Chapter 5 Wednesday, May 4

Sykes returned to Wildwood, but this time he was not greeted with the enthusiastic cheers that followed when he was led away by police.Not even a side story in the Patriot.Back then, when he was arrested in the fall of 1976, the newspapers ran front-page stories for five weeks before giving up. Few people can still remember his name, and almost no one can recognize his appearance.His face is no longer as youthful and wild as it was when he was twenty-five.Now, with scars on his face, he looks older than his actual age.A mess of pale hair and a tumor on his neck.Most people look away from him immediately when they see him.When he walked near crowds, people were either looking down at the ground or averting their eyes.Just like the old ladies in the nursing home in Yulin, every time Sykes walked in, they would take a mop and circle around on the green tarpaulin floor to prevent him from going in. Walk.

But Andrew Marko should have a deep impression on him.Although his appearance has changed over the years, Marco must still remember his name.Susan had deliberately let her father know that she was hanging out with a guy who was in jail.She purposely let him know that her daughter was running amok outside with a trash, so that he wanted to protect his daughter but was powerless.Susan always tried her best to deliberately anger her hypocrite father.And Marco must have hated Sikes too. So if Marko's daughter is found murdered, he will definitely put his suspicion on Sykes.So before killing Susan, his goal was to get rid of Andrew Marko first.

The first dilemma facing Sykes after his release was the problem of work.He was no longer interested in drugs and alcohol, so he called the parole officer at Trenton Prison and asked him to help him get the green light for the job.Asking them for help is much more effective than asking him personally. While he was serving time in an Oklahoma state prison, inmates were paid for their work.He worked a total of almost thirty years while serving his sentence, and was paid 48 cents an hour.With the money, he bought an old RV and a Jeep after he got out of prison.His RV was a royal blue parked on a pile of soot.On the roof, a three-legged television antenna is propped among a pile of soda cans.The creek behind the trailer smelled of sewage, which was a little bit better in winter, but in July and August, it smelled foul from afar.Outside the RV cabin, there are flattened trailers and scrapped cars, old tires, and some discarded box springs and other sundries.Garbage bags were torn to pieces by cattle and wild dogs.

The wind was pouring in through the broken windows, which had been mended with broken boards and pipes, but still no protection from the wind.He habitually extended his hand to the back of his neck, scratching vigorously at the wound there. Sykes grew up only a few hundred feet away.His father, named Oberlin, brought his mother to this place after World War II to live a remote suburban life.Oberlin had not returned from battle as a soldier, but had just been released from Newark prison.He expected that in the suburbs, with fewer police officers, it would be easier to mess around.But country life offered him no more opportunities than city life.He was shot and killed once while trying to rob a gas station outside Avalon.

There was a phone book open on the kitchen table, with Jim Lynch's name circled in black ink.Jim Lynch used to be the police chief of Wildwood.When Sykes drove to 26 Atlantic Avenue to find out the news, he found out that Lynch had retired, and Jim Lynch's daughter O'Shaughnessy was now working in this police station.There is no contact information of the Marko family recorded in the phone book, which means that Susan may be dead or married. Sikes lit a cigarette and opened the faded curtains.The neighbor's trailer was parked thirty yards away.Through the window, one can clearly see the coloring pages of magazines nailed to the wall of her living room.There were dozens of pictures of rock singers, and pictures of NASCAR drivers, and a few nude centerfolds torn from Ladies Playwright magazine.

Sikes opened the bag and dunked the things on the table.Then put the beer, mustard, bread and sausage in the refrigerator.He stuffed lottery tickets and cigarettes into his pockets. The furniture in the house is easy to arrange, even the car.Now you don't need to find a guarantor for anything.And after the purchase, you can defer payment for one year.Thinking of this, he couldn't help laughing.So fucking cool!he thought so. Sykes had been thinking a lot lately about being with the neurologist at Jason Reed Prison.His time at Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania coincided with a federally funded overhaul that included renting private prisons as part of the plan.Sykes will be eligible for release at liberty as an inmate for a nonviolent crime.So he and 750 other prisoners were transferred to Jason Reed Prison in Texas.

The private prison was nothing like anything Sykes had ever seen or imagined.The prison corridors here are carved with artistic portraits on the walls, and carpets are laid on the floors of each room.The loudspeakers in the hall played beautiful music.The recreation room feels more like the luxury of a spa club recommended on a morning TV program. "Welcome here, Mr. Sykes," he remembered the doctor greeting him.As she spoke, she held out a small, clean hand, "I'm sure you'll feel much better here than those guys from Luisberg." Sikes looked at her. Under her fashionable short blond hair, she wore a pair of red teardrop earrings, which seemed to Sikes like two drops of blood hanging around her ears.He could smell the expensive powder on her body.The scent is comforting and of course expensive.Not one of those cheap powders his mother used to dab her slack neck like it had been sprinkled with a sack of flour.

