The Road To Deliverance

by James, Harper

  She cut short his whoop of joy with a single, barked word.

  ‘Evan!’

  And he knew when he heard her voice that what she said next would be a matter of fact, plain and simple. That if, somehow, he managed to defy her on this, she would hunt him down if it took the rest of her life. And when she found him, he would be sorry, would regret the day he was born and every day that had ever followed it.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Chapter 55

  ‘WHERE WERE WE?’ Evan said, as if nothing had happened since he took his leave of Jay the previous evening.

  Jay grinned at him, full of the guilty camaraderie of two schoolkids waiting outside the Principal’s office.

  ‘Want another beer?’

  Evan contemplated the mess of empty bottles surrounding them on Jay’s porch and shook his head, even though his body screamed at him that he’d sure as hell earned one.

  ‘I was telling you how the place Sarah hid Cole’s dog tag had something to do with her Zippo lighter,’ Jay said.

  Evan nodded slowly, as if it was only now coming back to him.

  ‘That’s right.’

  It didn’t fool Jay.

  ‘What have you found out?’

  Then Evan told him the story Guillory had recounted. Unlike her, he got it out in one long, flat, emotionless monologue. Because if you let the first crack appear, who knows where it will end.

  ‘Jesus,’ Jay said, everybody’s stock response. He climbed wearily out of his chair like you’d expect a man who’d been suspended over a raging bull would, went inside the house. ‘I’m having one,’ drifted out from the direction of the kitchen.

  Evan called out that he still didn’t want one.

  ‘That explains a lot,’ Jay said, dropping back into his chair.

  Evan watched him sipping his beer, almost felt it sliding down his own throat, as he told him about the plan to go to the derelict house with Guillory, see if his hunch was right.

  ‘I want to come.’

  Evan told him no, two of them was more than enough. Jay accepted it without argument, perhaps because he was beaten down by the morning’s ordeal. Evan gave him a hard-eyed stare nonetheless. In case it wasn’t that at all.

  Jay squirmed under the intensity of it, held up his hands in surrender.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m not going to follow you.’

  ‘Finish telling me what happened to Sarah before I go.’

  Jay picked at the label on his beer bottle. Evan gave him time, praying that for once the worst hadn’t been saved to last. Then Jay stopped picking, started talking.

  ‘After we couldn’t open the encrypted files and she’d hidden the dog tag, the only thing left was Cole’s medical records, the reports the doctors had written.’

  As he talked Evan heard the change in his voice, a weary resignation creeping in. On the one hand, he could rest easy now, accept gracefully that the process of law would run its course and eventually Beau Layfield would be convicted and pay the price for the act of pulling the trigger, the physical action that killed his brother. He had to accept something else. And there was nothing graceful about it. He had to accept that even if Evan recovered the dog tag, it would do him no good. Nobody would be brought to account for the things that were on it. Because there are some things you just can’t beat.

  Hence the resignation in his voice as he told Evan how Sarah discovered that for herself. And how the only one to pay any kind of a price was her.

  ‘I already told you she was obsessed. It only got worse after she came back from hiding the dog tag.’

  Evan choked back a rising tide of bitterness, one he knew would always threaten to engulf him when he heard those words and the spiteful voices in his head supplied the alternative that would forever be inseparably linked with them.

  After she put something behind her.

  ‘She decided direct action was the way to go, harassing the doctors who’d diagnosed and treated Cole. She wanted them to go on the record, tell the world what had happened to him. Whose fault it was. Look what the big bad government did to our brave soldier boy. For a while she had a tame reporter following her around until even she got bored waiting for a story to happen. Because nobody would listen to her or talk to her.’

  ‘And the more that happened, the more determined she got?’

  They shared a wry smile.

  ‘You must have met her. Anyway, things got worse and worse. She trashed Kleinman’s car one time. He was the top specialist, the one she was after the most. He didn’t want to press charges so she got off with a warning. That time. He ended up paying for private security at his clinic. No problem, she hassled him at home instead. There was even a bust up with his wife in the street.’

  Evan listened without comment, the disbelief growing inside him. He was tempted to get out Sarah’s photo, thrust it in Jay’s face, is this really the woman we’re talking about? Because it didn’t sound like the woman he’d known, had shared his life with.

  Jay read his mind.

  ‘I know, it’s unbelievable. I asked the doctors about it. They said it was possible. Irrational behavior, mood swings, maybe even violence. She came out with a cryptic remark about making amends for past failures, washing the blood from her hands. When I asked her what she meant, she got so angry she was spitting nails.’

  They shared a look, now we know.

  Jay’s words that she’d gotten off with a warning, that time, begged the question that Evan forced himself to ask now.

  ‘What happened in the end?’

  Jay dropped his eyes. That’s not a fair thing to do after somebody asks that question. Not unless a police sniper really did gun her down in the street or something similar. Evan prepared himself for the worst, hoped Jay wasn’t about to pull his phone from his pocket, show him another video.

  ‘She got arrested.’

  He released the breath he’d been holding, relief and concern colliding inside him, the absence of the words he’d been sure Jay was about to utter stealing his voice momentarily.

  ‘What, here?’

