Redemption Road

14

At eight o’clock Elizabeth found Faircloth Jones on the porch of his grand old house. He was alone, with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other. “Elizabeth, my dear.” He rose to press a papery cheek against her own. “If you are looking for our friend, I fear time and circumstance have stolen him away.” The porch was dark but for open windows and squares of light. Long-untended box bushes pressed against the rails. Down the bluff, the river moved with the sound of a whispering crowd. “May I offer you something? I know it’s not the evening I promised, but I’ve opened a fine Bordeaux, and there’s Belvedere, of course. I also have a lovely Spanish cheese.”

“I don’t understand. Where has Adrian gone?”

“Home, I fear, and on foot.” Faircloth tilted his head down the hill. “It’s only a few miles if you know the trails that follow the river. I dare say he knows them well.”

Elizabeth sat in a rocking chair, and the old lawyer did the same. “You mentioned circumstance.”

“Tight spaces and paranoia, my dear. I brought our friend home as intended, but he was unwilling to remain under my roof or between my walls. Nothing uncivilized, mind you. Lots of thanks and kindness; but, he wasn’t going to have it. Apparently, he has every intention of sleeping beneath the stars, and the risk of another trespass charge is no deterrent. Love of place. I believe Adrian suffers unduly.”

“He’s also claustrophobic.”

“Ah, that’s very good.” The lawyer’s eyes narrowed as he smiled. “Not many people ever figured that out.”

“I saw him in lockdown.” Elizabeth pressed her hands between her knees. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“He spoke to me of reasons, once, and I had nightmares for a year, after.”

“Tell me.”

“Adrian had family in some farm town up in Pennsylvania. His mother’s parents, I believe. It was a little place, regardless, all cornfields and trucks and dusty brawls. He was six, I think, or seven, wandering about on a neighbor’s farm when he went down an abandoned well shaft and wedged tight at sixty feet. They didn’t find him until lunch the next day. Even then, it took another thirty hours to get him out alive. There’re newspaper accounts out there somewhere if you care to dig them up. Front-page stuff. The pictures alone would break your heart. The most blank-eyed, traumatized look I’ve ever seen on a child. I don’t think he spoke for a month, after.”

Elizabeth blinked and saw Adrian as he’d been in the lockdown cell, shirtless in the dark, scarred and sweat-slicked and talking to himself. “Jesus.”

“Indeed.”

“I think I’ll have that drink.”

“Belvedere?”

“Please.” He shuffled into the house and returned with a glass that clinked as he handed it to her. “You mentioned paranoia.”

“Oh, yes.” The lawyer reclaimed his chair. “He thought we were followed from the jailhouse. A gray car. Two men. He was very agitated about it. Told me he’d seen the same car on three prior occasions. I pushed him for motive or cause, and though he refused to discuss it, he did act as if, perhaps, he knew what it was about.”

Elizabeth perked up. “Did he elaborate?”

“Not at all.”

“Was he believable?”

“His concern was. He was stoic about it, of course, but more than eager to be on his way. He did allow me to find clothes that fit, but I couldn’t coax him to linger for love or money. He stripped where we sit; asked me to burn the clothes he’d been wearing, even suggested I consider leaving for my own protection. Wanted me to stay in a hotel for a few days. The very idea.”

“Why did he think you unsafe?”

“I know only that my obstinacy upset him. He kept staring off that way.” Crybaby pointed left. “And calling me a stubborn fool of a man who was old enough to know who to trust and not. He said I should leave with him. Or, barring that, call the police. At the time, I thought his behavior the height of foolishness.”

“At the time?”

The lawyer’s eyes glinted in the night. “You came in from town, right? Crossed the river there?” He gestured right, where land fell away. “You crossed the bridge and turned directly into my drive?”

“I did.”

“Hmm.” He drew on the cigar, thin legs crossed at the knee. “If you look left”-he gestured to a gap in the trees-“you’ll see the land rise up to where the road follows the ridge. It’s distant, I’ll give you; but there’s a turnoff there from which you can see the house. Tourists find it from time to time. It makes a nice picture when the leaves peak.”

“What, exactly, are we talking about?”

“We’re not so much talking as waiting.”

“For…?”

“That. Do you hear it?”

