This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel

by Cash, Wiley

  “Twenty-five thousand up front. He’ll disappear for fifty. Just like before.”

  “No way,” the Boss said. “No way. I don’t have that kind of money just lying around.” My hand reached for the doorknob. “Hold on,” he said, his eyes closed like he was deep in thought. “Five thousand up front, ten thousand if you find him, and then ten thousand if I get all my money back. Twenty-five thousand if he disappears after that.” He opened his eyes. “That’s it, Pruitt. Take it or leave it.”

  I took it.

  “You got ten days,” he said. “Ten days, and then I’m bringing you back in.”

  “The take.”

  “What about it?”

  “How much did he get?”

  “Enough,” the Boss said. He pointed at me. “And you’d better bring back every damn cent of it.”

  “You don’t have any idea how much he took, do you? If you did, you’d tell me.”

  The Boss leaned back in his seat and stared at Eddie, and then he looked back at me. “Don’t push me, Pruitt,” he said. “Do not push me.”

  He picked up a pen and scribbled something down on a pad and tore off the sheet. He handed it across the desk; the name Lane Kelly and an address and phone number were written on it. “This guy knows something,” the Boss said. He nodded at Eddie. “But my asshole cousin couldn’t find him either.”

  The Boss unlocked a drawer, pulled out stacks of bound twenties, dropped several into a plastic Food Lion grocery bag, and held it out to Eddie. Eddie jumped up from his chair and walked to the Boss’s desk and took it, and then he carried it across the office, refusing to make eye contact until he’d sat down.

  I opened the door and the light behind me fell into the dark hallway. Music from the club filled the office. The Boss’s voice stopped me from leaving. “So what do you have against Wade Chesterfield?”

  My face turned toward him. “Why?”

  “It just seems like you want to find him more than I do.”

  “He stole something from me too.”

  “Really,” the Boss said. “And what would that be?”

  I took my hand off the doorknob and lifted my sunglasses. The Boss’s smile fell when he saw what was beneath them. “Everything.”

  The house lights came up at 2 A.M., and the place was cleared by 2:30. My truck sat by the Dumpster in the back corner of the lot, out of the reach of any lights. Movement behind the Dumpster caught my eye. A swift kick flushed them out: the tanning-bed blonde and one of the guys who’d been watching her dance scrambled like rats across the parking lot, the woman laughing, yelling, “Sorry, Pruitt,” over her shoulder, the man trying to outrun her like they hadn’t been together. They disappeared around the front of the building where a few cars were still parked.

  One click of the remote and my truck unlocked, another click and the headlights and the roof lights came on. The plastic grocery bag bounced onto the floorboard after hitting the passenger’s seat. The truck’s V-8 rumbled itself to life.

  It took half a trip around the parking lot to find Eddie’s new silver Camaro, the same car he usually drove the Boss to work in. He’d backed it in and double-parked it beneath a light on Wilkinson Boulevard on the Charlotte side of the lot. I stopped the truck about ten feet in front of the Camaro’s bumper, my lights illuminating every drop of rain on the car’s waxed surface. Two black thirty-four-inch Pro Stock Louisville Sluggers rested in the gun rack in the truck’s back window.

  At first, it was only Eddie’s face in my mind: his skinny mustache, his redneck haircut, the little gold hoop piercing the cartilage on the top outer edge of his left ear. But then his face blurred into Wade Chesterfield’s, the way he’d looked ten years ago. The Camaro’s headlights became eye sockets, the taillights too, and when they busted and the glass and plastic fell to the asphalt, there was the sense of a fading bright light, the world turning black, the feel of something lost forever.

  The house sat alone in a dark, wooded cul-de-sac, no lights on inside, the sun coming up through the trees behind it. The .45mm Glock that had been hidden under my front seat was sitting on the dash, my batting gloves lying beside it, the slip of paper the Boss had given me a few hours earlier with Lane Kelly’s name and address on it still in my hand.

