Page 10 of Three-Inch Teeth

CATES STARED AT Winner for half a minute. Finally, the CO broke his gaze and looked away. Cates got dressed in the new clothes and stuffed his old ones into the plastic parcel to take with him. He carried his ruined hat by the brim in his free hand.

As Winner stepped to the side to let Cates walk into the public lobby, Cates paused.

“I just added you to the list,” Cates said in a whisper.

“What list?”

“My special list of special people,” Cates said. “You know, like for Christmas cards.”

“Well, that’s darned sweet of you,” Winner said. “Unless you’re making some kind of threat.”

“I’d never do that, Officer. Especially right now.”

Winner narrowed his eyes.

“I’ll send you my address when I get settled,” Cates said. “Then you’ll know where to send me my belt and buckle.”

“You do that.”

“I surely will,” Cates said. “And I surely expect to get my property back.”

*

THE SKY WAS gray and overcast and the wind was blowing as it always was in Rawlins when Dallas Cates pushed his way through the double doors toward the parking lot. He deposited the square cube of his old clothes into a garbage can on the way out.

A tumbleweed propelled by the wind hit his left leg as he walked, and he shimmied around it and avoided another one that flew out of the lot into the sagebrush flat to the north.

Cates squinted against the wind and the grit it contained until he saw the white 2015 Chevy pickup in the lot. It was a four-by-four with a topper over the bed, and there was a bloom of primer on the front passenger door. Just as she’d described it. She’d obtained it from a former boyfriend who’d been arrested and sent away on drug charges.

Bobbi Johnson, twenty-eight years old and dirty blond with a gold front tooth, beamed at him and waved from behind the wheel. He headed in her direction and climbed into the cab.

“You look happy,” she said.

“I am. I am,” he said, gesturing through the front window. “Air, open country, open sky. You have no idea how good this all looks to me. It’s like I’m breathing real air again.”

“What are you wearing, Dallas?” she asked in her high-pitched voice.

“The COs thought it was funny,” he said as he leaned over and grasped her in a bear hug. It was the first time they’d ever touched. The prison’s visiting room maintained a strict no-contact policy.

Johnson was bony, but she had large, soft breasts under her hoodie. Her hair smelled like weed smoke and he felt her hand squeeze the top of his thigh. He was instantly hard and he wanted her now.

She looked older than she was because her face was weathered from too much time in the sun, too much time in the wind, and too much time mixing alcohol and meth. She swore that she was no longer a tweaker and now relied solely on weed, alcohol, and the occasional Oxy for the pain in her lower back. Cates wasn’t sure he believed her.

They’d met online and she’d confessed to him that she’d once been a teenage buckle bunny who liked to hang around rodeos and bed contestants. She’d also confessed that she’d always had her eyes on Dallas Cates, but that he was too big of a star at the time to get close to him.

Johnson had visited him twice in the last two months, and she’d promised to be there to pick him up when he was released.

“After all,” she’d said, “you don’t have no family no more.”

*

CATES SAID, “LET’S get the fuck out of here.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He beamed and said, “We’re gonna buy a bottle of whiskey and get a cheap motel room. I’m gonna get drunk and then I’m gonna fuck your brains out. Then I’m gonna get drunk again and fuck your brains out again. How does that sound?”

“It sounds good, babe. I’ve been waiting for this day for years.”

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