‘Because of what Cole said to her when he gave her the tag. May God defend me from my friends. She thought he might have been referring to me. You’ve got to remember she was very confused a lot of the time. After she’d had the nightmare a couple times, she let slip that the dog tag was involved somehow. I waited until she was in the shower one time, took a closer look at it. I saw what it was immediately. Trouble was, it was password protected. I couldn’t get into it.’
‘May God defend me from my friends,’ Evan suggested.
Jay gave him a tight smile, easy to be wise after the event.
‘She hadn’t told me about that at the time, either. Anyway, it all came out after that. I knew Cole must have given her the password. I got her to tell me about the nightmare and what he’d said to her. It was easy after that.’
Evan nodded in agreement.
‘It wasn’t what you’re thinking,’ Jay said.
‘I can defend myself from my enemies?’ Evan said, reciting the second half of the well-known quote.
‘No. It was easier than that. Voltaire. He was the French philosopher it’s attributed to.’ He smiled softly to himself. ‘I’m sure the irony of it all isn’t lost on you.’
It wasn’t. Cole had chosen a quote that exactly matched his own circumstances. It was his own government that he had cause to fear.
‘What was on it?’
‘Scanned copies of his medical files, the reports the doctors had written. Some other files. They were encrypted.’
‘You’ve got no idea what they were?’
‘No. Except that they were important. Important enough for Cole to think he could blackmail the government into paying for his treatment. Important enough for somebody else to think they warranted running a young woman down in the street to get them back.’
‘That must have been a big disappointment.’
Jay let out a short bark of laughter.
‘For Sarah it was. She’d held Cole dying in her arms and he’d given her that damn dog tag—then she can’t find out what’s on it. You know her. You don’t need me to tell you what she was like.’
Evan nodded along with him. Even if he wasn’t paying attention as Jay continued talking.
‘I know it was only a dream, but the fact that I blamed her in it made her feel guilty. That’s what made her so obsessed about getting justice for Cole. Even if she’d only known him two days.’
Jay’s words washed over Evan, a low-level static in the background. He was still thinking about what he’d said a minute earlier. Because he hadn’t missed how Jay referred to it as that damn dog tag. It was understandable. His own brother had died as a result of the things on it. Was that as far as it went? Or were there more consequences, more trouble to come out of it, that Evan wasn’t yet aware of? With Cole already dead and Jay sitting in front of him, that only left one other person whose life had been touched by the dog tag unaccounted for.
‘What happened to it?’
Jay rocked back in his chair, a playful sparkle in his eyes.
‘Guess. You know your wife.’
And Evan did know the answer. Jay was already nodding as he said the words.
‘Sarah hid it.’
Chapter 48
‘SHE WAS BECOMING PARANOID,’ Jay said. ‘After we couldn’t get into the other files, she decided we had to hide it. In case the guys who tried to take it off her came back. She had all these wild ideas about getting in contact with hackers and God knows who else who might be able to crack the encryption. In the meantime, we had to put it somewhere safe.’
They shared a knowing smile as he said the words somewhere safe. Because nine times out of ten, somewhere safe means somewhere you forget.
‘You don’t know where?’
Jay shook his head.
‘It’s not here, that’s for sure. It had something to do with the Zippo lighter they stole from her.’
Evan lifted his butt to get his hand into his pocket, pulled out the Zippo. He passed it to Jay.
‘So that’s it, huh. The famous Zippo.’
Like everybody before him, he tried to light it without success. Then he read the verse aloud.
We the unwilling
Led by the unqualified
To kill the unfortunate
Die for the ungrateful
Sitting there in the crepuscular light of the porch, the words were more poignant than ever. Nobody could deny that Sarah had been unwilling, unqualified and unfortunate at the very least. And three out of four ain’t bad.
‘Sends a shiver down your spine, doesn’t it?’ Jay said, rubbing his thumb over the pitted metal. ‘Shame it doesn’t help much.’ He let out a long sigh, one that made it clear that Sarah hadn’t been the only one obsessed with finding justice for Cole. It was simply that life had beaten Jay down. Evan knew he’d get a punch on the nose if he dared suggest it. That didn’t make it any less true. And he understood that. He’d felt the same himself more times than he could remember.
What he didn’t know was that fate had one last nasty surprise up its sleeve that would make everything that had come before, all the dashed hopes and crushing disappointments, pale into insignificance.
He needed to ask Jay a few more questions before it came to that, before Jay said the words that would rip him apart.
So he started easy, working unwittingly towards his doom.
‘What makes you so positive it’s not here?’
Jay didn’t answer immediately, his mind lost somewhere in the past.
‘Because those guys did come back. And they turned the place upside down, inside and out. If it had been anywhere here, they’d have found it. They had dogs too.’ His mouth turned uncharacteristically down, the words coming out of it with a bitter edge Evan hadn’t heard before. ‘Gave them Cole’s blood-soaked shirt to go on.’
There was more to come. Evan gave him time. Gave him some space too, getting up to fetch them a couple more beers which must have gotten cold enough by now. Walking through the small house into the kitchen, he kept his eyes front, fixed on the fridge ahead of him. Didn’t turn his head left or right, didn’t want to see an open bedroom door, a double bed beyond that.
