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  “You will not do this, boy,” Ben had ordered, his hand gripped so tightly around John’s wrist that the bones felt ready to break. “You hear me?”

  John looked into his eyes, knew that the last man who had seen Ben Carver this angry had ended up floating naked and facedown in a shallow pond outside an abandoned church.

  “I will turn them loose on you, son. Like a pack of jackals. Do you understand me?”

  The protective custody wing had ten cells with two men each. Six of them were pedophiles. Two liked girls, four were stalkers of young boys. At night, John could hear them jerking off, whispering his name as they moaned their release.

  “Yes, sir,” John had answered. “I promise.”

  The rest of the offenders in the wing were like Ben. They preyed on adults on the outside, so John felt fairly safe around them. But sex was sex, and on the inside, you took fresh ass where you could get it. He had found out later from Ben that all of them had at separate times offered various trades for a go at the new boy. Prison etiquette dictated that as cellmates, Ben had first dibs. As time wore on and Ben didn’t take his due, some of the guys got twitchy; but every last one of them, from the baby-rapers to the child-killers, was afraid of Ben. They thought he was a sick bastard.

  Those first few years in lockup, John blocked off every day in his calendar with a big X, counting down until he was released. Aunt Lydia was working on his case, trying to find every angle she could exploit to get him out. Appeal after appeal was rejected. Then, Aunt Lydia came one day with Emily and they both told him that the Georgia Supreme Court had refused to hear his case. Lydia had been his champion, the only other person aside from his mother who had insisted he fight it out in court and not take the plea the state offered.

  Her expression said it all. It was the end of the line. There were no other options.

  The state plea had been fifteen years no parole. Lydia had told him not to take it, that she would fight for his innocence with every bone in her body. Now he was looking at twenty-two to life.

  Aunt Lydia shook with sobs. John ended up being the one to comfort her, trying to soothe her with his words, absolve her from the guilt she felt for not saving him.

  “It’s okay,” he told Lydia. “You did your best. Thank you for doing your best.”

  When John got back to his cell, he started reading his latest issue of Popular Mechanics. He didn’t cry. What was the use? Show his emotions so some murdering child rapist in the next cell could get off on his pain? No. John had toughened up by then. Ben had shown him the ropes, how to make it in prison without getting knifed or beaten to death. He kept to himself, never looked anyone in the eye and seldom spoke to anyone but Ben.

  What John found out in prison was that he was smart. He didn’t come to the realization out of vanity. It was more like an epitaph, a sort of eulogy to the person he could have been. He understood complex formulas, mathematical equations. He liked to study. Sometimes, he could almost feel his brain growing inside of his head, and when he solved a problem, figured out a particularly difficult diagram, he felt like he’d won a marathon.

  And then the depression would set in. His father had been right. His teachers were right. His pastor was right. He should have applied himself. He should have—could have—put his brain to work and done something with his life. Now, what did he have? Who cared if you were the smartest convicted murderer in prison?

  Some nights, John would lie awake in bed thinking about his father, how disgusted Richard had been that one time he’d visited his son. John was learning other things about life while he was incarcerated. As bad as Richard was, he had never hurt John the way some of his fellow inmates had been hurt. His father may have been thoughtless, but he wasn’t cruel. He had never tortured him. He had never beaten him so badly that a lung collapsed. He had never put a gun to his son’s head and told him to choose between letting some old bastard suck him off so daddy could have a bag of dope or getting a bullet in his brain.

  Years passed, and John saw that he had adapted. He could take prison. His days were long and drawn out before him, but he had learned the patience, had built the capacity, to do hard time. The possibility for parole came up for him his tenth year in, and then again every two years after. He was a week away from his sixth parole board hearing and a year and a half away from completing his twenty-two-year sentence when Richard visited his son for the second and last time in prison.

  John had been expecting Emily in the visitors’ room, and he’d been staring at the metal detector, waiting to see her come through, when Richard had blocked his view.

  “Dad?”

  Richard’s lip curled in distaste at the word.

  John had barely recognized him. Richard’s hair was a shock of white, still thick and full, a sharp contrast to his well-tanned face. As always, his body was fit. Richard saw obesity as a sign of laziness and he was a health nut long before it became a national obsession.

  Emily had divorced Richard a year after John’s conviction, but the two had stopped living together under the same roof the day John was arrested. Richard did not go to the trial, did not pay a dime for his son’s defense, refused to testify on his behalf.

  “You’ve finally done it,” Richard said, not sitting at the table but looming over John, his disapproval and disgust raining down like a summer shower. “Your mother has end-stage breast cancer. You’ve finally killed her, too.”

  A week later, John sat in front of the parole board, looking them each in the eye in turn, telling them how he had finally come to realize that he had no one to blame for his incarceration but himself. He had hated Mary Alice Finney. He was jealous of her popularity, of her friends, her status. He had been a drug addict, but that was not an excuse. The coke had only lowered his inhibitions, his ability to judge between right and wrong. He had followed her home the night of the party. He had broken into her bedroom and brutally raped her. When he started to come down from the coke, he realized what he had done and murdered her in cold blood, mutilating her body to make it seem as if a psychotic stranger had killed her.

