The Road To Deliverance

by James, Harper

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well normally the way it works is that the cops hold something back from the reporters. They don’t give it to them and ask them to promise not to write about it, scout’s honor.’

  ‘But you were there. You saw what your uncle saw.’

  ‘Everything.’

  Evan’s face compacted into a frown just as the dogs splashed their way out of the water. The one with the ball dropped it at Evan’s feet.

  ‘Looks like I throw it too far for them,’ Dalton said with a wink to accompany the challenge.

  Evan picked up the wet, slimy ball and got up off the rock. Then he hurled it as hard as he could out into the lake.

  ‘What do you mean everything?’

  ‘You asked what wasn’t I allowed to write about. The answer’s everything. I wasn’t allowed to write about any of it. I had it all ready to go. The editor gave it the thumbs up. Then suddenly it got pulled. Right after the editor took a call from the owner.’

  ‘But you did it anyway.’

  Evan got the same rueful smile as he’d gotten earlier when Dalton commented on Mrs Dalton’s dinner choices.

  ‘Not exactly. It didn’t make it to the print version. That was out of my control. I was trying to establish an online version at the time. It was early days and the dinosaurs with control over the purse strings weren’t interested. They knew it was the start of the end of their jobs. It was pretty much just me.’

  ‘And you decided to publish and be damned.’

  ‘Yep. Got fired for it the very next day too.’

  He said it as if he was proud of the fact, proud of his journalistic integrity.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘I thought so too—at the time. Turns out it was the best thing ever happened to me. I don’t reckon I’d ever have quit if they hadn’t fired me. I’d still be there now. Instead, I started my own IT support business. I’ve got a ton of great contracts, do a lot of work at the university over there.’ He waved off beyond the houses towards US-59. ‘As I said, Cole Nix getting shot was the best thing ever happened to me.’

  ‘You know who was behind getting you fired?’

  ‘The owner, I suppose. No idea who might have leaned on him.’

  ‘If they were that pissed with you, how come they didn’t take the article down immediately?’

  Dalton’s face split into a self-satisfied grin, the grin of the little guy sticking it to the big corporation.

  ‘I told you I was it, the whole damn online version. Just me. I ran it from my laptop out of my back bedroom. In my own time, too.’

  ‘So you sort of forgot to take it down immediately.’

  The grin grew wider.

  ‘You got it. There must have been a mix up’—he made quotes in the air as he said the words—‘with the passwords I gave them too. And don’t forget, they didn’t have anyone there who knew their ass from a hole in the ground. Then I think they forgot about it. My old boss, the editor, had a heart attack right about then.’

  Evan shook his head at the strange twists of fate that had conspired to leave the article up long enough for Crow to find it and to bring him to this place.

  ‘They’ve taken it down now.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I stopped checking a long time ago.’

  Evan reckoned he heard the ring of truth in Dalton’s words. He’d had what turned out to be a lucky break, enjoyed his moment of petty revenge. Now he was getting on with his life.

  Except that didn’t fit with his earlier behavior.

  ‘They only recently took it down,’ Evan said.

  He let the implications of his words sink in. Something had happened, something had changed. And change is rarely good.

  ‘Must be because you started poking around.’

  That still didn’t explain his earlier denial, the fear Evan had seen in his eyes—because at that point, he hadn’t known Evan was poking around.

  ‘What else, Mr Dalton? What aren’t you telling me? Why did you deny even knowing the name Cole Nix, the name of the man whose death led to all this?’

  Like Dalton before him, he took in the expensive homes behind them with a wide sweep of his arm. Dalton kicked at a small rock, sent it flying into the water. Any second now the hip flask was going to make a reappearance, provide moral support. Then Dalton looked up, met his eyes.

  ‘I was warned off. Told to forget I’d ever heard the name Cole Nix if I knew what was good for me.’

  ‘By who—’

  ‘By my Uncle Bill. Now I really must get back.’

