This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel

by Cash, Wiley

  He smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “We can do it down at the police station if you’d like,” he said. “Give you a chance to see all your old friends. Detective Sanders was just telling me on the way over about what a huge fan club you’ve got down there.” I looked at him for a second, and then I turned back to Sandy.

  “Y’all have to take off your shoes if you’re coming inside,” I said. “I won’t get my security deposit back if you track bullshit everywhere.” I turned and looked at Barnwell and took my keys out of my pocket. “And you’d better move your car before one of my neighbors sees that you don’t know how to park. Director Freeh’s not going to appreciate you getting his car keyed.”

  The inside of my apartment was dark, and I flipped on the lights and Sandy and Barnwell followed me into the small kitchen.

  “Nice place,” Barnwell said, looking around and smiling.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I love hosting parties.”

  “You mind if we go into the living room and sit down?” Sandy asked. “We just need to talk for a bit. It won’t take long.” They followed me into the living room, and I turned on the light on the ceiling fan and sat down in the recliner. Barnwell looked around the room, and then he took a seat on the sofa beside Sandy.

  “Y’all see Sammy get fifty-eight tonight?” I asked, but they just sat there staring at me. I looked at Barnwell. “You not a big baseball fan?”

  He pulled out a pad and pen from inside his jacket. He flipped through the pad until he found an empty page. “What were you doing at Tomcat’s tonight?” he asked.

  I shrugged and raised my eyebrows. “Having a four-dollar beer,” I said. “That’s what you should be investigating.”

  Barnwell looked up from his pad. “How do you know Tommy Broughton?” he asked.

  “The same way Sandy knows him. We used to run into him from time to time. You meet all kinds of people in this line of work,” I said. “Gangsters, thugs, FBI.”

  Barnwell laughed and closed his pad. “You’re a piece of work, Weller,” he said. He looked over at Sandy. “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” He stood up from the sofa and walked past me and stopped at the sliding-glass door. He pulled back the curtain and looked out onto my tiny, cluttered patio. He acted like he was looking at something, even though I knew it was too dark out there and too bright in here for him to see anything besides my rusty, old grill and folding chairs. The curtain swished closed when he let it go, and then I felt his hand rest on the back of the recliner. I looked up and saw him staring down at me.

  “That was cute,” he said. “Turning up the music: they teach you that in alarm school?”

  “No,” I said. “I saw it on Law & Order.” Barnwell snorted again, and then he looked at Sandy. “I can’t believe you got to work with this guy,” he said, smiling. Sandy was leaning forward, staring at me. “We should take you down to the station and let you do some stand-up,” Barnwell said. “Maybe you could sign some autographs for your fan club.”

  “They’re a devoted bunch,” I said. I stared at him until he looked away.

  “Brady,” Sandy said, “what the hell were you doing there tonight?”

  “No,” Barnwell said before I could respond. “No more questions.” He stepped in front of me so that I couldn’t see Sandy anymore. “If you do that again, if you piss on this investigation again, I will do everything in my power to bury you,” he said. “You can take that to mean anything you’d like, but you should know that I mean it. We don’t need you out there playing cop. Those days are over.”

  “What he’s saying, Brady, is that we’ve got everything under control,” Sandy said.

  “It seems like it,” I said. “Y’all are really doing a great job.”

  Barnwell laughed and walked back over to the sliding-glass door and stood staring at the closed curtain, his hands making fists in his pockets.

  “Brady, I’m telling you: don’t do this again,” Sandy said. “That’s not going to help anybody: not those girls, not us, and definitely not you.”

  Barnwell turned around and pointed at me. “You pull some shit like that one more time and I won’t come back here looking to talk,” he said. “You’re in the way, Weller, and I’ve been on this case for too long for you to waltz in and blow it here at the end.”

  “In the way of what?” I asked. “Finding the money or finding those girls?”

  “We think we’ll find both of them if you let us do our jobs,” Sandy said, standing up.

  “I hope so,” I said. “I also hope you know what’s out there.”

  “We know more than you think,” Barnwell said.

  “I doubt that.”

  They both stood there looking at me, but then Sandy reached into his pocket and brought out a closed fist that held the bullets he’d taken out of my .38. He lined them up slowly one by one on the coffee table. When he was finished he looked up and smiled. “Have a good night,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  I kept my seat and watched them leave, and I didn’t move until I heard the car crank and pull away from my apartment. It was only then that I walked to the small hall closet, opened the door, and pulled down my old suitcase from the top shelf.

  Easter Quillby

  C H A P T E R 26

  The first night after leaving Charleston we pulled off the highway at a rest stop in North Carolina. We got out and used the bathroom and got some snacks and some Cokes from the vending machines and went back to the car. Wade pulled around back behind the bathrooms, hoping we could stay there for the night, but just as we got settled in a man in a uniform came and knocked on the windshield with a flashlight and told us we couldn’t spend the night there. Wade rolled the window up without saying anything, started the car, and pulled back onto the highway.

