Van had always been a deep sleeper. Even if he was in a weird place or a weird mood, he could usually fall asleep within a couple of minutes and stay asleep until his body had however many hours was required each night. His time in the county jail was a bit of a test: there’d been too many guys for the few benches in the cell, which meant Van had to sleep on the floor. Sure, he could have fought them for a spot, but he wasn’t about to let those cops think that the whole Palmer line was the same. His dad would have paid someone to fight the biggest guy in the room for him, and everyone would know, in the end, that James Palmer was the brains behind the brawn and he ought not to be fucked with.
Van had chosen a different path for his life. He’d decided years ago that he wasn’t going to be another crony on the dark side of his dad’s motorcycle club; he really wanted to make something of himself legitimately.
And somehow, he’d wound up in the place he would have ended up in had he been dealing drugs and breaking kneecaps and all the other shit that those guys did. Somehow he was the one in a fucking detention center, despite his clean record—or maybe because of his clean record—and the guys who did most of the dirty work for his dad were out on the streets. The irony made him sick more times than he could count, and he’d only been behind bars officially for a few weeks.
Tonight was the first night he’d been assigned a bed with the general prison population. He’d spent a few weeks getting acquainted with everything, waiting for a work detail, learning the lay of the land—all the crap first-timers did. His dad, apparently, was the one pushing him through a speedy trial, and the old man informed him that he was looking at years instead of months if he waited for the system to sort him out. So, Van had to fall on his dad’s good graces, as much as he didn’t want to, and accept that he had to do time for a crime he didn’t commit.
A lot of the other guys would say the same thing there. They’d argue that they were set up, that someone had framed them—but in Van’s case, he was actually speaking the truth. He’d never done drugs, not even recreationally at parties. Alcohol was the only drug he’d put in his system, and since owning a bar, his intake of even the weak stuff had decreased considerably. How the drugs wound up in his bag specifically was a mystery to him. A lot of the other guys bailed as soon as the cops put him in cuffs, and the few that hung around were just as clueless as he’d been.
The only difference was that those guys actually got out. Their bails were paid in a matter of days by family and friends, while Van’s pricey fee for release was never touched. He’d known his dad had been running low on funds for the last few years, but he never thought he’d be cheap enough to let his son sit in a cell.
But then again, his dad had bribed whomever he needed to in order to get Van in his current location. It was maybe a half-hour drive from Cascade Falls, and most of the guys in there were petty criminals who only needed minimum security. Max security was up the road, and since Van had arrived, there’d been a few transfers of some of the old-timers down to his facility. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but he’d been trying to make the best of it since they handed him a jumpsuit and told him breakfast was at seven o’clock sharp.
As was expected, he’d been placed with a bunch of other white guys, taking a bed in a cell block of about fifty prisoners. There were dividers to offer some hint of privacy between the sleeping cubes, though the walls only came up to Van’s armpits and were pretty damn thin. His new roommate was a quiet kind of guy—in for insurance fraud. He had a year left on his sentence, and he told Van he just tried to keep his head down and fly right. Gus was his name—seemed like a pretty okay guy. As far as roommates went, it could have been worse.
The snoring was outrageous that night. He’d just come from the new arrivals hall where he’d roomed with four other people, but nothing compared to the sounds of fifty assholes sawing wood late into the night, exhausted from doing… whatever the hell they did all day to keep busy. Normally, the noise wouldn’t have bothered him. Hell, he’d slept through the roar of motorcycle engines singing into the early hours of the morning, and this sounded almost the same. Something was keeping him up, and he just couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was the new surroundings. Maybe it was the exceedingly hard bed whose covers he’d learned he shouldn’t sleep under. (Bunk inspection was a bitch, apparently.)
Whatever it was, Van spent the better half of the night tossing and turning, his old bedspring squeaking each time. Gus made no noise when he slept. It was like looking at a fucking statue.
Maybe he couldn’t sleep because there wasn’t a warm, supple body beside him. It had been a long time since he’d wrapped his arms around April, and he imagined that if she was here with him now, he would have fallen asleep in all of two seconds. But he’d never want her here. As much as it broke his heart to see her go, sometimes he wondered if she was better off without him.
Other times, he couldn’t help but think she’d been forced to break things off somehow—something he’d yet to discuss with dear old dad, but planned to do as soon as possible.
Huffing irritably, Van rolled over the umpteenth time, his head a little sore from resting on such a thin pillow with zero support. Something about this particular movement felt different. Even with his eyes closed, he sensed someone was watching him. Maybe Gus was a bit of a creep after all. He tried to ignore it, willing his brain to shut off, but when something that sounded suspiciously like a footstep sounded just a few feet away, his eyes snapped open, and he saw a dark figure lunge toward him.
With a sharp object.
If he’d been asleep, he probably would have been stabbed.
Great—should make falling asleep all the rest of the nights a total breeze.
He reacted quickly, arms shooting up and blocking his attacker’s lunge, and then rolled out of bed and dragged the guy down to the floor. The commotion woke Gus, and as Van tried to wrestle the shank-wielding asshole off him, Gus started screaming for the guards. It was the loudest Van had heard him speak yet—though he didn’t step in and help. No, it was the older guy in for petty theft a few bunks down who came to his rescue, dragging the attacker off him while Van laid a few cheap shots at the guy’s face.
Blood trickled down from his nose as the lights came on, and suddenly there were a handful of guards in there screaming at everyone, telling them to stay in their cubes. As Van sat up, he realized the attention of everyone in the block was on him. A few of the guys looked concerned. Some seemed annoyed to have been woken up.
But there were a few… a few who wore the mask of indifference, and that set him on edge.
“Fuck you, Palmer!” his attacker screamed. Van’s eyes narrowed, but he stayed at the far end of his little cube, watching them drag the guy off. He was a junkie; Van could tell just by looking at him, and he wouldn’t have stood a chance if they’d fought squarely. They hadn’t said two words to each other since Van arrived in the sleeping hall earlier in the day. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever seeing the guy, and Van had an eye for tattoos. The ones that swirled up the junkie’s arms were intricate. Definitely memorable.
“Okay, let’s go,” one of guard’s said, grabbing Van by the arm and dragging him forward. “Gotta fill out a statement.”
“That guy tried to kill me,” he hissed, and the realization hit him as soon as he said it out loud. Someone had tried to murder him tonight while he slept. When would it happen again? Were there others? Was this a one-off incident because that psycho thought Van looked at him the wrong way? It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a fight, and he knew he could handle himself, but he wasn’t in the mood to get cornered by a bunch of assholes because someone outside of prison was paying them to take him out.
Sweat trickled down his face, as he was marched away from the scene of the crime.
He had the get the hell out of here—fast.