  ‘No, in Maryland. At the military hospital where they’d been treating Cole. You can imagine how that went. She couldn’t tell them anything about herself beyond her first name. They thought she was refusing to tell them anything, pretending she’d lost her memory.’

  ‘Not the sort of attitude that gets you an early release.’

  ‘No.’

  An unspoken accusation hung in the air between them, turning Jay’s mouth down, hardening Evan’s eyes.

  What did you do about it?

  ‘There was nothing I could do.’

  Evan had an uncompromising attitude towards that.

  There’s always something you can do.

  ‘I went up there, wasn’t allowed to see her. The second time I tried I was told she’d been moved. Apparently, the location was classified information.’

  He met Evan’s eyes and it was as if a light had gone off in them, and Evan was able to see into them, to a dark unused corner of his spirit where a different Jay Killinger lived, one normally kept out of sight. One he wasn’t happy with himself either. So keep your holier-than-thou attitudes and condescending looks to yourself.

  ‘It became very apparent that the only way I might find out where they’d taken her was if I kept on pushing so hard, they’d have arrested me too and maybe taken me to the same place. That wouldn’t have gotten either of us very far.’

  It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened. The same people who had tried to take the dog tag away from Sarah had been pushed too hard, had then reacted swiftly and decisively.

  The same people he had prodded awake six years later.

  He knew then that he would have to meet them again, the man who called himself Smith, who had interrogated him, warned him off, after tasering him outside a restaurant.

  The difference was, the next time they met, he would know the location of what they wanted, hopefully would ha
ve it in his possession.

  But would they give him what he wanted in return?

  Chapter 56

  GUILLORY WAS WAITING for him when Evan landed in Portland, Maine at 9:15 p.m. She insisted on driving, said it’d be quicker to walk if he was behind the wheel. It took them less than fifteen minutes to get to Westbrook on the banks of the Presumpscot River where Sarah’s family had lived. They didn’t discuss what he’d learned in Texas on the way. Instinctively they both understood that the story he had to tell deserved to be told in one sitting. With liquid moral support on hand. But they held each other for a very long time before they set off.

  The house was on a quiet residential street leading down to the river. It wasn’t difficult to find amongst the cared-for properties surrounding it, paint flaking from the once-white clapboard siding, most of the windows broken, a jungle of overgrown vegetation slowly claiming it for its own.

  They’d been sitting in the car watching the derelict house for a quarter hour, each of them lost in their thoughts, when Evan broke the silence.

  ‘You’re not going to throw me out and drive off, are you?’

  It was a joke in very poor taste, referring back to the last time they’d been in a similar situation, watching a storage facility. That was the time she’d thought she saw the pedophile, Robert Garfield, with a young girl in his car. She’d kicked Evan out, given chase. It had ended in disaster, particularly for Evan who’d almost gotten killed when he went in alone.

  He couldn’t see her eyes when she turned slowly to look at him, felt her gaze turning him to stone nonetheless.

  ‘No. But I’m thinking of sending you in there on your own. Not afraid of the dark, are you?’

  Not me, just what I might find when the darkness is stripped away.

  ‘Come on, let’s go. There hasn’t been anyone here for twenty years . . .’ He paused, struck by the stupidity of his words. The reason they were here now was because Sarah had been there a lot more recently than that. ‘You know what I mean.’

  She handed him a heavy-duty tactical flashlight as they beat their way through the overgrown wilderness that used to be somebody’s front yard, kept one for herself.

  ‘Don’t lose it.’

  The stairs up to the porch were sound, barely creaked as they mounted them, feeling carefully with each footstep. They kept the flashlights off until they got inside the house, not wanting to advertise their presence. The front door had been kicked in so many times by kids and vandals, it wouldn’t shut properly behind them. Guillory flicked on her flashlight, panned around, picked out a wooden chair. She pulled it over, wedged it under the door handle. It was better than nothing, would give an early warning if nothing else.

  Because, despite their vigilance on the journey from the airport, neither of them would have put money on getting through the night without being joined by others who’d been searching far longer than they had.

  ‘Basement first?’ he whispered.

  ‘There’s no need to whisper,’ she whispered back.

  They shared a smile. It’s what you do in the dark, in a creepy old house. Anything else feels like you’re tempting fate.

  The door to the basement wasn’t where they were expecting it to be. It was balanced across two packing crates. At some stage the house had been occupied by drifters and derelicts, unaware or unconcerned about what had happened here to turn a family home into somewhere as cold and unwelcoming as a crypt. A filthy sleeping bag with its meagre filling ripped out lay under the makeshift table. So they quickly searched the whole house, a quick sweep of the flashlight into each room, to make sure it was empty.

  ‘Ladies first,’ he said as they stood staring down the open wooden steps that descended into the blackness of the basement.

  ‘Pussy.’

  She stepped forward. He stopped her, moved past her.

  ‘Only joking.’

  Somebody had ripped the wooden handrail away. He kept his shoulder to the wall as he made his way carefully down, played the flashlight beam ahead of him, step by step. She followed, so close her breath caressed his neck, warm and comforting, a stark contrast to the cold, stale air coming up to meet him. The smell of decaying rodent—at least that’s what he hoped it was—grew stronger as they descended.

