Redemption Road

17

Gideon woke in a hospital bed, the room dim and cool around him. For an instant he was lost, then remembered everything with perfect clarity: the morning light and Adrian’s face, the pain of being shot, and the feel of an unmoving trigger. He closed his eyes against the disappointment and listened to the voice that rose from the corner of the room. It was his father, who was quiet at times, but not always. Gideon heard the mumbling and the disjointed words and wondered why he felt such sudden pity. Other than the pain from being shot and the bed in which he lay, nothing had changed since the night he’d set out to kill Adrian Wall. His father was still useless and drunk, and talking to his dead wife.

Julia, he heard.

Julia, please…

The rest of it was all mumbles and mutterings. Long minutes of it, then an hour. And all the while Gideon lay perfectly still, feeling the same strange and poignant pity. Why was it like that? The curtains were pulled so it was dark in the room, his father more a shape than a man. Long arms around his knees. Shaggy hair and jutting elbows. Gideon had seen the same shape on a thousand nights, but this was different somehow. The old man seemed desperate and harder and sharp. Was it the mumbled words? The way he said her name? The old man was… what?

“Dad?”

Gideon’s throat was dry. The bullet wound ached.

“Dad?”

The shape in the corner went quiet, and Gideon saw eyes roll his way and glint like pinpricks. The odd moment felt more so for the length of it. Two seconds. Five. Then his father unfolded in the gloom and turned on a lamp.

“I’m here.”

His appearance shocked the boy. He was not just disheveled but gray, the skin hanging on his face as if he’d lost twenty pounds in a few days. Gideon stared at the deep lines on his father’s cheeks, the crueler ones at the corners of his eyes.

He was angry.

That was the difference.

His father was hard and bitter and angry.

“What are you doing?” Gideon asked.

“Watching you and feeling ashamed.”

“You don’t look ashamed.”

His father stood and brought a stale smell with him. He hadn’t bathed. His hair was greasy. “I knew what you were going to do.” He put a hand on the bedrail. “When I saw the gun in your hand, I knew.”

Gideon blinked, remembering his father’s face, and the crown of flowers in his hands. “You wanted me to kill him?”

“I wanted him to die. I thought for a minute it wouldn’t matter how that happened, whether you killed him or I did. When I saw you with the gun, I thought, well, maybe this is right. It was a flash of a thought. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But then you ran and were gone so damn fast.”

“So you do hate him?”

“Of course I do, him and your mother.”

There was the anger, and it wasn’t just at Adrian. Gideon ran the last hour in his head: the way his father had said her name over and over, the thrust of it like a blade. “You hate her?”

“Hate is not the right word-I loved her too much for that. That doesn’t mean I could forgive or forget.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You shouldn’t. No boy should.”

“How could you hate her? She was your wife.”

“On paper, maybe.”

“Stop talking in riddles, okay!” Gideon rose up in the bed, pain spreading under the bandages. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to his father or expressed his own frustration. But so much of it was inside him, the filthy house and poor food and distant father. Mostly, though, it was the silence and dishonesty, the way his father drank himself stupid, yet had the stomach to curse and groan if Liz came by to help with homework or make sure milk was in the fridge. Now, he was talking about on paper as if he were not some kind of paper man, himself. “I’m fourteen years old, but you still ignore me when it comes to her.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. You turn away if I ask about what happened or how she died or why you look at me sometimes like you hate me, too… Are you angry that I didn’t kill him?”

“No.” His father sat, and none of the tension left him. “I’m angry because Adrian Wall is alive and free, and your mother’s still dead. I’m upset that you’re shot and in this place, and that, when it came down to it, you were the only one of us with the courage to look her killer in the face and do what needed doing.”

“But, I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s not the point, son. The point is you had the gun, and I’m just the chickenshit who let you take it. Adrian Wall stole everything from me that ever mattered. Now, look at you, all shot through and small, and somehow bigger than I ever was. And why is that? Because I saw you with that gun and went weak inside for all of ten seconds. Ten goddamn seconds! How could I not be bound up and turned around and choking on the kind of anger that comes from that?”

