Relentless (Bertoli Crime Family #1) by Lauren Landish

Author:Lauren Landish [Landish, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

Dane

Despite the fact that it was late spring, I was wearing a hooded shirt as I walked the streets. Walking the streets seemed to be the best way I'd found to deal with the stress and uncertainty of freedom. At Leavenworth, I'd spent too much time cooped up, being told what to do, and exactly how to do it. Why was I in prison? There was a simple answer: fuck the why. Why existed for people better than me. I was a prisoner. I didn't deserve a why.

So now, freed from the confines of military prison, I walked, often for hours, starting each evening as the sun went down and sometimes lasting until midnight. As I walked, my mind would replay the frustrations of the day, driving my feet forward like an invisible mental lash. I could see in my mind the faces each time I handed my resume or application over to someone, the tightness that would come behind their eyes when they saw that I'd checked 'yes' on the box that asked if I'd ever been convicted of a felony, and the combination of fear and finality that would then come when they saw what I wrote on the line after that.

That's one of the challenges of being convicted by court-martial. If I'd been convicted of the same crime by the State of Georgia, I'd have gotten a parole officer, and the resources of said office. Now, I know it doesn't sound like much, but most parole officers know someone who knows someone who can get you a job. It may have been shoveling shit at some pig farm, but it’d be an actual job. The state system wants to at least make some sort of effort to rehabilitate its prisoners. It helps with keeping the streets safer—in theory, at least. And there's nothing wrong with shoveling shit. Someone has to do it, and I've done far worse in my years on this Earth. A lot worse.

The military justice system doesn't have that sort of backup. Once your sentence is finished and you're discharged—with, of course, the mandatory DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE stamped at the top to hang around your neck like a scarlet letter for the rest of your life—you're on your own. It was like one of the other prisoners, a former aviation captain who'd been busted for sneaking in trophies from Afghanistan and was doing a two-year stretch once told me while we played cards one afternoon:

"Uncle Sam, he's all about taking care of you when you're doing exactly what he wants you to do. Note, I didn't say do what the rules say to do, or do the right thing, but what Sam wants you do to. But as soon as you don't, Uncle Sam turns into Uncle Scrooge, and he doesn't give a fuck about you. Hell, look at the VA system. They fuck the guys who actually did good over so bad it's a fucking crime. How does that bode for us, the rejected stepchildren of Sam's brood? Bell, most of us? We've got no chance.

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