Bernard Jamal woke up in the trunk of a large car, his left temple throbbing and ass aching. He reached up and his hand rebounded off the felt roof of the trunk, a jolt of alarm reverberating through his 6’ 6” frame.

There was little that Bernard feared. Growing up in East Baltimore, he’d seen a man die on a sidewalk, his chest spurting blood from a shotgun wound the size of a baseball. He’d heard the sounds of gunfire reverberating nearly nightly in the black air; given a wide berth to skinny men in sagging jeans jumping out of their skins on crank; watched as fellow teenagers were braced against cop cars for the crime of walking through their own neighborhood late at night.

He’d been a thrill seeker as a kid and teenager, cruising the streets with his boys looking for things to climb. Rusty fire escapes leading to the top of an early 20th century apartment building, pedestrians looking like figurines in those train gardens that the city fire stations stage for the holidays. In the dead of night climbing the scaffolding surrounding one of the few remaining water towers in the city, sneakers crunching on the gravel-covered roof. Buzzed on MD 20/20 in the suburbs, the night air bristling against their cheeks, scaling a microwave tower and gazing at the city lights to the south, all the way to the diffused glow of M&T Stadium, where the Ravens were playing Monday Night Football.

Fearless he was, unless thrown into a dark, enclosed space like the one he was now lying in, sprawled diagonally, his head in the far right corner and feet bumping against the ledge at the front of the trunk...

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"Like Printing Money" is available online through the usual suspects. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...