There were other things besides the need for normal sexual satisfaction one became obsessed with when he was buried "inside"… and in this case it had been a plan to extort a half-million dollars. A thousand and one nights he had lain awake plotting, planning, learning all he could from his vindictive cellmate, Antoine Poirier, regarding the latter's infamous crime czar "uncle", Gaston Larreau; until he was certain he had devised a workable scheme. Nothing else seemed to matter all those long months and years except this fantastic coup that was going to even every score for him, even the medieval torture of being denied the biological need for a woman.

At first, when he'd walked onto the street and heard the big gate clang shut behind him the sensation of being a free man once more had nearly over-powered him. By God, he was going to kick things off with a few drinks, then, a woman, and he was going to fuck that doll, whoever she would be, until she couldn't walk, until he'd drained the last drop of stored-up semen from his aching, ravenous loins… but he hadn't done either. Instead, he'd gone directly to the CNR station, bought a ticket for Montreal and spent the day enroute, his brain cogitating in a never-ending pattern of hashing and rehashing, for it was the enormity of such a scheme and the aftermath should it fail that caused him to break out in periodic cold sweats.

The big gamble existed in the fact that he was playing at a game he knew nothing about, where the stakes, win or lose, were the ultimate… financially fixed for life, or very, very dead. The payroll escapade had been a foolhardy thing; the proof of that had been his tackling it single-handed and without a carefully prepared program. They'd caught him flat-footed. This time, he intended to minimize the gamble with methodical planning. There was no room for error, or else he would damn sure wind up in a basket; not that he feared death so much, but it was the uncontrollable ways one could achieve the state that bothered him.