Gideon heard the words, but thought they were bullshit. His father had half the night to stop him. He could have gone to the prison, gone to Nathan’s. “And my mother?” he asked. “What did she ever do to make you mad?”

“Your mother.” Gideon’s father turned his face away, then pulled a bottle from his pocket and drained a third of it. “When things got hard between us, we’d go to the church and pray. No reason you’d know that, but we did. If we argued about money or you or… other things. We’d kneel and hold hands and ask God to give us strength or commitment or whatever the hell we thought we needed. We were married in that church, and you were baptized there. I always figured if one place could fix us, then that’d be it. Your mother disagreed, but she would go to humor me. Goddamn.” He shook his head and stared at the bottle. “She’d kneel at that altar and say the words just to humor me.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Then, I’ll say one last thing and leave it at that. As much as I loved your mother and as pretty as she was…” He shook his head and drained the bottle dry. “The woman was no kind of fucking saint.”

After the run-in with her father, Elizabeth left Channing at the house and pointed the old car at skinny roads that ran wild into the country. It’d been like that since she was a kid: confrontation, then speed, sometimes for hours, and more than once for days. The next state. The next county. It didn’t matter. The wind felt good. The engine’s scream. But no matter how fast or how far she drove, there was nowhere to go and no white tape marking the end. It was the same empty escape-the same race-and when it was done, Elizabeth’s world was no more than her father claimed, just violence and the job and her fascination with Adrian Wall. Maybe he was right about that life. He’d called it pointless once, an embarrassment of lightless rooms. She was thinking of that now, of decisions and the past, and of the only child she would ever conceive.

It was nine at night when she told her parents the first real lie: “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

Her father looked up from the kitchen table, and the notes he’d made for Sunday’s sermon. “Good night, Elizabeth.”

“Good night, Father.”

Such words had been said all the nights of her life. Dinner and homework, his lips dry on her cheek. A week had passed since she’d told the truth of what had happened at the quarry, and supposedly there was peace between them. She didn’t see it, though. She saw his hand on the boy’s shoulder, the way he’d told his own lies, saying, “Prayer and contrition, young man. These are stones in the path to God’s right hand.”

Elizabeth watched her father return to his notes. First gray was in his beard, hair thinning on the crown of his head.

“Come here, baby girl.”

Elizabeth went to her mother, who was warm and smiling and smelled of bread. The hug she offered was soft and long, so complete Elizabeth wanted to fall into it and never leave. “I don’t want this baby.”

“Hush, child.”

“I want the police.”

Her mother squeezed harder and spoke in the same guarded whisper. “I’ll talk to him.”

“He won’t change his mind.”

“I’ll try. I promise. Just be patient.”

“I can’t.”

“You must.”

Elizabeth pushed away because her own decision was so suddenly hard inside her she feared her mother might feel it.

“Elizabeth, wait…”

But, she didn’t. She pounded the stairs, went to her room, and squeezed her legs together until lights were off in the house. When the time came, she went through the window and onto the roof, then down the great oak that had shaded her room since before she could speak.

A friend with a car waited at the end of the drive. Her name was Carrie, and she knew the place. “Are you sure about this?”

“Just drive.”

The doctor was slick skinned and Lithuanian and unlicensed. He lived in a trailer at the bad end of a bad trailer park and wore his hair long and parted in the middle. His front tooth was gold, the rest of them as shiny and brown as old honey. “You are the preacher’s daughter, yes?”

His eyes moved up and down, gold tooth flashing as he pushed a damp cigarette into the center of a narrow smile.

“It’s okay,” Carrie said. “He’s legit.”

“Yes, yes. I helped your sister. Pretty girl.”

Elizabeth felt a cold ache between her legs. She looked at Carrie, but the doctor had his fingers on her arm. “Come.” He moved her toward the back of the trailer. “I have clean sheets, washed hands…”

When it was done and she was in the car, Elizabeth was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. She hunched above the place she hurt. The road was black, and white lines flicked past, one after another and endless. She settled into the hurt, and into the hum of tires. “Should there be this much blood?”