She didn’t at first, and then she did: a car on the road. The noise grew from a whisper, then the car hit the bridge, and the old lawyer gestured left with his cigar. “Watch the gap.” She did what he asked, heard the car, sensed its lights as it climbed through the trees. “Do you see it?”

Lights rounded a bend, rose, and then leveled off. The car was on the ridge, the road shining beneath it. For three seconds, that’s all she saw. Then, the car sped past the gap, and Elizabeth saw a second car parked on the verge.

“You saw it?” Crybaby asked.

“I did.”

“And the men in it?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“What color was the car?”

“Gray, I believe.”

“Thank God.” The old lawyer leaned back, finished his drink. “After three cocktails and two hours of staring up that hill, I was beginning to think our troubled friend’s paranoia might be contagious.”

Elizabeth kept the headlights off until she reached the bottom of the driveway. When the road appeared, she clicked on the lights, and turned left. At the top of the ridge she stepped on the gas and hit the blues when the parked car appeared. It was a Ford sedan and fairly new, judging by the paint. She pulled in behind it and saw the outlines of men in the front, shapes changing as they turned to look back. She kept the lights bright, blues thumping behind the grille as she keyed the license plate on her laptop. What she saw made little sense, but there it was.

The number.

The registration.

Keeping one hand on the grip of her pistol, Elizabeth opened the door and exited, flashlight held high as she kept the weapon low and gave the car’s rear bumper a wide berth. Inside the car, both men held still, and she saw them plainly. They wore dark ball caps, the both of them. Elizabeth took in the heavy shoulders and blue jeans and dark shirts. Late thirties, probably. Maybe early forties. The driver kept his hands on the wheel; the passenger’s were out of sight. That brought Elizabeth’s weapon higher, kept it up as the window slid down. “Is there a problem, Officer?”

She stayed behind his left shoulder, watched the line of his jaw, his fingers on the wheel. “I want to see the passenger’s hands. Now.” Hands rose from the dark, then settled on the man’s lap. Elizabeth checked the backseat, leaned closer. No alcohol smell. Nothing obviously illegal. “Identification.”

The driver lifted his shoulders and dipped his head so the cap shielded his eyes against the light. “I don’t think so.”

The attitude bothered her. Something about his face did, too. It was partially obscured, but an arrogance was there, and an unpleasant softness. “License and registration. Now.”

“You’re a city officer five miles into the county. You have no jurisdiction here.”

“City and county cooperate when called for. I can have a sheriff’s deputy here in five minutes.”

“I don’t think so, seeing as how you’re suspended and under investigation. The sheriff won’t jump for you, lady. I doubt he’d even take your call.”

Elizabeth studied the men more closely. The hair was clipped short, the skin pale. The flashlight washed out their features, but what she saw of the driver seemed familiar: the rounded jaw, and drained-out eyes, the sweat just dry enough to make him look sticky. “Do I know you?”

“Anything’s possible.”

A smile underlaid the words, the same condescension and easy conceit. Wheels turned in Elizabeth’s mind, gears that wanted to mesh. “This vehicle is registered to the prison.”

“We’ll be leaving, now, Ms. Black.”

“Are you following Adrian Wall?”

“You have a nice evening.”

“Why are you watching this house?”

He turned the key. The engine caught, and Elizabeth stepped back as gravel sprayed and the car surged onto smooth pavement. She watched it rise and fall and disappear beyond the next hill. Only then, alone on the road, did the last gear finally click.

Ms. Black…

She holstered the weapon; checked her math.

Yeah.

She knew the guy.

Adrian did not go to the farm. He followed the river, instead, and listened for a voice on the wind that refused to come. The water spoke. So did the leaves, the branches, the soles of his shoes. Everything that moved gave voice, but none of it offered him what he needed. Only Eli Lawrence knew the guards and the warden and the secret corridors of Adrian’s hurt. Eli kept him together in the dark and the cold. He was the steel that held Adrian straight, the steady hands that gathered the threads of his sanity.

“They’re following me,” Adrian said. “They were at the farm, I think. Now, they’re at Crybaby’s.”

No response came, no voice or touch or flicker of humor. Adrian was alone in the night. He picked his way along the trail, his feet finding the rocks and muddy places, the deadfalls and the moss and the slick, black roots. The bank dipped where a creek trickled in. Adrian held on to a sycamore, the branch of a pine. He splashed through the creek and climbed the bank on the other side.

