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 were just heavy duty, gray concrete walls with solid iron bars covering the tiny windows in the cells. It is very depressing. They locked us up for twenty-three of the twenty-four hours each day. That did not include meals and showers but I would rather have skipped those. The food was mush 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 mastered several different Japanese and Chinese 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.

.......

Since Big Jim, Little Louis and Brock had gotten to the max, it seemed like they had done well for themselves. They each had a large following. Brock even had a couple of guards he had smooth talked onto his payroll.

Being my first day, I did not know anybody but I was definitely known. The guys decided to lay out the welcome mat for me. It was not a pleasantly warm welcome though. My first meal in the joint and I got skipped. I walked through the line finally getting to the front, I hadn't eaten much in two days so anything looked good, but the dick behind the line shook his head as he shoveled the slop onto the guy's tray behind me.

I sat at one of the steel, bolted to the ground tables reserved for the outcasts of max. The crowd consisted of rapists, child molesters, and the mentally ill. By mentally ill I mean the schizophrenics, sociopaths, you know, the real psychos. I was hungry but maybe at dinner I will get to eat something. Even a scrap would be cherished.

After my less than fulfilling lunch, I went back to my cell with my cellmate. He did not seem to know me or have a problem with me. He also was not very talkative. I sat there until dinnertime staring at the cell wall listening to the other rowdy prisoners hooting and hollering back and forth across cell block D. Some of the noise was hard to stomach because every now and then you would hear a couple of guys going at it. Some of them willingly others screaming in agony at becoming their cellmates bitch.

.......

Finally, dinnertime was here. I was hungry and I was hoping for food. I got to the front of the line again. This time they reached down to serve me something on my cheap plastic tray. The douche who would not feed me earlier plopped down a nice big, dead rat in the entree slot of my tray. I was hungry so, fuck it, I ate the damn thing. Then, when it was time to put our trays away, I hopped over the dinner tray cart pummeling the dick who served me the rat. By the time the guards got there, I had knocked out eight of his teeth, busted his nose and successfully sent him to the infirmary. As the guards were rushing me I grabbed a few of his teeth, shoved them back in his mouth and made him eat them.

One day in and I was already in solitary, also known as the SHU or shoe. The conditions in the solitary housing unit were much worse than the cells up top, but at least I was alone. There were no windows. The hole in the door only opened when a guard was bringing dinner or just wanted to spout some shitty comment to us dirty criminals. I only had to spend two days in the shoe for my first time, which I was okay with. It was psychotically peaceful.

That was my first day in max. I have been here three weeks now. Shit has not gotten any better but I have been able to avoid too much trouble from my old crew. The weekends were the hardest because we had more free time. Rather than the one hour during the week, we had six hours. We got track time, library time, visitors if anyone visited us, and TV time. I chose library time most weekends, then back to my cell. This weekend will be my fourth weekend. I have to find a different hobby because I am tired of just sitting and reading. This weekend I am just saying fuck it and going out to do something different. I need a change. I cannot read every weekend for the rest of my life I will go nuts.