the alarm blared, loud enough to be heard in all corners of the prison.

Hunter waited patiently.

Three. Two. One.

Bump. There it was, the sound of a body smacking the ground.

“Fuck,” a grouchy voice said.

“You okay, Mac?” Hunter said, sitting up and letting his long legs hang from the bed for a second before jumping off onto the ground from the top bunk. He stood to his full six-foot-two height.

“I’m okay. Forgot where I was for a moment, I guess.”

“It’s good you’ve got the bottom bunk.”

Every day, the same conversation.

Hunter reached down and offered his cellmate a hand, pulling the old man up easily and setting him on his feet. Mac was sixty years old and could best be described as a bag of bones. He was in for murder. Hunter couldn’t imagine Mac murdering anybody, but then it wasn’t a topic they’d ever discussed.

Hunter stared at the oversized khaki shirt and secondhand jeans draped over the cell’s single chair. He would never understand why there were two of every item in the cell except for the chair, which the two inmates were somehow supposed to share.

“How does it feel, boy?” Mac asked, looking at the clothes. They hadn’t been there long. A guard had brought them in the night before, just before lights out.

Hunter didn’t reply. He didn’t feel like a boy. He’d been twenty years old when he arrived in prison, and maybe that was why Mac still thought of him as a boy, but now, at the age of thirty-two, he felt positively ancient. Ancient and surprised he had survived this long, if he was honest.

He stripped down to his boxer shorts. He’d been instructed that everything that belonged to the state had to stay in the cell once he left, except for his underwear and socks. He could apparently keep those. He folded the orange prison suit and placed it on the top bunk.

I hope I never see this color again.

As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he flinched, trying to take it back. Nothing good ever came from hoping.

“How does it feel, boy?” Mac repeated. The old man sounded truly curious.

Hunter splashed some water on his face. He looked up at the small rusty mirror over the sink. The face staring back at him was familiar but at the same time not quite his. He recognized the square jaw and the high cheekbones that had made him popular with the girls in high school. The scar along his neck was new. He’d acquired that inside. His eyes were different as well. Still the same stone gray, but so much older than they used to be.

His body was harder too. He stretched his shoulders and flexed his thick biceps. He’d worked out hard while in prison. Not because he couldn’t think of anything better to do with his time, but because every ounce of muscle mass increased the chances that his mother wouldn’t be called in to identify his body.

He pulled on the shirt. Even as big as he was, the shirt swallowed him whole.

Who the hell wore this? André the Giant?

He rolled up the sleeves, revealing faint scars along his arms.

He realized Mac was still looking at him.

I’m afraid.

He’d never, in all his time behind bars, confessed to feeling fear, and he wasn’t going to do so now.

He shrugged.

Mac nodded in understanding. He’d lived through this before with other cellmates.

“You’d better believe it, boy. That’s the guard coming for you already.”