In the two weeks between being told he was getting out and the time of his release, Coop went from puzzled to suspicious, back to puzzled, then even more suspicious, and finally, he settled into a nice long stretch of grim paranoia. Maybe he was a lab rat in a prison psych experiment and when he reached the gate to get out, the warden and all the guards would shout “April Fool’s!” and drag him back to his cell.

“Good luck, Coop,” said Rodney, his cellmate, as he was packing up.

“Luck? Why do I need luck? Did you hear something?”

“Relax,” Rodney said. “It’s just an expression, like ‘see you around’ or ‘take it easy.’ It doesn’t mean nothing.”

“Right,” said Coop, trying to sound cool or, at least, a dignified level of panicked. “Nothing. But you didn’t hear anything, did you?”

“Not a thing.”

“Okay.”

Rodney put out his hand to shake as Coop prepared to leave. Rodney was one of the many things Coop wouldn’t miss about prison. It wasn’t that Rodney was a bad guy. In fact, he was a fine cellmate. He knew when to keep his mouth shut and he never touched any of Coop’s stuff without permission. Beyond that, Coop didn’t know exactly what Rodney was and he was too polite to ask. He knew that before jail Rodney had haunted a swamp out by Cienega Grande and he got the feeling that he’d had some kind of drive-in horror-movie run-in with a vanful of idiot city kids over a spring break weekend. What Coop was most acutely aware of was that Rodney smelled like a garbage dump dry-humping a slaughterhouse in the large intestine of a sick elephant.

Coop stood there for a few seconds staring at Rodney’s hand, just long enough that it become uncomfortable for both of them. Rodney was withdrawing his perpetually damp mitt when Coop reached out and shook it. Rodney beamed at him with his moss-colored teeth.

“Take care of yourself, Rodney,” said Coop as he walked out of the cell.

He waited until he was at the end of the tier before sniffing his fingers. It was like his hand was made of liverwurst that someone had forgotten under a moldy sofa.

On his way out, Coop made sure to shake hands with every guard in his cell block.

Then, just like that, it was over and he was out. After all his paranoid fantasies, the walk out of jail was almost anticlimactic. He was outside the gate in the same blue suit he’d had on the day he’d been convicted. It was just a little baggier now.