Redemption Road: A Novel (36 page)

Don’t do it, son.

But, the gun didn’t move. It pressed so hard against Olivet’s chest Adrian felt the man’s heart beat against the metal.

“Please…”

The trigger tightened under Adrian’s finger. It was too much, too many years. It had to happen, so the trigger had to move. Olivet must have seen the decision in Adrian’s eyes, for his mouth opened, and in the stillness of that final moment, of the long, hard second that would be his last, a noise rose in the darkness beyond the field.

“Sirens,” Olivet said. “Police.”

Adrian turned his head and saw lights far away. They were blue and thumping and moving fast; but he had time if he wanted it. A minute. Ninety seconds. He could pull the trigger; take the car.

Olivet knew it, same as him. “Her name is Sarah,” he said. “She’s only twelve.”

*   *   *

Elizabeth passed the cops two miles over the bridge, but didn’t slow. They blew past her in the other direction: two patrol cars and an unmarked unit she swore was Beckett’s. They were moving fast—maybe eighty on the narrow road—and she knew they were going for Adrian. At speed like that there had to be a reason, but stopping or turning was not an option. Nothing mattered but the lawyer.

Reaching back, she found his hand. “Hang on, Faircloth.”

But no answer came.

She flew through town and hit the hospital parking lot at speed, the slick tires squealing as she bumped over the curb and rocked to a stop at the emergency-room door. Suddenly, she was inside and yelling for help. A doctor materialized.

“Outside. I think he’s dying.”

The doctor called for a stretcher, and at the car they lifted him. “Tell me what happened.”

“Trauma of some kind. I’m not sure.”

“Name and age.”

“Faircloth Jones. Eighty-nine, I think.” Doors slid open. The gurney clattered as they rolled him inside. “I don’t know his next of kin or emergency contact.”

“Any allergies? Medications?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I need to know more about what happened.”

The doctor was confident and sure, Elizabeth the opposite. “I think he was tortured.”

“Tortured? How?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

The physician scribbled a note as the stretcher rolled. “And, you are?”

“Nobody.” She stopped at a second set of sliding doors. “I’m nobody.”

He didn’t argue. There was too much to do, too many ways a man that age could die. “Room four!” he yelled.

Elizabeth watched them go.

When she returned to her car, she slipped behind the wheel and felt how the nurses stared after her. The doctor may not have recognized her, but others did. Would this make the papers, too? Angel of death. Tortured lawyer. For an instant she cared, but only for that instant. She got out of the car and walked back inside, approaching the first nurse at the first counter. “I need a phone.”

The nurse pointed, terrified.

Elizabeth crossed the gleaming floor and lifted the courtesy phone from its cradle. Her first instinct was to call Beckett, but he was at Adrian’s farm—she knew it. Instead, she called James Randolph.

“James, it’s Liz.” She eyed the nurse, the security guard, who looked just as nervous. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me everything.”

*   *   *

James Randolph had never been shy or slow. The phone call took less than a minute, so that when Elizabeth left for Brambleberry Road, she knew everything Randolph did about the grim, dark underbelly of her father’s church. It turned the world upside down.

New victims linked in death.

More bodies in the place she’d learned to pray.

She saw it as if she were there, but Randolph’s final words haunted her more deeply.

The whole world’s looking for him, Liz.

Every fuckin’ body.

He was talking about Adrian, and why not? Fresh bodies on the altar. Nine more under the church. Elizabeth had to ask herself again how much she trusted him. She said it was an easy question—that he was still the same man and that nothing
real
had changed. But she saw Preston’s face when she closed her eyes and wondered if, even once, he’d begged for mercy.

Every fuckin’ body.

Elizabeth turned onto Brambleberry Road and checked the pistol on the seat beside her. It was not the Glock she preferred, but when she pulled behind the old gas station and got out of the car, the gun went with her. She told herself it was smart, and only reasonable; yet the safety moved under her thumb. It was the silence and the darkness, the still trees and the scrub and the gray car bleeding into night as it sat under a tree at the back of the lot. The place had been old when she was a kid and was ancient now, a dirty cube on an empty road, a scratch mark that stank of chemicals and rust and rotting wood. Elizabeth understood why Adrian chose it, but thought if it came to dying, the old gas station was as good as any place she’d ever seen. Maybe it would open in the morning, and maybe not. Maybe a body could lie beside it forever, seasons rolling one across the other until the old bones and concrete looked like a single patch of broken pavement. That’s exactly how the place felt. As if bad things could happen here. As if they probably would.

