1. Bede

Chapter 1

Bede

A s the white prison van trundled along the dirt road that rolled itself out like a ribbon of dust, Bede thought, not for the first time, that the driver had taken a wrong turn. But he didn't say anything, because in his line of work, the one he'd been arrested for, the less you said, the better.

Besides, saying something to irritate the driver, who was already tight around the neck, a vein jumping in his temple, was a guarantee that you'd get hauled up and smacked back down.

Bede could withstand the blow, sure. What would make his heart race would be the uncertainty of what might follow. That the driver would turn around and take them all back to Wyoming Correctional in Torrington. That he would be thrown back in the slammer.

Bede put his concern down to the fact that five years before, when he'd been a very cocky young man of twenty-eight years, he was his own driver, with his hands on the wheel of a very nice, spicy fast, two-seater BMW convertible. Blue with sparkles in the paint job.

He'd been his own man then, only now his life was at risk because of the driver who, barreling through the countryside, barren, blue-skied, dusty and windy, didn't appear to be taking safety into consideration.

Bede was on the verge of having a headache. And he never got headaches.

As for his van-mates, Toby and Owen, they were wide eyed and looking to him for direction.

Toby, with dirty dishwater hair and skinny shoulders, was the younger, the low man in a two-man pair.

In contrast, Owen, dark-haired and flash-eyed, seemed to have more swagger. Maybe he was older than Bede's thirty-two years, or maybe it was prison or a decades-long smoking habit that had scored lines into his forehead, deep curves on either side of his mouth.

Bede didn't want to be responsible for the two low-life, dumb-as-rocks housebreakers, but yet he was, because who knew what would happen to them if the driver turned around.

"I think this road curves south and turns into pavement," Bede said, keeping his voice low and slow.

"What?" asked the driver with a snap, his eyes seeking Bede's in the rearview mirror. "What'd you say?"

In the back of Bede's mind, he knew he did not control the universe, barely had control of his little corner of it. But it was a mild conceit that he could manage the outcome of this little drive that he'd never wanted to be on in the first place.

Bede stood on top of a cliff, about to dive into freefall. It could go either way. The driver either would turn the van around or keep going, depending on Bede's answer.

"Ah," Bede said, again low and slow. "Got curious. Looked at a map. I'm pretty sure you're going in exactly the right direction."

Whether or not the driver—Lenny? Bernard?—believed him, Bede felt the tension in the van go down a notch. And he wasn't lying. Curious as to his final destination, he'd checked out twenty minutes on the slow-cranking computer in the prison library and pulled up Google maps.

Highway 211 was the only way to get to Farthing and, from there, to Farthingdale Valley. But rather than go all the way down I-25 to Cheyenne, the driver had gone over to Chugwater and taken the back-road from there. Maybe to make up for lost time, since they had been an hour behind schedule when the drive began. Maybe to get the drive over with and go back to the break room and his pals at the prison.

Bede had no idea what was going on in the driver's head. All he knew was that the driver was going too fast around corners, barreling down the corduroy road with enough force to raise tornados of dust in the van's wake.

Yet, Bede's attempt to calm him, the driver—Lenny!—seemed to make Lenny slow down, and he appeared to start taking in the conditions of the road, and the fact that he had three ex-cons buckled into the bench seat behind him. That if he got into an accident and killed everyone in the van, including himself, it would be his own damn fault.

Then, lo and behold, around a sharp corner, a red-roofed farmhouse hove into view, and the dirt road turned into blacktop.

Letting out a slow breath, Bede settled back into the seat, his hand gripped the buckle of the seatbelt. Beside him, Toby and Owen did the same, looking at each other like they had found the only bulwark in a storm.

Bede knew full and well what it was like to have a bulwark. He could remember that feeling of solidness around him, though Winston was long gone from his life.

In Winston's place had come various cellmates—cellies, they were called inside of Wyoming Correctional, including Ellis, who was now with his forever partner somewhere in the Farthing area, and Kell.

It was Kell who, through charm and pure love, had talked Bede into applying for the Farthingdale Valley Fresh Start Program.

He still wasn't sure why he'd been accepted into the program.

Of the parole board, only Mr. Webber had been supportive of the idea. The other two board members had judged Bede as soon as they'd looked at him, and expressed their concerns over his exodus from prison. You're not suitable for the environment, they had said, almost together, heads nodding.

Bede might have agreed with them. The wilds of Wyoming were most certainly not the environment he was suited for.

He was a city boy since birth, having grown up with paved streets and scraggly city trees and the constant grind and hum of cars and trucks. The smell of exhaust, and odors from the dog food plant when the wind came from the east, that had been his world.