Carrie looked sideways, and her face turned as white as the lines on the road. “I don’t know, Liz. Jesus.”

“But, your sister-”

“I wasn’t with my sister! Jenny Loflin took her. Shit, Liz! Shit! What did the doctor say?”

But Elizabeth couldn’t think of the doctor, not of his dead eyes or filthy room or the way he touched her. “Just get me home.”

Carrie drove fast to make it happen. She got Elizabeth to the house and onto the porch before something else broke inside and stained the porch like a flood.

“Jesus. Liz.”

But Elizabeth couldn’t speak, watching instead from the bottom of a lake. The water was clear and warm, but getting dark at the edges. She saw fear on her friend’s face, and black waters pushing in.

“What do I do, Liz? What?”

Elizabeth was on her back, everything warm around her. She tried to raise her hand, but couldn’t move at all. She watched her friend pound on the door, then turn and run and spray gravel with the car. The next thing she saw was her father’s face, then lights and movement, then nothing at all.

Elizabeth eased up on the gas, watching mile markers slide past as she played it out again: long days in the hospital, the silent months that followed. She blamed herself when the nights got long. For not wanting the baby, for the dead place inside her. How old would the child be had she kept it?

Sixteen, Elizabeth thought.

Two years older than Gideon. Two years younger than Channing.

She wondered if that meant something, if God indeed paid attention, and her father had been right all along. It was doubtful, but why else did she find these children? Why were the connections so immediate and unshakable?

“A psychologist would have a goddamn field day.”

The thought amused her because psychologists ranked about the same as preachers, which meant pretty low. What if she was wrong about that? If she’d gone for therapy as her mother wanted, then maybe she’d have finished college and married. Maybe she’d have a career in real estate or graphic design, live in New York or Paris, and have some fabulous life.

Forget it, she thought. She’d done good work as a cop. She’d made a difference and saved some lives. So what if the future was shapeless? There were other things and other places. She didn’t have to be a cop.

“Yeah, right.”

Those were her thoughts as she approached a creek with two boys fishing from the bridge. Her foot came off the pedal, and she moved past, parking beyond the bridge to watch. The smaller boy went into his cast, and for a moment everything hung in perfect balance: the rod all the way back, small arms flexed. He was nine, she guessed, his friend pointing at a deep-looking pool beside a willow tree and a slab of gray stone. The baited hook flicked out, landed perfectly. They nodded at each other, and she marveled that life could be so simple, even for a child. It gave her a moment’s peace, then the phone rang, and she answered.

It was Channing.

She was screaming.

Channing had stood on the porch and shaded her eyes as Elizabeth backed from the drive and accelerated down the street. The poor woman had been apologetic and calm, but Channing understood the sudden need to move and do and think wild thoughts. She felt the same thing when her mind went to the basement, like she could scream or rock in the dark or punch the walls until her fingers bled. Anything was better than stillness, and acting normal was the one impossible thing. Conversation. Eye contact. Anything could open the door.

She watched the street for another minute, then went inside and wandered the house, liking everything about it: the colors and the furniture, the comfortable clutter. A bookshelf covered an entire wall of the living room, and she walked its length, opening one book and then another, picking up photographs of Elizabeth and some small boy. In most of the pictures he was young-maybe two or three. In others he was older, shy looking and thin, and close at her side. He had troubled eyes and a pretty smile. She wondered who he was.

Turning from the photographs, Channing locked the door, poured a glass of vodka from a bottle in the freezer, and made her way to the bathroom at the end of the hall. She locked that door, too, and wondered if she’d ever relax behind a door that wasn’t bolted. Even here and safe, she felt as if her clothes were too thin and certain muscles had forgotten how to unclench. The vodka helped, so she took a sip, started the bath, and then lifted the glass again. She made the water very hot and waited for steam to rise before undressing in a careful, controlled manner. It wasn’t that she hurt-the stitches, the bite marks-but that she feared her eyes might betray her, that they’d find the mirror by mistake and linger on the bruises and dark thread and the tight, pink crescents his teeth had left. She wasn’t ready for that.

