Prey Drive Read Free Page B

connect with her.
    “My poor Joey. I should have taken you away from that man. I loved him though. I know you can’t understand that, but I loved your father.”
    Joseph Miles never once mourned his father’s death. Seeing his mother weep over her murdered husband was disconcerting.
    “He was a killer, Mom. He murdered children.”
    “And you murdered him and those other people. Should I turn my back on you, Joey?”
    “Maybe you should, Mom.”
    His mother shook her head, and for a moment he could see the strength she’d once had. “Your father was sick. He had a weakness inside him, an illness like the one you have. You don’t know all the things he went through as a child. I don’t even know all of it, but what Damon Trent did to you, terrible as it was, was nothing compared to what your father went through. We tried to protect you, Joey. We never wanted you to turn out like him. He never wanted that. If it wasn’t for that Damon Trent …” She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eye with a handkerchief.
    Joe’s thoughts paused, stuck on what his mother had just confessed.
    “You knew what Dad was? You knew?”
    “I suspected. I knew he had a mean streak and I was sure he’d killed people before. I just never knew it was children. I thought maybe he’d killed guys in bar fights or maybe even evening ladies. That’s why I left him. I thought he might have been buying whores and hurting them. Men do that sometimes. I never knew it was children.”
    Joe stared at his mother, seeing her through different eyes. Men do that sometimes. She made killing prostitutes seem as natural to man as leaving the toilet seat up. Maybe she wasn’t the innocent, clueless victim he’d made her out to be. Maybe she wasn’t exactly a saint herself.
    How far did the corruption in his bloodline go? Joseph wondered.
    “He was proud that you went off to college. You know that? He was always talkin’ about his big college boy. We thought you were going to do great things. He called me when he saw on the news that a woman was murdered at your school. I didn’t even know he knew how to find me. He knew it was you who did it. I don’t know how he knew, but he did.”
    Joe smiled weakly and shook his head. Looking at his mother, hearing how she’d known or at least suspected what his father had been up to all those years—yet had done nothing—had continued to love him, Joe realized he’d never had a chance. He’d been cursed from the womb. Furthermore, he wondered if perhaps he’d been following the wrong bloodline. Perhaps the curse had not begun with his father but with his mother. He chased the thought from his mind, not liking the conclusion it inevitably led to or the actions that conclusion would necessitate.
    “I love you, Mom. Goodbye.”
    Joe stood to his full, hulking, six feet, six inches and summoned the guard. He never looked back once as he left the visitation room, even knowing he probably wouldn’t see her again until her funeral.
    “Goodbye.”
    The guard took Joseph Miles back to his cell. Joe waited until he heard their footsteps echo down the hall before he allowed himself to weep.
     
     

Two 
     
     
    It was dark. The air was moist with Joseph’s sweat, and every surface within reach was hard and cold, metal and concrete. He breathed in his own musky funk and breathed it out in a steaming cloud of halitosis. The guards had taken away his toothbrush and he hadn’t showered since they’d placed him completely naked in solitary confinement in a “strip cell.” His “crime” had been refusing to leave his cell for a shower. That had been enough.
    The idea of solitary confinement was ridiculous in supermax because every day was solitary. He was locked up twenty-three hours a day. The only thing they’d taken away by throwing him into solitary was his hour-a-day trip to the exercise yard and his thrice weekly showers.
    Joe held his hand up in front of him and couldn’t see his fingers. In