prison life was hard on me. It is a bad memory that I do not try to spend time on. Things in the future will likely be better for you if you just bide your time and wait for it. Brooding over past hard times does you not good. You gotta shake that.” Tisha told him that Joe and her planned to rob a small neighborhood bank and go to the Caribbean. She talked Howie into joining with them. So he decided it might be a good opportunity. Finishing their food and drinks, the three of them stood at the table to say goodbye. Howie left her with a smile.
The heist worked but some hidden bank cameras took photographs secretly and eventually got the three of them arrested and put in jail. The trial got Howie a third conviction and fifteen more years. He got out in ten and had no straight future at age 60 with three convictions.
*****************************The White Lilly******************************
Chapter 4. Deals, Crooked Deals
Red Springs was a small community of maybe three thousand people. It was 114 miles east of Charlotte. There was a red brick two story house built about the turn of the century that stood in the east part of town on a main road. The front porch had eight cement pillars and a floor made of chipped red tiles. The yard was large at about three acres. Nice shrubbery gave privacy and isolation to it. There was a two car brick garage that was separated from the house. It aimed the two doors at a side street. There as a brick mechanical room behind the house that had two gas boilers that through a network of pipes going into the ground and father out went all over the house to heat it in cold weather winter times. The house had an eastern sun room with many windows, a large living room across the front of the house, a den, a formal dining room, and a double sized kitchen with three stoves and a Dutch oven. A stair went to a landing at the back of the house. A large window here bathed the house with sunlight from the south wall. The stair went up to a balcony on the second floor. A large fan as built into the ceiling above the stairs. It had slats and vents to the roof. In the heat of summer, this fan ventilated the entire house cooling it efficiently. There were four bedrooms and four bathrooms upstairs. Two chimneys provided four fireplaces that could be lit for extra heating. About twenty cast iron radiators all over the house heated it well. A large attic was accessible by another stair. The house had a full sized basement. The attic and basement were mostly were for storage of not much used but still owned items. Large houses like this were on both sides of the street. It was a better than average neighbor hood.