“We’ve got plenty of time,” Hardy pointed out from the back seat.
“He was brilliant—well, I mean, you can tell that just listening to this.”
Cassandra smiled slightly to herself as a new song—“Pretty (Ugly Before)”—started.
“Except for this song and I think maybe one or two others on the album, he played all the instruments on all the songs.”
“Impressive,” Hardy said, and Cassandra thought she heard the faintest tinge of sincerity in his voice.
“Anyway,” she said, sighing, “he didn’t actually finish the album. He’d done the recording, but not the mixing. He died—and how he died sort of…” she shrugged. “It’s one of those situations where there’s an official story and an unofficial theory.”
“I’m familiar with that concept,” Hardy said flatly.
“The official story is that he stabbed himself twice in the chest,” Cassandra said, feeling her cheeks warm up with a deep blush at the reminder of Hardy’s status as a convict. “That it was a suicide.”
“You don’t sound like you believe the official story,” Hardy observed.
Cassandra shrugged, licking her lips as she remembered the details of the case as she’d read them, years and years before.
“There’s…” her lips twisted into a grimace. “First—how likely do you think it is for someone to stab themselves in the chest twice?”
“Not fucking likely,” Hardy said, snorting. “It’s hard enough to stab yourself in the chest once.”
“So there’s that,” Cassandra said. “There’s also the fact that the coroner noticed what looked like defensive wounds on his hands, and the fact that he wasn’t in the apartment by himself—his girlfriend was there with him.”
“And they didn’t take her in for questioning?”
“I don’t think so,” Cassandra said, trying to remember. “Nothing more than the standard questions, anyway.”
“Why were they so keen on the suicide angle?”
Cassandra rolled her eyes, thinking about the police who had responded to the 911 call and handled the case.
“He had a history of suicide threats and one or two attempts,” she replied. “So I guess they figured it was just easiest to put it down as that.”
“They’re all about what’s easiest,” Hardy said, his voice full of bitterness.
Cassandra thought about the police officers she had met since she had started at the newspaper. She would have to agree with Hardy in the case of more than one or two of the ones she knew; whenever she had to get information for the paper from those particular officers, it was like pulling teeth. They never wanted to even fax her the information, much less get her official copies of reports. Cassandra had, more than once, secretly wagered herself that those particular officers would rather not even write the reports, much less copy them for the press.
“Not all of them,” Cassandra countered. “But enough of them to make many people’s lives miserable.”
“So when did that Elliott guy die?”
Cassandra considered. “Years ago,” she replied. “Over a decade, I think.”
“And in all this time, no one’s been able to convince the police to re-open the case, to see if there’s some merit to that whole murder possibility?”
“Apparently not.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Cassandra wanted to argue; she wanted to protest that it didn’t make sense to reopen an investigation without new evidence, but she stopped short of acting on the impulse. He’s the last person who would appreciate a defense of the police right now, she thought, reminding herself that she was not on some road trip, driving in the middle of the night to go to a theme park before the gates opened for the day; she was driving an escaped convict to some place she didn’t even know, ostensibly to help him figure out who had framed him for murder.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s some stinking bullshit. But that’s the way of the world, apparently.”
“Once they think they know what the story is, you can’t get a single cop to even consider that he might have something wrong, or that he didn’t see it all happen in front of his own two eyes.”
Cassandra heard the creaking of old leather as Hardy turned over in the back seat.
“How long are we going to be driving for?”
“Just keep going north,” Hardy said. “I’m going to take a nap now, but I swear to God: if you try and stop the car or call the cops while I’m asleep, the next time I break out I will kill you.”
“Go to sleep,” Cassandra said, trying to ignore the adrenaline coursing through her and convince Hardy she wasn’t afraid. “I want it to be noted that I think it’s bullshit that you get to sleep and I don’t.”
“I’ve been awake for twenty-four already,” Hardy countered. “We’ll talk about fairness when you’ve been up that long.”
Chapter Five
Around an hour later, Cassandra heard movement in the back seat.
“Oh, you’re awake?”
The caffeine was still working in her system, but she could feel the fatigue underneath it.
“You do realize that taking over the driving would be exactly the worst thing I could do to avoid being caught, right?”
“So when I’m too exhausted to carry on,” Cassandra said, looking at him in the rearview mirror, “what are we going to do then?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Hardy said. “Maybe if we have some space—and we’re not being chased actively—I’ll find somewhere, a safe house or something. We’ll hide your car and you can catch a few hours’ sleep.”
“You know,” Cassandra said, licking her lips as she thought. “Listening to the radio would be a good way to find out whether they’re still after you or not.”
“I know they’re still after me,” Hardy said.
He shifted in the seat and Cassandra saw his arm snake out around the passenger seat, his hand rooting around until he found the pack of cigarettes, and extracted one.
“The question is whether they have any idea where I am or where I’m going.”
“Considering I don’t even know where we’re going, and I’m the one driving…”
“They could figure it out, if they had someone like me on the case,” Hardy countered.
