Redemption Road

by John Hart

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  For Norde, Matthew, and Mickey.

  Good men gone …

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the following people for their kindness, support, and patience: Sally Richardson, John Sargent, Thomas Dunne, Kate Parkin, Nick Sayers, Jennifer Enderlin, Pete Wolverton, Christian Rohr, and Esther Newberg. As always there are others who mattered so much—family and friends—but the unwavering support of such outstanding publishers, editors, and agents has been more than meaningful.

  Few books succeed without the tireless efforts of caring, knowledgeable people, and no one understands that better than a working novelist. In that spirit—and in addition to the industry professionals listed above—I would also like to thank Emma Stein, Jeffery Capshew, Ken Holland, Cathy Turiano, Kenneth J. Silver, Paul Hochman, Jeff Dodes, Tracey Guest, Emi Battaglia, Justin Vellela, Jimmy Iacobelli, and Michael Storrings. I would also like to thank the Macmillan sales force—true professionals, and simply the best.

  I’d also like to mention the Honorable James Randolph, who advised me on the law. Any mistakes in that arena are mine alone. I’d also like to thank Markus Wilhelm, who has always been supportive. Inman Majors read an early draft and offered exceptional insight. Special thanks goes to the boys of The Hung Jury—Corban, John, Inman, and Chad—you guys are the best, and I love what we’ve built.

  My wife, as always, was a saint, and my children spectacular. Final thanks, then, to Katie, Saylor, and Sophie. None of this makes sense without you.

  It’s a cold and it’s a broken halleluja.

  —LEONARD COHEN

  YESTERDAY

  The woman was a rare beauty in that she knew nothing of her perfection. He’d watched her long enough to suspect as much, but only in meeting her had his instinct been proven true. She was modest and shy, and easily swayed. Perhaps she was insecure or not very bright. Maybe she was lonesome or confused about her place in this difficult world.

  It didn’t matter, really.

  She looked right, and that was all about the eyes.

  Hers flashed as she came down the sidewalk, the sundress loose around her knees, but not inappropriate. He liked the way the dress shifted, and how neatly she moved her legs and arms. She was pale skinned and quiet. He’d have preferred her hair a little different, but that was okay.

  It really was about the eyes.

  They had to be clear and deep and unguarded, so he watched carefully to make sure nothing had changed in the few days since they’d agreed to meet. She looked about in an apologetic way, and from a distance he could sense the unhappiness born of bad boyfriends and a meaningless job. She hoped life would be more. He understood that in a way most men would not.

  “Hello, Ramona.”

  She shied unabashedly away now that they were so close to each other. Her lashes were dark on the curve of her cheek, her head angled so that he lost sight of her flawless jaw.

  “I’m glad we decided to do this,” he said. “I think it will be an afternoon well spent.”

  “Thank you for making the time.” She blushed, the eyes still downcast. “I know you’re busy.”

  “The future matters for all of us, life and the living of it, career and family and personal satisfaction. It’s important to plan and think things through. There’s no need to do it alone, not in a town like this. We know each other here. We help each other. You’ll understand that once you live here longer. The people are nice. It’s not just me.”

  She nodded, but he understood the deeper feelings. They’d met as if by accident, and she was wondering why she’d opened up so readily and to such a stranger. But that was his gift—his face and his gentle manner, the way they trusted. Some women needed that: the shoulder, the patience. Once they knew his interest was not romantic, it was easy. He was steady and kind. They thought him worldly.

  “Are you ready, then?” He opened the car door, and for an instant she looked unsettled, her gaze lingering on cigarette burns and torn vinyl. “It’s a loaner,” he said. “I apologize, but my usual car needed service.”

  She bit her bottom lip, muscles tightening in the back of one smooth calf. Stains marred the dash. The carpet was worn through.

  She needed a push.

  “We were supposed to do this tomorrow, remember? Late afternoon? Coffee and a chat?” A smile creased his face. “I would have had the other car if plans had stayed the same. But you needed to change the day. It was kind of last-minute, and we’re really doing this for you.…”

  He let the words trail off so she’d remember that she’d suggested the meeting and not the other way around. She nodded a final time because it made sense and because she didn’t want to look like the kind of person who cared about something as meaningless as a car, not when she was too broke to buy her own. “My mother’s coming in from Tennessee in the morning.” She glanced back at the apartment building, new lines at the corners of her mouth. “It was unexpected.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s my mom.”

  “You told me. I know.” A little frustration was in his voice, a little impatience. He smiled to take out the sting, though the last thing he wanted was to be reminded of the girl’s hillbilly roots in some hillbilly town. “It’s my nephew’s car,” he said. “He’s in college.”

  “That explains it, then.”

  She meant the smell and the dirt; but she was laughing now, so he laughed, too. “Kids,” he said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  He made a mock bow and said something about chariots. She laughed, but he was no longer paying attention.

