“I’ll try.” Kent hesitated again. “Listen, I’ve got your gun in the car. Beth’s car, that is. Mine is still missing. I figure… not much need for the gun now. I appreciated having it, but now, I guess I’d rather clear it out of the house. Too easy for something to go wrong, especially with kids.”
“Sure. It was there when you needed it, and if you ever do again, say the word.”
“I hope I never do.”
“Likewise.”
They walked out to the car, and Kent opened the door, unlocked the glove compartment, and removed the Taurus Judge pistol. Passed it over to Adam carefully, still not liking the feel of the thing. It fit Adam’s hands so much better.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your day,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you, and to thank you. Your willingness to be around when we needed you… it meant a lot. To all of us.”
“I’m a phone call away, Franchise. Remember that.”
“I will.”
“You let me know if you hear anything else from Salter, or the FBI, or anyone. I’d like to know what the situation is.”
Kent promised him that he would, and said that he hoped it would go fast. The quicker all of this went public, the quicker other people could begin to find the same sort of peace Kent was feeling right now.
He called Beth as he drove, and he told her that it was done.
“It’s terrible,” he said. “Hearing that someone was murdered and finding some pleasure in it. But I can’t help that.”
“It’s a human reaction, Kent. He was a threat, and the threat has been removed. We can’t blame ourselves for finding some comfort in that. It’s not as if we just wished death upon someone. We just wished for protection, for safety.”
“Yes. No sin in that.”
“Does Adam know?”
“Yes. I’ve just come from seeing him. He’s been at the office all day, but I guess someone with the police told him.”
“Good,” she said, and he knew from her voice that she’d held the same questions he had. “I was afraid of what we were doing to him, you know.”
“What we were doing to him? I don’t follow.”
“Asking him to sit down there with his gun, asking him to be ready to do things we weren’t ready to do ourselves, it just felt—”
“He’s better at it,” Kent said. “That’s what he does, he deals with criminals, he handles weapons, he’s prepared for what we were facing.”
His voice had risen too loud, too fast, and Beth’s silence condemned him for it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You hit a nerve. I was worried about it, too. I just didn’t want to…”
“Say it out loud?” she finished when he did not.
“Yeah.”
“It’s done now,” she said. “That’s what matters. It’s done, and Adam is okay.”
“He’s fine.”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “Tell him not to stay away, please.”
“I already did.”
“He helped me. More than I probably wanted to admit. Knowing he was there helped.”
“Yes,” Kent said. “It did.”
Only half of the promise had been fulfilled. It felt like more than that, certainly, but you couldn’t consider promises things of balance, things that you could tilt enough to count. You either did what you said you were going to do, or you did not.
He had promised to find Rachel Bond’s killer and destroy him, and that was done. He had also promised to tell Rachel’s mother when it happened.
Today, this part seemed almost more difficult. It was an admission of guilt, a confession, impossibly foolish.
It was also what he had promised. And when she’d called him in the night, it was all she had asked of him. He thought about his mother and father, searching for some resolution in the unending smoke of sorrow, afraid to venture away from phones that did not ring, remembered his mother opening a letter from amidst the stacks of useless tips and finding an anonymous complaint from someone who found all of the posters of Marie around town to be depressing, to be just a little too much, and he knew he had to follow through on his word. He could not keep Penny Gootee waiting.
He called her from one of the disposable cell phones he kept, a different model than he’d used on the Bova setup. She answered on the first ring, and again he thought of his parents, of the long, terrible wait.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Penny. I’m the man who made you a promise not long ago. Do you understand?”
A pause. “Yes.”
“It’s done,” Adam said.
When she finally spoke again, her voice didn’t have its sea legs.
“You really mean it? You’re telling me that the man who—”
“I’m telling you that it’s done,” Adam said, and then he hung up. His hand was shaking when he tossed the phone into a nearby Dumpster.
41
ADAM WAITED FOR THE POLICE to come, but they never did. The day dwindled away without contact. He ran the police scanner in the office and heard nothing but the standard traffic. Whatever was taking place was not running through dispatch and radio calls. They’d be processing the scene now. Interviewing the neighbors, looking for security cameras that might have seen something.
AA Bail Bonds had no skips, nobody who required hunting. No one came in during the day to process a bond, either. All quiet. Chelsea occupied herself with financial spreadsheets; Adam spent some time on the computer, browsing real estate websites. At four thirty, while the sun was still up, he grabbed his keys and asked her if she wanted to go for a ride.
“A ride?” she said, looking at him with one arched eyebrow and sweeping her hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear.
“Please.”
She took his hand and got to her feet. “What is going on with you today?”