  Once I was outside the truck there were no sounds except for the engine cooling and the birds waking up in the trees around the house. My eyes darted from window to window looking for the slightest movement in the blinds, shadows on the other side of the glass. The house seemed empty.

  A detached garage sat at the end of the driveway, the glass panes on its door covered on the inside with a curtain.

  Dense woods bordered the backyard, and with my truck parked down the street and out of sight I thought of hiding there, listening to the birds and waiting for someone to come home. But instead my hands slipped on the batting gloves and tried the knob on the back door. It was unlocked, but the dead bolt wasn’t.

  The first kick shook the house and rattled the windows. The second busted the dead bolt through the frame, and the door swung open and slammed against the wall inside.

  Slowly, gun raised, I cleared the rooms one by one—lights were turned on and off, closets and bedroom doors were opened and closed. No one was home. Framed photographs ran the length of the hallway, and my eyes went from picture to picture looking for Wade Chesterfield’s face in the dim light coming through the living room windows at the other end. A particular man and woman appeared in just about every picture. I chose the photo that showed their faces the most clearly and lifted it from the wall and carried it into the kitchen.

  After the frame had been removed and the picture folded and slipped into the cargo pocket of my shorts, all the kitchen drawers were opened one by one until keys were found—some of them loose, some of them on rings in twos and threes.

  The fourth or fifth key unlocked the garage door. It was dark inside and my hand felt around on the wall until it found a light switch. The garage was full of power tools—a table saw, nail guns, air compressors—and a single car: a silver two-door Honda Civic. It was a woman’s car with a lipstick-smeared coffee cup in one of the cup holders, CD cases, including Celine Dion’s latest, scattered on the passenger’s seat.

  Lane Kelly’s car was missing.

  C H A P T E R 6

  Euphrates Evans was still in the same trailer park down by the South Carolina state line, sitting outside the same trailer he’d been living in for at least ten years. He didn’t turn around when my truck came to a stop in the gravel drive fifteen feet behind him, didn’t give any sign that he heard footsteps coming toward him. Late forties and still thick in the arms and shoulders, and, except for a little gray hair, no different than he’d ever been. A television sat on a small table in front of him; it was plugged in to a bright orange extension cord that snaked through the grass and up through a cracked window in the trailer. A black cord for the cable ran alongside the orange one. On the television, the Cubs/Rockies game was in the first inning. When my shadow fell across him, Phrate looked up like he’d been waiting on me all morning. He wore a thin red tie and a short-sleeved shirt that was too tight, tucked into a pair of gray slacks: church clothes.

  “Well I’ll be damned, Pruitt,” he said. He stood up slowly, his face wrinkling in pain as he straightened his back. While shaking hands, he nodded toward my truck. “I thought I heard somebody’s redneck-ass truck pull up in my driveway.”

  He shuffled over and picked up a closed folding chair that was leaning against the trailer. He opened it and set it down beside his. “Have a seat,” he said. He put his hands on his chair’s armrests and slowly lowered himself. “So,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Over four years.”

  “When’d you get out?” he asked.

  “February.”

  “Right in time for spring training,” he said, smiling.

  “Yeah. Right in time.”

  “You working?” he asked.

  “Over at a bar ca
lled Tomcat’s on Wilkinson. Weren’t a lot of other options.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you on the outside, man. You look good, stronger than hell.” He flexed his biceps. “You still at it?”

  “Still at it.”

  “What you on?”

  “Deca. Testosterone. That’s about it.”

  He turned and looked at the television. “Not me, man. Not anymore.”

  My eyes took in the shirt and tie he was wearing. “You been at work?”

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, and then he straightened his tie.