Sinking into the bath, though, she thought of what Elizabeth stood for, of her patience and strength and will. Maybe it was the vodka, or something more. Whatever the case, Channing climbed from the tub before the water cooled. She kept her eyes up this time and confronted the mirror with a steadiness she thought she’d lost. She started with wet hair and the water on her skin, then looked at the bruises and marks and the ribs that showed too plainly. But it wasn’t enough to simply look. She needed to see, and that’s what she tried to do, to see not just the person she’d been or was, but the woman she wished to be.

That woman looked a lot like Liz.

It was a good thought that didn’t last. Someone was banging on the door.

“Jesus-”

Channing jumped so hard and fast she slammed her hand against the sink. It wasn’t a knock at the door, but a hard, brutal pounding.

“Shit, shit-”

She shoved a leg into her jeans, fabric sticking on wet skin, the other leg going in just as hard. The pounding got louder and more intense. Front door, she thought, over and over, and hard enough to shake the house. Channing pulled on the sweatshirt, thinking telephone, Liz, run. It was panic, pure instinct. She could barely breathe, and it took all her strength to open the bathroom door. The hall was dim, no movement. The pounding got even louder.

Creeping into the living room, she risked a glance through the window. Cops were in the yard-blue lights and guns and hard-faced men wearing Windbreakers that said SBI.

“This is the state police!” A loud voice at the door. “We have an arrest warrant for Elizabeth Black! Open up!”

Channing twitched away from the window, but not before someone saw her.

“Movement! Left side!”

Guns came up, squared on the widow.

“State police! Final warning!”

Channing ducked sideways, saw men on the porch. They wore helmets and body armor and black gloves. One of them had a sledgehammer.

“Break it.”

An older man pointed at the lock, and Channing screamed when the hammer hit. The sound was like a bomb, but the door held.

“Again!”

This time the frame buckled, and she saw bright metal. Six men stood behind the hammer, soldiers in a row with fingers tight above the triggers. The old man nodded, and the hammer struck a third time, the door breaking from its frame.

“Move! Move! Move!”

Channing felt the rush, but was already moving. She snatched up the phone and sprinted left.

“Movement! Back hall!”

Someone else yelled “Freeze!” but she didn’t. She hit the bathroom in a skid; slammed the door and locked it. They’d clear the house before they broke the door, but it was a small house, and she was already dialing.

One ring.

Two.

She sensed men, tight-packed in the narrow hall. It was the stillness, the silence.

Please, please…

The phone rang a third time, and Channing heard the click. She opened her mouth, but the door exploded, and the world was guns and men and screaming.

As hard as Elizabeth drove the car before, she pushed it to breaking now, turning off the crumbled road and onto a state highway, cars slashing past as the needle touched 105. The wind made so much noise she could barely think. But what could she think about anyway?

The girl wasn’t answering.

Screams. A dead phone. But, she’d heard other things, too. Hard voices and shouting and breaking wood.

Elizabeth dialed the house, but the line was off the hook. She tried the girl’s phone again, but that failed, too.

“Damn it!”

Three tries. Three fails.

Desperate, she called Beckett. “Charlie!”

“Liz, where the hell are you? What’s that noise?”

She could barely hear above the wind. “Charlie, what’s happening?”

“Thank God. Listen. Don’t go to your house!” He was yelling to be heard. “Don’t go home!”

“What? Why?”

“Hamilton and Marsh…” She lost a sentence or two, then he was back. “Word just hit the street. They have an indictment, Liz. Double homicide. We just found out.”

“What about Channing?”

“Liz…” Static. “Don’t…”

“What?”

“State police locked us out-”

“Charlie! Wait!”

“Don’t go to your fucking house!”

Elizabeth hung up in numb disbelief. It wasn’t the warrant or that she’d be arrested. State cops were at her house, and so was the girl who’d saved her life, Channing, who was eighteen and hollowed out and liable to confess anything. Already, five minutes had passed.

“Too much time.”

She pushed the old car until the needle touched 110, then 115. She watched for slow movers and cops; squeezed the wheel hard and said her first real prayer in a dozen years.

