Redemption Road

by John Hart

“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.”

  15

  He liked morning light because it was so unused. Anything could happen with such soft, pink lips pressed upon the world, and he took a moment—just for himself—before dragging the girl from the silo. She fought harder than most, her skin filthy and her fingers torn bloody at the tips. She kicked and screamed, cuffs clanking on her wrists, both hands locked on a ridge of metal. He pulled until her hips rose off the ground, then sighed deeply and touched a strip of skin with the stun gun. When she went loose, he dropped her legs, t
hen stepped away to blot sweat from his face. Normally, the silo made them easier to work with. Fear. Thirst. This one was a fighter, and he thought that might be a good sign.

  When his breathing slowed, he rolled her onto a tarp, then removed her clothes and took his time cleaning her. This was a big part of it, and though she was beautiful in the light, he focused on her face instead of her breasts, on her legs rather than the place they joined. He cleaned dried blood from her fingertips and wiped her face with care. She moved once as the sponge slipped behind her knee, and then again when it touched the plane of her stomach. When her eyes fluttered, he used the stun gun a second time and after that moved more quickly, knowing how the light would harden and age her, how different she would appear if he waited too long. When her skin was scrubbed and dried, he used a silk cord to bind her ankles and wrists, then placed her in the car and drove to the church. Yellow tape sealed the door, but what did seals matter? Or police? Or worry itself?

  At the altar, he laid her down and used the same cords to strap her flat, cinching the legs tight, pulling the arms down until the shoulder bones jutted. He moved faster now because she was stirring. He covered her with white linen, folding it just so, making it perfect. By then his vision was blurred, both eyes so full and brimming it was as if no time had passed, and all the years between then and now were glass. Her lips were parted; breath moved. And while some deep part of him recognized the illusion, the weeping part embraced it with profound and terrible joy. He touched her cheek as the eyes fluttered and the pupils dilated. “I see you,” he said, then choked her for the first time of what he knew would be many.

  * * *

  It took a long time for her to die. She was crying; he was crying. When it was done, he went under the church, dragging himself to the worn spot beneath the altar, and curling in the earth as he’d so often done. This was his special place, the church beneath the church. Yet, even there he could not hide from the truth.

  He’d failed.

  Had he chosen poorly? Was he somehow mistaken?

  He closed his eyes until the grief passed, then touched one shallow grave after another.

  Nine women.

  Nine mounds in the earth.

  They bent around him in a gentle curve, and it troubled him to take so much comfort from their presence. He’d killed them, yes, but there was such lonesomeness in the world. He touched the earth and thought of the women beneath it. Julia should be here, too, as should Ramona Morgan and the girl dead above. It was their place as much as his, their right to lie quiet beneath the church where each heart, in its turn, had slowly and painfully ceased to beat.