"Would you like some water, Mr. Sikes?" She poured a glass of water from the large stainless steel pitcher.The ice cubes slammed into the glass with a crisp clink. Beads of frost hung on the bulletproof glass outside the window, and scattered snowflakes were still falling in the air.Sikes stared at the bulge of her breasts, and through the gap between the buttons he saw the flat whiteness of her belly. "Did you enjoy watching it?" She paused for a few seconds before asking. Sikes moved his eyes to her face, but said nothing.He felt that there was something different about her.

"I'll give you every opportunity to express your opinion, Sykes. There are many rules in Jason Reed Prison, but there is never any objection to everyone expressing their opinions." She spoke very slowly, spitting out each word, like ice cubes in a glass, pouring into her heart.She stretched her arm towards the window, then pointed to the world outside, and said to Sikes: "Have you ever thought of going out?" He still stared at her quietly, without making a sound. "From your youthful education, you don't have much of a chance to be yourself. There's nothing you can do to help you. Your family, your teachers, the police, they molded you into what they wanted you to be, You haven't let them down." She shifted her position, exchanging crossed legs, and went on, "So to save yourself, you must learn how to tolerate your emotions, Sikes. You must learn Vent your anger calmly. You should also always remind yourself not to get angry easily. Don’t vent your anger on others, this is also the law of social life. Only by doing this can you obtain the key to freedom.”

free again?Is it really possible to regain your freedom? Sykes has since worked in a hardware workshop and a milking factory.He learned to repair small machinery and passed his general education placement test, not a single person in his class failed.They understand that they need to learn some skills before they can move forward.Those who are released on parole will have the opportunity to be placed in work.There is no doubt that they will all become mechanics and repairmen, and their wages will not be too high, but they can quickly settle their lives if they have a skill. The sun rises and the moon sets, time flies, the 1970s entered the 1980s, and the 1990s came in a flash, and a new century is coming.One day a certain year ago, the female doctor used fifteen minutes to influence and change his life. During those years, he stayed quietly in Jason Reed Prison, day after day, year after year.It was the female doctor who made the change in his life.