  She was already in the car.

  “I enjoy a Sunday.” She sat straight as he slid behind the wheel. “The stillness and the quiet. No expectations.” She smoothed the skirt and showed the eyes. “Don’t you love a Sunday?”

  “Of course,” he said, but couldn’t care less. “Did you tell your mother we were meeting?”

  “Not a chance,” the girl said. “There’d be a million questions. She’d say I was needy or irresponsible, that I should have called her instead.”

  “Perhaps you underestimate her.”

  “Not my mother, no.”

  He nodded as if he understood her isolation. The mother was overbearing, the father distant or dead. He turned the key and liked the way she sat—back straight, both hands folded neatly in her lap. “The people who love us tend to see what they want to see, and not what we really are. Your mother should look more closely. I think she’d be pleasantly surprised.”

  The comment made her happy.

  He pulled away from the curb and talked enough to keep her that way. “What about your friends?” he asked. “The people you work with? Do they know?”

  “Only that I’m meeting someone today, and that it’s personal.” She smiled and showed the warm, rich eyes that had drawn him in the first place. “They’re very curious.”

  “I’m sure they are,” he said; and she smiled a second t
ime.

  It took a dozen minutes for her to ask the first meaningful question. “Wait a minute. I thought we were having coffee.”

  “I’m taking you somewhere else first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a surprise.’

  She craned her neck as the city sank behind them. Fields and woods ran off in either direction. The empty road seemed to take new meaning as her fingers touched her throat, her cheek. “My friends will expect me back.”

  “I thought you didn’t tell them.”

  “Did I say that?”

  He gave her a look, but didn’t respond. The sky outside was purple, the sun an orange push through the trees. They were far past the edge of town, an abandoned church settling quietly on a distant hill, its steeple broken as if by the weight of the darkening sky. “I love a ruined church,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see it?”

  He pointed, and she stared at the ancient stone, the twisted cross. “I don’t understand.”

  She was worried; trying to convince herself everything was normal. He watched blackbirds settle on the ruins. A few minutes later, she asked him to take her home.

  “I’m not feeling well.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  She was scared now—he could tell—frightened of his words and the church and the strange, flat whistle that hissed between his lips.

  “You have very expressive eyes,” he said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  He turned the car onto a gravel road, the world defined by trees and dusk and the heat of her skin. When they passed an open gate in a rusted fence, the girl began to cry. It was quiet, at first, then less so.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  She cried harder, but didn’t move. The car rolled out of the trees and into a clearing choked with weeds and old equipment and bits of rusted metal. An empty silo rose, round and streaked, its pinnacle stained pink by the falling sun. At its base a small door gaped, the space beyond it black and still. She stared up at the silo and, when she looked back down, saw handcuffs in his hand.

  “Put these on.”

  He dropped the cuffs in her lap, and a warm, wet stain spread beneath them. He watched her stare desperately through the windows, looking for people or sunlight or reasons to hope.

  “Pretend it’s not real,” he said.

  She put on the cuffs, the metal clinking like tiny bells. “Why are you doing this?”

  It was the same question, but he didn’t blame her. He turned off the engine and listened to it tick in the stillness. It was hot in the clearing. The car smelled of urine, but he didn’t mind. “We were supposed to do this tomorrow.” He pushed a stun gun against her ribs and watched her twitch as he pulled the trigger. “I don’t need you till then.”

  1

  Gideon Strange opened his eyes to dark and heat and the sound of his father weeping. He held very still, though the sobbing was neither new nor unexpected. His father often ended up in the corner—huddled as if his son’s bedroom were the world’s last good place—and Gideon thought about asking why, after all these years, his father was still so sad and weak and broken. It would be a simple question, and if his father were any kind of man, he’d probably answer it. But Gideon knew what his father would say and so kept his head on the pillow and watched the dark corner until his father pulled himself up and crossed the room. For long minutes he stood silently, looking down; then he touched Gideon’s hair and tried to whisper himself strong, saying, Please, God, please, then asking strength from his long-dead wife, so that Please, God turned into Help me, Julia.

  Gideon thought it was pitiful, the helplessness and tears, the shaking, dirty fingers. Holding still was the hardest part, not because his mother was dead and had no answer, but because Gideon knew that if he moved at all, his father might ask if he was awake or sad or equally lost. Then Gideon would have to tell the truth, not that he was any of those things, but that he was more lonesome inside than any boy his age should be. But his father didn’t speak again. He ran fingers through his son’s hair and stood perfectly still as if whatever strength he sought might magically find him. Gideon knew that would never happen. He’d seen pictures of his father before and had a few dim memories of a man who laughed and smiled and didn’t drink most every hour of every day. For years he’d thought that man might return, that it could still happen. But Gideon’s father wore his days like a faded suit, an empty man whose only passion rose from thoughts of his long-dead wife. He seemed alive enough then, but what use were flickers or hints?

