It was all I could read, the tears making the words impossible to follow. He was dead. Although he was only briefly in my life, I still felt a humungous loss. I felt like it was Aiden again, another family member torn from my life. Why? Over what?
Rather than tear the paper to shreds; rather than punch the shit out of my cell, I quietly sat and wept. I say wept because it was almost silent, the tears flowing as I sat staring at the wall of my cell. No one bothered me for the rest of the day.
An officer called Horton McMurray came to my cell just before the 5 o’clock muster and offered to lock me down. I simply nodded. It meant I wasn’t required to stand by my door for the following muster. It would also effectively lock me in for the remainder of the day, but under the circumstances, I welcomed it with open arms.
It was a painful night for me, a lot of soul searching going on. I had a lot of voices in my brain, all telling me how to continue. It was as if all the lost souls I’d lost in my life were returning to provide guidance. My mum, Aiden, San, Rhonda and Abby, all speaking their ideas of direction. Did it help?
The voice that sounded loudest of all was that of Aiden, the only one who truly understood me.
‘Do what your heart tells you. The rest is everybody else’s bullshit,’ was what he said. It made the most sense to me. Regardless of what everyone else thought, I had to take care of me first. And right then I understood that the list of names I needed to get even with was now topped by 2 in particular. Rock McGovern and Frank Crudinski. While one had a history with me that would only ever end in death, the other had inflicted countless pain and suffering on too many innocent people. Young Katerina Traiforous was at the top of that list. She deserved revenge. But so did Sam Lester’s little boy.
You might think me a hypocrite for only counting those 2, when I was also involved in the murder of Kon Traiforous. He also left children, just as Sam had. I don’t forget those kids as easily as you might think. They weigh heavy on my conscience and I assure you, I too will pay for my own evil deeds in time.
7.
Despite being another long night of soul searching, I met the morning light with something concrete in my hands, a new sense of direction now guiding me. It was a simple list of names, written in the back of one of my books that was by Stephen King himself. He too had a prison story, one that Hollywood had successfully turned into a true movie legend.
The book was called ‘Different Seasons’, the story ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’ a short novella within it. It was a prison story, one of my favorites during that year. When I first saw the movie as a kid, it didn’t hit me out of the park. But after watching it again within the confines of a prison cell, it brought the movie into a whole new light, Andy’s struggle truly impacting me.
It was in the back of this book that I wrote the names of those that I needed to purge from this world. I didn’t exactly know how I would achieve the monumental task, especially with half of the names absent from the Palace. But I knew I had time on my hands. It wasn’t a huge list by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a bunch of names that now became my reason for surviving.
Rock McGovern
Frank Crudinski
The Nielsen Brothers
Chester Jennings
In all honesty, I had considered adding Brad Gorman’s name to the list, but he was just as involved with the Jesters as I was with the Cruds. And I’d already given the prick a decent hiding. I also considered Nails. He’d killed San as much as Razzie did, but after quite a bit of soul searching, decided that he had his own demons to fight and despite killing my father, he’d avenged his own mother and that’s something I would have done as well. The five names on my list were those that truly had reason to die.
Rock for turning Aiden into a full-blown junkie, for ordering him killed and for what he’d done to Gabby and me. Frank for the hit on Nick’s daughter and Sam Lester’s boy and all the other officers he’d destroyed. The Nielson brothers for killing Aiden and then of course, there was Chester, the man that destroyed my friend Jasper.
I had written the names into the back of that book and opened it each and every day to read over. There would never be another opportunity lost, of that I was sure. No matter what else happened in my life, nothing would be over until those 5 men were dead.
Chapter 5
1.
Although I could have, I didn’t apply to attend San’s funeral. It was a conscious decision I’d made at the time, deciding that I didn’t want to grieve the way people did when watching the end of a life’s story. What I wanted was to keep the grief deep inside me; for it to join the bottle of rage I kept hidden deep within my soul.
What I did do the day of San’s funeral, was to go to work. It was a Thursday, just another ordinary weekday as far as I was concerned. The medical unit was quite full that particular week, all but 2 beds filled. Most were older prisoners, those living out their twilight years who needed constant medical supervision. A few were prisoners that