  Friday morning I woke up with the light hitting my eyes through the windshield. When I sat up I saw that the sun was just rising and that Wade had covered me and Ruby with a couple of sweatshirts dotted with paint stains and one of his old coats. It was chilly inside the car, and I knew it was early by the way the light looked outside—all soft and glowing.

  The car sat in a paved parking lot surrounded by mountains that were covered in fog; that fog could’ve even been clouds for how high it seemed like we were. Ours was the only car in the parking lot. I slipped my shoes on as quiet as I could and wrapped one of Wade’s sweatshirts around my shoulders, and I opened the door and slipped out and pushed it shut behind me. Wade was laying across the front seat, his eyes closed and his arms pulled up inside the sleeves of his T-shirt.

  A little sidewalk ran around the edge of the parking lot, and just beyond it a guardrail kept you from getting too close to the edge. I walked right up to it and leaned against it and looked down into the valley, where the fog was thicker than it was up where we’d spent the night. When I was in the fifth grade my class took a field trip to Crowders Mountain in Gastonia, and that seemed like the tallest thing I’d ever seen, especially after we hiked all the way to the top. But now, standing where I was standing and seeing what I was seeing, I realized that I’d never seen anything like these mountains before.

  Behind me, a car door opened and closed quietly, and when I turned I saw Wade standing there looking around like I’d just been doing a few minutes before.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “We’re on the Blue Ridge Parkway,” Wade said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a road that runs through the mountains from Virginia clear down to South Carolina.” He rubbed at his eyes. “It’s the country’s most visited national park,” he said, his words turning into a yawn that finished with him stretching his arms over his head.

  “You wouldn’t know it right now,” I said, looking around at all the empty parking spaces.

  “It’s early,” he said. “People will be up here soon enough to check out the leaves.”

  I hadn’t noticed the leaves yet. You could see their color through the fog in the valley right b
elow us: gold and red and some green here and there. It seemed like the fog couldn’t cover the tops of the tall mountains, and up on top of them almost all the leaves were gold. I couldn’t believe that just last night we’d been down in Charleston, where the air was salty and hot and sticky, and now we were up here looking at these mountains, my breath coming out of my mouth like smoke every time I breathed.

  “Look back here,” Wade said. “Back behind us.” He pointed to a huge mountain on the other side of the parking lot that you could just barely see through the clouds. A red-and-white antenna tower sat up on top of it. “That’s Mount Pisgah,” he said, looking up at it with his hands cupped around his eyes even though the sun wasn’t hardly out yet. He dropped his hands and looked over at me. “You know where that name comes from?”

  “No,” I said.

  “From the Bible,” he said. “God told Moses to climb to the top of Mount Pisgah so that he could finally see the Promised Land.” He looked back over at the mountain. “It wasn’t this mountain—that one was out in the desert somewhere—but that’s where the name comes from.”

  “Did you make that up?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then how’d you know it?”

  “What?” he said. “You think I can’t know things just because I know them?” He stood there looking at me like I’d hurt his feelings, and then he smiled and pulled a brochure out of his back pocket and showed it to me. “I got this at the rest stop last night,” he said. “I needed a little bedtime reading.” He opened it and spread it out on the hood of the car. “The early explorers who found this mountain climbed to the top of it and thought they’d found the Promised Land when they saw what waited for them on the other side. Those guys were heading west, just like us.”

  “Where are we going exactly?” I asked.

  “St. Louis,” he said. “I thought y’all wanted to see some baseball.”

  “After that.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Oklahoma? Texas? California?” His eyes got bigger as he listed the names. “We could keep going clear on to the Pacific Ocean if we wanted to.”

  “Then what?” I asked. “We can’t live in this car forever.”

  “I don’t know,” Wade said again. “I guess that’s why they call it an adventure.”

  Ruby opened the car door and climbed out. Wade’s other sweatshirt was wrapped around her shoulders. She looked around the parking lot at all the mountains and the fog; she’d never even been to Crowders Mountain like I had, and I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Mount Pisgah,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re looking for the Promised Land,” Wade said, folding up the brochure and sliding it into his back pocket. He winked at me. “And we’re almost there.”

  The next couple days passed by like blurry dreams of riding in the car on back roads and getting lost late at night in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Cookeville, Tennessee, where no stores or restaurants were ever open and there was never any place to use the bathroom. Wade had told us it would take about fifteen hours to drive from Charleston to St. Louis, but we were in the car a lot longer than that. It began to feel like we were just driving in circles, and it seemed like there were times when Wade had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do once we got there. We went long stretches without talking, me and Ruby looking out the windows and Wade trying to tune in baseball games on the radio to see where McGwire and Sosa were in the home-run race. It seemed like Wade hadn’t hardly closed his eyes since we’d left Myrtle Beach, and while he drove he told us long stories about playing for the Rangers and throwing batting practice to Sosa: how Sammy couldn’t hit any of his pitches except his fastball; how, back then, Sammy was just a skinny little Dominican kid who didn’t even speak English. The stories and the radio games all ran together, and before long I started picturing Sammy Sosa as a poor, skinny teenager in a Cubs uniform catching McGwire’s pop-ups out in the outfield.