  “Hell no,” he said. “I’m at church.” He smiled and pointed to the television, where the Cubs were at bat in the top of the first in Colorado. “At least my mother thinks I am.” He turned around and looked at the trailer where the cords snaked through the cracked window. “She’s inside, asleep, lying up in a hospital bed with lung cancer, hooked up to oxygen.” My mind pictured a shriveled, old black woman with Phrate’s face, her eyes closed, tubes running into her nose and both her arms. “She can’t leave the house,” he said, “but she sure as hell wants to know where I’m at all the time. ‘My way or the highway,’ she says.” He laughed. “On Sunday mornings, I’m . . . in . . . church.”

  “It’s almost three P.M.”

  Phrate smiled. “You ain’t ever been to church with black folks, have you? If you want to go I bet every one of them in town is still meeting.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Probably ain’t even got to the sermon yet.”

  In Denver, Sosa hit one out against Kile. The announcers went crazy; so did the fans. Phrate clapped his hands. “All right!” he said. “Ol’ Sammy—that’s fifty-four. That white boy better look out; Sammy’s getting hot.” He reached into his breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and picked up a lighter off the table. “You know I played with him, right?”

  “Yes; ’eighty-seven, ’eighty-eight.”

  “That’s right,” he said. He lit his cigarette. “And you were with the—”

  “Grasshoppers.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I remember now.” He smiled and looked back at the television. “You were something, Pruitt: those quick hands, that nice swing.” He stopped talking and looked over like he was seeing my arms and the rest of my body for the first time. “But now,” he said, “you should be crushing it with Sammy and McGwire.”

  “Wade Chesterfield was on that team with you and Sosa.”

  “Yep. He was. I played with Wade for a couple years with the Rangers before he—you know.” He stopped talking and acted like he was taking a drink out of a bottle. He looked at me again. “Why?”

  My eyes were on the television, but Phrate’s eyes were on me. “Ever see him around?”

  “Pruitt, come on, man,” he said, “you got to let that go. That was, what, ten years ago? You’re not one of those dudes who’s on some kind of trip like you see in the movies, are you? Guy gets out of jail and then spends the rest of his life getting even with everybody who screwed him before he went in.”

  “Why? You worried about why I’m here to see you?”

  “Shit,” he said. He ran both his hands down the length of his thighs and sunk lower in his seat. He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled through his nose. “Man, what did you want me to do? Roll up in the front office, turn myself in to the cops because I let you juice my players every now and then? Come on, man. You know it don’t work like that.”

  “How does it work, Phrate?”

  “It’s a calculated risk, man, and you got hit. The Knights hired you to weight-train the team, not to inject those kids with all kinds of shit. But they knew what was going on, and it’s messed up, but that don’t mean it’s somebody else’s fault. It’s like stepping into the batter’s box. You think Wade meant to do that to you? No way. It’s all calculated risk. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. Wade could be a deadbeat and a bum, everybody knows that, but he wasn’t no headhunter.”

  “This isn’t about the past.” The Cubs had ended the inning with a pop fly to right, and the game had gone to commercial.

  “Then why are you here?” he asked.

  “Just need to know if you’ve seen him.”

  “I haven’t seen you in years and years, and suddenly you show up asking questions about Wade Chesterfield because you want to know if I’ve seen him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I ain’t stupid, Pruitt,” he said.

  “Well, then this is a pointless conversation, isn’t it?”

  Phrate sat there staring at the television until the commercials were over and the game was back on. The camera followed Sosa as he trotted out to right field to begin the inning. Phrate looked over at me. “You still got your bag of tricks?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “Because I might be a whole lot more interested in talking about ol’ Wade if you do.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Vicodin, Oxy, Flexeril—anything that might take the edge off.”

  “Might be some Dilaudid in the truck.”

  “A dose of that, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  Phrate said he hadn’t seen Wade Chesterfield in a couple years, but the last he’d heard he’d gone clean, gotten a good job. “I think that girl he was with had a couple of kids,” he said. “But Wade wasn’t no kind of daddy to them.”

  “Boys or girls?”

  “Girls,” he said. “One of them was named something like Sunday or Wednesday or a holiday or something. Might’ve been Easter.”

