The Road To Deliverance

by James, Harper

  Are you going to do anything about what happened to Sarah?

  They were avoiding talking about the other passage in the note, the one that was hanging in the air between them. Because all they’d done so far was talk about the easy part, the part that didn’t relate to him.

  So she dived in.

  ‘That other passage . . .’

  He picked the note up again, re-read the part she was referring to.

  As if there was a chance that he’d forgotten the gist of it.

  And because he liked to put himself through the wringer at every opportunity.

  I don’t know who is reading this. If you are somebody that I knew from before, you’re probably asking yourself how come I remember what happened here, in this house, and not the rest of my life. And all I can tell you is, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the impotent rage I feel at the injustice of Cole’s death found a soul mate in my subconscious in the guilt over Jack. Who knows? I don’t. And you’re probably asking yourself why I didn’t do more to find out who I am, get back to my old life. I can’t tell you that either. Maybe I can’t face going back to a life where everybody knows me and I don’t know them. That doesn’t sound real to me. Maybe I will one day.

  He stopped reading, pinched the skin between his eyebrows as if trying to staunch the onset of a headache. She could’ve told him there was a lot worse coming his way than a throbbing head. Because she knew he’d paused at the worst part.

  Sarah had known it too.

  These next words are the most difficult words I have ever had to write. Jay has told me that I am married. If you, the person reading this, are my husband then I am so sorry because I have no recollection of you. Jay also told me that one time I shouted a name in my sleep. Evan. I don’t know if that was my husband. I hope it isn’t you reading this. All I can say is that I am so sorry for all the pain I must have caused you. I can’t do this anymore.

  She knew when he’d stopped reading. Because his eyes were closed. And he wasn’t breathing. She held her own breath for fear that if she exhaled too strongly, he’d shatter into a million broken pieces. She wanted to scream at him, why did you make yourself read it again? What would be the point? She might as well ask him, why are you Evan Buckley?

  Neither of them knew what to say, so she bit her tongue, gave him time. When he did speak again, it wasn’t anything she was expecting.

  ‘Jay lied to me. He said he’d never heard my name before.’

  ‘He was only trying to soften the blow. He didn’t know what Sarah had written, that you’d find out anyway.’

  ‘Makes you wonder what else he was lying about.’

  ‘What’s that mean? Back to square one, disregard everything he told you?’

  He waved the note in her face instead of answering the question.

  ‘This sounds like she didn’t expect to come out of it alive. All that stuff about I can’t stop until they stop me.’

  She saw where he was going with it now, wasn’t surprised. He couldn’t change who he was.

  ‘Well, she did stop,’ he went on, ‘so they must have stopped her.’ He jabbed his thumb at the black SUV sitting next to them. ‘They’ve got all the answers. Whoever they are.’

  ‘We’re not going back to that house.’

  He patted the air, calm down.

  ‘Not those two, the people they work for.’

  ‘So you are going after them. Suddenly it is your problem.’

  ‘You mean our problem. Don’t forget, they threatened you too.’

  She wasn’t about to forget. She’d been threatened a lot more recently than he had too, the threat that the same thing would happen to her as had happened to Sarah.

  He leaned away from her, looked her up and down.

  ‘I’d eat you if I was a fish.’

  ‘What? Only if you were a fish?’

  He took another, longer look.

  ‘Well, maybe—’

  ‘Evan! What the hell are you talking about, you idiot?’

  He grinned sheepishly. Whether for assuming she was able to read his mind or for what he was about to say wasn’t clear.

  ‘Bait.’

  She mouthed the word, her face suggesting she wasn’t happy with the feel of it, might spit it out again.

  ‘Not just you. Me too. We need to give these people a poke, see if we can’t get a response.’

  She laughed out loud, couldn’t help herself, at the sight of the black SUV parked alongside them, visible through the window behind his head.

  ‘You don’t think we’ve already done that? Beaten up two of their guys, stolen their vehicle sort of poking.’