  By Saturday night, McGwire had hit sixty home runs to Sosa’s fifty-eight, which meant that McGwire only needed one more to tie Maris’s record. Saturday’s game was in Cincinnati, and Wade said there was no way McGwire would tie the record there; he said that was the kind of thing a ballplayer wanted to do on his home field, and he had no doubt that McGwire would wait on the record until him and Sosa were both in St. Louis on Monday, and he promised us that we’d all be there to see it.

  Wade didn’t have tickets to Monday’s game, but he told us he had a feeling they wouldn’t be too hard to come by. The radio had been saying that just one ticket might cost as much as $1,000, so I knew Wade’s hope for a ticket had more to do with the money he had hidden in that black bag than any kind of luck or know-how he pretended to have.

  Late Monday morning we drove into St. Louis. Just as we were crossing a river, Wade slowed down and pointed at something on the other side of the bridge. “See that right there?” he asked. It was a huge white half circle that looked to be sitting in a field off to our right. “That’s the St. Louis Arch.” He looked at us in the rearview mirror. “They call it the ‘Gateway to the West.’ ”

  Ruby moved over to my side of the backseat to see it better. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s a sculpture, kind of,” Wade said. “And it’s a monument too.”

  “How’s it a gateway?” I asked.

  “That’s just symbolism,” he said. “Like a metaphor or an analogy. You know what that means?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “It means when something stands for something else. That arch stands for the gateway to the West. Like the old-time settlers, we’ve left everything behind in the East and we’ve crossed the mountains, and now we’re pointing our horses west.” The car was quiet, and the three of us sat there looking at the Arch as it got closer and closer, and before I knew it we’d driven right past it.

  “Like Oregon Trail,” Ruby said.

  “What?” Wade asked.

  “Oregon Trail,” I said. “It’s a game you play on the computer.”

  “I want to go see it,” Ruby said, turning and climbing up on her knees to look out the back window at the Arch.

  “We will,” Wade said. “Maybe tomorrow. But today we’re here to see a baseball game. Tomorrow, we head west.”

  Brady Weller

  C H A P T E R 27

  Before leaving town on Sunday morning I’d gone by the Fish House to get the $2,000 Roc owed me. He must’ve known I was on the way over to see him because he was sitting on an overturned trash can and smoking a Black & Mild outside the kitchen door when I pulled up.

  “Damn, son,” he said when I got out of the car. “Don’t you know we don’t open for lunch until eleven on Sundays? I know your ass isn’t on the way to church.”

  “I thought I’d come by here and collect my money so I’d have something to drop in the offering plate,” I said, taking his hand and fumbling through another awkward handshake.

  “Sammy and McGwire mono y mono tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to let that two thousand steep in the pot?”

  “No way,” I said. “Not the way my luck’s been going.”

  He laughed, jumped up off the trash can, and pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket, counting out twenty one-hundred-dollar bills and handing them to me. I folded the bills and tucked them into my breast pocket. Roc stuffed what was left of the wad back into his jeans.

  “I can’t believe you carry that kind of cash,” I said.

  He smiled. “Come on, man,” he said, lifting up his shirt to reveal a compact 9mm tucked into the waistband of his jeans. “Everybody knows the Fish House is the safest place to work in town.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” I said. “Before I take off, you mind if I run another name past you?”

  “Hey.” He spread his arms like he was about to give me a hug. “That’s what I’m here for, baby: to shar
e my wealth of knowledge with my community.”

  “Have you ever heard of a guy named Bobby Pruitt?”

  “Robert Pruitt?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Old baseball player?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Shit, man,” he said, “that’s the dude who took Wade down. That’s the one I was telling you about.”

  “The guy he hit?”

  “Yeah, man, and I’d stay away from that dude if I was you.”

  “I think he’s looking for Wade and those girls.”

  “Well, you’d better find Wade before he does.”

  I took the keys out of my pocket and nodded toward my car. “That’s what I’m hoping to do tomorrow.”

  “Where you off to?”

  “St. Louis,” I said.

  “For what?” he asked, smiling.

  “A baseball game.”

  He laughed. “Shit, you got tickets?”

  I held up the folded bills he’d just given me. “I do now.”

  Pruitt

  C H A P T E R 28

  All that money, and you’re calling me collect,” the Boss said.

  “You should’ve paid it in quarters.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’d better have good news,” he said.

  “He’s been found.”

  “Then why don’t I have what I want?”

  “Because it’s not time yet.”

  “When will it be time?”

  “Monday. In St. Louis.”

  “Why St. Louis?”

  “That’s where he’s headed. And that’s where this will end.”

  “It’s Thursday. Why should I have to wait that long?”

  “Because the terms of the deal have changed.”

  “What the hell makes you think that?”

  “Because the cards aren’t in your hands anymore.”