“Adrian?”

She stepped over shattered glass and cinder block to where a sliver of light spilled through a crack at one of the rusted doors. Up close, she saw a pry bar and twisted metal. The lock was broken.

“Hello?”

No one answered, but she heard water running beyond the door. Opening it, she saw a single bulb above a grimy sink and a metal mirror. Adrian stood over the smudged porcelain, washing his hands in water that ran red. His knuckles were swollen and split, and Elizabeth felt her stomach turn as he pulled a bit of tooth from beneath the skin and dropped it in the sink.

“It’s just what prison does. It’s not who I am.”

She watched him work more soap into the cuts and tried to put herself in his shoes. How would she fight if every fight were to the death? “Crybaby didn’t deserve what happened to him,” she said.

“I know.”

“Could you have stopped it?”

“You don’t think I tried?” He was looking at her in the mirror, his face blurred in the filthy metal. “Is he alive?”

“He was alive when I left him.” Adrian looked away, and she thought she saw something soft. A blink, maybe. A flicker. “What did they want with you? Those guards?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s personal.”

“And if Crybaby dies? Is that personal, too?”

He straightened and turned, and Elizabeth felt the first real fear. The eyes were so brown they were black, so deep they could be empty. “Are you going to shoot me?”

Elizabeth looked at the gun, forgotten in her hand. It was pointed at his chest, her finger not on the trigger, but close. She tucked it away. “No, I’m not going to shoot you.”

“May I be alone, then?”

Elizabeth thought about it, then gave him what he wanted. She would help him or not—she didn’t really know. But this was not the time to worry or plan. Crybaby was dying or dead, and as much as she wanted to know Adrian’s heart, what she really wanted was to breathe and be alone and grieve for the places of childhood. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

“Thank you.”

She eased the door closed but stopped at the end, watching through the crack as Adrian stared long in the mirror, then soaped his hands again, the water running red and pink and then clear. When it was done, he spread fingers on the sink and lowered his head until it was perfectly still. Bent as he was, he looked different yet the same, violent and held together and still somehow lovely. It was a foolish word—
lovely
—but that, too, came from childhood so she gave it a moment. He was lovely and undone, every tortured inch a mystery. Like the church, she thought, or Crybaby’s heart or the souls of wounded children. But childhood was not all good, nor were its lessons. Good came with the bad, as dark did with light and weakness with strength. Nothing was simple or pure; everyone had secrets.

What were Adrian’s secrets?

How bad were they?

She watched a moment more, but there was no insight in the filthy room with the metal mirror and the dim, greenish light. Maybe he’d killed two men in the drive of his old farm, just shot them dead and left them there. Maybe he was a good man, and maybe not.

Elizabeth lingered, hoping for some kind of sign.

She left when he started crying.

*   *   *

When the door opened again, Elizabeth was beside the shuttered pumps in front of the old station, watching taillights fade a mile down the road. “Are you okay?”

Another car appeared in the distance, and Adrian shrugged.

She watched the lights swell and spill across his face. “You need to leave,” she said. “Leave town. Leave the county.”

“Because of what just happened?”

“That’s part of it. There’s more.”

“What do you mean?”

She told him about the discovery of another body on the altar, and of the graves beneath the church. It took some time. He struggled with it. So did she.

“They’re looking for you,” she said. “That’s why they went to the farm, to arrest you if they could.”

He used a thumb to massage one knuckle, then another, did the same with the other hand. “How old are the graves?”

“Nobody knows yet, but it’s the big question.”

“And the one on the altar?”

“Lauren Lester. I met her once. She was nice.”

“The name means nothing to me.” Adrian scrubbed both palms across his face. He felt numb and cold and disconnected. Two women murdered since his release. Nine more bodies found beneath the church. “This can’t be happening.”