Cassandra raised an eyebrow. “Someone like you?”
“A bounty hunter,” Hardy explained. “Someone who’s knows how to track people, and figure out where they’re likely to try and disappear.”
“So, if they had someone like you hunting you down,” Cassandra said, checking her mirrors in a sudden burst of paranoia, “where would that person go?”
“That would depend on if they guessed what I was doing,” Hardy said, and Cassandra heard him open his window a crack before lighting his cigarette. “If someone figured out that I was interested in clearing my name, in figuring out who really did it, they’d go where we’re going right now.”
“You know, it would be easier if you would just tell me wherever it is we’re going,” Cassandra said. She glanced at Hardy in her rearview mirror. “I’m already on board, obviously.”
Hardy was silent for a few moments. He took a drag of the cigarette and exhaled once, then twice.
“Okay,” he said, apparently coming to a decision. “We’re going to my friend Riley’s place.”
“Hold on a second—why would a friend frame you for murder?”
Hardy scowled at her from the back seat. “It’s a long story,” he said curtly.
“Well, according to you we’ve got nothing but time, right?”
Cassandra felt a mixture of genuine curiosity—the same curiosity that had led to her becoming a journalist in the first place—and lingering fear at the fact that she had a convicted murderer in her back seat. The evidence had seemed so clear, and the jury had deliberated for such a long time that she’d had no question about the verdict once it was announced.
“Riley…” Hardy sighed. He took an
other drag of his cigarette and continued. “Riley and I grew up in the same town. Tiny place, no one’s ever heard of it. Our fathers worked for the same company, and we were mostly in the same classes in school.”
“Okay, so you were close,” Cassandra said. She glanced around, unable to shake the feeling that they might currently have someone on their tail. It was still too early for all but the road trippers and the early-shift workers to be on the road. She was ninety percent certain that the person behind her in the lane hadn’t been there an hour before, but she couldn’t be entirely sure.
“More than close,” Hardy said. “Brothers.”
“Brothers?” Cassandra wanted to keep him talking. She remembered the flat, stoic gaze that Hardy had turned on her in the courtroom; the way he’d looked in her kitchen over an hour earlier.
If someone is tailing me, why wouldn’t they just pull us over? Wouldn’t that make sense? Put an end to his escape quickly? But maybe—if someone was pursuing them—they wanted to see where Hardy was going. Would I be considered an accessory? He doesn’t have a weapon. But then again, his whole body is a damn weapon.
“We lost our virginity the same night,” Hardy said, and Cassandra could almost hear him smile at the memory. “We did everything together—even enlisting in the Navy.”
Cassandra nodded; in the course of her research for the articles she had written about the Laura Granger case, she’d learned that before his career as a bounty hunter, Jack Hardy had been a Navy SEAL. He’d put his skills to good use after getting out—he was checked out on multiple firearms, had concealed carry permits and marksmanship awards, and knew multiple nonlethal ways to take a person down.
“Okay, so you grew up together, you were best friends—brothers,” Cassandra corrected herself before Hardy had the chance. “So what happened? Why would he be the one to frame you for a murder? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Everything was good for a long time,” Hardy explained. “We looked out for each other, you know? We had each other’s back.”
“That makes sense,” Cassandra agreed.
She glanced at her mirrors and saw the car still behind them. If you’re tailing us, why can’t you just pull us over and have done with it? She wasn’t sure why she felt so paranoid; she wanted her ordeal to be over, but at the same time, the idea of it ending without her finding out anything more than that Hardy had a list of people who he thought might have framed him was frustrating. If she was going to be awake for twenty-four hours or more, Cassandra wanted a good story to tell.
“So all was well,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.
“When we were out on deployment, after we got out of basic, we were in the same unit. He saved my life once,” Hardy said, almost absently. “We were on a training exercise out in the desert. Some asshole was doing the wrong thing, totally fucking everything up, and ended up severing an artery in my leg. I was going to bleed out, but Riley was right there. He managed to keep me alive, and keep pressure on the artery, until they could get me stitched up.”
“He sounds like a good guy.”
Cassandra pressed her lips together. She had been skeptical all of her life about the “brothers in arms” narrative that she’d heard so many times from members of the military, but it seemed like, in Hardy’s case at least, there might be something to it.
“He got engaged to his high school sweetheart while we were still in the Navy,” Hardy said.
He reached around the seat and snagged another cigarette, and Cassandra snatched up her pack to take one for herself. She waved off Hardy’s offer of the lighter and pushed in the electric button-lighter in its socket on her center console. She lit the cigarette when the button popped out, rolling her window down an inch before putting the lighter back into its spot.
“Okay, I’m still not understanding how your best friend ended up framing you for murder,” Cassandra said.
“You wanted the story,” Hardy said irritably. “Let me tell it.”
Images from the coroner’s reports swam up into Cassandra’s memory and she felt her heart beating faster.
“Fine, go ahead,” she said as calmly as she could.
