Reprisal

Chapter 1

I stared at myself in the mirror, and the face staring back at me didn't look familiar in the slightest. My cheeks that have always been so shrunken now looked strangely prominent. I always used to be skinny and bony, but hard workouts have turned my upper body into some kind of muscular machine. My nose has been broken so many times that my doctor at one point just gave up fixing it. I couldn't blame him. And the eyes...you know, my eyes had always been the feature that women liked about me the most. Nowadays, the color inside of them was of a dark blue, a blue that you only got to see when you're accidentally stumbling over a dark lake at night. They have seen a lot, and too much of that was misery.

That's what spending 5 years in prison does to you, I guess.

I stretched my arms and turned around in the miniature apartment that I was living in since I was released 5 months ago, and I still couldn't believe I was actually out. I remembered sitting on the front steps of my apartment complex the day I came home, staring at the streets, the bag with my personal things still hanging off my arm, trying to remember what it felt like to be free.

I couldn't.

Then Emma came along, and as she saw me, broke out in that massive smile I love about her so much, throwing her arms around me and saying my name over and over while her tears started soaking my shirt. The moment I felt the touch of her body, the warmth of her breath against my neck, was the first moment I knew what freedom felt like, and it was the damn best feeling I had felt in an eternity. Although I always thought I didn't deserve her.

She had never given up on me. When I got busted for an armed assault of a gas station that went horribly wrong, she had promised to wait for me, no matter how long it would take. It only took five years, but she will never know how much I feared every phone call with her, always expecting she'd tell me she couldn't take it anymore, that she had enough, that she couldn't support a murderer anymore.

Of course, it had all been a horrible mistake. A set-up. I was thrown into the gas station incident as much as I was thrown into prison. A friend of mine, Billy Madden, a total blighter, had had this funny idea to scare the owner of a local gas station to death with some water pistols that looked like real guns. He had thrown us out a couple of times for "impertinent behavior" and "harassment" of him and his customers when we were younger, and that was our way - well, actually Billy's way,- to pay him back. What I didn't know was that the water pistols were actual guns and Billy didn't consider himself satisfied with just scaring the old man. Before I knew what was happening, the police showed up with me pointing the gun at the owner while I was sheepishly waiting for Billy, thinking he only went out to go get the car - when in fact he took a full flight, leaving me at the crime scene with no good explanation why I was there, pointing a gun at an old, innocent man with a bullet stuck in his right shoulder. I guess you could say that my luck was the cops never found the money that came out of this raid. My bad luck probably was that the old man died on his way to the hospital.

Guess you couldn't have it all.

Ever since my trial, I had been waiting for the moment to come out of prison to find Billy - who had disappeared with the money, probably making a sweet life somewhere where palmtrees were a part of the countryside,- to pay him back for getting me busted for something I hadn't even done; the bullet that got the gas station owner shot originally came from his gun, which could never be proven. Billy had been involved in more than one crime, and although just as me, he had only been 20 years old when the gas station incident happened, he was way more experienced in squirming his way out of delicate situations like that. For five years, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of apprehending him when he expected it less. 1.826 days to plan my revenge.