Handing Jay one of the beers, he said the two words that would cause the axe to fall. And somewhere up above a malicious deity rubbed its hands in glee.
‘What else?’
‘She knew it was no good trying to hide it here. There was no way those guys were going to give up. It was driving her nuts that she couldn’t think of somewhere safe to hide it. She didn’t want to use a safe deposit box at a bank or anything that could be traced. And she kept on about how much she wished she had her Zippo lighter.’
‘Yeah. She always said it helped her think. She’d start reading the verse and then, hey presto, the answer would come to her.’
Jay took a long swallow of his beer. Anyone would’ve thought it was the first one of the day.
‘That’s still warm.’
Evan ignored him, get over it.
‘And that’s exactly what happened,’ Jay said. ‘She’s bellyaching about the Zippo and suddenly her face lights up.’
Jay’s own face fell abruptly at the memory. Evan immediately saw the problem, the problem they were still stuck with.
‘She wouldn’t tell you.’
‘No. Refused point blank. Said it was better that way.’ He lifted his arm as if to slap at something, dropped it again, a gesture of futility, of exasperation. ‘You don’t need to hear about the fight we had. This was my brother we were talking about . . .’ He jabbed his finger into his breastbone so hard, Evan expected to hear the sharp crack of broken bone.
‘And you have no idea where?’
‘None.’
Then he said the few words that would kill something inside Evan as surely as Beau Layfield had killed his brother Cole with a bullet to the gut.
‘All I know is that she went away for three or four days.’
He didn’t realize what he’d said, t
he implications. Nor did Evan for a split second. Then they came down on his head like a brick wall falling on him. He was still standing after fetching the beers. He shot out his hand, hanging onto the railing, trying to stand on legs made of plastic hose.
Because if an idea had come to Sarah, a hiding place, and she had gone away for three or four days to secrete the dog tag there, it meant only one thing.
She’d remembered something, somewhere, from her past.
And if she remembered that, why not everything else?
Even if her memory only came back in dribs and drabs as Jay had said, she’d chosen not to explore the possibilities of the one thing she had remembered.
She’d chosen to ignore her old life, other than how it facilitated her current purpose, to hide Cole’s dog tag.
Jay was giving him a curious, head-cocked look.
‘You okay?’
Evan dropped weakly into his chair.
‘The beers must be going to my head.’ He gazed at the long line of empty bottles by each of their chairs. ‘I don’t usually drink this much.’
Jay raised his beer bottle in a salute, let him know what he thought of that.
‘I don’t know where she went,’ he said, blissfully unaware of the damage his words had done.
It was as if the spiteful, malignant force choreographing Evan’s pain had decreed that the knife wasn’t in far enough. It needed one more, final twist. And of course, spiteful malignant forces are like everybody else—they save the best to last.
‘All she would say when she came back was that she’d put something behind her.’
Evan was aware that elsewhere people were getting on with their lives—eating and drinking, watching TV and getting ready for bed, despite the words Jay had spoken. It seemed, somehow, that it should all have come to a halt, that the clocks should have been stopped and the mirrors covered, voices reduced to a respectful hush as the axe fell on his outstretched neck and everything he had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly into the weathered boards of the porch.
Put something behind her.
He was sorely tempted to get up, thank Jay for his time and the beers and the buttered toast, walk directly to his car, drive to the airport, get on the first plane home, hopefully catch Kate Guillory as she was snuggling down in her bed.
He didn’t. Because in truth the leaden limbs where his legs ought to be wouldn’t have carried his weight. And because he was an ornery son of a bitch. So he sat there drinking his beer—which was warm as Jay had said—trying not to think about Jay’s words. Trying not to think. Period.
But an empty mind is the Devil’s workshop or some such nonsense. He needed to fill the void. And when you don’t want to look back, there’s only one way you can go. He’d follow this through, find out how it ended if it killed him. And then he’d be done. For good.
‘She didn’t say anything else?’
He didn’t care now what Jay might say. He couldn’t say anything worse. Bring it on, why don’t you? And for once he was right. Fate was all out of misery and suffering to dump on his head. Jay closed his eyes, tried to dredge up memories through the haze of time and beer.
‘Only that it was the Zippo that gave her the idea.’
Evan didn’t get it out again. He could recite the words by heart. And there was no clue in them. If not the words, then what? An idea began to slip and crawl over the surface of his mind like a worm seeking entrance.
The man who gave it to her? Her father.
He’d been dead two years at least. And even though he’d still been alive back when it all happened, Evan refused to believe he’d have been party to Sarah’s deception.
He’d given it to her to help her keep a sense of perspective when things got rough.
You think you’ve got problems, take a read of that.
It had worked. Suddenly that ding in the car fender or losing her purse didn’t seem quite so bad when she thought about what her father had endured in Vietnam.
Why had he felt the need to give it to her in the first place?
The answer was hidden somewhere in Sarah’s past. Something that had happened in her life that made her father think she needed something to cling to, to help her get through it.
He knew what it was.