  For a moment Evan thought he was going to offer his hand. Instead, he caught himself, rubbed his palm against his thigh. As if trying to scrape something from it, something sticky that didn’t want to be rubbed away, dog drool perhaps.

  He turned away, hurried along the lake shore without even looking to see where his dogs had gotten to. Evan watched him go, walking briskly into the last of the sun’s dying rays. He was halfway to his house when his hand went into his pocket once more. It was too far away for Evan to see what he pulled out. The fact that he put it to his ear and not his lips told Evan everything he needed to know.

  Uncle Bill Dalton, ex-chief deputy sheriff.

  Chapter 8

  AS PART OF HIS DEAL with Kate Guillory to let him come to Laredo without her, Evan had promised to stay in regular contact. And even though once every five years would qualify as regular, it wasn’t the same thing as frequent at all, which is what she’d meant. He wouldn’t get away with that shit any more than the guy in the Jerusalem Tavern had gotten away with patting her butt.

  And if he was going to get a slap across the mouth, he knew what he’d rather do to deserve it. He called her as soon as Dalton had disappeared into his house.

  ‘Hey, Kemosabe, how’s it going? Martina told me how you wanted to ride in the trunk. What’s wrong with lying on the back seat?’

  He’d expected as much, pictured the tip of her tongue on her lips, the mischief in her denim-blue eyes.

  ‘Just being cautious. Wouldn’t want to be accused of running around like a pig-headed ass.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Martina told me you’re taking her out for a blast in the Corvette too.’ There was a stifled snicker in the background, made him think Martina Perez was with her now. ‘I had to put her straight concerning a Buckley blast . . . about how my apartment moves faster than that Corvette with you at the wheel.’

  He waited patiently while the two of them laughed themselves silly on the other end of the line. There were other, non-police station noises in the background too. A song he recognized—Boys & Girls by Alabama Shakes—on a jukebox, men and women talking, glasses clinking. Then Guillory’s laugh, low and boozy with a promise of sex in it, right in his ear as she came back on the line.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said.

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Not the Jerusalem.’

  He knew it was true before she answered, smelled the place coming down the line.

  ‘Uh-huh. Guess who’s sitting in your favorite seat, keeping it warm for you?’

  He was pleased he was stone cold sober, able to pick up on the subtle nuances in her voice, even with all the background noise. She wasn’t happy about him taking Martina out for a blast even though she asked him and he hadn’t even said yes.

  ‘You are.’

  It was the correct answer.

  It didn’t matter who was sitting where, giving Martina’s name would have been interpreted as that’s who he wanted it to be. For all he knew they might be standing on their heads in the corner.

  ‘Good boy. What do you want anyway? There are a couple of good-looking guys keep giving us the eye.’

  ‘Giving you the eye, you mean.’

  One of the benefits of being at the other end of a telephone line was that he didn’t need to try to keep the smirk off his face. She heard it in his voice anyway.

  ‘Okay, okay, don’t overdo it.’

  ‘Any other guys I shoul
d be worried about?’

  ‘Like the guy yesterday, you mean?’ There was a pause. He imagined her looking around the barroom. ‘Not anyone obvious, no.’

  Except he got a feeling in his gut that the pause had nothing to do with scanning the room for shifty-looking men pretending to read the sports pages, and more to do with deciding whether to tell him something.

  ‘Tell me, Kate.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing—’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘It was when I went to lunch with Ryder. I thought there might have been a car following us. A big black SUV with tinted glass. So I ran the license plate number through the system.’ She paused for a brief moment. ‘It doesn’t exist.’

  In the background Evan heard Martina tell her she was going to the ladies’ room. The interruption dispelled any sense of foreboding, of unseen dangers lurking in the shadows, that might have accompanied her words.

  ‘I must have copied it down wrong.’

  ‘Easily done,’ Evan agreed.

  Neither of them believed a word of it. Knew the other didn’t either. Someone with as many years on the force as she had doesn’t make that kind of rookie mistake. And if it had been him who suggested it while he was within reach, he’d have gotten a smack around the back of the head for his insolence.