“What if they’re still there? What if they hurt him?”

They won’t bother the lawyer.

Relief flushed through Adrian like a drug. He knew the voice wasn’t real-that it was an echo from prison and the darkness and a thousand horrible nights-but for years it was all he’d had: Eli’s voice and his patience, his eyes in the dark like dim, small suns.

“Thank you, Eli. Thank you for coming.”

Don’t thank anybody but yourself, son. This little delusion is all yours.

But Adrian didn’t believe that, entirely. “First day in the yard. You remember?” Adrian clambered over a fallen tree, then another. “They were going to kill me for being a cop. You stood them down. You saved my life.”

More years on the inside than I could easily count. There were still a few who listened to me.

Adrian smiled at the understatement. There were men alive today who would kill or die for Eli Lawrence. Dangerous men. Forgotten ones. Until the day he died, the old man had been a voice of wisdom in the yard, an arbitrator, a peacemaker. Adrian’s life was not the only one he’d saved.

“It’s good to hear your voice, Eli. Eight years since I watched you die, and it’s still good.”

You’re basically just talking to yourself.

“I know that. You don’t think I know that?”

Now, you’re bitching at yourself.

Adrian stopped where the river widened. People would find it strange, how he talked to a dead man. But the world had grown strange, too, and every sound reminded him of that: the slide of the river, the scrape of pines. He’d known this land as a boy, fished thirty miles in either direction, walked every trail and climbed a hundred trees that hung above the water. How could it be so foreign, now? How could it feel so wrong?

’Cause you’re a goddamn mess.

“Hush now, old man. Let me think.”

Moving down the bank, Adrian slipped his hand into the river. That was real, he told himself, and unchanged. But the sky felt too broad, the trees too tall. Adrian climbed back to the trail and tried to ignore the ugly truth, that only he was different, that the world spun as it always had. He walked and considered that and realized, once, that he’d been standing still long enough for the moon to rise. He held out a hand and watched light spill through his fingers. It was the first moonlight he’d seen in thirteen years, and thoughts of Liz came, unbidden. Not because she was beautiful-though she was-but because the same moon had risen on the night he’d found her at the quarry, and then again on the night she’d made her first arrest. He imagined her in the light. The moon. Her skin.

Jesus, son. The first pretty woman you see…

Adrian laughed, and it the first honest laugh he could remember.

“Thank you, Eli. Thank you for that.”

You’re still talking to yourself.

“I know I am.” He started walking. “Most of the time, I know.”

The river bent west, and the trail with it. When it twisted again a mile later, Adrian turned away from the low ground and worked his way upslope until he found a dirt road that trended in the right direction. That was good for half a mile. When it, too, turned away from his path, Adrian crossed a band of woods, then a farm with a small, white house, brightly lit. A dog barked twice from the porch, but Adrian knew how to stay quick and quiet, and the night swallowed him before the dog got a good scent. Beyond the farm was a road that took him to an intersection three miles farther. Left would take him into the city. Right would lead to a subdivision on the flats beneath the mountain.

Adrian went right.

Francis Dyer lived right.

When he got to Dyer’s house, he checked the name on the mailbox, then rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he peered through the window, saw lights inside and things he remembered: pictures of Dyer as a rookie and the day he made detective, leather furniture and Oriental rugs, rowed guns that looked the same as the last time they’d gone hunting together as partners and friends. That was hard to see because it reminded Adrian of laughter and hot sun, of quiet competition and bourbon drinks and dogs that lay panting and wet when the birds were rowed on the tailgate and the last gun put away in the back of the old truck. It drove home the sad fact that he and Francis had been friends, once; and it reminded him of the trial and disappointment, and of the unpleasant truth that had split them apart.

Everything Francis had said at Adrian’s trial was true. Julia had a face that could drive a man to do bad things, and Adrian was, in fact, obsessed. He’d fallen so hard and fast that even now the memory dizzied him. But, it was more than the face. It was visceral, electric, needful. They’d both been unhappy, and their first meeting delivered a shock of energy so strong it could have lit the city. Recognition. Desire. The need that even now he felt. They’d fought it, and not just because they were married. Her husband worked for the county and was helping with an embezzlement case that ran into the six figures. Money had been disappearing for years: $5,000 here, $10,000 there. The total was $230,000 at best count. Real money. A serious case.

