Connected: Short Hauls

A collection of twelve crime stories; including Harrows...
They had been drinking one night when Robby had come out with the murder bit. Jeff had been talking about other men he had met in prison, before he had met Robbie: Men who had reps of being a bad ass, or connected, or extreme: Killers, men who bragged about having bodies, more than one in some cases. Jeff had made the statement that he could never kill anyone. It wasn’t in him to do it. Robby had called him a pussy and told him the world didn’t work that way. The world, according to Robby worked this way: You did what you had to do to keep on being.
“Keep on being what?” Jeff had asked.
“Keep on being… Alive… You… Free… Whatever you got to be doing you do it to keep on going, doing, seeing, feeling, breathing,” Robby had told him. And hearing it that way it made perfect sense. Perfect.
That had been a few weeks ago and one of the nights when the drinking had gone on for a while. Something had happened that night. Robby had gotten the wrong idea months before, that one time, and so he thought it was that way. That Jeff was that way. He believed it, and so it didn’t matter what Jeff thought.
Jeff didn’t want it to be that way, it was just that he got a few beers in him and it didn’t seem to matter what happened. Someday he would tell him. He would tell him and he would understand it completely and it wouldn’t happen again. That night it had happened and he had let it happen and it had been okay. In fact it had seemed to make Robby happy, and so it had also made Jeff happy. A little happy. Sometimes he wondered if that was all life was, feeling a little happy sometimes; just a little.
It had been the same in prison too. Sometimes people just got the wrong idea about him: Completely wrong. In prison that could be a very bad thing. If he had been with Robby, Robby would have made them stop, but he had been on his own in the beginning and being on your own was one of those Robby sayings he did believe in: You did what you had to do to survive and he had for three years until he had been transferred to a medium prison for his last year and met Robby: Everything had changed then. No one messed with him at all. He and Robby had become friends and that feeling had begun to build inside him. That feeling that they were bound for something special, something unique and something that would make them famous...