  His record was remarkably clean. John had been a model inmate with only two infractions on his record, both over a decade old. He had attended every class the prison offered: Victim Impact, Family Violence, Corrective Thinking, Depression Group, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Life Issues, Communication Skills, Anger Management, Focus Group and Worry Control. He had finished his GED, completed a bachelor’s degree and was in the middle of completing a postsecondary degree when an amendment to the 1994 Crime Bill banned federal education grants to prisoners. John volunteered at the prison hospital where he taught CPR and basic hygiene to the other inmates. He had attended on-the-job training sessions in horticulture and food preparation. A letter penned by John and attached to his file stated that his mother was sick, and he just wanted to go home and be there for her the way she had been there for him all these years.

  The official notice granting him parole came on July 22, 2005.

  Emily had died two days earlier.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JANUARY 6, 2006

  Cousin Woody. The cool one, the popular one. He had a weight machine in the garage and he spent most of his days working out and smoking dope. His chest was ripped, six-pack abs separated by a trail of hair leading down to his privates. Girls climbed all over him like kudzu up a pine. He drove a silver Mustang hatchback, brand-new. He got the kids at the local school to sell some of his stash for him so he always had money burning a hole in his pocket. His widowed mother was on the fast-track at her law firm, always working late nights, always leaving her son alone. Mr. “Come Upstairs,” Mr. “You Wanna Toke?” Mr. “Just Snort It Up Your Nose.”

  Cool Cousin Woody.

  John had been following Woody for almost two months now, parking the Fairlane at the Inman Park MARTA station because gas was too expensive to use the car for anything but business. That’s how John thought about it: business. He was the CEO of Keep John Out
of Prison. The fucking chief financial officer, the vice president, the secretary, all rolled up into one.

  From the beginning, Woody had made it easy for John to keep tabs on him. He had always been a creature of habit, and his adult life had proven no different. John could set his watch by the guy. He went to work every day, came straight home after, kissed the wife if she was home, tucked in the kid, then planted himself in front of the television for the rest of the evening. He did this every evening the first week, and John was beginning to think he was wasting his time when Sunday rolled around. The kid wasn’t there—the wife hadn’t brought him back from church and John assumed he had been left with a family member. The wife left around six, dressed for work, leaving her husband all alone in the house.

  Woody waited about thirty minutes after she was gone, then he got into his car and drove away. Weeks passed with him doing this, then a month, then another. Every Sunday night, Woody was in that car like clockwork.

  With time, John had gotten good at keeping his distance, making sure Woody couldn’t see the Fairlane trolling along behind his car. Not that Woody seemed to be looking anywhere except toward the row of women who lined the streets of downtown Atlanta. He’d stop, wave one over, then drive her into an alley or park on an empty street. John would see the woman’s head go down for a few minutes, then it’d bob back up for good and she’d get out and Woody would move on down the road, have himself back in front of the TV an hour later.

  Then one night, he’d changed the pattern. He took a left out of his street instead of a right, heading east up Highway 78. John had been forced to hang back farther than usual because there weren’t many cars on the road. He’d jerked the steering wheel hard at the last moment to take an exit, following Woody up a winding road for about twenty minutes, passing a sign that read, Welcome to Snellville … Where Everybody’s Somebody!

  John had parked the car on a residential street, going on foot because that’s what Woody was doing. It was cold out, the first week of December, but John was sweating bad because he was smack in the middle of a neighborhood, sleeping kids packed into every house around him. He got so caught up in his fear that he lost sight of his target. He scanned the empty streets, walking down dead-ends, getting so turned around that he couldn’t even find the Fairlane.

  John was worrying about his own safety now. He hid in the shadows, tensed at every noise, certain some cop would pull up, run his record and wonder what brought a pedophile to this neck of the woods.

  Suddenly, in the distance, he saw a man walking with a little girl beside him. Both of them got into Woody’s car and drove off. John found the Fairlane five minutes later, cursing himself the whole way back to Atlanta. The next two weeks, he scanned the papers, looking for news of something bad happening in Snellville—an abducted child, a murder. There was nothing, but he knew it was just a matter of time.

  The truth was simple: Woody was using John’s identity for a reason. He was trying to cover his tracks. John had spent enough time surrounded by criminals to know when he was seeing one in action. It was just a matter of time before whatever Woody was up to landed squarely back on John’s shoulders.

  John decided then and there that he would kill himself, or find someone else to do it for him, before he would go back into prison. He had already lost twenty years of his life rotting away among pedophiles and monsters. He would not go back to that. He would not put Joyce through that pain and humiliation again. He had been strong on the inside, his will hardened steel, but the outside had made him soft and he knew that he could not take the loss of what little life he had carved for himself. He would put a bullet in his own brain before he did that.