After a week, it barely mattered.

After a month, he was lost.

Adrian slumped on the porch, feeling her death as if it had happened days ago and not years.

“Ah, Julia…”

It had been so long since he’d allowed the luxury of remembrance. It was hard in prison because it made him soft when he could not afford it. Besides, she was dead, and death was forever. So, where did that leave him now? Out of prison and alone, sitting before an empty house and suddenly full to bursting.

Thirteen years!

They filled him up, all those years, all the suffering and pain, the hours to think of things he’d lost and pieces that didn’t fit.

“Francis!”

He beat again on the door; knew it was pointless.

So, wait for him.

“That’s your advice, old man? Wait for him?”

’Less you plan to beat the door down or converse with an empty house.

Adrian took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. He was here for information, an exchange of words. That meant Eli was right. No violence.

“All right, then. We wait.”

Adrian found a dark place on the porch and sat with his back against the wall. He watched the empty street and tried to let the anger go. But what else was there?

Answers?

Peace?

You don’t look so good.

Adrian’s lips twisted in the dark. “I don’t feel so good, either.”

You can handle this, son. You’re bigger than this.

“I’m an ex-con talking to a dead man. I don’t know anything anymore.”

You know my secret.

“They’re watching me.”

Not right now they’re not. You can walk this very second. Go anywhere you want. Have anything you want.

“Maybe I want to kill them.”

We’ve discussed that.

“If I don’t kill them, they’ll find me.”

That’s the inmate talking.

“I don’t want to be alone, Eli.”

He’s coming.

“Don’t leave me.”

Hush, boy. The voice flickered, faded. Motherfucker’s right there.

Adrian opened his eyes as Francis Dyer stepped onto the porch. The suit was dark gray; the shoes glinted. He kept a shooter’s stance, weapon level as he checked the corners, the yard.

Adrian showed his hands. “Just take it easy, Francis.”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Myself. It happens.”

Dyer checked the corners again. His weapon looked like the same revolver he’d always carried. “What are you doing here?”

“I have questions.”

“Such as?”

“Where’s my wife?”

Tension showed on Dyer’s face; turned his fingers white on the gun. “That’s why you’re here?”

“Part of it.”

Adrian started to push himself up, but Dyer didn’t like it. “You sit until I say. Hands, again.”

Adrian took his hands from the decking and showed his palms.

“This is my house, Adrian. My home. Convicts don’t show up at a cop’s home. That’s how they get shot.”

“So do it.” Adrian put his hands on the floor; slid his back up the wall until he was standing. It was a small victory. He took it. “Where’s my wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“The farm’s burned. Liz says she disappeared.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t leave sooner.”

The revolver didn’t budge. Adrian studied the narrowed eyes, the tight lips. Catherine and Francis had been close. Hell, before the murder and the trial, they all had.

“You were her friend.”

“I was her husband’s partner; that’s different.”

“You want me to beg, Francis? We were partners for seven years, but fine. You want me to beg. I’m begging. Please tell me what happened to my wife. I won’t ask anything of her or ruin her life. I just want to know where she is, that she’s well.”

Maybe it was the tone of voice, or memories of their partnership. Whatever it was, Dyer holstered the weapon. In the gloom, he was all angles and dark eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was surprisingly soft. “Catherine wouldn’t talk to any of us after the trial. Not me or Beckett or anyone else from the department. We tried to keep up with her, but she wouldn’t answer the phone or the door. It went that way for three or four months. The last time I went to see her, the place was locked up tight. No car. Mail stacked up on the porch. Two months after that, the house burned. It was too much for her. She left. I think it’s that simple.”

“But, she still owns the farm.”

There was a question there, and Dyer understood. “The county took it two years later. Unpaid taxes.”

Adrian leaned against the wall. The land had been in his family since before the Civil War. Losing it to the same people who’d locked him away for thirteen years was an unbearable injustice. “I didn’t kill Julia.”

“Don’t.”

“We’re just talking.”

“Not about her, we’re not.”

Every angle in Francis Dyer seemed to sharpen. The shoulders. The jaw.

“Tell me about the beer can.”

“What?”