  Two-thirds of the way down, when he was confident the stairs weren’t about to collapse under him, that there were no missing treads, he swung the flashlight beam up to illuminate the basement itself.

  Big mistake.

  That’s when he felt it, with one foot in mid-air. Something taut against his shin. Too late he realized what it was. A tripwire. He teetered, a fraction of a second away from falling. A sharp intake of breath, the flashlight beam weaving crazily as his arms flailed.

  Then a strong arm around his neck, choking him, Guillory yanking him backwards. She sat down hard, his full weight on top of her. The back of his head smacked into her nose, knocked her backwards. Lying on their backs, her arm still clamped around his neck, they bumped the rest of the way down the stairs. His legs passed under the tripwire, then it snagged on his belt buckle, stretched and twanged free. There was a loud crash from the other side of the basement as their combined weight pulled over whatever the end of the tripwire was tied to.

  They hit bottom, his heel knocking something out of the way. They both played their beams on the floor in front of his feet.

  ‘Jesus.’

  That was her, hissed loudly in his ear, as they struggled into a sitting position with him in her lap.

  ‘You think Sarah did that?’ he said.

  ‘You tell me, she’s your wife.’

  The floor in front of them, the area right at the bottom of the stairs, was littered with nail spikes—four-inch nails, hammered through old wooden shingles, carefully placed with the points facing upwards. Some of them lay on their sides, knocked over by the friends and relatives of the deceased mice and rats they could smell.

  Others, the ones Evan almost dived onto, were still upright, their sharpened points waiting for the unwary. His neck went clammy, her breath cold on it now, as his mind pictured what he’d narrowly avoided. He saw himself flying through the air, not knowing what was waiting for him at the bottom, expecting a banged head or a twisted wrist as he hit a hard, concrete floor. Never imagining the reality—landing face or hands or knees first on four-inch nail spikes, knees shattered or eyes lost, maybe worse.

  ‘If it was her, she must really have hated the guys she thought were coming after her,’ he said.

  Neither of them said anything as they contemplated the horrific consequences if it hadn’t been the men who had been pursuing her, if it had been kids playing, exploring the spooky old house.

  ‘This is nice,’ she said, breaking the silence, moving her thighs and lap provocatively under him. ‘Except I think I’m supposed to be on top. I might be wrong, it’s a long time since I sat on a man’s lap.’

  He cleared the nearest spikes out of the way with a wide sweep of his foot, pushed himself off her. She squealed as he deliberately pushed down into her first, the undisguised pleasure in the sound incongruous in the circumstances.

  She played her beam over the spikes.

  ‘Couldn’t have you landing face-first on those. You’re ugly enough already.’

  He picked one of them up, ignored her.

  ‘Whoever it was, painted them black, too.’

  ‘Would Sarah have done that?’

  ‘A couple of days ago, I’d have said, no way.’ He shrugged. ‘Now? Who knows? Sounds like she was pretty messed up.’

  She took the spike out of his hand, inspected it, tested the point with her thumb.

  ‘Not as messed up as somebody landing on these.’

  They swept the room with the flashlights, hearts falling as they picked out the amount of junk, the number of hiding places. The family had cleared most of the furniture out of the rooms upstairs when they’d moved out. They’d left all of the junk. It wasn’t hard to understand. Why would y
ou come down here, to the place where your son blew his brains out, in order to pack up a bunch of stuff you hadn’t used in years? You wouldn’t. He was surprised they hadn’t flooded the whole damn basement with concrete.

  On the far side of the room an old filing cabinet lay on its side, the drawers pulled open. The tripwire glinted in the flashlight beams, tied to the handle of the top drawer. All kinds of home office clutter lay scattered on the floor.

  ‘Where to start,’ he said as much to himself as to her.

  She wasn’t listening. Because she’d seen it. And she knew. She flicked the beam across the room.

  ‘Over there.’

  At the far end there was a low beam, only four feet above the ground. Beyond that the ceiling stayed at that height, the room above lower than the rest of the house. A couple of old closets stood like sentries in front of the low opening, a three-foot-wide gap between them. A perfect secret den for a teenage boy. Somewhere to take his cute cousin Sarah for their secret games. A few tatters of yellow and black crime scene tape were still strung across the opening.

  They made their way towards it, washed the floor with their beams in case Sarah had set any more traps. There was nothing. Just faint footsteps in the thick dust and grime that covered the concrete floor. He went in first. He stood between the two closets, moved his beam around the space and over the ceiling until he was satisfied there was no final surprise. Then he ducked in all the way. For him it was nothing more than a low space, maybe six by eight feet, that made his back ache as he bent nearly double. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Sarah, coming back here. How long had she stood outside where Guillory stood now? Telling herself she had to do it while her whole being screamed at her to turn and run, find another hiding place.

  ‘Make room,’ Guillory said, pushing in behind him.

  It was too uncomfortable for him to stand. He dropped to his knees, sat on his heels. She did the same, the two of them facing each other.

  ‘It’d give you claustrophobia,’ she said.

  ‘It did. I never knew why.’