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  "John?" His mother had some sixth sense and always seemed to knock on his bedroom door when he was jerking off. "We need to talk."

  Emily wanted to talk about his failing grades, his latest detention, something she had found in the pocket of his jeans. She wanted to talk to the stranger who had kidnapped her son, to beg him to give her her Johnny back. She knew her baby was in there somewhere, and she would not give up. Even at the trial, John had felt her silent support as he sat at the table listening to the lawyers who said he was scum, facing a panel of jurors who wouldn't even look him in the eye.

  The only person in that courtroom who still believed in John Shelley was his mother. She would not let go of that boy, that Cub Scout, that model airplane builder, that precious child. She wanted to put her arms around him and make everything better, to press her face to the back of his neck and inhale that odd scent of cookie dough and wet clay he got when he played in the backyard with his friends. She wanted to listen to him tell her about his day, the baseball game he had played, the new friend he had made. She wanted her son. She ached for her son.

  But he was already gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  OCTOBER 2, 2005

  John hadn't slept well, which was nothing new for him. In prison, nighttime was always the worst. You heard screams, mostly. Crying. Other things he didn't like to think about. John had been fifteen when he was arrested, sixteen when he was incarcerated. By the age of thirty-five, he had lived in prison more years than he had slept in his parents' home.

  As noisy as prison was, you got used to it. Being on the outside was what was hard. Car horns, fire engines, radios blasting from all over. The sun was brighter, the smells more intense. Flowers could bring tears to his eyes and food was almost inedible. There was too much flavor in everything, too many choices for him to feel comfortable going into a restaurant and ordering a meal.

  Before John was locked up, you didn't see people jogging in the streets, headphones tucked into their ears, tight spandex shorts clinging to their bodies. Cell phones were in bags like big purses that you carried over your shoulder and only really wealthy people could afford to have them. Rap didn't exist in the mainstream and listening to Motley Crue and Poison meant you were cool. CD players were something out of Star Trek and even knowing what Star Trek was meant you were some kind of nerd.

  He didn't know what to do with this new world. Nothing made sense to him. None of the familiar things were there. His first day out, he had gone into a closet in his mother's home, shut the door and cried like a baby.

  "Shelley?" Art yelled. "You gonna work or not?"

  John waved his hand at the supervisor, pushing his mouth into a smile. "Sorry, boss."

  He walked over to a green Suburban and started wiping water off the side panel. That was another thing that had shocked him. Cars had gotten so huge. In prison, there had been one television that got two channels, and the older inmates got to decide what was playing. The antenna had been ripped off and used to pluck out somebody's eyeball well before John showed up, and the reception sucked. Even when the snow cleared and you could halfway see the picture, there was no sense of scale with the cars on screen. Then you wondered if what you were seeing was real or something just made for a particular show. Maybe the series was really about an alternative world where women wore skirts up to their cooches and men weren't beneath sporting tight leather pants and saying things like, "My father never understood me."

  The guys always got a laugh out of that, shouting "pussy" and "faggot" at the set so that it drowned out the actor's next line.

  John didn't watch much TV.

  "Yo, yo," Ray-Ray said, bending down to sponge silicone onto the Suburban's tires. John looked up to see a police cruiser pulling into the drive of the car wash. Ray-Ray always said things twice, hence the name, and he always alerted John when a cop was around. John returned the favor. The two men had never really talked, let alone exchanged their life stories, but both knew on sight what the other was: an ex-con.

  John started cleaning the glass over the driver's door, taking his time so he could watch the cop in the reflection. He heard the man's police radio first, that constant static of the dispatchers speaking their private code. The officer glanced around, pegging John and Ray-Ray in about two seconds flat, before he hitched up his belt and went inside to pay for the wash. Not that they would charge him, but it was always good to pretend.

  The owner of the Suburban was close by, talking on her cell phone, and John closed his eyes as he cleaned the window, listening to her voice, savoring the tones like a precious piece of music. Inside, he had forgotten what it was like to hear a woman's voice, listen to the sort of complaints that only women could have. Bad haircuts. Rude store clerks.

  Chipped nails. Men wanted to talk about things: cars, guns, snatch. They didn't discuss their feelings unless it was anger, and even that didn't last for long because generally they started doing something about it.

  Every two weeks, John's mother had made the drive from Decatur down to Garden City to see him, but as glad as John was to see her, that wasn't the kind of woman's voice he wanted to hear. Emily was always positive, happy to see her son, even if he could tell by looking in her eyes that she was tired from the long drive, or sad to see that he'd gotten another tattoo, that his hair was in a ponytail. Aunt Lydia came, but that was because she was his lawyer. Joyce came twice a year with their mother, once at Christmas, once on his birthday. She hated being there. You could smell it on her. Joyce wanted to be out of that place almost more than John did, and whenever she talked to him, he was reminded of the way the black gangbangers and Aryans talked to each other. You fucking nigger dog. You fuck-eyed white motherfucker. I'll kill you soon as I get the chance.

