Stand Your Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

country.
    They might be criminals . . . but that didn’t mean they weren’t patriots.
    The new prisoners were cooperative. Not polite, really. There always seemed to be sneers lurking on their faces and hate gleaming in their eyes.
    But they went along and did what they were told and hadn’t caused any trouble in the time they had been here. Admittedly, that had only been a few days. If they kept that up, Bert supposed he could tolerate them.
    But there was something about them . . . something about the way they looked at their captors . . . that worried Bert.
    They looked like they knew their victory was inevitable.
    Like it was only a matter of time until all their enemies were destroyed.
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    â€œWhat do you think, Albert?”
    â€œWhat do I think?” Albert Carbona said. “I think these orange jumpsuits look like hell. They got no style at all. You know, I once paid ten grand for a suit, Billy. Ten grand just to look snazzy. And then they stick us in these pieces of crap.” Carbona sighed. “It’s cruel and inhumane, I tell you. Cruel and inhumane.”
    â€œYou’re right, boss,” Billy Gardner said. “If they’re gonna make us stay in here for life, at least they could let us dress nice. But that’s, uh, not what I was talkin’ about.”
    â€œWell, then, what were you talkin’ about?”
    â€œThe new prisoners.” Billy lowered his voice. “The Arabs.”
    Carbona said, “Phhhtt! All they wanna do is kill, kill, kill. They got no style at all.”
    â€œThat’s what you just said about these jumpsuits.”
    Carbona glared at the big guy who had once been one of his right-hand men, and demanded, “It’s still true, ain’t it?”
    â€œYeah, sure,” Billy said quickly. Carbona was half his size but that didn’t matter. He was still the boss.
    Carbona hunched forward on the bench bolted to the floor next to the table, which was also bolted to the floor, and frowned at the cards in his hand. He and Billy were playing hearts, as they did most days to pass the time, but right now Carbona wasn’t really seeing the cards.
    â€œWe never wanted to destroy the country,” he went on. “We just wanted our piece of the action. Those guys, they’re crazy. Can you imagine what it’d be like if they took over, with all the rules they got? And if you break one of those rules, they don’t just send you to jail. No, they stone you, or chop your hand off, or even your freakin’ head, just like it was still the Middle Ages instead of the twenty-first century.” He revolved his index finger next to his temple. “Crazy.”
    â€œYeah, guys like us would be in real trouble, wouldn’t we?” Billy asked.
    Carbona narrowed his eyes and said, “We’re sitting in a damn max security prison for the rest of our lives, you big dumb ox. Ain’t we already in trouble?”
    â€œWell, yeah. That’s not what I meant.”
    Carbona snorted. He had a lot of affection for the big ox, who had taken a bullet for him more than once, but sometimes the guy just didn’t have any sense.
    Of course, the same was true of him, Carbona told himself. They were both throwbacks, men out of their time. And that had been true even before the Feds convicted them on a few dozen counts of murder, racketeering, and income tax evasion and threw them into Hell’s Gate for the rest of their lives.
    The fifties and sixties, that had been the golden time for guys like him and Billy, Carbona mused. He had been just a kid then, but he remembered those days well, remembered his father Giovanni and his uncles Sal and Bruno and Petey. Snappy dressers. Men who got things done. Nobody in the outfit crossed them. Nobody. Albert had wanted nothing more than to grow up and be just like them.
    Even when his father and Bruno had been killed in a hit and Sal and Petey were crippled for the rest