Please, God…

But, it was over by the time she got there. She saw it from a block out: no lights at the house, no cars or cops or movement. She came hard anyway, locking up the brakes and rocking into the drive.

“Channing!”

She took the yard at a run, saw tire tracks in the grass, and the door broken in its frame. On the porch she hit the door with a shoulder, felt it rock on a single hinge. Inside, she found out-of-place furniture, dirty footprints, and the bathroom door, blasted off the hinges, too.

She was too late.

That was real.

She checked the house, anyway. Bedrooms. Closets. She wanted to find the girl, hidden maybe, or tucked away. But she was kidding herself, and she knew it. The warrant wasn’t for Channing, but they had a subpoena, and Hamilton and Marsh would use it, were probably talking to her now.

What happened in the basement?

Who pulled the trigger?

In a fog, Elizabeth stepped outside and wedged the door shut behind her. They had the girl, and the girl would talk. Whether from guilt or naïveté or the desire to help Elizabeth, Channing would eventually break.

Elizabeth couldn’t let that happen.

The shooting was too political, too racial. They’d burn her down to make an example.

“I saw it happen.”

The voice came from beyond the hedge, and Elizabeth recognized the neighbor who lived to the right, an elderly man with a ’72 Pontiac station wagon he polished on weekends as if it were made of something more precious than steel and paint. “Mr. Goldman?”

“Must have been twenty cops. Assault rifles and body armor. Goddamn Nazis.” He pointed and ducked his head. “Sorry about your door.”

“There was a girl…”

“A small one, yes. Two tough old bastards hauled her out.”

“You saw her?”

“Hard to miss, really, hanging between them like she was, all bright-eyed and flushed and kicking like a mule.”

For a hard flat second Elizabeth didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t go to the station with a murder warrant on her head. It was beyond even Dyer to help her, now. Hamilton and Marsh had their indictment. That meant they’d pick her up and drop her in a hole. Even if she won at trial-which was doubtful-she’d be vilified by the national press, picked apart, and stripped to her bones. It was an angry nation and she was another white cop on the wrong side of a shooting. It couldn’t play otherwise, not with fourteen bullet holes in the floor.

And that was best-case scenario.

Worst case, Channing would talk. That meant time mattered, and not the kind that would be counted in days.

Hours, she thought. Minutes.

Would the girl even fight?

Elizabeth’s paralysis snapped like a glass rod. She started the car and had Channing’s father on the line before she reached the first turn. He would move heaven and earth, but his lawyers were in Charlotte. That would take time. So, she went the only place that made sense: around the city, across the river. Box bushes took paint off the car, but she found the old lawyer sitting in the same chair on the same porch. He offered pleasantries, but she shut him down before he could rise from the chair. “No time, Faircloth. Just listen, please.”

She started too fast, too shaky.

“Slow down, Elizabeth. Catch your breath. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. Sit down. Tell me from the beginning.”

“It needs to be privileged.”

“Very well. Consider me your attorney.”

“You’re not licensed.”

“Then consider me a friend.” She hesitated, so he spoke carefully to make his point. “Anything you tell me I will take to my grave unless you instruct otherwise. You cannot shock me or dissuade me or make me anything less than your ally.”

“I’m not the only one at risk.”

“Five decades before the bar, my dear, and you would not believe the secrets I have kept. Whatever the problem, you have come to the right place.”

“Very well.” She took a deep breath and focused on his hands, on the class ring and creases and parchment skin. He leaned into her words, and she told him everything, her eyes never leaving the crooked fingers, her words rising from some dim, far place. She started with the subpoena for Channing and her own indictment, then moved to the horrible truth of what really happened in the basement on Penelope Street. It hurt like being naked in the cold, but there was no time left for shame or self-pity. She told him everything and let her wrists show to make it real. He interrupted only once, when he whispered, “You poor dear girl.”

Even then she couldn’t look him in the face. It was the shame of it, as if she weren’t just naked but nailed to a board. “I don’t know what she’ll say, Faircloth, only what will happen if she tells the truth.”