  His father came to see him twice in all the time he was locked up, but John didn't like to think about that.

  "Excuse me?" The woman with the cell phone was beside him. He could smell her perfume. Her upper lip was a little bow tie, gloss making her mouth look wet.

  "Hello?" she said, half-laughing.

  "Sorry," John managed, shocked that she'd gotten this close to him without him even noticing. In prison, he would be dead right now.

  "I said 'thank you,' " she told him. She held a dollar in her hand and he took it, feeling cheap and dirty at the same time.

  John made a show of putting the bill in the communal tip box, knowing every eye in the place was watching him. He did the same thing when a customer handed somebody else a tip. No one trusted anybody around here and for good reason. You didn't need a college degree to figure out why a bunch of middle-aged guys were working for minimum wage plus tips at the Gorilla Car Wash.

  Art came out of the office, yelling, "First shift, lunch," as he walked over to the cop standing by the vending machine. Shit, John hadn't noticed that, either. The cop had come outside, had been watching him, and he hadn't seen it happen.

  John tucked his head down as he went into the back, clocking out and grabbing his lunch off the shelf. He had a soda in the refrigerator, but there was no way he was going back out there until the cop was gone and Art was back behind his desk counting his money.

  Chico, one of the other workers, was sitting on the cement wall under the shade of a big magnolia tree that grew in the strip of grass in back of the car wash. John liked to sit there under the tree, enjoyed the solitude and the shade, but Chico had beaten him to it today. This sort of thing wouldn't have happened in the joint. Taking a man's space was like fucking his sister up the ass. Nothing happened in that place that didn't have some kind of price attached to it.

  "How's it going?" John said, nodding at Chico as he walked past him to the carport that served as a detail shop. The detail guys went out for lunch. They made enough money to afford the luxury.

  John sat on the ground under the canopy. He took off his ball cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. November used to mean winter, but now it meant you were lucky if the jacket you put on
in the morning didn't have you sweating by noon.

  Christ, even the weather had changed without him.

  He glanced around before pulling a piece of paper out of his back pocket. The credit report. Part of him had wanted to shove it back in the trash bag last night, just let it go. So some motherfucker was pretending to be him. What did that mean to John Shelley? Obviously, the poser wasn't running some fraud. Why would he pay off the credit cards every month for six years? John had heard about all kinds of scams in prison, and though he hadn't really had access to any computers, he knew that the Internet was the best way to run an identity fraud. This, though. This was nothing like that. You took the money and ran. You didn't stick around and pay your monthly bills on time. It was like that old joke of ordering fifty pizzas to somebody's house, only you paid for them yourself with your credit card.

  He folded the report and tucked it back into his pocket. He should leave it be. No good would come out of any of this. What John should do is exactly what his parole officer said: Concentrate on rebuilding your life. Get a steady job. Show people you've changed.

  It bothered him, though. Like a splinter that wouldn't come out, he had picked at it all night, trying to see the angle. There had to be an angle. Why else would someone do this? Maybe somebody with a past was using John's vitals as a cover. Could be some escaped ax murderer or blue-collar guy was on the lam and John Shelley seemed like a good cover.

  He laughed at this idea, taking a bite of his peanut butter and banana sandwich. You had to be pretty desperate to assume the identity of a convicted murderer and registered sex offender.

  The peanut butter caught in his throat and he coughed a couple of times before getting up and going to the coiled hose on the ground. John turned on the spigot and took a drink, watching Ray-Ray talking to some woman over by the vacuums. John could tell the other man was doing his usual jive, trying to work his magic on the woman. Judging by the way she was dressed, Ray-Ray could have saved some time and just given her some money. Most of the guys around the Gorilla availed themselves of the local talent. Straight up Cheshire Bridge Road, you ran into the Colonial Restaurant, a meat-and-potatoes kind of joint with hookers a plenty trolling the apartments behind them. John had often heard the guys arguing Monday mornings about which was best: get them early when they were fresh and pay more, or go later when they were sloppy and pay less.

  Street economics.

  "Fuck off, asshole!" the hooker screamed, slamming her hands into Ray-Ray's chest.

  Ray-Ray growled something and pushed her back until she fell on her ass.

  John's first impulse was to stay exactly where he was. You didn't get involved in other people's shit. That was how you got yourself killed. This was a woman, but she worked the streets. She knew how to take care of herself. At least it seemed that way until Ray-Ray hauled off and punched her square in the face.

  "Damn," Chico muttered, ringside at a championship wrestling bout. "Didn't even give her time to stand up."

  John looked down at his shoes, which were soaking wet. The hose was still on. He could get into trouble for that. He went back to the spigot, turned it off, forgetting for a minute that it was righty-tighty and turning it lefty-loosey. He coiled the hose back in place. When he looked back up, Ray-Ray's foot was in the air, sailing down toward the hooker's face.

  "Hey!" John said, then, "Hey!" again when Ray-Ray's foot made contact.

  John must have run over to them. He must have said something else along the way, something loud that called even more attention to the situation. By the time his brain caught up with his actions, John's fist hurt like a hornet had stung him and Ray-Ray was splayed out on the ground.