“It is.”

“But why? Why now?”

Elizabeth waited for him to speak of conspiracy and the beer can, and how maybe this was part of some elaborate setup. To her relief, he said nothing. This was too big for that. There were too many bodies. “What about the guards?”

“Do you think I killed them?”

“I think you’re troubled.”

Adrian smiled because
troubled
seemed such a small word. “I didn’t kill them.”

“Should I take your word?”

She was small on the roadside, unflinching in the way any good cop should be. Adrian walked to the car and opened the trunk. Olivet was inside.

“Why did you bring him here?”

He dragged the guard out; dropped him on the tarmac. Elizabeth was alarmed, but Adrian was unswayed. He pulled the weapon from his waistband, sank into a crouch, and watched Olivet stare at the revolver as if to read the future. Adrian understood that, too, that fascination.

“I wanted to kill him,” Adrian said.

“But you didn’t.”

He saw her pistol from the corner of his eye and smiled because she’d come so far from the frightened girl she’d once been. The gun was unholstered, but low and steady. She was steady.

“Answer a question,” he said.

“If you give me the gun.”

“The men who died in the basement. Did they not deserve to die?”

“They did.”

“Do you feel regret?”

“No.”

“And if I told you this was no different?” He put the gun against Olivet’s chest and saw Elizabeth’s rise beside him.

“I can’t let you kill him.”

“Would you shoot me to save this man?”

“Let’s not find out.”

Adrian studied Olivet’s face, the fear and bruising and the sunken eyes. It wasn’t the daughter that saved him at the farm. It wasn’t blue lights or sirens. Adrian could have killed him and gotten away. Even now his finger felt the curve of the trigger. There was a reason though, and it still mattered.

“If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead already.”

Adrian lowered the hammer and placed the revolver on the ground. Elizabeth stooped to retrieve it, but he kept his attention on Olivet, leaning close until their faces were inches apart. “I want you to give the warden a message.”

“Yes.” Olivet tried to swallow, but choked. “Anything.”

“You tell the warden you’re alive because of Eli Lawrence, and that it won’t be like this the next time. Tell him if I see him, I’ll make it personal. I’ll make it like it was for me.” The guard nodded, but Adrian wasn’t finished. “Daughter or not, the same thing goes for you. Do you understand?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

Adrian stood and studied Liz’s posture, her face. Her fingers were still white on the pistol grip, but he could live with that. What mattered was that she was there at all, that she’d come back when she didn’t have to, and that she’d exercised restraint where no other cop would have. It was a small thing in a large world, but in the dim light before the old station Adrian felt less alone than he had in a long time, not at peace but not destroyed, either. He wanted Liz to understand that, to know she meant something to him and that it wasn’t something small. “You have questions,” he said. “I’m not sure I can tell you everything, but I’ll try.”

“That would be nice.”

“Will you come with me?”

“What?”

“You said it yourself. I have to leave this place.”

“Where would we go?”

“It’s a secret,” he told her, and Liz looked down the darkened road. Secrets were dangerous; both of them understood that. But he could tell that she was hurting, and that her life, too, was at a crossroads. “Please,” he said; and she looked at him with those clear and telling eyes. “I’m tired of being alone.”

*   *   *

They took Elizabeth’s car because cops had found Preston, and the gray car would by now be flagged. Adrian directed her to a road that went east, and they rolled through the night in silence, small towns sliding past, the emptiness between them black and flat and whiskered with pine. “Tell me I’m not crazy,” Elizabeth said, once.

“Maybe the good kind,” he said, and that seemed to fit. She was alone with the man who’d saved her life. He was wanted for murder, and wind was in her hair and nothing else mattered. That was crazy, but she thought it needed to be. Everything else she loved was beyond her help. Channing and Gideon and Crybaby. They’d face prison or heal or die, and Elizabeth could affect none of it. Circumstance had stripped that power from her and left her here with this man, in this place of darkness and speed and screaming wind. She could touch the moment and the man beside her, and that was it. Her own wants were strange to her. Was she a cop or a fugitive, a victim or some peculiar, new thing?