Stand Your Ground Read Online Free PDF

of their lives by the same hail of bullets, they were still role models to Albert.
    Except he would be tougher, more ruthless. Nobody would ever take him out like that. He would crush his enemies before they ever got the chance.
    Unfortunately, by the time Albert grew up and started rising in the ranks of the family business, most of the old bosses were gone. And the guys who took their place were freakin’ accountants. Guys with MBAs. It was an era when greed was good—hell, greed had always been good, as far as Albert was concerned, but now everybody believed that—but the way of going about it was changing. There was more money to be made on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms than in back alleys.
    So there wasn’t much room for somebody like Albert Carbona who wanted to do things the old way. Oh, he’d been able to claw out some territory of his own. He had attracted guys like him who had grown up in the waning days of the previous era and still thought that was the way to run this thing of theirs. It had been a lot of work and trouble, but he was on his way to putting together an old-fashioned empire.
    So what had the damn suits done? Betrayed him. Set him up. And the Feds had swooped in and gathered up him and his inner circle, of whom Billy was the only one left. They had been split up, and all the others had been shanked, victims of payoffs from the new bosses who wanted anybody who represented the old days gone for good.
    He and Billy had stayed alive, though, because Billy was a monster. Not even those Aryan Brotherhood nutjobs would mess with him.
    So here they sat, two guys who weren’t young anymore, playing hearts and living out their days behind the walls. It was pretty crappy, Carbona thought.
    But at least it couldn’t get any worse.
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    Kincaid tapped at the keyboard and looked at the results that came up on the monitor in front of him. The high school football team’s upset win over McElhaney was plastered all over the front page of the Fuego Star ’s online edition, but there was nothing he could find about a fight in the parking lot after the game.
    If it wasn’t important enough to rate a mention in the local paper, that was good. That meant giving in to impulse and getting involved in something that was none of his business hadn’t done any harm.
    This time.
    Next time he would have to be more careful, whether he liked it or not.
    A man wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting at a desk in the corner muttered a curse. Kincaid shut down his monitor and swiveled his chair behind the counter in the prison library.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Simon?” he asked.
    Simon Winslow, whose carrot-colored hair didn’t go well with the jumpsuit at all, waved a hand at the typewriter in front of him and said, “How did anybody ever write anything on these? Those keys just wear out your fingers and when you make a mistake it just sits there mocking you. Even after you x it out.” A wheedling tone came into Simon’s voice as he went on, “It would be so much easier if I could work on a computer, Mr. Kincaid.”
    â€œYou know you can’t get anywhere near a computer, Simon,” Kincaid said. “You hack into people’s bank accounts and steal millions of dollars, then leak a bunch of government secrets, you can’t expect to be allowed online ever again.”
    â€œEver?” Simon looked aghast as he said it.
    Kincaid shrugged and said, “As long as you’re here, I guess. What is it? Forty years?”
    â€œI’ll be an old, old man,” Simon said with a sigh.
    â€œSorry,” Kincaid said, and he really was. He wouldn’t want to be locked up for most of the rest of his life, either.
    That was one reason he had gone on the run after what happened at Warraz al-Sidar.
    So in order to avoid prison, what had he done after making it back to the States with a lot of back-channel help from spooks he’d