Adrian watched him, looking for the lie. “A twelve-ounce Foster’s can with my prints on it was found in a ditch thirty yards from the church. It linked me to the murder scene, but here’s the thing.” Adrian stepped closer. Dyer didn’t budge. “I never drank a beer near that church. I never left a can there, I wouldn’t. The last time I drank a Foster’s was here, in this house, two days before she died.”

“You think I planted evidence?”

“Did you?”

“There were other people here that night. Beckett. Randolph. Even Liz was here. I could name fifty people. It was a party. Besides, no one needed to plant evidence to convict you. You handled that part just fine by yourself.”

Dyer meant DNA and skin and scratches. That was logical and fine, but the can was first-day evidence. Without Adrian’s prints at the scene there’d have been no court order subjecting him to a physical exam, no knowledge of the scratches on his neck, and nothing connecting him to the murder.

“Someone planted that can.”

“No one framed you.”

“It didn’t get there by itself.”

“You know what? We’re done.”

“I didn’t kill her, Francis.”

“Mention Julia again, and I’ll shoot you for real. I mean it.”

Adrian didn’t blink or back down. He held his ex-partner’s gaze and felt all the emotion behind it. “Do you really hate me so much?”

“You know why,” Dyer said; and looking in his black and bitter eyes, Adrian did.

Because Francis Dyer had always been jealous.

Because he’d loved Julia, too.

That certainty grew as Adrian walked out of his old partner’s neighborhood. The can was peripheral at trial, not a nonevent but almost an afterthought. By then, the prosecutor had scratches on Adrian’s neck and skin under Julia’s nails; he had prints in the house and Adrian’s own partner to testify against him. Those things made a case so strong the beer can at the church was a blip. But, that was the trial, and the early days of the investigation had been very different. Liz had found Julia’s body in the old church, and it was like marble on the altar, white and lifeless and clean. Adrian could still feel the rage and sadness that ripped through him when he got the call; he remembered every second-had lived them a million times: the drive to the church and the sight of her there, the love of his life gone lifeless, hardwood under his knees as he’d wept like a child, uncaring.

But, people saw: Francis and other cops. They saw and they wondered. Then a tech pulled Adrian’s print, and everything changed. Not just the doubts and dirty looks, but the court-ordered blood sample and the physical exam that found the scratches on his neck. After years behind the badge Adrian was on the outside, a suspect. He lost standing, trust, and, in the end, everything he’d ever loved.

Julia first.

Then life as he’d known it.

That his partner might have been jealous enough to plant evidence didn’t occur to Adrian until his first year in solitary. It was so out there and so extreme, a thought born of the smallest memory. Julia lay propped on an elbow, a sheet gathered at her waist. They were in a hotel in Charlotte, tenth floor. Light from the city spilled in, but all else was dark. It was a week before she died, and she was beautiful.

Are we bad people, Adrian?

He’d stroked her face. Maybe.

Is it worth it?

It was an old question between them. He’d kissed her, then, and said, Yes, it has to be.

But doubt was in the room, a dark conjuring.

I think your partner knows.

Why?

A look, she said. A feel.

Like what?

Like he watches more than he should.

That was it, a nothing in the night. But nothings grow when the world is eight by six and hours stretch forever. Adrian replayed the memory a hundred times, and then a thousand. Two days later, he added the can to see how the pieces fit. It seemed possible, he’d thought, which was not the same as probable. But the can was not probable, either.

Not with his prints on it.

Not at the church.

Francis had always been insecure, lost at times in Adrian’s shadow. That’s how it could be with cops. One was first through the door, and one was second. One got the media. One was the hero. But jealousy alone could not explain something as malignant as planted evidence. That required stronger emotions, the minting of a single coin, perhaps, with love bright on one side, and envy black on the other. Spin it fast enough, and what would you see?

A partner grown silent and strange?

A man who watched more than he should?

It still seemed possible, but there was no certainty on the roadside or under the high, dim stars. Nor did conviction present itself between the crumbled walls of his burned-out home. Adrian lit a fire as he’d done before and tried to pace the questions into ordered form. Who killed Julia, and why? Why the church? The linen? The violence that crushed her neck with such utter, irretrievable conviction?

Could someone else have planted the can?