“And you wish to put her interests above your own.”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain of that? If she tortured those men-”

“That’s on me. My decision.”

“May I ask why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not if you understand the consequences of what you’re asking me to do. The indictment has your name on it, not hers. You’re risking prison-”

“I’ll never go to prison. I’ll run first.”

“As your friend and lawyer, I feel compelled to advise you that such plans rarely work out.”

“Just keep her from talking, Faircloth. I’ll live with what comes after.”

“Very well. One thing at a time.” He patted her hand. “You were right to come to me, Elizabeth. Thank you for that, for that trust.”

“What can we do for Channing?”

“For starters, don’t panic. Even if she confesses everything, we can argue the shooting is justified. She’s a child, and traumatized. Prosecution is not a foregone conclusion. Conviction is not even worth discussing.”

“Eighteen rounds. You’ve seen the papers. You understand the context.”

He nodded because he did. Things were different since Baltimore and Ferguson. Everything was racial; everything was watched. That made the deaths of Brendon and Titus Monroe not just public but political, especially with allegations of torture and retribution. If the attorney general had to shift targets, he certainly could. The cop, the rich girl; at this point it didn’t matter. Win or lose, the machine needed a body.

“Even if she’s acquitted,” Elizabeth said, “you know what a trial would do to a girl so young. She won’t recover.”

“Give me a dollar.” The old lawyer held out a hand.

“What?”

“Make it two.”

“I have a twenty.”

“That’s fine.” He took the bill. “A ten-dollar retainer for you, and another for the girl. In case anyone asks. Do you have a cell phone?”

“Of course…”

“Give it to me.” Elizabeth handed it over. He removed the battery and the SIM card, then handed everything back and smiled to take away the sting. “Cops make bad fugitives. It’s the mind-set.”

“Jesus.”

She stared at the phone. Crybaby was already moving.

“Get a burner phone when you can. Call me with the number.” He shrugged on a wrinkled coat. The rest of him was in faded jeans and boat shoes without socks. “I’ll deal with the girl first, then we can talk about this indictment. Her father is Alsace Shore?”

“You know him?”

“I know his lawyers. They may complicate matters, which doesn’t matter so long as they keep her from talking. We’ll see when I get there. Will your friends on the force help the state police find you?”

“Beckett’s on my side. Dyer, too, I hope. Everyone else is a wild card.”

“Then, you should leave, immediately. Do you have a safe place to go? A friend in another town? Family?”

The question almost ruined her. How could she admit the truth? That most of her friends were cops and would arrest her on sight, that even family was a shelter built on sand. “Right now, you and Channing are all I have.”

The old man took her hand, and she felt kindness in the heat of his fingers. “Allow me to make a suggestion. I have a fishing cabin on the lake. It’s on Goodman Road, not far at all. I haven’t been there in forever, but a handyman keeps it open for me. You should go there. Just for now,” he assured her. “Just so I can find you.”

“Shouldn’t I be doing something?”

“Let me find out what’s happening. Then we can make a plan.”

“All right. Come on. I’ll drive you.”

“No. Stay out of the city. Stay away from people. I’ll call the car service.” He guided her off the porch, and she stopped on the second step. “Be quick, Elizabeth. They may have tracked your phone, already.”

He was eager, but she needed this single moment, just to be sure. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you have pretty eyes and a lovely smile.”

“Don’t joke, Faircloth.”

“Very well. I’m helping you because Adrian spoke of you often, and because I’ve followed your career since his trial, because you are thoughtful and kind and unlike other detectives, because I find you to be a most admirable woman.” A twinkle glinted in the old man’s eyes. “Have I not told you that?”

“And if you’re charged for practicing without a license?”

“Until you showed up the other day, I’d not been out of my house for over a decade. Now, I’ve been to court, breathed fresh air, and helped a friend that needed help. I’m eighty-nine years old, with a heart so weak I’m unlikely to live another three. So, look at me.” He lifted his arms so she could take in the old jeans and flyaway hair, the coat he could have used for a pillow. “Now, ask again if I give a good goddamn about being charged with anything.”