He didn’t answer. On the drive to Amherst Road he felt tense, forcing himself through silly small talk that she indulged, all the while refusing to ask him where they were going. It was a gorgeous afternoon—blue skies had slid in behind the last front, and fat white clouds rolled through on a warm southern breeze. An Indian summer day, full of sunshine and bright colors and the last gasps of warmth. An illusion. He’d seen the forecast and knew it was going to break overnight, that by tomorrow morning the wind would be blowing hard out of the north and driving rain with it. Still, today was so perfect it was almost hard to believe that. Easy to ignore it, at least. Easy to put the forecast aside.
The house was a stone ranch with a detached garage and a full basement. It looked too suburban to Adam, lacked character, but the property appealed. Eighteen acres, all of it wooded except for the lawn, old-growth oak and walnut trees. A few white pines near the back deck.
“Foreclosure sale,” he told her as they got out of the car and stood in the fading sunlight, the trees beyond the house alive with color. “There are a lot of them around here right now.”
She was watching him in silence, the warm wind fanning her hair out behind her.
“You’ve decided,” she said.
He nodded.
“Is it what you want, Adam? Don’t do it just for me. If you’re not ready to leave that house, or if you don’t want to, then please do not—”
“I’m ready,” he said. “And I want to. It’s time.” He looked away from her and added, “It’s probably well past time.”
She reached out and put her hand on his arm, and he felt a tingle along his spine and wondered how that was possible, how such a familiar touch could continue to provoke sensations like that. Why didn’t it wear off, like so many other things did?
“It’s a good spot,” she said.
“It’s just an option. Like I said, there are lots of them. This economy, it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to buy one than it will be to sell the ones we’ve got. We’ll have to figure that out.” She was making clean breaks, she was moving forward. He would do the same. “Who will take care of the snakes?” he asked.
“I’m not a fan. But, still, they’re out there. Someone has to take care of them. We can’t just pretend they don’t exist.”
“Someone will take care of them,” she said. “Don’t worry about that.”
He nodded. They were walking through the side yard now. He waved a hand at the house. “Whether this is right for us, I don’t know. I just wanted to see it, because I like the idea of the space. It’s almost twenty acres. Good privacy. No neighbors looking over your shoulder.”
“Pioneer mentality,” she said. “All you midwestern boys are ranchers at heart. You want land. The more the better.”
“Privacy,” he repeated.
She smiled. “I like privacy. Good deck for a hot tub. I’d really like privacy if we put one of those in.” She leaned over and kissed his neck, her tongue gliding over his skin.
“I’d actually want neighbors for that,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Athletic past. I perform better in front of a large crowd.”
“You do all right in the bedroom when it’s just the two of us.”
“Just the two of us? I’ve got cameras all over the place in there.”
She smiled, then tugged on his belt, bringing him to a stop, and her eyes went serious. “I love you,” she said.
He told her that he loved her, too, and he meant it. Had never stopped meaning it. As he kissed her there in the yard, he thought that this might actually be the place. They could make it work here, where they had some space, where they were far enough from home but not gone from it completely. He knew better than to try to run from his sins—and it was in his sins that Adam’s past and present joined hands, their embrace as intimate as the one he now shared with Chelsea—but he also believed, maybe for the first time, that you could build something clean in their shadows.
Part Four
AUTUMN’S END
42
GAME DAY.
Kent had slept deeply the night before; he knew this because Beth told him so in the morning.
“You’re usually so restless on Thursday nights,” she said. “Last night, you slept like Lisa. Only with additional snoring.”
“I gather you did not sleep as well?”
“As I said, there was the snoring.”
They could afford to be light again, afford to joke. The front page carried news of the murder of Clayton Sipes, a recently paroled felon from Cleveland. There was no mention of Rachel Bond yet, but he hoped there soon would be. Stan Salter and Robert Dean would do their jobs. Until then, he would be grateful for the comfort of his private knowledge.
“Bad football weather,” Beth said. The sun that had set the previous day seemed to have chosen not to rise; the sky was a deep gray and rain splattered in nickel-colored drops on the driveway.
“There is no such thing,” Kent said, “as bad football weather.”
Rodney Bova came by that afternoon, and Adam knew instantly that it wasn’t good. The man’s eyes were red-rimmed and he was humming with tension. The first words out of his mouth were “Did you help them?”
Adam said, “Help who?”
“The police. Did you help them?”
Behind him, Chelsea stirred, and while Bova didn’t turn, Adam saw her hand going under her desk, down to where she kept a snub-nose .38 Special. He’d insisted that she keep the weapon there, but she never paid attention to it. Something about Bova was already putting her in a state of high alert.
“If there is one thing I am not right now,” Adam said, “it is a friend of the police, Rodney.”
“Why did you put the tracking bracelet on me?”
Now Chelsea’s eyes rose from the pistol and found Adam’s. He looked away fast, and got to his feet.
“Let’s go outside,” he said. “I’ll hear you out, Rodney, but I will not allow you to shout in my office. I’ve got a business to run.”
