The Road To Deliverance

by James, Harper

  ‘Whoa, slow down. Take it easy. You’re safe now?’

  She took a deep breath. Held it before letting it out slowly.

  ‘Yes. I’m back in the car now.’

  ‘What happened to the guy?’

  She laughed then, a release of nervous tension. He’d never been so happy to hear a sound.

  ‘I kicked the bastard in the balls.’

  ‘Good for you. Is that the same bastard you called a disgusting pervert?’

  ‘That’s the one. Lucky there weren’t two of them.’

  ‘I don’t know, sounds to me like you can look after yourself. I heard some other noises as well.’

  The laugh turned into a nervous giggle as the adrenalin released its grip on her.

  ‘He had this stupid comb over. I grabbed it, swung his face into the fender when he bent double from the kick in the balls.’

  ‘Nice move.’

  ‘And I kicked him in the face when he tried to get up.’

  ‘Ouch. I got off lightly by comparison.’

  It was out before he knew it. He wanted to bite off his tongue. An awkward pause filled the void between them.

  ‘Make sure you bear that in mind in future. Next time you kidnap somebody. Are you still at the motel?’

  ‘Yep. Somebody took my car.’

  ‘Is that so? It’s a bitch, ain’t it? And here was me thinking it was my car.’

  Getting up off the bed, he paced as far as the phone cord would allow him. He needed to be on the move now, too much time lost already.

  ‘Which way are you driving?’

  He held his breath, sent up a prayer for the answer he wanted to hear.

  ‘I saw the texts and the pictures. I’m on my way back. I’m so sorry. You think it’s too late?’

  The anguish in her voice made him want to reassure her, say, no, of course not. The truth was, he didn’t know. He did the exact same math in his head she had done, came up with a different answer. Because he knew they were aiming at a 6:00 p.m. deadline. He’d just never gotten around to telling her, didn’t know she’d wrongly assumed midday. It would still be close, but they could still make it—so long as nothing else happened to her on the way back.

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Me too.’

  The voice on the other end of the line sounded very small and sorry for itself. He didn’t want to break the connection, leave her alone with her guilt. But they couldn’t stay on the line for the next three or four hours.

  ‘You got another text.’ She paused for an uncomfortable moment. ‘And another photo. I don’t understand what they mean.’

  Something cold poked its finger into his entrails, the words of the Press one for ears verse filling him with a nameless dread. Had they started on him already?

  ‘Tell me what it said.’

  It came out more harshly than he meant it to. Down the phone line he heard her swallow, lick her lips.

  ‘Don’t want you getting a bum steer on what’s gonna happen. The word steer is capitalized. What does it mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. What was the image?’

  She described the cattle brand to him, her voice catching as she forced the words out. He understood then what the meaning was, made him feel sick.

  ‘Cole?’

  He didn’t want to tell her. She’d feel worse for running out on him. It wasn’t an option, not with Little Miss Incessant Questions.

  ‘They’re playing with words. Bum steer—’

  ‘I worked that out. They don’t want you getting the wrong idea. But why emphasize . . .’

  It came to her without warning, the question dying on her lips. The cattle brand. The other meaning of steer when applied to cattle. A castrated male cow. The proximity of the brand on Jay’s stomach to his waistband—and what lay immediately below that—was no coincidence.

  ‘No. They wouldn’t . . .’

  He cleared his throat, his own stomach queasy at the thought.

  ‘I don’t know if they’d go through with it. But that’s what the threat means. It also means somebody else is involved now.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a long story.’

  ‘Cole!’

  The sudden shout made him jump.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re doing it again. The reason we’re in this mess is because you wouldn’t tell me what was going on.’

  She was right. And she was heading back towards him, wanted to see it through to the end, whatever that might be. She deserved to know what was going on. So he told her about El Carnicero, explained that it wasn’t a horseshoe in the brand, it was the letter C rotated through ninety degrees.

  The silence coming down the line as he spoke was so deep it made him wonder if she was still there, made him worry his words were scaring her off, making her reconsider her decision.

  ‘They also wrote KKK across his stomach.’ She sounded like a person trying out a new word in Swedish. ‘Is that Ku Klux Klan? Why are they involved?’

  ‘No. That’s Lucas sending me a message. Letting me know he’s the one who did it.’

  He didn’t wait for her to ask him to explain, told her the whole story behind Lucas and Jay’s animosity, the disfigurement that Lucas blamed Jay for.

  ‘So this is payback for that as well as everything else that’s going on here.’

  ‘Uh-huh. They didn’t need to brand him to let me know they’re not messing around.’

  He had to change the subject. The thought of what they’d done, what they might still do, to Jay made him feel ill. The room was too hot, too reminiscent of his nightmare, the dampness of his palm as he gripped the cheap plastic phone like Jay’s blood on his hands.

  ‘I can’t stay in the room. I’ll be outside on the road.’

  He killed the call before she asked him to explain, relieved she was on her way back. They were still in with a chance. At the same time, he felt swamped, drowning in a sea of guilt. She had no idea what she was getting herself into.