That it existed was more accurate. An incident she would never talk about, not even with him. He’d always suspected that it lay behind her pathological aversion to guns. Which made the story Jay had told all the more incredible.
Had the memory of it somehow survived the trauma of her road trip to hell and back?
He needed to find out what it was.
Opposite him, Jay was yawning, the effects of too many beers and the long day of talking taking their toll. He looked half-asleep, like one more bedtime story would do it. They agreed to resume in the morning. An hour earlier and Evan would have been reluctant to go. Jay would have had to pry him out of the chair. Things were different now. Now that something had been laid to rest inside him. It was an exercise in investigation, pure and simple. A desire to see it through to the end because Guillory was right and he was a pig-headed ass.
And because no bastard was going to taser him and threaten the people dear to him and think they could just walk away.
Chapter 49
GIVEN THE AMOUNT he’d drunk, Evan decided to walk back to his hotel. It was only a few miles. He had a belly full of beer to walk off, a mind full of bleak thoughts to expunge. Turning right onto the highway the wind was in his face, whipping at his coat. The sky was heavy with the threat of rain. If it started, it would be the exact same conditions as on the night Cole Nix was shot.
He walked down the shoulder like a man wandering in a battlefield, searching for life amongst the death all around him. When he came to the place Dalton had brought him to that morning he stopped to rest. It was fully dark now, the similarity to that night six years ago almost complete. He sat down, leaned against the tree Cole Nix had leaned against, feeling as if he had a hole in his own gut. Except it wasn’t so much a hole, it was as if his whole body was a scooped-out hollow, filled only with a sour filth of pain and anguish.
Sitting, staring up at the sky, he heard some dumb animal sound torn out of his body as he remembered Jay’s words: she’d put something behind her. Had he really spent the last six years searching for a person whose aim had been the opposite, to put him behind her?
He must have nodded off at some point. The sound of tires on the dirt shoulder suddenly brought him gasping up out of a shallow pool of sleep. His first reaction in that hazy state between sleep and wakefulness was that it was Jack Adamson and Beau Layfield come back to finish what they started six years ago.
We couldn’t get the woman, let’s see if we can get the husband.
Then a voice he recognized from behind the blinding glare of the vehicle’s headlights.
‘Thought I’d find you here.’ It was Bill Dalton. ‘You sure are a glutton for punishment. Jay called me, said you’d insisted on walking back. He was worried about you. Thought something he’d said had upset you. That maybe you’d do something stupid.’
‘It’s the beer. It was the warm one at the end.’
Dalton nodded, yep, it’s always the warm ones you gotta watch out for. Then he held out his arm, helped haul Evan to his feet, caught him when he staggered.
‘Looks like you’ve had a few. Jay too by the sound of him.’
Then he smiled to himself and something in it made Evan ask him what was so amusing. Dalton shook his head as if to say it was nothing really.
‘It’s funny how the booze hits people in different ways. Here you are sitting in the dirt looking like you wish somebody would shoot you, put you out of your misery. Then there’s your drinking partner Jay—I’ve never known him so agitated, so excited.’
Evan kept his mouth firmly shut, didn’t volunteer an explanation as to why that might be.
‘Get what you were after?’ Dalton said when he’d gotten Evan settled in t
he passenger seat of his car.
Evan rested his head on the headrest, his eyes closed.
‘And then some.’
They were both quiet for a while as Dalton pulled back onto the highway.
‘Still planning on stirring things up?’
Evan looked sideways, stared at his reflection in the window.
‘Thought so,’ Dalton said.
Evan hoped he’d leave it at that. He didn’t. And he wasn’t prepared for what he did next. They’d only gone a quarter mile, crested the rise that Dalton had pretended to try to see over when they’d been at the scene earlier that day, seeing if he could see the sheriff’s office from where he stood. He made a left and turned into it now, parked in what used to be his space, empty at this time of night.
‘I ought to throw you in a cell for the night. No, make that a week.’
Evan was tempted to say it sounded good to him. He’d even welcome them throwing him naked into the showers, hosing him down with ice-cold water from the high-pressure hose, slamming him hard into the white-tiled walls, see if he couldn’t feel something. Because anything would be better than the paralyzing deadness he felt now.
Dalton didn’t make a move to get out, not yet.
‘You shouldn’t have lied to me earlier.’
Evan turned his head away from him, his mouth already opening to pile another lie on top of the first one.
‘Don’t say you got the names mixed up,’ Dalton said.
‘I wasn’t going to.’
Dalton laughed out loud at that, shook his head sadly. Like when you try something one last time hoping it’ll turn out differently. And it doesn’t.
‘She wasn’t wrong,’ he said.
Evan’s head snapped all the way around then. He caught the remains of the smile that was still on Dalton’s lips, knew exactly what he meant.
‘You spoke to Kate Guillory?’
‘I spoke to Detective Guillory, yeah. If she’s Kate to you that explains a lot. You want to hear what she said about you?’
‘No thanks.’
‘I’m not surprised. Sounds like she’s got her head screwed on. Sounds nice, too. You want to know what I think?’
The Road To Deliverance Page 25