  “Easter?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was Easter. It was definitely Easter.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I heard their mama OD’d on something a few months ago.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “We’re just talking about Wade here, man.”

  “Anything else?”

  “His real name ain’t Chesterfield,” he said, smiling. “It’s Chessman.”

  “Why’d he change it?

  “Come on, man,” Phrate said, laughing. “Why do you think he changed it? You ever hear of a Jew ballplayer?”

  “Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Erskine Mayer.”

  “Well, maybe Wade wasn’t a fan of them.”

  “Any other family in the area?”

  “Not that I know of.” He was quiet for a minute, like he’d said everything he’d ever known about Wade Chesterfield. Then he raised his eyebrows. “So, back to our deal.”

  My doctor’s kit was hidden under a gym bag in the floorboard behind the passenger’s seat of the truck. Phrate’s eyes lit up when he saw me carrying it back to the table.

  “Where do you want to do this?”

  “Hell, man,” he said. “Right here’s fine. It don’t matter.” The trailer to my right had its blinds closed tight, and there was no car parked in front of it.

  Syringes and multidose vials lined the inside of the kit. I slipped on my batting gloves before popping the cap off a syringe and plunging the needle into a vial and drawing out 10 ccs.

  “Your gloves sterile?” Phrate asked. His laugh sounded nervous.

  “They’re sterile enough.”

  Phrate put his cigarette between his lips and stood up and untucked his shirt. Then he undid his belt and dropped his pants a few inches and turned around. The needle sunk into the fatty upper muscle of his right glute just like it had a thousand times before. He winced a little when it went in. “That brings back memories,” he said, his eyes already turning glassy. As soon as the needle was out he lowered himself down into his chair, the cigarette still burning between his lips. “Damn,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to feel it so—” The muscles in his face relaxed and the cigarette fell from his mouth and landed in his lap. “Damn,” he whispered. My gloved hand picked up the cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. Phrate’s eyes closed and his head lolled back, his body already l
imp in the chair.

  Easter Quillby

  C H A P T E R 7

  I’d spent Sunday afternoon sitting on the floor in the TV room, watching the Cubs play the Rockies and making a card for Marcus. After Sammy had hit number fifty-four in the first inning, I’d drawn a picture of him waiting on a pitch on the front of Marcus’s card, and I’d put a little 54 up in the corner of the picture, and then I’d drawn a little heart around it and used Magic Markers to color it all in. I’d never thought of myself as much of an artist, but that picture surprised me by how good it looked; part of me hated to give it away, but I hoped Marcus would like it. On the inside of the card I’d written, I’m sorry. Can we talk tonight? and I’d signed it Love, Easter, your girlfriend (I hope!). McGwire hit number fifty-five that night against the Braves, but he did it late in the seventh inning, and I’d already gone to bed.

  On Monday morning, just before we left for school, I’d taped up the card inside an envelope and given it to a boy named Damon because he was in Marcus’s class.

  “What is it?” he’d asked.

  “It’s for Marcus,” I’d said. “Don’t read it.”

  “Y’all like each other?”

  “No,” I’d said, but then I caught myself and remembered why Marcus had gotten mad at me in the first place. “I mean, ‘I don’t know.’ Just give it to him—please.”

  I was on pins and needles all day, and it didn’t help that it was my week to wipe down my class’s tables after lunch in the cafeteria. They called it being a “table helper,” but all you really did was fish a stinky, old rag out of a bucket of soapy brown water and wipe down the table after the class was finished eating. The kids in your class lined up against the wall and waited on you to finish, some of them just standing there staring at you. I hated to have all of them look at me while I cleaned those tables, but I hated the pukey smell the brown water left on your hands even more. When it was your turn, a copy of your school picture always hung on the bulletin board in the cafeteria, but somebody’d come along and taken mine down. I asked Mrs. Davis where it could’ve gone, and she just shrugged her shoulders and said she’d find another one to put back up.