Breaking Habits

Prologue- How I started

I'm Micah Yorke. I'm thirty-two. I'm just over six-foot six and weigh around two hundred in muscles. I'm naturally built for my height, but I spent time building my physic.

I'm currently single. Actually, I'm always single. I've been single for the last, hmmm...umpteenth years. It's not by choice and as far as I'm concerned, I'm a good guy. I treat the women that I'm with right, but the relationships that I've been in never go past a year. The longest I remember being in one is close to six months. I don't know what goes wrong in them, they just fizzle away.

I live alone down south in the city of Bristol. One of the major cities in the U.K. The people in my community are great. They're good-natured and spirited. It's how a homeowner expects it to be living in an urban community.

I'm a workaholic, but that isn't why I'm not in a relationship. I work in my private security firm. It's doing well; however, my profit margins could be better. The economy is bad so I count myself lucky that my business is doing great. My employees are hard workers, but those assholes could do with a few lessons in minding their business and... manners.

I was in a gang once and because of said gang, I'm now an ex-con. It happened when I was twelve. It started when the older kids in my neighbourhood invited me to hang with them. They enticed me with friendship and in turn I did their errands. Chocolate treats, video games and the latest football cards were my payments, and oblivious to what I was doing, I was more than eager to do their deeds to impress them.

Eventually I became a part of their crew as I did everything that they wanted, and things went well for three years, then I turned fifteen, and initiation day came.

Our leader, Eric, wanted me to break into a police car outside the local station because he wanted the item in the trunk that the police confiscated that morning. I was ok with doing their petty shoplifting jobs but I knew better to go that far. I got worried and was too afraid to carry out my mission but Eric pushed me.

We watched the station all day and knew which car the items were in. When the time came, I chickened out and he knocked me around. I was a puny kid so it was easy for him to do it.

He threatened me with a crowbar and an ultimatum. "Get the car or leave the crew," were his words and although it sounded like an option, it wasn't.

That day common sense kicked in. I tried telling him that I wanted out but before I could someone knocked me out.

I came around to a shit storm. Police had surrounded us with pointing guns, and Eric wrestled with them as they tried hard not to shoot him during the tackled arrest.

The other crew members were cuffed to the car that we planned to steal, and with the hood wide open, the crowbar on the ground incriminated all of us. To say we were fucked would have been an understatement.

It took less than six weeks for the trial to complete. They tried us as adults and we were found guilty. The guys who were cuffed to the car got seven years for attempted robbery.

I got five years. The sentence was bullshit seeing as I didn't do anything...well, except lying. I lied to the police during investigations and it came out in court. I did it because I was being threatened by my crew members families. They wanted me to keep my mouth shut. I didn't care that they were doing it to me but when they involved my parents, I figured that I had to do something, so I lied. I got three years for being an accessory to a crime and two years for perverting the course of justice.

Eric got the book thrown at him. He was lippy and he did all kinds of shit during the trial. I think the judge was more pissed off that he assaulted a cop. He got fifteen years for everything.