He was short and stringy, with a full head of hair, but mostly gray. The overall effect was of a jockey past his prime. He used these features to his advantage, letting people think he was old and weak, until they got a better look at him. Some were fooled for a longer while than others. Those others shivered or inadvertently turned their back to him, as if affected by something evil at his core.

Prison hadn’t made him officially bad. He was already declared bad by the time he was twelve. That was when he killed his little brother with his dad’s shotgun. It was 1956. He told the judge, he told all of them it was an accident, but no one believed him. He got sent to a boys’ reformatory school outside of Pascagoula, Mississippi. His own parents didn’t even believe he was innocent of the homicide, and even if they did they wouldn’t forgive him for killing their baby. They figured they saw the writing on the wall and Jeremiah would always be bad. So his parents wouldn’t let him back in the house when he was released two years later. No, prison could not have made him worse than he was thought to be.

But it had honed his technique.

“Jeremiah Randolph Beaufort, number 4570937450.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your sentence has been commuted. You are free to go without parole. Do you have any dress-outs?”

“Yes.” Beaufort thought to add “sir,” in his habit of being a model prisoner all these years, but then he thought it was no longer necessary. He didn’t have to be a model prisoner any longer.

“We will provide you with a bus ticket to the destination of your choice. Do you have a choice?”

“Pascagoula,” he said.

The warden laughed. “Well, that’s practically around the corner. You could almost walk. You don’t want to go any further than that?”

Beaufort pretended to think on it. “How about Bangkok?”

Now that he was getting out the warden appeared to be more relaxed than usual, laughed again rather than calling him on being a smart mouth. “It’s just that, don’t you have family or something? In another state?”

“Warden, I’ve been in here for thirty-three years, four months, and five days. What do you think?”

Not liking the feeling of being on the defensive, the warden shrugged. “I think you’re fortunate to be released. Your sentence has been commuted, Mr. Beaufort, but you’re hardly innocent of crime.” The warden tapped an open file on his desk. “This last stint was your third. You’ve been in and out of prison for drug possession and trafficking”—he glanced down at the page before him, frowning as if the math was hard—“for almost fifty years.”

“This is Your Life,” Beaufort said, his mood turning dark as he lost patience with sucking up to someone young enough to be his grandson.