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Houston Gets a Job (Waylaid on the Road to Nowhere pt 1)
This is the first in a series of stories about a group of friends taking on a neighborhood drug cartel.
The sunshine seemed brighter, somehow. Houston Jones knew it was the same sunshine that had beamed down on him when he was in the yard, the same as when he last experienced it as a free man nearly thirty years ago, but his heart didn’t believe it. His skin didn’t believe it. Everything else had changed for him; why not the sunshine too?
When he stepped outside Thousand Oaks Federal Correction Facility, into the brighter sunshine, the gate slammed behind him with such finality that he nearly jumped. He at least turned around to look behind him, at his home for the last three decades. What now? His mama was dead. Nana, her mother, was dead too. Pops had taken off about five years in — probably the reason Nana had lived so long — and Houston’s own dad may as well have been dead too, for all his son had ever seen him. Other than one sister sending a card every year at Christmas, he hadn’t had any contact with his siblings, and he had no plans to change that. Which left him with nowhere to go, no one waiting for him to get out.
The prison’s social worker had hooked him up with a small efficiency apartment on the edge of downtown. The landlord apparently had no problem with his renters’ backgrounds…