  ‘Uh-huh, that’s a start. I just know we can do better than that.’

  He pulled his phone out, opened his Twitter account, started typing. She leaned over to see.

  ‘Cole Nix’s dog tag found hidden in derelict house. Two men injured . . .’ She read it aloud as he typed, looked up at him sharply before she reached the end. ‘You’ve got to take the last part out.’

  ‘What part?’ Mr Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt said.

  ‘You know what part. Take the ha ha! out.’

  ‘That’s the best bit. The whole idea is to get their attention.’

  He hit tweet before she could grab the phone.

  There’s attention and there’s attention, she thought to herself as the tweet pinged away into the ether on its mission to hunt out and bring down the mother of all shitstorms onto their heads.

  Chapter 60

  THEY WERE SITTING in Evan’s office when they came for them. Evan was seated behind his desk in his executive swivel chair. Guillory sat on a hard wooden chair at the side of the desk. Behind them, Tom Jacobson, the dentist from downstairs who owned the whole building, framed the shot, made sure he had both of them and the door beyond them in the viewfinder of the video on his phone.

  The man who called himself Smith came in first, took the single chair in front of the desk. He made a point of glancing around the room, even looked up at the ceiling. Then he looked past Evan at Tom Jacobson.

  ‘You know, Mr Jacobson, if Mr Buckley was my tenant, I’d make sure he looked after the place a damn sight better than he does. It’s a pigsty. I hope you’ve got a good security deposit in case he leaves suddenly.’

  Evan was impressed with the way Smith’s demonstration of the thoroughness of his homework had segued so easily into a threat. It was clear why he was the dog that ate first. The rest of the pack, the two men from the derelict house, had trailed in behind him. They stood either side of him, hands clasped loosely in front of them, tough bodyguard style. Trouble was, the gauze taped to the nose of the one Evan had headbutted let them down. That, and the way the other one kept running his tongue over his teeth as if there was something on them he couldn’t get off. It looked like he had a caterpillar crawling around his gums. Having your mouth stuffed with a rotten sock would do that to a person.

  ‘Did you bring my handcuffs?’ Guillory asked him. ‘I’ll be in trouble if I lose them.’

  He pulled them out of his pocket, threw them onto Evan’s desk. His mouth was turned down as if he still had the sock caught in there.

  ‘You won’t need them where you’re going.’

  ‘You’ve still got some sock stuck in your teeth.’

  Smith held up his hand to quieten them both, then turned his attention to Evan.

  ‘Have you got it here?’

  ‘Do I look stupid?’

  Guillory snickered which spoiled the professional front they were trying to portray, evened the two teams up a bit. Smith kept his face deadpan. Evan could see that as far as Smith was concerned, he was the dictionary definition of exactly that.

  ‘No tasers this time?’ he said.

  ‘Clearly that didn’t work last time. I thought we’d try appealing to the venal side of your nature this time. What is it that you want?’

  ‘How’s the video, Tom?’

  ‘Recording nicely, backing up to the cloud. What
ever that might be.’

  ‘Beats me too.’ Smith shared a look with Jacobson, aren’t we the dinosaurs. ‘But whatever it is, we can easily get access to it. You might as well switch it off. Or carry on if it makes you feel better. It makes no difference to me.’

  He turned back to Evan.

  ‘I repeat, what do you want?’

  ‘I want to know what’s on those encrypted files you’re so keen to get back.’

  Smith stared at him for a long moment. Then he stood up slowly, straightened the creases in his pants.

  ‘It appears I’ve had a wasted journey. Good luck with trying to crack the encryption. You can let me know how that goes next time we meet. Don’t worry, it won’t be long. And it will be under very different circumstances, I can assure you. You too, Ms . . . sorry, Detective Guillory.’

  ‘I thought that was Detective for now,’ she called after him.

  The words bounced off Smith’s back. Evan let him get halfway to the door.

  ‘I want to know what happened to my wife.’