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 the disastrous 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 a ton to 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, the only reason, 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.

Bede had seen Kell in the prison yard, the first day he'd been let out from mandatory three-day solitary. And then looked away.

It wasn't his business to interfere with other people's lives. It wasn't his business that Kell was chatting with Ryan like they were old friends, as if Kell was unaware that Ryan was a full-on, foam-mouthed skinhead. Trouble. Something to stay away from, like a rattlesnake in the grass.

Except the next second, Bede had seen Kell walk away, which meant that he was smart, for all he was so young.

That hadn't kept Kell out of the stench of trouble that Ryan dragged around with him everywhere he went.

Quite soon, in the yard once more, Ryan and his buddies were all over Kell. Ryan had that I want you look in his eyes, and he wasn't the kind of guy to take no for an answer.

Kell had been doing his best to stand up to the onslaught. It had been about to turn ugly, with older cons taking small bets whether Kell would say yes or no to being Ryan's sex slave. Or whether he even realized what Ryan was truly offering him.

Which was nothing good. But did Kell know that?

It had gotten as far as Ryan hauling Kell up out of the mud after having slapped him.

Bede had stepped in. Did the prison yard power dance to show Ryan that he was not boss.

Then Griff, a cornerstone man with a life sentence for ending a brawl in a Cheyenne truck yard using a piece of metal to cave in at least half a dozen skulls, had stepped in and called the shots.

Griff had made Kell decide between Ryan and Bede so that Griff could more peacefully sun himself in the prison yard without a fight going on. Griff was old. Had done his crime and was doing his time, and he practically ran the yard.

Up close, in those green eyes of Kell's, Bede had seen an old soul. And an expression a little like Winston's, which showed Bede that Kell had seen some shit.

That shit could have made him bitter. But instead, beneath the surface, and not very far, lay a warm sweetness that needed only a bit of kindness to come out. A small brightness against the gray backdrop of prison walls.

There was a scarcity of kindness in prison, but that was self-evident, simply because of the high-tension environment.

There wasn't much kindness in Bede's old life, either, though he had fond memories of the party to celebrate his first real drug deal, standing in an abandoned house north of Five Points in Denver, holding out a plastic-wrapped burrito of white powder in exchange for a bundle of cash.

In the prison yard, the crowd that had gathered around Kell and Ryan waiting for blood, or something juicy to watch, had not seen Kell's expression, as Bede had. Nor would they ever know of the twinge in Bede's chest at that expression. Wise and frightened and brave, all at the same time.

When Griff had told Kell to choose between Ryan and Bede, Bede had thought for sure Kell would be taken in by Ryan's sudden sweetness. And that Kell would be put off by Bede, muscled, tattooed, grim.

To Bede's almost-surprise, Kell had chosen Bede. Kell wasn't a fool and had seen beyond Ryan's facade.

In their cell that night, Kell, subdued, shoulders slumped, had offered a blow job in payment for Bede's protection services. Bede had turned Kell down, of course. Kell was way young, and, as Bede found out, a virgin.

The tumble of Kell's offered innocence struck Bede to his core. Unsettled him. Made him want to rage at everything in his life that had brought Kell to that point.

But he didn't say it. Rather than telling Kell how much he reminded Bede of Winston, Bede dismissed Kell's offer, and casually allowed that it might be better if Kell was not so forthcoming about his virginity.

From that point forward, Bede protected Kell without telling him why. He shared his books. Gave him pointers. Went with him to the showers.

He even had a bit of fun pretending they were lovers, just to show Ryan what a loser he was. To which Kell responded like an old hand at improv. Looking up at Bede adoringly. Fluttering his eyelashes. Flirting in the food line.

And, in return, Bede had a shadow that almost never left his side.

Bede's situation could have been worse. He could have ended up with dull, rage-filled Toby as a cellie, or the snarl-mouthed Owen, rather than the bright-faced, quick-learning Kell.

This blessing turned into a curse, for just about as soon as Kell had applied for and been accepted into the Fresh Start Program, he started bugging Bede to also apply.

Frequent phone calls during Bede's phone time brought Kell's voice into his ear, describing the delights of the valley where he now lived and worked. How much fun it would be if Bede was also there.

There was also chatter about some guy named Marston, who, according to Kell, was so amazing. So handsome. Such a great kisser.

Bede did not care that Kell had found someone to be with, someone who took his virginity with what sounded like the utmost gentleness.

He was not jealous, not of Kell's happiness. Not of Marston. Though, if Marston harmed a single hair on Kell's dark head, Bede discovered he'd willingly do another stint in jail, just for the pleasure of skinning Marston alive. Nobody, but nobody , was going to take the shine out of those old-soul eyes.