  "What the fuck," Art yelled. He barely topped five feet on a good day, but he stopped about two inches from John's chest, screeching up at him, "You fucking monkey!"

  They both looked down. One of Ray-Ray's teeth was on the sidewalk swimming in a puddle of blood. The guy looked dead, but no one was dropping to check his pulse.

  The cop stood in the doorway. Slowly, John let his eyes trace up the man's thick black shoes, following the sharp crease in his pants, skipping past his gunbelt where a large hand was resting on the butt of his gun and forced himself to look the guy in the face. The screw was staring straight back at John as he turned his radio down, the calls from the dispatcher turning to a whisper. "What's going on here?"

  It took everything John had in him not to just assume the position right then and there. "I hit him."

  "Well, no shit, asshole!" Art barked. "You are so fucking fired." He prodded Ray-Ray with his foot. "Jesus Christ, Shelley. What'd you hit him with, a fucking hammer?"

  John's head dropped, and he looked at the ground. Oh, Jesus. He couldn't go back to prison now. Not after all of this. Not after everything he'd been through.

  "I'm sorry," John said. "It won't happen again."

  "You're damn right it won't," Art snapped. "Christ." He looked at the cop. "This is the thanks I get for giving these guys a second chance."

  "I apologize," John offered again.

  "Hey!" the hooker yelled. "Somebody wanna give me a hand?"

  All of the men looked down, shocked, like they had forgotten her existence. The whore had a hard face, the kind that told her life story in the millions of lines wrinkling her skin. Blood poured from her nose and mouth where Ray-Ray's foot had done its damage. She was propped up on her elbows, a filthy white feather boa wrapped around her scrawny neck, a purple plastic-looking miniskirt and a black tank top that showed the bottom of her sagging breasts barely covering her wasted body.

  Nobody wanted to touch her.

  "Hey, Knight in Shining Armor All," she said, shaking her hand toward John. "Come on, stallion. Help me the fuck up."

  John hesitated, but then he reached down and pulled her up. She smelled of cigarettes and bourbon, and had a hard time standing on the spike heels of her shoes. Her hand dug into his shoulder as she steadied herself. He tried not to shudder in revulsion, thinking about where that hand had been. In the sunlight, her skin was sallow, and he guessed her liver was desperate enough to shit itself out of her navel if it was ever given the opportunity. She could have been thirty, she could have been eighty.

  The cop took charge. "You wanna tell me what this is about?"

  "He wouldn't pay me," she said, tilting her chin, indicating the prone Ray-Ray. Her voice was like loose rock rolling in a cup of phlegm. What words she didn't slur were probably not worth hearing.

  "You gave him one on credit?" the cop asked, not bothering to hide his incredulity. The man had a point. John wouldn't sell Ray-Ray a petrified turd on credit.

  "We was in there," she said, meaning the Port-a-John behind the building. "He tried to sweet-talk me, the lousy fucker. Said he was get-tin' paid tomorrow."

  The cop's eyebrow shot up. "You gotta be shittin me."

  "He followed me out here, trying to make a deal," she continued, clutching John's arm again as she swayed. "Like it's double coupon day at the fucking Kmart. Stupid cocksucker." She lifted a patent-leather heel and kicked Ray-Ray in the arm.

  "Hey, hey, now," Ray-Ray said, groaning as he rolled over onto his back. John figured the asshole had been playing possum and wanted to beat him again for causing all of this.

  The cop prodded Ray-Ray with his shoe. "You try to get a freebie, you stupid mope?"

  Ray-Ray put his hand over his eyes, shielding the sun so he could look up at the cop without being blinded. "No, no, man. That ain't the thing. .Ain't the thing at all."

  "Get up, you fucking idiot," the cop ordered. "You." He pointed at the whore. "Where's your drag?"

  She was busy wiping the concrete off her elbows. "Up by the liquor store."

  There was a crash of static from the cop's radio, then, "Unit fifty-one, fifty-one?"

  The cop clicked the mic, said, "Check," then pointed to John, talking over the information the dispatcher gave but obviously still listening. "You. Prince Charming. Make sure she gets back
home safe. You," he pointed to Ray-Ray. "Don't make me tell you one more fucking time to get the fuck up or I will run your ass in so quick your P.O. won't even have time to call you a cab back to the pen." Ray-Ray jumped up and the cop clicked on the radio and said, "Roger, I'm there in ten minutes." As an afterthought, he asked Art, "You okay with all this?"

  Art frowned, his forehead sloping into a V. "Yeah, whatever," he finally agreed. "Shelley, take the day off. Come back with your head in the right place tomorrow."

  "Thank you," John said, so relieved he could have cried. "Thank you, sir. I won't disappoint you."

  The respect brought him some back. "You want me to get rid of this stuttering freak?" Art asked John as he jabbed his thumb at Ray-Ray.

  John thought about it for a good second, but he couldn't spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for this asshole. "We're fine," he said. "Right, Ray?"