Sikes grabbed his cigarette case and walked toward the jeep, humming loudly, scaring away a feral cat that was prowling nearby.He drives under the tacky monument, a wrought-iron monument to the park's founder.The monument is a vaulted building composed of wheat ears and a statue of a cherub.Families gather here to swim, have dinner, or play badminton.Paradise on the state highway has not become a summer camping place and leisure place for tourists, but is famous for speeding cars, drug addicts and prostitutes. The road winds along the Neschag River to Glass Sound.In the past, the road leading here mainly carried freight services.Now it's a feeding ground for seagulls and a sunbathing spot for odd-looking snakes and turtles. Old people can still remember what the area used to be like. On a hot summer day in 1942, a construction team arrived here with heavy machinery such as cranes.The purpose of their coming here is to build a large hazardous waste landfill pond in the swampland of New Jersey to deal with the hazardous waste discharged from laboratories, chemical research equipment, hospital clinics and other units in New York City and northern cities of New Jersey .Building the project will bring new tax revenues to New Jersey, and the government promises not to harm the waters. The government paid $18 a day to local residents to help discharge sewage from the swamp into the Nesjag River.People of the older generation remembered the vicious summer sun that scorched the land and the swamps that were full of poisonous spiders and poison ivy.In addition, there are diseases caused by heat poisons, infections caused by scratching borer bites, dysentery caused by drinking river water, and painful venoms carried by wolf spiders and waterbell snakes, etc.Day and night they dug deep pits in the fetid swamps, not to find water, or to detect oil or gas, but simply to dig deep pits. By 1944, they finally drained the water from the swamp, and then trucks kept coming, pulling many bags and barrels, all of which were poured into the deep pit hundreds of feet inside. No one expected that decades later, carcinogens and biological hazards would be discovered here one after another.Only then did I know that medicine, human organs, harmful gauze, blood plasma, X-ray films, carcinogenic waste liquid and other hazardous substances were stored in this swamp.The water in the swamp also gradually turned black and seeped into the nearby waters, completely polluting the Neshag River.This area is therefore also known as the "Black Swamp". The government discontinued the project in the early 1960s, and trucks no longer delivered the chemical waste.The government also sent workers from steel factories to add iron covers to these holes.Highway construction crews erected a safety fence around the swamp, enclosing the waste pit.Then, all the garbage piled up in the Nevak area was transported here and buried on the hole.Finally, all kinds of scrapped police cars, buses, school buses, safes, iron cabinets, highway signs, etc., all steel-like things, were piled on the hole. All of a sudden, environmental experts came one after another. They raised serious doubts about the authorities' approach and issued an early warning to the health of residents around the swamp.They even asked the government to help solve the problem by relocating all the residents near the swamp to other counties. It is said that there are large blind mice, as well as strange mutant species such as double-headed snakes, shellless turtles and hairless raccoons.It is also heard that when birds fly over the swamp in the air, they will also be poisoned by the poisonous gas rising from the ground, and then fall from mid-air.In addition, saucer-sized poisonous spiders and bugs with fangs have been reported to grow here.So, for years, even the most daring young man dared not approach the guardrail with warning signs printed with crossbones and human skulls. For Sikes, however, it was a place of complete freedom for personal pleasure.When he was a teenager, it became a hiding place for smuggled goods.As an adult, he would often bring his victims here and hide here after killing them. He parked the Jeep outside the fence, got out, climbed over the fence and got in.In addition to the original skull logo, a ring-shaped sign was added to the outside of the guardrail, with the words "biological hazard" written on it.The ground was covered with a layer of silvery frost.There was a stench from the polluted soil beneath the ground, undiminished even in the freezing air.Passing through a row of old cars, he came to several school buses from the early twentieth century.One of the cars was missing both axles and wheels.He stopped, lit a cigarette, and walked toward the open car door. The sun was shining brightly on a broken mirror in the car.A big gray and white mouse jumped out of the car door and hid in the overturned hood of a nearby car.He took a deep drag on the cigarette in his hand, then stubbed it out, and boarded the car.Half the seats had been removed, and a ottoman and a kerosene lamp had been placed in the rear of the car.A splint covers the floor at the front of the car.He walked to the first row of seats, bent down and lifted the seat to one side, revealing a deep hole underneath. He poked his head to look in, and the thick gas only rushed into his throat and eyes.In the past, this deep pit was covered with a large iron plate. Later, when the government rebuilt it in the past six years or so, a car bearing lifted by a crane fell and split the iron plate in two, and one of them fell into the deep pit. Suddenly, the bottom of the car was corroded by the acidic corrosive gas rising from the hole and a big hole was formed.This is what he saw with his own eyes when he was a child. No one knows what chemicals are in that deep pit, it is estimated to be cesium-137, radium, mercury and other elements.While in prison, doctors detected infectious substances, including radionuclides and isotopes, in his bones.They had questioned some of the places where he had grown up, trying to find the source of the infection.This made him feel very panicked, and he thought that if they came to the Black Marsh and found those corpses, they would be in trouble.However, they didn't care about investigating the details. After all, who would care too much about a cancerous criminal who was about to die? He lay down on the ground, reached into the edge of the pit with one hand and fumbled back and forth, and finally touched a spike inserted into the wall of the pit, and a plastic bag was hung on the spike.He took the bag and opened it, and took out a repeating revolver.The gun body has been covered with thick rust.He picked up the splints against the mouth of the hole and fastened the pistol to his belt.Turn around and get out of the bus and walk towards the jeep. It was time to make amends for what had been lost, he thought as he walked. Sykes put a coin in the payphone and dialed a number. "Red Snow Co., who are you looking for?" A man answered the phone. "Is Ricky there?" "Wait a minute, he's behind, I'll call him." Sykes held the phone, thumbed the lottery numbers in his hand, and watched the winning numbers displayed on the TV screen in the store opposite.I thought to myself, whoever came up with this trick to make money is really fucking talented.Get the right scrap of paper and you can make fucking millions of dollars. "I'm Ricky, who is it?" A boy's voice came from the microphone. "It's me, did you get the things?" "got it." "I'm just outside." Seagulls fly in a V shape in the air.Redshelco's door opened, and out came a pimply-faced young man they had last met on Atlantic Avenue.He looked up and down the road, and then came in the direction of Sikes. "Here, fifty dollars." Sikes pressed five and ten dollar bills into the boy's hand. The boy looked around again, then reached into his shirt pocket, took out a small note, and handed it to Sikes, "This is all the things you asked. I found them all on the Internet." Sikes read the note as he walked to the car.she is alive!It's just that she changed her name, and her surname is no longer Marco.He wondered what her house looked like?Is she rich now? The note read: William and Susan Paxton, 1515 Curley Drive, Gloucester Heights, NJ. He opened a can of beer, took a big sip, and then called the number on the note. "Hello." A little boy's voice came out.Is it a child? "Is Susan there?" he asked. "Grandma has gone to work. She doesn't come back until seven." Sykes thought for a moment and said to the child who answered, "This is Mr. Higginson from the church. I'm here to ask her about food donations. Do you have the number of where she works?" The little boy skillfully recited a string of numbers. "Thank you." Sykes hung up the phone.Then he dialed the number he had just written down. While waiting for the call to connect, he thought to himself, after all these years, he wondered what she had become. "Carmela Clothing Store, who are you looking for?" A voice came. The voice was a little thicker than he remembered. "Hello, I'm calling to inquire about the directions to your store." He replied hoarsely, and suddenly felt a painful taste in his stomach.He thought again of the wet hair hanging on her bosom, and the smell of strawberry shampoo on it.Strawberries are always inseparable from her side: strawberry ice cream, strawberry-flavored lipstick, strawberry-flavored chewing gum.She was such a wayward little girl back then. Will she let her hair go gray, or will she dye it?He guessed.