As his mind raced and his temper seethed, he didn’t know what the fuck to do with himself…so he just reached out to the animal and tried to pat down the fur that was sticking straight up between his ears.

“Get a load of this ’do, man. You look like Einstein when you wake up…you really do.”

Eye contact was everything when you were in jail.

Vin had learned this during his forays through the juvie system: Behind bars, how you met the stares of the guys you were in with was your Hello, My Name Is… and there were five main categories.

Junkies had unfocused peepers, usually because they couldn’t control their optic nerves any better than they could their sweat glands, bowels, or nervous systems. As the prison equivalent of lawn sculpture, they tended to pick a place and stay there, and for the most part, they kept out of the drama because they didn’t instigate and easy targets were a bore.

Dime-sizers, on the other hand, who were usually on their first trip through the penal system and more than a little freaked out, had stares like Ping-Pong balls, all willy-nilly, not-for-longs, their eyes bouncing around. This made them perfect candidates for ridicule and verbal harassment, but generally not fists—because they’d be the ones who’d yell for the guards at the drop of a hat.

Motherfuckers, in contrast, had seeker stares, always probing for weakness and ready to pounce. They were the ones who picked at everyone and loved playing the harasser, but they were not the dangerous ones. They instigated, but let the hotheads follow through—they were kids in the sandbox who broke toys and blamed it on others.

Hotheads had crazy eyes and loved to fight. All it took was the slimmest of openings and they were ready to go to town. ’Nuff said.

And finally, you had your bona fide sociopaths, the ones who didn’t give a fuck and could kill you and eat your liver. Or not. Didn’t matter either way. Their eyes drifted around, ocular sharks that swam in the middle distance of the room for the most part—until they ID’d a victim.

As Vin sat among a representative sample of the above, he was part of none of these groups, falling into a category that was fairly atypical: He stayed out of people’s biz and expected others to extend the same courtesy. And if they didn’t?

“Nice suit you got there.”

With Vin’s back against the concrete wall, and his eyes on the floor, he didn’t have to glance up to know that out of the eleven other guys in the holding bin, he was the only one with a pair of lapels.

Ah, yes, a motherfucker stepping up to the plate.