Alone (Detective D.D. Warren, #1)(30)

Well, all these years of wondering later, the man had his answer—double mocha lattes tasted one step above cat piss. He was not picturing SUVs, soccer games, or perfectly mowed lawns. He was thinking how the hell had he gotten suckered into paying so much money for something that tasted so positively bad? It was tempting to return to the coffee counter. He would stand right in front of the black-haired cashier with her numerous facial piercings and sullen attitude. He'd never say a word. Just stand. Stare. She'd give him his money back in sixty seconds or less.

Then she'd hustle out back for a desperately needed smoke, rattled without being one hundred percent certain why.

He would like to see her face then. More than anything else in the past quarter century, he'd missed the look of a young girl's face filling with fear. The way her eyes would dilate, pupils growing dark as the rest of her face turned to ash. And then that moment, that sublimely erotic moment, when the true horror would wash across her features, when she would realize it was no longer a vague, unidentified sense of fear. When she would realize that he really was going to kill her. That she belonged to him now and there was nothing she could do.

The man had been locked up eight thousand three hundred and sixty-three days. He'd gone into the slammer barely a day over twenty. Sure, he'd been oversized, freakishly strong, and, as his neighbors had testified at his trial, “frighteningly strange.” But, he'd still been a kid.

Now, as of a few hours ago, at the ripe old age of forty-four, he'd become a bona fide civilian again. He knew the parole board assumed that age would mellow him, just as quality time within concrete walls had supposedly eradicated his baser instincts. Surely, after nearly twenty-five years in prison, he'd be a good boy now.

He thought about it. Nah. Truth be told, he mostly felt like killing someone.

Two girls walked by. Eighteen, nineteen years old. One of the girls caught him watching. She flipped him off, then gave a little twitch of her hips as she sauntered by, jeans so low and tight they appeared painted on her ass. He muttered a single word under his breath, and the girl suddenly picked up her pace, dragging her startled friend behind her. Smiling, the man let them go. It almost made up for the bad coffee.

He'd started his Walpole stint in PC, protective custody, for “snitches and bitches.” It was a double-bunked dorm-room–like situation, technically medium security. “Don't screw this up,” his court-appointed attorney had told him sternly. “For a guy like you, this is as good as it's going to get.”

First night, his bunk mate had curled up in the corner and begged him not to rape him. The man had stared at the sniveling mass in disgust. He did not jitterbug.

Second night, the bunk mate started crying and the man gave in to his baser impulses and beat the little shit unconscious. That at least shut him up. It also gained the man an infraction. And a reputation.

He didn't know it then, but the hawks were already watching, the prison scuttlebutt working overtime. His act of hostility got him kicked into general pop, then the real adventure began. A white guy had two choices in prison: join the Aryan brotherhood for protection against the blacks and the Hispanics or find God. God's protection was a little less certain inside the cement walls of Walpole. The man (boy) became a neo-Nazi.

He got an education. How to poke holes in the drywall of his cell, then patch them up with toothpaste and modeling paint to hide the drugs. How to pass off cigarettes, cocaine, heroin, you name it, using the rolled cuffs of his pants. How to fasten razor blades to the metal frame of his bunk, or inside the tank of his toilet, to catch the fingers of inexperienced guards.

How to live surrounded by dirty, filthy, angry men. How to piss in front of an audience. How to take a dump in front of an audience. How to sleep through certain half-realized screams, while knowing to wake for others. How to pass day after excruciating day inhaling stale, overprocessed air that stank of urine and Windex.

He still didn't learn quite enough. They caught him the second year. Boston Red Sox were trying to make the World Series and the guards were glued to the TV. The Hispanics came out of nowhere and “bungled” him good. Guards said they never saw a thing. So did his two fellow neo-Nazis, who never took their eyes off the game.

He was big, he was strong, he was mean. He managed to break various ribs, noses, and wrists of his eight attackers. They got his kidney with a homemade shank, dropping him like a stuck rhino and leaving him to bleed out on the floor.

One of the white guys came over then. “Baby rapist,” the neo-Nazi said and spat on the man's face.

He began his plotting, lying twisted on a cement floor, his blood pooling up around his face.

The prison officials weren't stupid. Put him back in general pop and he was as good as dead. Put him back in PC and someone else was as good as dead. So what to do?

Stick him in solitary confinement, the only place left. It took the man only one week to realize his sack-of-shit lawyer had been right after all—medium security had been as good as it was ever going to get for a guy like him.

Now he passed his time alone in a six-by-eight cell. He was allowed out one hour a day, to exercise in a penned-in yard the size of a dog kennel or attend to personal hygiene. From a rectangular window about the same size as his face, he could watch leaves turn from green to gold to brown. Watch trees go from full to bare to covered with snow. Watch the seasons pass painfully slow, month after month, year after year.