  There was something else behind her reticence, too. He knew how much the abduction by the pedophile gang, the prospect of meeting her maker at the hands of their hired killer, had shaken her. Despite her best attempts to hide it. Being followed by a suspicious-looking vehicle with plates that didn’t exist would have had her worrying about a lot more than being busted back down to the ranks. That maybe next time when she wasn’t with someone else like Ryder . . .

  He was torn between two conflicting emotions. Regret that he’d reminded her, spoiled her night out with Martina Perez. And a retrospective relief that made him not feel so stupid about getting into the trunk of Martina’s cruiser.

  ‘I spoke to Abe Dalton,’ he said to get her back on track, then told her about the conversation.

  ‘So you’re going to speak to good ole Uncle Bill tomorrow, are you?’

  ‘That’s the plan. Unless he arrests me first.’

  ‘And remember, I’ve never heard of you if he does. And Martina says she hasn’t either.’

  With that the line went dead.

  Chapter 9

  ‘ARE YOU EVAN BUCKLEY, by any chance?’

  The guy doing the asking was in his early sixties, the question coming at Evan from under a large, nicotine-stained mustache. Tall and knob-boned, like all the spare flesh had been sliced off him, he had one hand resting on the roof of Evan’s car, the other one on his hip. They were on the shoulder of US-59 a mile or so after it turns east at the southernmost tip of Lake Casa Blanca. The previous evening Abe Dalton had told him that Cole Nix had been shot at a location directly across the lake from where they sat talking. So he thought he’d take a drive, see if he could find the place for himself.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Thought so.’ He thrust his right hand through the open window. ‘Bill Dalton.’

  Evan took Dalton’s hand in his and they shook, the grip firm and dry, the words to the Eagle’s Doolin-Dalton in his head once again.

  ‘How’d you know it was me?’

  Dalton gave him a you serious? look.

  ‘Abe called me last night, told me about you interrogating him out by the lake. He said you looked kind of interested when he pointed out where it happened. So when I saw this guy tooling down the highway at twenty peering in all the bushes as he drove past, I figured it must be you.’

  Evan glanced in his mirror at the police cruiser sitting on the shoulder twenty yards behind them, lights still flashing. The driver had remained in the car.

  ‘I heard you were retired.’

  ‘You heard right. I was just hitching a ride from Joe when we saw you.’

  Evan didn’t believe it for a minute. It didn’t make any difference either way. It saved him the effort of tracking Bill Dalton down. Dalton walked around to the passenger door, lifting his arm to wave Joe in the cruiser on his way.

  ‘I’ll show you where it happened if you like.’ He climbed in as Joe pulled out, pedal to the metal, blatted past. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  Evan waved his hand, be my guest. Dalton let the window down. They’d only gone a half mile when Dalton leaned around to look out of the rear window, glanced to the front again.

  ‘Do a U-turn here. Quickly!’

  Evan threw it into a wide U-turn across all four lanes.

  ‘Pull onto the shoulder.’

  Evan pulled onto the dirt shoulder and stopped.

  ‘Here we are.’ The laughter lines around Dalton’s eyes crinkled as he put his hand on the door handle. ‘You wanna go search for clues?’

  Instead of opening the door, Dalton leaned back in the seat, started half coughing, half laughing. Then he spat a big gob of phlegm out of the window.

  ‘Oops. Contaminating the crime scene.’

  They sat in silence for a long moment, Dalton’s mocking words still in Evan’s ears, making him feel stupid now.

  ‘I’m gonna stretch my legs even if you aren’t,’ Dalton said and got out.

  Reluctantly Evan did the same, knowing all he was going to get was more ridicule from Dalton. There wasn’t anything to see. He hadn’t expected to find anything, just wanted to get a feel for the place. And not under the mocking gaze of the man who’d overseen the investigation six years previously—or so he thought.

