Redemption Road

by John Hart

  “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 questio
ns,” 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?

  What about the feelings in her chest?

  She risked a glance, but Adrian’s eyes were closed, his face tilted up so wind lifted his hair and streamed it backward. She felt a moment’s connection; and that was the thing, she decided, the one thing she knew for sure. Adrian had a story, and she was going to hear it, to know what and why and if anything remained of what she’d once thought to love.

  “Tell me the story.”

  “When we’re not moving,” he said. “Once we’re still.”

  “Okay.” She frowned and felt the road through the wheel, the hum of rubber, and the movement of old springs. “Then tell me one true thing.”

  “Just the one?” Humor rose in his eyes, a flash quickly gone.

  “It’ll do for now.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m happy that you came.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  She let him have the moment and the silence that followed. It was his game, and she’d agreed to play. Tomorrow, after all, was time enough for reason. Not to say they didn’t play things smart. They stayed off the main roads and watched for cops, passing like ghosts through one small town and then another. After a final, long stretch of empty road, he said, “This’ll do.”

  He meant a low-rent motel, lit up in the night ahead. Elizabeth slowed the car, then turned into the lot and drove past a dozen old cars brushed with road dust and red neon. The motel was low and long, with an empty, concrete pool and lime stains seeping from the mortar. “What town is this?”

  “Does it matter?”

  They were on the edge of something small, but there were a hundred towns like that in the coastal plains, some of them wealthy, most of them poor. This felt like the latter. “Get us two rooms.” Elizabeth parked in front of the office, dug some bills from her purse, and handed them over. “Try for something in the back, preferably at the far end. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Adrian took the money but didn’t move. Pale blue doors stretched off to the left. Ten feet away, an ice machine rumbled and clanked. “Where are you going?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  He looked at the motel, frowned.

  “Twenty minutes,” she said, and waited until he got out of the car. When he was gone, she drove into town and found what she expected to find: silent streets and shuttered buildings, small men passing bottles in brown paper bags. There were no restaurants, so she bought beer and food at a convenience store that smelled of fried chicken and sweet tobacco. When she took change from the woman behind the counter, Elizabeth asked, “What town is this?” The woman named the town, and Elizabeth visualized a map in her head. Halfway to the coast. A lot of empty space and skinny roads. The name sounded right. “What’s here?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. A college? Industry? When people think of this place what comes to mind?”

  “Hell if I know.” The woman used her teeth to draw a cigarillo from the box. “Not much around here but poor people and swamp.”

  * * *

  When Elizabeth returned to the motel, she entered the lobby and inquired about room numbers from the old man working the desk.

  “You mean the scarred fella?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked her up and down, then shrugged as if he’d seen it all. “Nineteen and twenty. Left side around the back.”

  “May I use your phone?”

  “I got phones in the rooms.”

  “I’d rather call from here.”

  “Long distance?”

  “Maybe.”

  A mean glint rose in his eyes, so she put $10 on the counter and watched the bills disappear.

  “Ten dollars buys five minutes.” He pushed a rotary phone across the counter and shuffled into a back room.

  Elizabeth dialed a number from memory and got the hospital switchboard. “I’d like to inquire about a patient.”

  “Are you family?”

  Elizabeth played the police card, offering her name and badge number, and telling the woman what she wanted. “Mr. Jones is in ICU. Just a moment.”

  The phone clicked, and an ICU nurse answered Elizabeth’s questions. Faircloth was alive, but critical. “A stroke,” she said. “A bad one.”

  “Jesus. Faircloth.” Elizabeth pinched her eyes. “When will you know if he’s okay?”

  “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”

  “A friend. A good one.”

  “Well, we won’t know anything until tomorrow, at least. Even then, it’s more likely to be bad news than good. Is there anything else I can tell you?”

  Elizabeth hesitated because she was hurting for Faircloth, and because the next part was slippery.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Do you know anything about a man found beaten on the roadside north of town? Early forties. Thickset. Uniformed officers would have called it in or transported him directly.”

  “Oh, yeah. Everyone’s talking about that.”

  “What are they saying?”

  The nurse told her, and Elizabeth may or may not have said good-bye. She hung up the phone, walked into the night, and sat for long minutes in the car. Crybaby was still alive—the best possible news—but William Preston was not. He spent an hour in surgery, then died on the table, beaten to death, the nurse said, by an as-yet-unidentified person.

  But, that was coming.

  Elizabeth turned the key and felt a hot wind on her neck.

  When Olivet told his story that was definitely coming.

  * * *

  Adrian sat on the edge of the bed with his back straight. He was worried, but not about normal things. He was going to lose her, Elizabeth, who, other than Crybaby Jones, was the only person alive who’d kept faith in him during the trial. He’d find her face first thing in the morning, front row as they led him in, shackled. He’d look for her, too, at day’s end. A final glimpse before they took him away. A nod that said, Yes, I believe you did not kill her.

  But, that was a long time ago, and there were other issues, now. Olivet. Preston. He’d seen the way she looked at him, his bloody hands. She wanted him to be the same. He wasn’t.

  “What do I do?”

  He was talking to himself, the room, the ghost of Eli Lawrence. Nobody answered, so he waited for the sound of her car beyond the glass, and only as it came did Eli finally speak.

  Stand tal
l, boy.

  Adrian closed his eyes, but felt the room around him. “She saw what I did.”

  So?

  “You saw how she looked at me.”

  You’re only what prison made you. You already told her that.

  “And if she doesn’t believe?”

  Convince her.

  “How?”

  Eli didn’t answer, but Adrian knew what he would say.

  Tell her the truth, son.

  If she’s all you have left, then tell her everything.

  Adrian thought that made sense but had no idea how to do it. She’d think him delusional or untruthful or both. It was all so jumbled and fragmented: the things that were real, the things imagined. How could she possibly believe that, for years, his waking hours had been worse than the worst nightmare? She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

  A minute later, she knocked on the door.

  “You came back.” He smiled, trying for a joke as he stepped aside to let her in.

  She put a bag on the dresser, and bottles clanked. Something was different. She was stiff, unyielding.

  “What?”

  “Officer Preston is dead.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “He died in surgery.”

  Adrian tried to get his head around that. The beating had been about Crybaby and past hurts and blind rage. He’d not meant to kill the man, but he wasn’t sad about it, either. “Is this where you arrest me?”

  “If that was the case, I wouldn’t be here alone.”

  “Then, what?”

  “Give me your hands.”

  She stepped closer and took his hands. The skin was split, but the bleeding had stopped. She held the crooked fingers, looked at the swollen knuckles, the stippled nails.

  “About Preston—”

  Elizabeth shook her head, stopping him. “Take off your shirt.”

  He looked down, ashamed.

  “It’s okay. Go ahead.” She released his hands, and his fingers were clumsy on the buttons. Elizabeth kept her eyes on his face, and when the shirt came off, she guided him to the lamp. “It’s okay,” she said again; but he flinched when she touched the first scar, tracing its length, and then touching a second. “So many.”

  “Yes.”

  He knew what she’d find if she took the time to count: twenty-seven on his chest and stomach, and untold more on his back and legs. When she put her hands on his hips, he said, “Please, don’t.” But, she gentled him like a child, then turned his back to the light and traced a scar that ran from left shoulder blade to right hip. “Elizabeth—”