Wandering Ends A Flash Fiction Collection

Maximum Security: The SHU

Part One

My name is Jack Keyes. People think it is funny to call me Jackie. I hate it! Ask my mother-in-law. Just run over to Peace Hills cemetery, that will tell you everything you need to know. She is the bitch who put me here. Well, I guess I put myself here but I told her not to call me Jackie.

We were fighting that day. She referred to me as Jackie. I told her to shut her fucking mouth but she just kept pushing it. She was mad because the heist that morning almost went awry. When we got back to my house, she just kept on Jackie this, Jackie that, and then came the baseball bat. My wife, Patricia, was screaming for me to stop but I had a bad habit of not quitting until the job was done. I hit her so hard with the first swing one of her eyeballs popped out of her head. Then again and her skull split right down the middle. There was a lot of blood. My wife passed out when our dog picked up her eyeball and had it as a snack.

Anyways, the robbery was enough to put me in prison for 20 years but the vicious murder of my poor elderly mother-in-law was what got me 50 to life in max. I would have rather gotten the death penalty.

Max is a horrible place to go. The walls are just heavy-duty, gray concrete walls with solid iron bars covering the tiny windows in the cells. It is very depressing. They lock us up for twenty-three of the twenty-four hours each day. That did not include meals and showers but I would rather skip those. The mush they served us for meals came with a name to make it sound like food. The prisoners were rowdy. In addition, I had many enemies here.

......

Big Jim was on one of my first crews. We took out large jewelry stores and scored big. Unfortunately, for Jim, he was our distraction the day he became a rat in a cage. Hey, it was all part of the business. He was supposed to know when to get out of there. Instead, he shot two SWAT members right between the eyeballs. They wanted him alive so they wailed on him with beanbag bullets and nightsticks. He had welts the size of Russia from head to toe but lived, so they sent him to max for life without a chance at parole. He was a hurting man but he would be able to serve his sentence.

He blamed me for his failures in the heist but he knew the risks and the rules. It is what it is, though. He is a big guy. He towered over most at six feet seven inches tall and weighed a staggering three hundred eighty pounds of pure muscle. To call him large would be an understatement. He has a deep scar running just under his left eye where the cops sliced him during interrogations. He wears his jet-black hair in a flattop cut so he looks like an evil drill sergeant. He always made me a little nervous.

Then there was Little Louis. Do not let that name fool you though. He was a master in several different fighting styles. He may have only been five and a half feet tall weighing in at just a hundred forty-five pounds but it took six cops to take him out when they busted him. He had decided to go rogue, abandoning my crew and starting his own. I got a little jealous because he was pulling off some big heists. Therefore, I may have tipped the cops off...maybe not. Call me a snitch or whatever the hell you want to call me but I called it protecting my business.

Last but certainly not least was my second in command; Brock Hughes. Brock was an average looking guy with an average build. You could never have known he was a cold-blooded killer. He handled most of our dirty work. He was directly responsible for at least thirty-five murders. He was vicious, bloodthirsty, and batshit crazy. People trusted him though. He was charming, as I said average looking but he did have the bleach blonde hair and those steely blue eyes that present a sense of calm to the unwitting. Normally his victims were not calm when he was chopping off body parts or slicing throats from ear to ear. However, the sense of calm he portrayed hooked them in.