Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,28

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 Mötley Crüe 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