  John saw his sister around this time. Just before Christmas, Joyce had called him at the boardinghouse and he had been so surprised to hear her voice that he thought maybe someone was playing a joke on him. Only, who would play a joke? He didn’t know anybody, didn’t have any friends on the outside.

  They met for coffee at a fancy café off of Monroe Drive. John had worn a new shirt and his only good pants, the chinos Joyce had sent to him so he would have something to wear when he left Coastal. The custom was to just give the inmate back the clothes he’d come in with, but John was several sizes larger than that scrawny kid who’d ridden the prison transport down to Savannah.

  The night before, he had taken off work early so he could go to the gift shop down the street. John had spent an hour picking out a Christmas card for Joyce, going back and forth between the cheap ones and the nice ones. The weather had made business at the Gorilla sporadic. Art was laying off guys left and right. John had saved as much money as he could during the flush times, but he had finally had to get a winter coat. Even though he told himself he was never going to wear used clothes again, John had no choice but to go to the Goodwill Store. The only coat he could find that halfway fit him was torn at the collar and had a funky smell to it that he couldn’t wash out at the Laundromat. It was warm, though, and that was all that mattered.

  Joyce was five minutes late to the café, and John was sweating it out over the fact that he’d had to pay three dollars for a cup of coffee just to be able to sit at one of the tables when she rushed in. She looked harried, her sunglasses pushed onto the top of her head, her long brown hair down around her shoulders.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting across from him. She left about six inches between her and the table, even more space between her and John.

  “You want some coffee?” He started to stand to get it for her but she stopped him with a terse shake of her head.

  “I’ve got to meet some friends in ten minutes.” She hadn’t even taken off her coat. “I don’t know why I called you.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  She looked out the windows. There was a movie theater across the way and she was watching the people who were standing in line.

  John pulled the Christmas card out of his pocket, glad he had gone for the more expensive one. Three sixty-eight, but it had glitter on the outside and the inside was folded so that when you opened it, a snowflake popped up. Joyce had loved pop-up books when they were little. He could remember her giggling over one that had farm animals jumping off the pages.

  He held out the card. “I got you this.”

  She didn’t take it, so he set it on the table, slid it toward her. He had spent most of last night testing out his thoughts on notebook paper, not wanting to give her a card with words scratched out or worse, to write something stupid that would ruin the card and make him have to buy a new one. In the end, he had simply signed it, “love, John,” knowing there was nothing else he could say.

  He asked, “What have you been up to?”

  She focused back on him as if she had forgotten he was there. “Work.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Me, too.” He tried to make a joke of it. “Not like what you do, but somebody has to clean those cars.”

  She obviously didn’t think he was funny.

  He stared at his cup, rolling it in his hands. Joyce was the one who had called him, inviting him to this place where he couldn’t even afford a sandwich off the menu, yet he felt like the bad guy.

  Maybe he was the bad guy.

  He asked her, “Do you remember Woody?”

  “Who?”

  “Cousin Woody, Lydia’s son.”

  She shrugged, but said, “Yeah.”

  “Do you know what he’s up to?”

  “Last I heard, he joined the army or something.” Her eyes flashed. “You’re not going to try to get in touch with him again?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward, urgent. “You shouldn’t, John. He was bad news then and I’m sure he hasn’t changed now.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “You’ll end up back in jail.”

  Would she care? he wondered. Would it be better for her if he was back at Coastal instead of living right under her nose? Joyce was the only living person in the en
tire world who remembered John the way he used to be. She was like a precious box where all his childhood memories were stored, only she had thrown away the key the minute the police had dragged him out the front door.

  Joyce sat back in her chair. She looked at her watch. “I really should go.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Your friends are waiting.”

  She met his eyes for the first time since she’d walked in. She saw he knew she was lying.

  Her tongue darted out and she licked her lips. “I went to see Mom last weekend.”

  John blinked back sudden tears. In his mind, he saw the cemetery, pictured Joyce standing at his mother’s grave. The buses didn’t go out there and a cab would cost sixty dollars. John didn’t even know what his mother’s headstone looked like, what inscription Joyce had decided on.

  “That’s why I called you,” she told John. “She would’ve wanted me to see you.” She shrugged. “Christmas.”

  He bit his lip, knowing if he opened his mouth he would start crying.

  “She always believed in you,” Joyce said. “She never once thought you were guilty.”

  His chest ached from the effort of reining in his emotions.

  “You ruined everything,” Joyce told him, almost incredulous. “You ruined our lives, but she wouldn’t give up on you.”

  People were looking, but John didn’t care. He had apologized to her for years—in letters, in person. Sorry didn’t mean anything to Joyce.

  “I can’t blame you for hating me,” he told her, wiping a tear with the back of his hand. “You have every right.”

  “I wish I could hate you,” she whispered. “I wish it was that easy.”

  “I would hate you if you had done …”