Ghostriders' Revenge of The Iron Wolves Heir

POV: Jason De'Leon

The gates of the Federal Correctional Institution opened the way bad things always did, without ceremony and without apology. Steel scraped against steel, a sound like the desert itself groaning, and then there was nothing between Jason De'Leon and the Nevada sun but thirty feet of cracked asphalt and the rest of his life.

He stopped just past the threshold and let the heat hit him.

After three years of gray walls and flickering fluorescents, the kind of institutional lighting that made everything look dead even when it was still breathing, the sun felt like a fist. He squinted, one hand raised against the glare, green eyes adjusting slow. The sky was enormous. He had forgotten how enormous the sky could be. In a cage, the world shrank down to what you could see from a slit window. Out here, the Nevada desert went on forever in every direction, flat and pale and merciless, and Jason felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with fear.

He was carrying a clear plastic bag. Everything the federal government thought summed up three years of a man's life.

A pair of jeans that no longer fit right, hanging loose around a waist that prison food and two hundred pushups a day had carved down to bone and muscle. A leather wallet without cash, only his old driver's license with a face that looked like a stranger's, some kid who had not yet learned what the world was willing to do to a man who trusted the wrong people. And a photograph.

He did not look at the photograph. Not yet.

"De'Leon."

The voice came from behind him, from the gate, and Jason turned slow the way he had learned to turn in the joint, no sudden movements, hands visible, body angled to present the smallest target. Old habits. The kind that kept a man breathing.

Guard Terrence Mack stood with one boot propped on the base of the gate, arms folded, the kind of smug carved into his face that some men were simply born with. He was a big man gone soft around the middle, the sort who had once been dangerous and now got by on the memory of it. Jason had known a dozen like him inside.

"Three years," Mack said. "Thought for sure we'd see you in the box before your time was up. You got people killed in there, De'Leon. Guards don't forget that."

Jason looked at him for a long moment without speaking. In another life, three years ago, he might have had something to say. He was a different animal now.

"You had a good run," Mack continued, pushing off the gate, voice dropping low enough that the tower screws could not hear. "Pack in Victorville still wants what you took from them. Your boy Reyes talked before they shanked him. Word travels, even out here." He smiled, the smile of a man delivering bad news he enjoyed. "Figure you've got maybe a week before someone comes to collect."

Jason held his gaze.

"I appreciate the warning," he said. His voice had gone to gravel after three years of concrete walls and steel doors, roughed down to something that carried without needing to be raised. "Now step back inside."

Mack blinked. Something shifted in the man's eyes, some old animal instinct that recognized the thing standing in front of him was not what he had expected to walk out of that gate. He unfolded his arms. He took a step back.

Jason turned away and lit a cigarette.

He had swiped the matches off Guard Patterson on the way out, an old habit from the inside where everything had value and nothing was free. The flame flickered once in the desert wind before he cupped it to life with practiced ease, protecting it with scarred knuckles. Smoke filled his lungs, sharp and bitter and real in a way that nothing inside had ever felt real. Three years without freedom, three years inside a machine designed to grind men down to something manageable, and the first thing he tasted on the outside was tobacco and ash.

He stood at the edge of the lot and smoked and looked at nothing.

The photograph was in the bag. He could feel it the way you felt a bruise, that low persistent ache that sharpened when you pressed it. His father's face, staring up from a faded Polaroid, creased and worn from three years of being carried in his wallet. The old man in his Iron Wolves leather, arm slung around a younger Jason at some long-ago club barbecue, back when the world had still made a kind of sense.

He had not pressed that bruise yet. Not today. Today he needed to be sharp.

The guard tower loomed behind him, and Jason could feel the eyes of the screws watching from their perch. They were probably betting on recidivism. Most cons were back within two years, sometimes sooner. It was their bread and butter, the revolving door that justified the budget and the overtime. But Jason was not most cons. He had learned things in those gray walls that the guards had not taught him in orientation.

He dropped the cigarette and ground it under his steel-toed boot, prison issue, built to last, heavy enough to break bones if a man knew how to use them.

The cicadas were screaming somewhere out past the fence line, and from the far side of the lot came the low hum of highway traffic from I-95, and underneath all of it, like something heard through water, a voice.

"Jason!"

He turned toward it.