  The man touched his son’s hair a final time, then crossed the room and pulled the door shut. Gideon waited a minute before rolling out of bed, fully dressed. He was running on caffeine and adrenaline, trying hard to remember the last time he’d slept or dreamed or thought of anything else besides what it would take to kill a man.

  Swallowing hard, he cracked the door, trying to ignore that his arms were skinny-white and his heart was running fast as a rabbit’s. He told himself that fourteen years was man enough, and that he didn’t need to be any older to pull a trigger. God wanted boys to become men, after all, and Gideon was only doing what his father would do if his father were man enough to do it. That meant killing and dying were part of God’s plan, too, and Gideon said as much in the dark of his mind, trying hard to convince the parts of him that shook and sweated and wanted to throw up.

  Thirteen years had passed since his mother’s murder, then three weeks since Gideon had found his father’s small, black gun, and ten more days since he’d figured out a 2:00 a.m. train would carry him to the gray, square prison on the far side of the county. Gideon knew kids who’d hopped trains before. The key, they said, was to run fast and not think on how sharp and heavy those big, shiny wheels truly were. But Gideon worried he’d jump and miss and go under. He had nightmares about it every night, a flash of light and dark, then pain so true he woke with an ache in the bones of his legs. It was an awful image, even awake, so he pushed it down and cracked the door wide enough to see his father slumped in an old brown chair, a pillow squeezed to his chest as he stared at the broken television where Gideon had hidden the gun after he stole it from his father’s dresser drawer two nights ago. He realized now that he should have kept the gun in his room, but there was no better hiding place, he’d thought, than the dried-out guts of a busted-up television that hadn’t worked since he was five.

  But how to get to the gun when his father sat right in front of it?

  Gideon should have done it differently, but his thoughts ran crooked sometimes. He didn’t mean to be difficult. It just worked out that way, so that even the kind teachers suggested he think more about woodshop and metalworking than about the fancy words in all those great, heavy books. Standing in the dark, he thought maybe those teachers were right, after all, because without the gun he couldn’t shoot or protect himself or show God he had the will to do necessary things.

  After a minute, he closed the door, thinking, Two o’clock train …

  But the clock already said 1:21.

  Then 1:30.

  * * *

  Checking the door again, he watched a bottle go up and down until his father slumped and the bottle slipped from his fingers. Gideon waited five more minutes, then crept to the living room and stepped over engine parts and other bottles, tripping once as a car rumbled past and splashed light through a gap in the curtains. When it was dark again, he knelt behind the television, slipped off the back, and pulled out a gun that was black and slick and heavier than he remembered. He cracked the cylinder, checked the bullets.

  “Son?”

  It was the small voice, the small man. Gideon stood and saw that his father was awake—a man-shaped hole in a stretch of stained upholstery. He seemed uncertain and afraid, and for a m
oment Gideon wanted to go back under the sheets. He could call everything off; pretend none of this had ever happened. It would be nice, he thought, not to kill a man. He could put the gun down and go back to bed. But he saw the halo of flowers in his father’s hands. They were dry and brittle now, but his mother, on her wedding day, had worn them like a crown in her hair. He looked at them, again—baby’s breath and white roses, all of it pale and brittle—then imagined how the room would look if a stranger were looking down from above: the man with dead flowers, the boy with the gun. Gideon wanted to explain the power of that image—to make his father understand that the boy had to do what the father would not. Instead he turned and ran. He heard his name again, but was already through the door, half falling as he leapt off the porch and hit the ground running, the gun warm now in his hand, the impact from hard concrete slamming up his shins as he ran half a block, then ducked through an old man’s yard and into thick woods that ran east with the creek, then up a big hill to where chain-link sagged and factories were rusted shut.

  He fell against the fence as his father, far behind him, called his name over and over, his voice so loud it broke and cracked and finally failed. For a second, Gideon hesitated, but when a train whistled in the west, he pushed the gun under the fence and scrambled over the top, tearing skin as he did and banging both knees when he landed wrong in the overgrown parking lot on the other side.

  The train’s whistle blew louder.

  He didn’t have to do it.

  No one had to die.

  But that was the fear talking. His mother was dead, and her killer needed to pay. So he aimed for a gap between the burned-out furniture plant and the place that used to make thread but now had one whole side falling in. It was darker between the buildings, but even with loose bricks under his feet Gideon made it, without falling, to a hole in the fence near the big white oak in the far corner. There was light from a streetlamp and from a few low stars, but it disappeared as he belly-slid under the wire and plunged into a gully on the far side. The dirt was dry and loose going down. He slipped—scrabbling to keep the gun from falling out in the blackness—then splashed through a trickle of water and clambered up the other side to stand breathless in an alley of scrub that spread out from metal tracks that looked white against the dirt.