Triptych

The door opened and Waller was back. He glanced at the scene, mother and child, and John saw part of him soften. He sounded almost kind when he told Emily, “Mrs. Shelley, you’re going to have to step outside now.”

Her hand tightened around John’s. She looked down at him, tears spilling out of her eyes. For some reason, he had been expecting her to say that she loved him, but instead, she mouthed, “No one. ”

Talk to no one.

Anders let Emily leave before he reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the handcuffs. The moment of softness was gone as quickly as it had come.

He told John, “You listen to me, you little bastard. You’re go

“Yes,” John said, breathless with fear. “Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Coastal State Prison was located near Sava

Coastal was a maximum-security facility, only a few years old by the time John got there and remodeled ten years into his sentence to accommodate the influx of violent criminals. Today, the prison consisted of seven housing units with twelve two-man cells and twenty-four four-man cells. There were forty-four segregation cells, thirty disciplinary cells and fifteen protective custody cells. The L-building housed over two hundred men, N had another two hundred and O and Q were open dorms with bunk beds laid out like general military quarters. All told, around sixteen hundred men called it home.

John didn’t think he’d ever willingly go back to Coastal, but he had taken off work and boarded the Greyhound bus at six that morning. The ticket had cost him the rest of his television money, but that was hardly the point. He tried to sleep on the bus, leaning his head against the window, but all he could do was think about that first time he had made this trip in handcuffs and shackles. He couldn’t go back in. He could not die in prison.

He had brought a book-Tess of the D’Urbervilles-and he made himself read it during the nearly five-hour journey. John kept having to backtrack in the book, his mind wandering as each mile ticked past.

How had his mother made this drive every two weeks, rain or shine? No wonder she had looked exhausted by the time she got there. No wonder she had looked so defeated that first time she was allowed to visit him. She did it for twenty years, though, and she had only missed three visits during all that time.

Tess had just confided her noble ancestry to Angel when the Greyhound pulled up outside of the state prison. John used his ticket to mark his place, then put the book in the plastic grocery bag he had brought along with him.

At visitor processing, John burned with shame as he was searched and questioned-not because he was above it all, but because he finally knew what his mother had gone through every time she had come to see him. He did the math as they searched his grocery bag, opening the carton of cigarettes, checking the book almost page by page. Over five hundred times she’d made this trip. How had Emily endured this? How could he have brought this humiliation down on his mother? No wonder Joyce had been so livid. John had never hated himself more than at this moment in time.

He sat on one of the plastic chairs as he waited for his name to be called. His knee was bobbing again, but everyone else in the room looked perfectly calm. Mostly, it was women with their children. They had come to see daddy. One kid near John held a crayon drawing of an airplane. Another was crying because they hadn’t let her bring her teddy bear in. Something unusual had shown up on the X-ray and the mother had refused to let them inspect it.

“Shelley?” a uniformed woman called. None of the guards had recognized him, but considering the volume of prisoners and visitors they had each week, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

“Shelley?” she called again.

John stood, clutching his grocery bag to his chest.

“Table three,” she said, nodding him in.

He put his bag on the X-ray belt, the third time it had been screened, and walked through the metal detector and into the visitors’ room. He stopped at the end of the belt, staring at the room, trying to see it the way his mother had. There were picnic-style metal tables bolted to the floor all around the twenty-by-thirty room. Men sat on one side, their wives or girlfriends or hookers they’d paid to come see them sitting on the other. Kids were ru

Ben Carver sat at one of the back tables, table three. He was dressed in his usual white shirt, white pants and white socks. He had a pair of matching patent-leather slippers that his mother had sent, but Ben seldom wore them outside the cell because he didn’t want them to get dirty.

Everybody had a persona in prison, a different personality they adopted that helped them survive. The thugs got meaner, the Aryans more cruel, the gays gayer and the loonies absolutely fucking nuts. Ben fell into this latter category, and he worked it like a master thespian. Not that John thought it was much of a stretch for the man. By the time the GBI caught up with him, Ben had killed six men in the surrounding Atlanta area. His particular twist was to cut off their right nipples for souvenirs. During his arrest at the main branch of the Atlanta post office where Ben had worked as a mail sorter for eighteen years, one of the cops became a little overzealous and slammed Ben to the ground. A piece of tissue-later identified as the right nipple of his last victim-flew out of Ben’s mouth where he had been sucking on it like a Lifesaver.

This lurid detail combined with Ben’s appropriate last name of Carver had made a big splash in the press. Unlike John, he made the national news, even got his own nickname: the Atlanta Carver. Ben had never been particularly pleased with the moniker, but then he was also angry with Wayne Williams, the man convicted in the Atlanta Child Murders case, for pushing him off the front page a few weeks after his arrest.

“My dear boy,” Ben said, smiling his thin smile as he sized up John. His lips were wet, a black stain at the center where he usually kept a cigarette. His teeth were likewise marked, nicotine drawing a bull’s-eye right at the center. One of the first things Ben had told John was that he had something of an oral fixation. “Better cigarettes than your right tit, my dear boy.” John had never complained about his smoking after that.

“So,” Ben said.

John stood at the table, not sure whether he wanted to sit. He told Ben, “You look good.”

“Of course I do.” He pretended to primp his hair, which was practically nonexistent, winking at someone behind John.

Though Ben was in protective custody, there wasn’t really a room set up to accommodate visitors in that wing, so he had to sit with the general population on the rare occasion someone came to see him. Any prisoner from the Level III mental health unit was at his most vulnerable during visitation. He had to rely on his fellow inmates being too distracted by their whores or too respectful of their wives and girlfriends to pull out a shiv and rip open his belly.