  Because he couldn’t see any good way this could end. For any of them.

  For himself, he had no long-term expectations beyond waking up each morning, each day an unlooked-for bonus. And Jay had known the risks, chosen to ignore them, to not give a damn. Sarah was different, guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, just another of fate’s hapless victims.

  And fate really had his eye on this one.

  Chapter 27

  ‘THERE’S SOMETHING I NEED to do inside,’ Sarah said when Cole got in the car. He ignored her, asked her a question that sent a spike of guilt through her, stole her breath away.

  ‘Did you call your husband yet?’

  She shook her head, not wanting to get into this for fear it would weaken her resolve.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? I’d have thought that was the first thing you’d do. After calling the cops, of course.’

  She threw her head back, stared at the roof.

  ‘I didn’t do that either. And what am I going to say to Evan? I was kidnapped and then I escaped and now I’m going back.’

  He shrugged, don’t ask me.

  ‘I’ve never been married, I wouldn’t know. I don’t suppose that sort of thing goes down too well. Not what they had in mind when they came up with the for better, for worse lines.’

  ‘He’ll have called the police by now. They’ll be looking for me.’

  ‘You’re under some illusion about how interested they might be. People go missing every day.’

  She shook her head, didn’t want to hear it. It was a trait she’d picked up from Evan.

  ‘I don’t care. I’ve messed up enough already. I don’t want any more delays because of me.’ She grabbed a handful of her hair, pulled it out sideways. ‘I need to cut this, make myself look different.’

  He shook his head. Tried hard to keep a straight face as he took hold of the hand holding her hair.

  ‘You don’t need to do that�
��’

  ‘I want to do it.’

  A thought hijacked her mind, stopped her dead. Here she was, choosing to run away from Evan with a man she’d only known thirty-six hours and now she wanted to make herself unrecognizable to him or anyone else who knew her.

  What the hell was happening to her?

  She couldn’t worry about it now.

  ‘And you can change the license plate. They’ll have put the number out on one of those . . .’ She dropped her eyes, suddenly feeling very silly. ‘I know, I watch too much TV.’

  ‘No, it’s not such a bad idea. And I know exactly where to get some.’

  She drove into the motel lot, followed his directions around behind the office. She pulled up next to the manager’s pickup. He stopped her with a hand on her arm as she grabbed the door handle. His face told her the time for joking was over, it might never be that time again.

  ‘There is another alternative. I’ll take your car. You wait here. Then I’ll come back for you when it’s over.’

  It was the sensible thing to do. The thing was, she felt guilty for the delay she’d caused, wanted to make amends in some way. It was stupid and arrogant to think she could make a difference. She had to at least try.

  That wasn’t all.

  She thought back to the evening in the bar, the evening that felt like a lifetime ago, that started it all off. She thought about Elaine and her promotion, how she’d got the first inkling that it wasn’t what she wanted for herself, for the future. The mind-numbing drudgery of it all. Did she really want to go back to that? Climb back on the treadmill Monday morning, climb off again when she was . . . what? Sixty? Older? Thirty years of her life gone, what was left of it empty apart from the echoes of old dreams abandoned long ago.

  Screw sensible.

  And with that decision she sealed the pact she’d first made with the Devil when she decided not to call Evan, to sleep in her car instead.

  She didn’t need to say anything. Cole saw her expression, nodded.

  ‘Hey there,’ Sullivan said when she walked in. Still tied to the desk, his face was dangerously red, little beads of sweat on his forehead and top lip. ‘That your boyfriend out there?’

  He said boyfriend as if it were another word for mistake.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Decided to forgive him, eh? Came back for him. He doesn’t deserve you. You gonna untie me?’

  ‘Got any scissors?’

  He got the wrong end of the stick, thought she wanted to cut the rope. Thought she was worried about breaking a nail unpicking the knots after he’d pulled them so tight trying to get free. He told her to look in the top drawer.

  She found them, headed for the lobby to find the rest rooms. Shut the office door behind her to cut off his shouting. No wonder he was so red in the face.

  She stood in front of the mirror. Stared at herself. It was only hair. It’d grow back again. She pictured Jay’s bare stomach. Couldn’t imagine the searing pain he endured as the red-hot branding iron burned into his flesh. Had no problem imagining something that wouldn’t grow back again if they carried through with their threat. She grabbed a big handful of hair, started hacking.

  Cole did a double take when she walked back outside.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss . . .’

  The word made her skin crawl, her stomach heave, took her right back to the side of the road, back to Jacob’s hands on her. Cole wasn’t to know.

  ‘Have you seen Sarah?’

  ‘You finished?’

  He didn’t know whether she meant swapping license plates or cracking stupid jokes. The look on her face said it better be both if he knew what was good for him.

  She let him drive. He’d had four hours sleep and she hadn’t had any. Despite that, she couldn’t sleep, she was too wired. It didn’t matter how much her body craved rest and her mind craved oblivion, she had too much going through her head. It was 8 a.m. on Sunday morning. Four hours to go before the deadline. And almost seven hundred miles to drive.

