Page 89 of Backtrack

He knew his parents had moved to Texarkana, but he never got so much as a postcard. Either they were dead or he was dead to them. His aunt put a little money on his books now and again, but that dried up when she died in ’84.

He’d only ever had one real friend on the inside, twenty-two years in. A man not much older than him who went by the name Hog Head, in for murdering a cousin who he’d caught in bed with his wife. A Texas jury would have let off any other guy caught in similar circumstances, but Hog Head was a big-jawed bruiser with a snaggled canine tooth that peeked out from beneath his lip. The jury convicted him of premeditated murder, even though as far as Pink could tell the man hadn’t planned much of anything in his entire life. The judge slammed him with a fifteen-year sentence. He looked too much like a killer to give him anything less.

Pink and his snaggletooth cellie had hit it off immediately. It didn’t take long for Pink to bring up the diamonds—and, vastly more important in his mind, the son of a bitch who’d gunned down Vince Millner. The two men spent hours plotting. The Internet was just becoming a thing, but D Wayne Cutter turned out to be more than camera shy. It took a hell of a lot of searching to find out much about him. But neither Hog Head nor Pink had much else to do. It turned out the Florida Marine Patrol loved the press Cutter’s exploits got them. Once Pink figured out where he worked, it wasn’t too difficult to get a general idea of his location. This Internet thing was turning out to be extremely helpful.

Good behavior turned Hog Head’s fifteen-year sentence into seven. He and Pink had parted ways with the agreement that Hog Head could have half the diamonds if he’d get a lock on what was going on with D Wayne Cutter.

True to his word, Hog Head had sent back news. Wayne Cutter was still a lawman, living way too poor to have sold the stones. Probably thought they were still too hot, the idiot. He had a grandson who was also a lawman. If Wayne had told anyone about the diamonds, it was his grandson, Arliss. Hog Head said he knew that for a fact.

Hog Head turned out to be a true friend. He surely would have gotten the diamonds back if he hadn’t been killed trying to jack a coke dealer’s car in downtown Fort Meyers. Devoted, but not exceptionally bright. Still, Pink had what he needed for the time being.

Arliss Cutter. He tucked that name away.

He was paired with no less than a dozen cellies during his hitch, usually someone the guards wanted tuned up. He’d taken a few of them under his wing just as Grunt had done for him all those years ago. Four decades into six life sentences, they housed him with a “reformed” Neo-Nazi named Ajax. After checking out the new guy’s paperwork to make sure he wasn’t a Cho Mo—child molester, Pink taught him, as he’d been taught, to keep a tidy living space and how to play chess.

Ajax knew about the five million dollars in diamonds of course. That was virtually the only thing Pink ever talked about, that and revenge. Most seemed to believe him at first, questioning him atlength and hoping to strike it rich when they got out or send a relative to get the stones from Cutter. Pink was good with that, as long as they hurt the man while they were at it. But nothing ever came of it. And every year that went by, more and more the others took Pink’s stories for the ramblings of an old man.

Except for Ajax.

He mentioned the stones to his female pen pal. A week later, she showed up for a visit.

Shayna Hanford was the most beautiful thing Pink had ever seen. Five weeks later, she wrote him a letter, confessing she’d rather be prison pen pals with a strong man like Pink than a reformed Neo-Nazi whose life plan was to go back to cooking meth in a rented U-Haul in five-to-seven years. Pink was smart enough to know the diamonds—worth fifteen million on today’s market—had a lot to do with her sudden interest in him. He didn’t care.

Pink especially liked the way she drew little hearts instead of dots when she wrote an i. Ajax found out about the letters and blew his lid. He vowed to kick Pink’s ass—laughable on its face, considering their size difference. Still, even a small fry could pose a problem. The problem solved itself when the kid fell in the showers and landed on a sharpened toothbrush eleven times. The death investigation was cursory at best. None of the guards liked Ajax anyway.

Shayna showed up like clockwork, every other week on visiting day for three years. She even talked about marriage. Pink shivered when he thought about that. In a good way. Marriage had never even crossed his mind when he was a free man, let alone since he’d been incarcerated.

Then a miracle happened.

The Texas parole commission, in their infinite wisdom, decided that because Pink came into the system as a fifteen-year-old, forty-four years was the equivalent to six lifetimes. Pink didn’t understand their math, but he did not argue with it.

He spent a year being babysat in a halfway house before he was finally allowed to move in with Shayna. Periodic check-ins from a parole officer for the rest of his life were far better than twice daily head counts in the joint.

Shayna was young, but the age gap hardly made a difference. At sixty, Ricky Lee was in better shape than most men he knew. He wascertainly stronger, faster, and more agile than 90 percent of the bulls guarding him at the prison. Other than his job in the laundry, he’d had little to do for the past forty-five years besides read, exercise, and plot revenge.

He stayed away from free weights, preferring to use his body—push-ups (both flat and inverted), pull-ups, dips, towel curls, lunges, dead hangs, burpees …The possibilities were endless. He’d been a big teenager, but forty-four years of angry exercise had transformed him into a six-foot-five coiled steel spring.

He wiped his hands on a napkin and nodded at Shayna’s smartphone. “Show me how you did that.”

His jaw clenched when she used her chopsticks to take the second-to-the-last dumpling off his plate. That washisdumpling. He’d beaten men nearly to death for less than that.

“How I did what?” she said, oblivious.

“Used your phone to see if our plane was on time. I know you can use it like a computer, but you didn’t have to type in any—”

“I have the app.” She touched his hand again, bringing instant forgiveness for stealing his dumpling. She kissed his fingers. “You missed out on so much while those assholes had you locked up. But that’s okay. You have me.”

“I appreciate that,” he said.

Pink had gotten two bachelor’s degrees and taught himself to watercolor while he was in prison. He could watch television, movies, and use the occasional flip phone when someone smuggled one in. He’d never had anyone to call until he met Shayna. But watching someone use a smartphone on television was a hell of a lot different from understanding how they worked. All he really knew was that the cops could track you if you carried one around in your pocket. Seemed like a stupid thing, but Shayna had everything at her fingertips—the weather, the airline, the cruise company. He’d read somewhere that the phone had more computer power than the rocket that took men to the moon.

She scooted her chair away from the table to stand. “Okay, honey-bunch,” she said. “Let’s go take the second plane ride of your life.”

CHAPTER 40

ALASKA

Arliss Cutter operated on his grandfather’s rules of punctuality. There was no such thing as fashionably late. You were either early or you were rude.