Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,29
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,