  Smith stopped, turned, his eyebrows pinched together in confusion.

  ‘I’d have thought that was obvious. She discovered you can’t hold a gun to the government’s head and expect to simply walk away again.’ His face was a picture of pleasant helpfulness, happy to answer any and all questions. Then a spark of mock surprised realization crossed his face. ‘Oh. You mean specifically?’

  Evan played along, nodded.

  ‘Yes. Specifically.’

  ‘And if I tell you that, you’ll return the files that were stolen from us? And that will be the end of it?’

  ‘I was only interested in Cole Nix to the extent that he was connected to my wife. You tell me what happened to her, I don’t need to know about him.’

  They locked eyes for a long while, each trying to read the other. They both understood there was a degree of trust required from the other side. And neither of them was happy about it.

  ‘What happens,’ Smith said carefully, ‘if you don’t like what I tell you?’

  Evan took a deep breath, let it out slowly as he leaned back in his chair.

  ‘That already tells me I won’t like it.’

  Smith shrugged, that’s the way it goes sometimes.

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘At least you’re honest. And you want to know anyway?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Evan’s answer marked a watershed in the discussion. Smith’s shoulders relaxed. He sat down again, hitched up the knees of his pants as he did so. Because he could afford to relax, he held all the cards. If Evan didn’t like what he was about to hear, they’d simply revert to Plan B again and it would be tasers and sacks over the head all the way. Especially now Evan had the dog tag in his possession.

  ‘We may have overreacted, got off on the wrong foot—’

  ‘With the tasers, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, with the tasers—’

  ‘And the threats.’

  ‘And the threats, yes.’ Smith turned towards Guillory, gave her an apologetic smile now they were all behaving like grown-ups. ‘I want to give you a little background even if you’re not interested in Cole Nix per se. My predecessor was something of a maverick. He got results. Even if he liked to pursue his own agenda. Didn’t worry too much about the administrative details, getting prior authorization, that sort of thing. The end justifies the means.’

  Evan felt Guillory and Jacobson’s eyes on him, sensed the barely-suppressed smiles. If he looked at her, Guillory would laugh out loud. From what he said next, Smith’s homework was better than any of them had imagined.

  ‘That sort of thing might be acceptable in a small private investigator’s office’—he managed to choke back the words tin pot and then glanced around the room to make sure his point hadn’t been missed—‘but not in my department. As a result, he is no longer with us. He was responsible for the situation that resulted in Cole Nix’s unfortunate illness.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault is what you’re trying to say.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Evan couldn’t see why he was at such pains to distance himself from Cole’s illness. He’d already told him he wasn’t interested. Then Smith made it clear.

  ‘He was also responsible for authorizing the so-called accident that resulted in your wife losing her memory in an attempt to retrieve Nix’s dog tag.’

  Evan and everybody else in the room did the translation from weasel words to plain English.

  I wasn’t responsible for turning the last six years of your life into a living hell.

  Smith let his words sink in. Given his clearly-demonstrated background knowledge, he was fully aware of the implications of his words.

  ‘I can see now why you wanted to get that cleared up,’ Evan said eventually. He’d have liked to know if there’d been even one grain of truth in what Smith had said.

  ‘Personally, I would never have sanctioned something like that.’

  Guillory chose that moment to let out a disbelieving snort. Smith glanced her way, didn’t pursue it. He turned back to Evan. Suddenly he looked a lot more human than he had before. Perhaps it was the realization of how Evan’s life had been devastated. Perhaps he was just tired.

  ‘I’m sure you appreciate that I’ve already said more than I should have. Admitting the department’s culpability for past mistakes, telling you about the sort of attitudes that prevailed.’

  He waited for Evan to give a definitive acknowledgement before he continued. Everyone in the room understood why. There was only one reason for him to have said everything that he had.

  It was to pave the way for what came next. To get everyone in the right frame of mind.

  ‘I have to ask you one more time—are you sure you want me to continue?’

