Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,26
had to be a way she could fix it, make it better, but only if she could find out how it began. “Who got you hooked on this? Tell me who did this to you!”
A shrug from John. A sarcastic comment from his father. “Are you retarded now? Autistic? Is that what’s wrong with you?”
It had started with pot. There was a reason after all that Nancy Reagan told kids to just say no. John’s first hit, fittingly, was right after a funeral.
Emily’s brother, Barry, had died in a car accident on the expressway. Sudden. Fatal. Life-changing. Barry was a big guy, ate whatever he wanted, smoked cigars like he was Fidel Castro. He was on pills for high blood pressure, taking shots every day for diabetes and generally working his way toward the grave in a slow crawl. That he was killed by a truck driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel was almost a joke.
The funeral was held on a hot spring morning. At the church, John had walked behind the casket, his cousin Woody at his side. He had never seen another guy crying before, and John felt weird watching his tough cousin, four years older and cooler than John could ever hope to be, breaking down in front of him. Barry hadn’t even been the guy’s real father. Woody’s mother was divorced—a shocking event in those days. She had only been married to Barry for two years. John wasn’t even sure if the guy was his cousin anymore.
“Come here,” Woody had said. They were back at his house, so empty now without Uncle Barry in it. His uncle had been a gregarious man, always there with a joke or a well-timed chuckle to take off the tension in the room. John’s dad didn’t like him much, and John suspected this was out of snobbery more than anything else. Barry sold tractor trailers. He made a good living, but Richard put the job on par with selling used cars.
“Come on,” Woody told John, walking up the stairs to the bedrooms.
John had looked around for his parents, no reason but the tone in Woody’s voice warning him that something bad was about to happen. Still, he followed him to his room, shut the door and locked it when he was told.
“Shit.” Woody sighed, sinking into the beanbag chair on the floor. He took out a plastic film canister from behind a couple of books stacked on the shelf behind him, then pulled some rolling papers from under his mattress. John watched as he deftly rolled a joint.
Woody saw him watching, said, “I could use a toke, man. How about you?”
John had never smoked a cigarette before, never taken anything stronger than cough medicine—which his mother kept hidden in her bathroom like it was radioactive—but when Woody offered him the joint, he had said, “Cool.”
He watched his cousin suck the smoke into his lungs and hold it, hoping for pointers. Sweat formed on John’s upper lip as the joint was handed to him. He was more afraid that he would look stupid in front of his cousin than because he was doing something illegal.
John loved the relief that came from smoking a joint, the way it took the edge off of everything. He no longer cared that his father thought he was a total fuck-up or that his mother was constantly disappointed with him. His sister Joyce’s perfection as she followed in their father’s footsteps didn’t grate as much after a toke, and he actually enjoyed being around his family more when he was high.
When his parents finally realized what was happening, they blamed that age-old culprit, the bad crowd. What they did not realize was that John Shelley was the bad crowd. In a few weeks, he’d graduated from gawky nerd to pothead, and he loved the attention his newfound transformation gave him. Thanks to Woody, he was the kid who had the stash. He was the one who knew where the cool parties were, where underage high schoolers were welcome as long as they brought some pretty girls along with them. He was dealing dime bags to his new friends by the time he was fifteen. At a family reunion, Woody gave him his first hit of coke, and after that, there was no looking back.
By seventeen, he was a convicted murderer.
As far as John could remember, Mary Alice Finney was the first friend he’d ever had who wasn’t a member of his immediate family. Their