  Despite his lack of expectations, his own skepticism, the place resonated with him the moment his foot touched the ground. An irrational fear gripped him. As if he expected the devil himself to appear, to finish the tale that had brought him this far. A sudden gust of wind whipped up, had Dalton slapping at the hat on his head. And in it, Evan would have sworn he heard the echo of a man’s voice, a man busy doing the devil's work.

  Do the bitch first.

  Without thinking, his hand was in his pocket, his fingers closing around his Zippo lighter.

  Then Dalton’s voice, indistinct, muttered under his breath through the filter of the nicotine-stained mustache.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, son.’ He turned his head to spit noisily. ‘Except lose me my goddamn pension.’

  ‘I missed that. What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Dalton walked towards a small tree growing by the wire fence that ran along the edge of the shoulder. Evan thought he was about to make another sardonic comment along the lines of here’s the tree. He was wrong.

  ‘You want to tell me why you’re out here, stirring all this up?’

  Suddenly Dalton wasn’t joking anymore, his eyes hard under the brim of his hat. Evan didn’t say anything immediately, not sure how much to divulge. Seemed Dalton took it as a refusal to say anything at all.

  ‘You know this is a pretty stupid place for a drug deal or whatever it was.’ He stood on tiptoes, looking back the way they’d come. ‘Nope, you can’t see it from here because of the rise. I don’t know if you noticed the big pink building right before where we pulled you over . . .’ He paused to let Evan shake his head. ‘That’s the Webb County Sheriff’s Office. We could walk there in under ten minutes.’

  Evan nodded his agreement.

  ‘Stupid place for a drug deal, as you say. Or to shoot somebody.’

  Dalton showed him his teeth, made him feel like he’d wandered into the big cat enclosure at the zoo.

  ‘Handy it being so close if you wanted to ask a man some questions though, ain’t it?’

  So Evan had a choice. Answer Dalton’s questions here or answer them at the sheriff’s office. Looking at the hard lines of Dalton’s weathered face he knew he’d be answering them somewhere.

  ‘That’s the tree, is it?’ he said with a nod of his head.

  Dalton’s smile edged a little closer to his eyes.

  ‘The very on
e. Bit bigger than it was of course. You can touch it if you like. If you think it’d help. I hear some people hug them.’

  Evan walked over to the tree. Not to touch or hug it, or even to see if he could feel some further connection to Sarah having been in this place, more to give him something to do as he marshaled his thoughts.

  ‘You thought there’d been a woman at the scene,’ he said. ‘You found a button from a woman’s blouse.’

  ‘Yep. And that’s not all. We figured somebody had been kneeling in the mud with a second person lying across ‘em. Like their head was in their lap. Then they half carried, half dragged ‘em to the tree.’

  ‘There’s a possibility that was my wife. She disappeared six years ago, right about when this happened.’

  Dalton pushed his hat back on his head, scratched his closely-cropped scalp. It wasn’t the answer he was expecting.

  ‘Okay.’ He stretched the word out as he assimilated the information. ‘Where’s the connection? She know Cole Nix?’

  ‘I don’t think so—’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  Evan shrugged. He didn’t want to waste time trying to explain how six years apart and the stories he’d heard recently made him question whether he’d ever known her at all.

  ‘Okay. She didn’t know him. The thing is, I’ve met a guy who claims he was here that night when Nix was shot.’ He held up his hand to stop Dalton from interrupting. ‘I don’t want to get into how or why I think it was her. What matters is that I think it was. And the reason I’m here is to try to find out what happened afterwards, not particularly how she got here in the first place.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’

  Understandably, Dalton was more interested in potentially clearing up an unsolved homicide committed in the closing years of his tenure, rather than helping Evan find his long-lost wife. He didn’t give Evan much more than a split second before he was up on his toes again, pretending to see if the Webb County Sheriff’s office was visible from where they stood.

  ‘His name’s Carl Hendricks.’

  Dalton was silent for a couple seconds. Evan stared right back at him, hoping the lie didn’t show in his face. He didn’t know how this was all going to pan out. He might need Adamson’s help in the future. He’d be unlikely to get it if he sicked the Webb County Sheriff and the Laredo PD on him.