  Evan felt Guillory straining like a wild dog on a chain beside him. He could not believe she was still in her chair, not shaking Smith like a rag doll to make him spit it out. His mouth was dry. Nothing came out when he first opened it. He swallowed, a feeling like dirt travelling down his throat, making it ache.

  ‘Yes.’

  Smith stood up then. For an awful moment Evan thought he’d brought him this far for the sole purpose of leaving him twisting in the wind, one final punishment for sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Guillory thought so too. She was on her feet now, the man she’d cuffed and fed socks to between her and his boss.

  They were all wrong.

  ‘In that case,’ Smith said, ‘I want to show you, not tell you.’

  Chapter 61

  ‘WE’LL GET THAT CHANGED.’

  Evan barely heard Smith’s words, barely noticed the bone-crushing power of Guillory’s arm around him or the light rain blowing in his face. It wasn’t how he’d expected the end of his six-year search to be. Or maybe it was. He didn’t know. Because he was dead inside. That was wrong. He was nothing inside, which is much worse, a cold wind blowing through the empty places in him.

  Nor did it help that the inescapable, unrelenting draw of this place had dogged him from the moment they’d all trooped out of his office, down to the parking lot to set off on their mystery journey. He couldn’t remember, didn’t think two words had passed between Guillory and himself as they followed the black SUV. The growing sense of trepidation had spiked as they’d followed it through the imposing wrought-iron gates of the state psychiatric hospital, down the long driveway through an avenue of magnificent old trees. Nobody ever said people lacked a sense of their own importance back in the 1800’s.

  The feeling of dread ratcheted up another notch when they took a left fork in the road leading away from the front of the institution, followed it around the side of the impressive, if austere, building with its rows of equally-spaced small windows. If he could have found it in him, he’d have smiled then as he stared up at them, imagined the hospital principal, his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache quivering with pride, announcing at the grand opening t
hat every nutcase, sorry patient, has his or her own window. In order for them to see what they’re being deprived of. He doubted that part was in the speech.

  It’s amazing what the mind finds to amuse itself with in a desperate attempt to not think about what is actually taking place right now.

  When they stopped, it was as if he were in one of those little rooms. Peering out through the grimy window streaked with rain, watching himself climb out of the car on legs devoid of muscle or bone or ligament. Some inner strength, or perhaps it was Guillory’s firm arm, had propelled him to where he now stood, swaying gently.

  The end of his six-year journey.

  He stared without seeing, as in the respectful quiet the sound of somebody shouting carried clear and cold, at the name on the grave marker in front of him.

  Sarah Killinger.

  ‘We didn’t know her last name,’ Smith said. ‘We used the name of the man she was living with.’

  He didn’t say again that they’d get it changed. Evan didn’t know if he cared one way or the other. Whoever was in the ground at his feet wasn’t anyone he’d ever known. He was vaguely aware of Smith’s voice in the background, that same tone of voice that made his fingers flex, made him want to punch him in the mouth. Something about adding the date of birth and age too, they’d be in touch for the details.

  There was only one thing to say. Kate Guillory said it because it didn’t look like Evan would ever speak again.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She took her own life.’

  Smith’s voice was respectfully solicitous. Guillory reckoned he’d make a good living as an undertaker if they ever kicked him out of the secret service or whoever it was that he worked for.

  ‘How?’

  ‘She hanged herself. We didn’t think she was a suicide risk.’

  ‘Or what?’ Evan snapped. ‘You’d have strapped her to the bed? What kind of a place is this, anyway?’

  ‘It’s a hospital, what the hell does it look like? Given her condition—’

  ‘It doesn’t look like any hospital I’ve ever . . . what do you mean, her condition?’

  Something passed behind Smith’s eyes, surprise or perhaps worry, and then his composure was back in place, the solicitous tone replacing the irritation of a moment ago. And even though it was fast, Guillory saw it, even if Evan didn’t.