He moved for the door without waiting for Bova’s agreement. And without meeting Chelsea’s eyes. They went out into the rain that had replaced the beautiful Indian summer weather in less than twenty-four hours. Adam stopped walking under the overhang of his building, where the rain didn’t reach, and took a cigarette out and lit it. They were standing in front of the dust-filmed plate glass window of what had once been an insurance office and bond business rival. It had been empty for three years. Adam lifted the cigarette, drew in smoke, and held it for a few seconds before letting the cold wind peel it away from his lips.
“Why did you put the tracking bracelet on me?” Bova repeated.
“I told you the reasons. It was better for you. I could not have been clearer about that.”
Bova looked torn, and Adam took the opportunity to keep talking, to keep the pressure on him, force him not to dictate the situation but to react.
“You told me the police set you up,” Adam said. “You never told me why. You don’t have to. But if there’s one thing I can assure you, Rodney, hell, that I can assure anyone, it’s that I didn’t share your information with the police.”
Bova was silent. Adam was thinking about the tracking bracelet and knowing its risk, and he said, “You want it off, we’ll take it off. I’ve got a reputation to worry about here. I can’t have you talking like this.”
“Take it off, then.”
“I will. But first tell me why?”
“My brother was killed. They were looking for him and now he’s dead. And I… I saw him. I went to see him before he was killed, I mean. I didn’t know what they thought he’d done, but now that I do, then—”
“What did your brother do? Why did the police want him so bad?”
Bova looked away. “That’s personal.”
“You’re the one who came to me.”
“I knew they were looking for him,” Rodney Bova repeated softly. “But I didn’t know why. It’s bad. But they don’t understand him. He was a lot of things, he was a lot of trouble, but he wouldn’t have done this. Not what they’re going to say he did.”
“Were you close with him?”
“We didn’t talk often. But he was my brother. We went through a lot together, a long time ago. I got my feet under myself a little faster. He took a different road. But I know what he was, and who he was, and—”
“I get all that,” Adam said. “Just tell me this: Did you lie to the police about him at any point? They ask where he was and you said you didn’t know, that sort of thing?”
“Yes. He was on parole violation. That’s all I knew. But I wasn’t going to turn him in.”
“Did you tell them where he was staying after they came to you with the news?”
“No. I haven’t said anything yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want to understand what happened. Not from them. I want to know what happened myself.”
“And then?”
Bova wet his lips, looked away, didn’t speak.
“I haven’t told them anything,” Adam said. “And I won’t. But they can get a warrant for those tracking logs. Do they know about the bracelet?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll take it off now, and you should be careful how much you tell them. Don’t get yourself into trouble.”
“I’m not worried about that. Not now.”
“You should be,” Adam said. “Because if they’re ready to accuse him of something as heavy as this sounds, dead or alive, and you were involved with him, they’ll try to drag you into it. You’ve got to realize that. The heavier it was, the more they’ll want somebody living to take the fall. So whatever it is you’re talking about, are you prepared to become involved in it?”
Bova didn’t answer.
“Whatever your brother did,” Adam said, “be careful not to let it pull you down, too.”
Chelsea watched in silence as Adam removed the tracking bracelet from Bova’s ankle, but as soon as the man was gone, she wanted to know what it was about.
“Why’d you have a tracking device on him?”
“High bond.”
“You didn’t mention that to me.”
“My mind’s not really been on business, Chelsea. You know that.”
She was watching him skeptically.
“Are you in more trouble, Adam?”
“I intend to leave all my troubles behind me. You know this.”
She didn’t pursue the question any further. He looked at the clock.
“You about ready to head out?” he asked.
“To the game? It’s four hours away. We’re going to stand in the rain for three hours waiting on a football game?”
“We’ll grab an early dinner. I’d like to get over to Murray Hill, hit one of those little Italian places. Haven’t been there in a while.”
“It’s four hours away,” she repeated.
“When I played, the buses left at three thirty. That’s my tradition. Humor me?”
“My mission in life,” she said, and slipped on her jacket.
The game was a sellout, more than ten thousand tickets claimed by Friday morning, and the weather would not scare them away. Not in northeastern Ohio. Plenty of people would travel from Chambers, but the crowd would be largely hostile, and loud. Saint Anthony’s fans were used to seeing wins, particularly against Chambers. They would feel blood lust watching the Cardinals take their field with an undefeated record and a number-one ranking.
Kent intended to give the team the standard fare in the locker room. To keep things balanced and steady. Head down, head down, head down. It felt wrong tonight, though. So in the final moments before they took the field, after he gave them his usual reminder—Know how lucky you are right now, about to play the best game ever invented with the best friends you’ll ever have— he challenged his seniors.
“You’re going to take your uniforms off at some point this season for the last time,” he said. “You’ll never wear them again. Realize that. Every autumn has its end. Now let’s make sure you leave a trophy in the case before this one does.”
The Prophet Page 27