In the end, such questions were voices lost in the throng. Adrian was not the same man, and he knew it. His thinking grew muddled, at times. Sometimes, he blanked out. That was a gift from the warden and the guards. Yet, clarity had not deserted him entirely. Open spaces and faces of good intent. These things made sense to him and offered hope of a sort. Liz was his friend-he believed that. So was the lawyer, this land, memories of what it meant to be determined and sure. Had that man gone? Adrian wondered. Had he been carved away in his entirety?

He paced another hour, then found a corner and sat. The night was dark and still, and then gone as if it too was only memory.

He was on a metal bed.

He was screaming.

“Hold him down. Get the arm!”

They got the free arm strapped again, cinched it down as he screamed into the gag, and edged metal flashed red. Adrian tasted blood; knew he was biting his tongue, the inside of his cheeks. The room smelled of bleach and sweat and copper. Blood streaked the warden’s face. The ceiling was rusted metal.

“Now, I’m going to ask you again.” The warden leaned close, his eyes like black glass as metal flashed once more, and a line of fire opened on Adrian’s chest. “Are you listening?” Another cut, blood pooling on the table. “Just nod when you’re ready to talk. Look at me when I’m speaking. Look at me!”

Adrian fought the straps; felt something tear.

“It’s too much,” someone said. “He’s bleeding out.”

“Hand me a needle. Hold his finger.” The needle slipped under the nail; Adrian screamed, and his back came off the table. “Give me another.” That one went in harder, deeper. “Will you talk to me, now? Look at me. Not at the ceiling. What did Eli tell you?” A hand slapped Adrian’s face. “Don’t pass out. We’ll have to start over. Prisoner Wall? Adrian? Hey. Eli Lawrence. What did he tell you?”

Two more blows, Adrian’s head rocking. After that, the warden sighed and lowered his voice as if they were friends.

“You were close to him, I understand. You feel loyalty for a friend, and I admire that. I really do. But, here’s the problem.” He smoothed a hand across Adrian’s soaking hair, left it on the forehead and leaned even closer. “That old man loved you like a son, and I doubt he would have died with such a secret unshared. Do you see my problem? I need to be sure, and this”-he patted Adrian’s forehead; ignored the blood on his own palm-“this is the only way. Will you nod for me now, so I know you understand?”

Adrian did.

“You don’t need to die.” The warden removed the gag, and Adrian turned his head to vomit. “This can end. Just give me what I want, and the pain goes away forever.”

Adrian moved his lips.

“What?” The warden leaned closer.

Eight inches away.

Six.

Adrian spit in the warden’s face, and after that things got ugly. Deeper cuts. Longer needles. A vision of Eli appeared the moment Adrian thought he would finally break. The old man was a shadow beyond the lights, the only man since childhood that Adrian had ever loved.

“Eli.”

The name was in his head, because all else was screams and blood and the warden’s question. Adrian focused on the yellow eyes, the paper skin. The old man nodded as if he understood. “No sin in survival, son.”

“Eli…”

“You do what you need to do.”

“You’re dead. I saw you die.”

“Why don’t you give the man what he wants?”

“They’ll kill me once they know.”

“Are you sure?”

“You know they will.”

“Then look at my face, boy.” The old man blinked and was a ghost beside the bed. “Listen to my voice.”

“Everything hurts.”

“See how light it is. See how it floats.”

“It really hurts…”

“But that’s fading now, son. Falling away.”

“I’ve missed you so much.”

“Steady, now.”

“Eli…”

“Just listen to my voice.”

They wanted what Eli had told him, plain and simple. And they ran everything: the phones, the mail, the other guards. That meant they had the power, and they had the time. When a year of knives and needles failed, it got psychological. Darkness. Deprivation. Hunger. Eventually, the inmates themselves were turned against him, one after another until every waking hour became a nightmare. And the rules were simple. Hurt him. Don’t kill him.

But hurt was a big word.

Ambush. Intimidation. Isolation. Friendly faces began to disappear: three men dead in the space of a year, killed by a single stab wound at the base of the skull. Their crimes? Adrian believed. A word in the yard. A place, once, at his table. The true nightmare began in the isolation wing. Once they understood the impact of tight spaces, they got creative; and prison, it turned out, was full of subbasements and old boilers and empty pipes. Adrian shuddered thinking of the pipes, of crevasses so airless and rust-choked that every breath tasted of metal. They liked to shove him in upside down, flood the pipe with water, haul him out. They used rats, at times; and once, they left him in for two days, and it was as if childhood terrors found him in the dark. Adrian went blank for a week after that. Lights turned on and off; food went uneaten. When he came back, it was a slow crawl from an empty place. They gave him a week more, then started the cycle again: in the black and on metal beds, hurt and healed, then in a boiler with rats.

