“What was mine?”

Randall seemed startled by the question. “We’re not allowed to tell you.”

John made his voice firm, let some of the gravel come out. “What was mine?”

Randall’s pimples turned white, his skin a bright red. He whispered, “Seven-ten,” glancing over his shoulder to see if his boss was watching him. “You could go to a real store, Mr. Shelley. You could walk into a Circuit City or a Best Buy—”

“Let me see it.”

“Your report?”

John closed some of the space between them. “You said there were credit cards on there. I want to know what cards.”

Randall looked over his shoulder again, but he should have been more concerned about what was in front of him.

“Stop looking behind you, kid. Look at me. Answer my question.”

Randall’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Maybe I put in your social security number wrong. The current address was different—”

“But the name?”

“Same name.”

“Same previous address in Garden City?”

“Yes, sir.”

He summed it up for the kid. “You think there’s another Jonathan Winston Shelley out there with my birth date and my previous address, living in Atlanta, who has a social security number that’s close to mine?”

“No—I mean, yes.” Sweat had broken out on Randall’s upper lip and his voice began to shake. “I’m sorry, mister. I could lose my job if I showed you that. You can get a copy of it yourself for free. I can give you the num—”

“Forget it,” John said, feeling like a monster for pushing the kid. The fear in his eyes cut like a piece of glass. John walked back through the store, past the television he wanted, and left before he said something he would regret.

Instead of going home, John crossed the street and sat on the bench beside the bus stop. He took one of the free community newspapers out of the stand and thumbed through it. The street had four lanes, but was pretty busy. Using the paper as a shield, he watched the store, tracking Randall and his fellow clerks as they talked people who should know better into signing away their lives.

Credit reports, credit cards, scores. Shit, he didn’t know anything about this.

A bus came, the driver glancing out the door at John. “You gettin’ on?”

“Next one,” John said. Then, “Thanks, man.” He liked the MARTA bus drivers. They didn’t seem to make snap judgments. As long as you paid your fare and didn’t make trouble, they assumed you were a good person.

Hot air hissed from the back of the bus as it pulled away. John turned to the next page in the paper, then went back to the front, realizing he hadn’t read any of it. He sat at the bus stop for two hours, then three, leaving only once to take a piss behind an abandoned building.

At eight o’clock, Randall the salesboy left the rental store. He got into a rusted Toyota, turning the key and releasing into the otherwise quiet night the most obnoxious music John had ever heard. It had been dark for at least an hour, but Randall wouldn’t have noticed John even if it had been bright as day. The kid was probably seventeen or eighteen. He had his own car, a job that paid pretty well, and not a care in the world except for the asshole with good credit who had tried to strong-arm him that afternoon.

The manager came out. At least, John guessed he was the manager: older guy, flap of hair stringing across a bald spot, yellowish skin and a round ass that came from sitting around all day telling people no.

The guy’s groan could be heard from across the street as he reached up and pulled down the chain mesh that covered the front windows of the store. He groaned again as he stooped to lock the brace, then groaned a third time as he stood. After stretching his back, he walked over to a taupe Ford Taurus and climbed in behind the wheel.

John waited as the guy slipped on his seat belt, adjusted the rearview mirror, then put the car into reverse. The Taurus backed up, white lights flashing over red, then straightened out and left the parking lot, the engine making a puttering sound like a golf cart.

Ten minutes, fifteen. Thirty minutes. John stood up, giving his own groan from the effort. His knees had popped and his ass hurt from the cold concrete bench.

He looked both ways before crossing the street and walking past the store. The chains guarding the front doors and windows were strong, but John wasn’t planning on smashing and grabbing. Instead, he went to the back of the building to the Dumpster.

The security camera behind the rental place was trained on the back door, the Dumpster free and clear. He slid open the steel door, releasing a metallic shriek into the night. The odor coming off the metal container was bad, but John had smelled worse. He started pulling out the small black kitchen garbage bags like the kind he had seen lining the trash cans in the rental store. He was careful, untying the knots instead of ripping the bags open to search them, then tying them back in the same knot before moving to the next one. After thirty minutes of going through the store’s trash, he had to laugh at the situation. There was enough information in the trash bags—social security numbers, street addresses, employment histories—to launch a major con. That wasn’t what he was looking for, though. He wasn’t a conman and he wasn’t a thief. He wanted information, but only his own, and of course he found it in the last bag he opened.

He tilted the credit report so that the security lights made it easier to read.

Same social security number. Same date of birth. Same previous address.

Jonathan Winston Shelley, age thirty-five, had two MasterCards, three Visas and a Shell gas card. His address was a post office box with a 30316 zip code, which meant he lived somewhere in southeast Atlanta—several miles from John’s current room at Chez Flop House on Ashby, just down from the Georgia state capitol.

His credit was excellent, his checking account with the local bank in good standing. Obviously, he was a pretty reliable customer and had been for about six years. But for one “slow pay” on the Shell card, all his creditors were satisfied with his prompt payments, which was kind of funny when you thought about it, because for the last twenty years, Jonathan Winston Shelley hadn’t gotten out much. The guards at the prison tended to keep a close eye on you when you were serving twenty-two-to-life for raping and killing a fifteen-year-old girl.

CHAPTER EIGHT

John had known Mary Alice Finney all of his life. She was the good girl, the pretty cheerleader, the straight-A student, the person just about everybody in school knew and liked because she was so damn nice. Sure, there were some girls who hated her, but that’s what girls did when they felt threatened: they hated. They spread nasty rumors. They were nice to your face and then when you turned around they stuck the knife in as far as it would go and twisted it around for good measure. Even in the real world, find some woman who’s doing well for herself, being successful, and there’s always going to be a handful of other women standing around saying she’s a bitch or she slept her way to the top. That was just how the world worked, and it was no different in the microcosm of Decatur High School.

Actually, John later found that it was a hell of a lot like prison.

The Shelleys lived a couple of streets over from the Finneys in one of Decatur’s nicer neighborhoods bordering Agnes Scott College. Their mothers knew each other in that circular world of the upper middle class. They had met the way doctors’ and lawyers’ wives have always met, at some fund-raiser or charity for the local high school, hospital, college—whatever institution served as an excuse to throw an elaborate party and invite strangers into their beautifully decorated homes.