  It was never going to be what she had in mind for her Sunday morning, croissants and coffee in bed with the papers. Even so, she’d have saved herself a whole lot of anguish if she’d just come out and asked him when the damn deadline was.

  Chapter 28

  SARAH’S MIND WAS DRIVING her crazy. They’d been driving in silence all morning. Cole was lost to her, to the world, bleak thoughts of blood and death flowing like dirty water into the lowest recesses of his mind. She passed the time watching the instruments on the dash, the digits on the odometer crawling round, the minutes on the clock flying past. Why wasn’t he as nervous as her? The threatening verse wouldn’t give her any peace. Repeating over and over, guilt gnawing away at her.

  She wanted to scream, couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

  ‘I’ve earned the right to know what’s going on.’

  He pushed back into his seat. Stretched his arms out against the wheel. Like he needed to put some distance between him and what he was about to tell her.

  ‘Jay used to know these guys. I won’t bore you with the background sob story. What matters is that he straightened himself out. Then he stole some stuff from them.’

  ‘Some stuff? Let me guess. Drugs sort of stuff.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what’s in your backpack?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I got a call in the middle of the night a couple days ago. He was desperate. Something had gone wrong. He needed me to come pick him up. When we got near his place, some of the guys were waiting for him. I drove on, let him out a few blocks away.’

  ‘And you kept hold of the . . . stuff.’

  ‘What choice did I have?’

  Without warning he slammed the heel of his hand into the steering wheel.

  ‘It’s all so stupid. And all for nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, for nothing? Because you’ve got to give it back?’

  He gave an angry head shake.

  ‘No, not that. It was a waste of time in the first place. We arranged to meet in a bar a couple days later. I was going to give it back to him. Tell him he had to give it back to them. I didn’t need it. But I never got the chance.’

  The mention of meeting in a bar made something scratch at her memory, like a song she couldn’t quite place. Then she suddenly realized she hadn’t properly heard what he just said.

  ‘Did you say you didn’t need it?’

  His face compacted into a frown.

  ‘No. I said he didn’t need it.’

  No way.

  She was right. He’d slipped up. Now he was trying to cover his mistake. He was keeping something back. He was talking again.

  ‘Some idiot totalled my car when I was on my way. I got there late. He was already gone.’

  The nagging thoughts that had started up when he mentioned the bar intensified, a growing sense of horror building inside her.

  ‘Do you know these guys as well?’

  He shook his head, no thank you.

  ‘I know who they are, don’t actually know them. Don’t want to.’

  ‘You weren’t in their gang?’ She made air quotes with her fingers. ‘You were a goody two-shoes.’

  He sucked in air through his teeth at how far off the mark she was.

  ‘No, I didn’t say that. I found a better way to release all that aggression.’

  She let a dirty smile creep across her lips.

  ‘Really? In the shower?’

  ‘I joined the military.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘Anyway, we’re getting away from the point here.’

  She was amazed at the speed he changed the subject. His military career was right up there on the list of off-limits topics. It was a big list. She snuck a glance at him. His fingers gripped the wheel like he wanted to snap it, the veins corded on the back of his hands.

  ‘The bartender gave me a note they left for me. They’d got Jay. Told me what they’d do to him if I didn’t return what he stole from them—’
>
  ‘So why are we—’

  ‘Listen for a minute, will you?’ he snapped. ‘They wanted to kill two birds with one stone. Get me to do their dirty work for them. Which is why we’re driving their drugs half way across the country for them. Taking all the risks for them.’

  She realized then how close she’d come to ruining everything right back then, almost before they started.

  ‘If those cops had stopped us, you’d have been arrested for drug trafficking as well as kidnapping me.’

  ‘Exactly. They’d have booked me for driving on the cracks in the pavement too.’

  He was quiet for a long while. She didn’t want to break the silence. All she wanted was to be sucked down a hole in the ground, never to be seen again.

  ‘And they gave me a deadline, of course.’

  The bitterness in his voice wasn’t directed at her, he wasn’t like that. But that’s how she took it. She glanced at the clock on the dash.

  ‘Ten minutes to go.’

  Her voice was so soft she doubted he’d heard her. From the way his head snapped around it was obvious she was wrong.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ten minutes. Until midday. The deadline.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The deadline’s six o’clock. I don’t know where you got midday from.’

  She opened her mouth to argue. Clamped it shut again. She’d made assumptions, got it wrong. It wouldn’t do any good to get into a fight: Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask? Back and forth sounding like an old married couple, both desperate to offload the blame. So she asked him a different question she didn’t want to hear the answer to. And in doing so, she guaranteed that the relief she felt at the six-hour reprieve didn’t last long.

  ‘How far?’

  He glanced at the dash, at the odometer.

  ‘About three hundred and fifty miles.’

  ‘Six hours,’ she said under her breath.

  He was good enough not to ask her to repeat it. There was no need for either of them to state out loud that, thanks to the additional hours she’d added to the journey, it was going to be tight. Very tight indeed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s not your fault.’