A darker voice came, once. It spoke of endings and peace, told him to give up Eli’s secret and let the silence come at last. When that voice failed, they started to think maybe he knew nothing, after all. They left him alone for months: regular isolation, a regular prisoner. At times, Adrian’s thoughts were so splintered he wondered if he’d dreamed it all, if the scars came from fights with other inmates, as official records said. There were no more questions. No one looked at him twice.

But then he got out.

Adrian squatted by the fire; he added a few sticks, then moved, slow and silent, into the dark beyond the shell of his house. The fields were tall, so he stuck to the drive, hugged the ditch line, and kept his knees bent. When the road appeared, chalk white under the moon, he slipped into the field and drew close enough to see the car. It was not the same one that had followed him to the lawyer’s house. That was gray, and this was black. But, it was real, which meant the memories were real, too.

It wasn’t delusion.

He wasn’t insane.

At the house, he added a few more twigs to the fire, then stirred the coals until they caught in a sputter of flame.

“Talk to me, Eli.” He sat again, ancient trees above and the sky piled up forever. “Tell me what to do.”

But Eli was done talking, and that made it a bad night in the ruins. At one point, Adrian levered himself up and crept back to the road. The car was gone, but tracks were there, in the dirt. Even sleepless and pulled apart, Adrian knew what they wanted, and what they would do to get it. That made him not just cautious, but dangerous. The only reason no one had died yet was because he wasn’t yet willing, and they remained uncertain.

Did he know Eli’s secret or not?

They doubted it because no one should be able to suffer as he had and still keep his mouth shut. Not after so many years. Not after the knives and the rats and seventeen broken bones. What they failed to understand were the reasons. He didn’t keep the secret for greed’s sake. The reasons were older than that, and simpler.

He did it for love.

And he did it for hate.

Kneeling on the verge, Adrian put his fingers on the tire tracks where they were clearest. He saw cigarette butts, a damp spot in the dirt that smelled of urine. They’d been gone for an hour, maybe more. Had they given up? He doubted it. Laziness, maybe. Maybe they needed cigarettes.

When he returned to the fire, he piled wood until flames leapt higher. Dense clouds had moved in to cover the moon, so even with a fire the darkness pressed in. Adrian watched the flames, but visions still gathered in the dark.

“Fuck those guys, and fuck Dyer, too.”

He held on to the anger because it pushed the darkness back. The dirt was real, the burned-out house and the fire. Anger kept all that bright, so he thought of the warden, the guards, how the whole thing could still end bloody. It worked for a while, but he blinked once and the fire burned away as if the eye blink were an hour. He’d drifted as he used to do, blinked and gone away. He tried to shake himself alert, but was heavy; everything was heavy. When he blinked again he saw Liz, distant at first and then close, a face across the smoke, the eyes liquid and troubled and impossibly deep.

“What are you doing here, Liz?”

She moved like a ghost and sat, soundless, on the dirt. The edges of her face were blurry, her hair as weightless and dark as the smoke around her. “Did you know I was going to jump?”

He tried to focus, but couldn’t; thought maybe he was dreaming. “You wouldn’t have done it.”

“So, you knew?”

“Only that you were frightened and young.”

She watched him with those impossible eyes. “Was it terrible? What they did to you?”

Adrian said nothing; felt heat in his skin. The eyes weren’t right. The way she watched and waited and seemed to float.

“I see the hollow place.”

She pointed at his chest and drew the shape of a heart.

“I can’t talk about that,” he said.

“Maybe, there’s some of you left. Maybe, they missed a piece.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Doing what? It’s your dream.”

Her head tilted, a mannequin face on a mannequin body. He stood and looked down.

“You’re going to kill them, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Because of what they did to Eli?”

“Don’t ask me to let them live.”

“Why would I do that?”

She stood, too, then took his face and kissed him hard.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“What do the papers call me?”

“I don’t care if you killed those men.”

“Yet you dream of me,” she said. “You dream of a killer and hope we are the same.”