“So Riley got engaged,” Hardy told her. “He was totally gone on her—thought the sun shone out of her ass.”
Cassandra nodded, unsure of whether or not Hardy could see her.
“I was going to be his best man, of course. Everything was great, Riley had never been happier, all of that.”
“Honeymoon phase,” Cassandra said quietly. In the corner of her eye, she saw Hardy nodding.
“Exactly. Well, once he started being on night duty, getting deployed and stuff like that, their situation got more difficult. She had to stay home, of course…” Hardy paused to take a drag of the cigarette. “About six months after they got engaged, things started to go south between them.”
Cassandra still couldn’t see where the story was heading, but she knew better than to try and hurry Hardy along. She glanced in her mirrors; the car that had been behind her was moving off of the highway, heading to an exit. Cassandra felt a strange wave of relief at its departure.
“So, what happened then?”
“Riley stayed in longer than I did,” Hardy explained. “He needed the money and benefits more; he was saving up so he’d have somewhere to take Adrianna once he was out, you know?”
“That makes sense,” Cassandra said, nodding. She finished off her cigarette and flicked the butt out through the opening in the window.
“I got out, but obviously we stayed in touch.” Hardy finished his own cigarette and tossed it out of the window. “I was back home, and Adrianna was talking to me on a pretty regular basis. She figured that since I was Riley’s best bud, I was the person to vent to.”
Cassandra raised an eyebrow at that reasoning; if she were dating someone, she definitely wouldn’t complain to his best friend about anything he was doing. But this was Hardy’s story, and Cassandra decided not to contest his version of the events—not yet at least.
“About a month after I got out, I was out at a bar,” Hardy said. His words slowed, and Cassandra thought that she could detect the sound of guilt in his voice. “Adrianna comes in, angrier than I’d ever seen her.”
“Okay, what was she so mad about?” Cassandra checked her mirrors once more. They were on an almost deserted stretch of the highway, coming up on the interchange. “Am I staying on, or changing to one of the other highways?”
“Keep going straight on,” Hardy said. He paused for a moment before resuming his story. “Adrianna was pissed because she’d found out Riley had slept with a prostitute the weekend before,” he told her.
“That’s pretty understandable; I’d be pissed, too,” Cassandra said.
“Well, yeah,” Hardy agreed, and Cassandra could almost hear a smile in his voice. “I figured he might be picking up the occasional escort—he never got as lucky as me when our unit was on shore leave.”
“Have you used prostitutes before?”
“No, I never had the need—but I don’t have a problem with the idea, either. The guys in the Navy used to say that one night with a working girl is cheaper taking a girl out on three dates,” Hardy countered. “And there’s no guarantee she’ll put out after that.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Cassandra said, blushing without knowing why.
What should I care about what he thinks? What does it matter? He’s a murderer and a kidnapper—I shouldn’t give a damn about what he thinks.
Regretting having started the conversation, Cassandra changed the subject. “So Riley had sex with a prostitute and Adrianna found out.”
“Yeah.” Hardy went silent for a moment. “If I hadn’t been there in the bar, she would just have picked someone else. That was the state of mind she was in. She wanted to get even with Riley, to make him feel shitty the way he’d made her feel.”
“I can see that,” Cassandra said.
Somehow, even in the strange situation she
was in, she found herself falling back on her usual journalistic manners: prompting, encouraging, coaxing answers, getting her subject to say more if she could. She shouldn’t be interviewing Hardy, and yet she was intrigued by his story. She wanted to know just how delusional he was, or figure out the truth behind his accusations.
“Hey—why did you tattoo those names on your hip?”
“What?” Hardy sat up slightly in the back seat.
“You know, the people you want to—talk to, I guess—about this whole thing, right? So why tattoo it on your body?”
“It’s complicated,” Hardy said.
Cassandra saw him sink down once more. It was starting to get lighter on the horizon, but actual dawn was a good hour and a half away. Cassandra wondered just how long they would be driving. She glanced at her gas gauge and saw that it was edging towards empty. She’d have to tell him in a few more miles, and then they’d have to figure out what they were going to do about getting gas.
“So Adrianna went into the bar and started complaining about Riley cheating on her,” Cassandra said. She still wanted to know why Hardy would think his best friend had framed him for murder.
Do I believe he’s innocent? What if he’s just spinning me a yarn, and this is all just an excuse for him to deal with some unfinished business?
“She and I started drinking while she ranted about what a piece of shit Riley was, and how she wanted to leave him,” Hardy said quietly. Cassandra cringed to herself at the thought of what she knew, suddenly, the outcome of the drinking was. “I got pretty plastered—not that it’s any excuse, and so did she.”
“Let me guess what ended up happening,” Cassandra said blandly.
“Yeah, you’ve probably got it right,” Hardy said, and Cassandra heard the grimness in his voice. “We ended up sleeping together. It was stupid as shit, obviously, but at the time I didn’t even really think about it. She was hot, and she’d spent the whole night complaining to me about Riley, convincing me that she deserved some kind of revenge on him.”
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