Redemption Road(104)

“Do I know you?” He was backlit by the sun, a grown man in cap and dark glasses. Something about him was familiar, but she was deep in the vodka, and the world was a comfortable blur.

“I don’t know.” He stopped five feet away, the car behind him still running. “Do you?”

A bell was ringing in the back of her mind. He was confident. She didn’t like confident.

“Are you alone here?”

She looked at his car, a thirty-year-old Dodge spitting blue smoke. Nothing was right. She felt it, now. The burble under the hood. The man who looked familiar but not really. “This is a cop’s house.”

“I know who lives here. I don’t believe she’s home.”

He wore work boots and a flannel shirt. The bell was ringing louder. Ninety-five degrees and a flannel shirt. “I can call her.”

“Go ahead.”

Channing dug the cell phone from her back pocket and managed six digits before the stun gun appeared in his hand.

“What’s that?”

“This?” He tilted it. “This is nothing.”

She saw dull teeth when his lips twitched, then a hint of profile as he checked the street on either side. Channing pushed another button. “It’s ringing.”

He took the bottom step.

She stood. “Don’t come any closer.”

“I’m afraid I must.”

She turned for the door, caught her foot on the last step, and went down hard. She touched her head and the fingers came back bloody.

“You have beautiful eyes.”

He took the final step and leaned above her.

“Very expressive.”

*

Channing woke in a car that smelled of gasoline and pee and dried-out rubber. It was the same car, the Dodge. She was beneath a tarp in the back, but recognized it from other cars she’d known, the way it ran rough and tilted on the curves, brakes grinding like metal on metal. Her head was jammed against gasoline cans, a greasy floor jack, and what felt like a cardboard box full of rocks. She tried to move, but plastic ties cut her wrists and ankles. That terror was sharp and real because she understood what that kind of helplessness meant.

Not the theory of it.

The reality.

It wasn’t supposed to happen again. She’d promised herself a million times. Never again. I’ll die first. But truth was different. It was hard plastic and gasoline, her blood in the carpet of a filthy car.

Then there was the crazy.

No church, no church …

He said it over and over, loud and soft and loud again. Springs crunched as he rocked on the seat, and she pictured hands pulling on the wheel, his back striking split vinyl hard enough to make the car rock. He was familiar, somehow. Had she seen him somewhere? The television? The newspaper?

She didn’t know; couldn’t think.

She twisted her wrists, and the plastic cut. She worked harder and felt pain sharp enough to slice her open. It felt exactly the same.

The wires …

The plastic …

Before she knew it, she was thrashing against the cardboard, the sides of the car. She felt as if she were screaming, but was not. In her mouth, she tasted blood.

“Please, don’t do that.” The craziness fell out of his voice. The words were soft.

She stopped. “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”

“Ours is not to wonder why.”

“Please…”

“Hush, now.”

“Let me go.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”

She believed him. It was the voice, the sudden, crazy calm. She held still as the car turned right, rose up, and thumped over railroad tracks. Metal rattled behind her, as the car angled back down. The tarp shifted, and through a crack she saw tree limbs and phone poles and arcs of black cable.

West, she thought. They were moving west.

But what did that matter? They were moving faster, now. No sounds of other cars, no billboards or signs. When the car slowed, it made another turn, then jolted over broken ground for what felt like miles. They were off the road, deep in the green. More metal clanked, and her head felt too small for the truth spinning inside it, that God had made this special hell for her, to be taken not once, but again. It couldn’t be coincidence, not twice. So swaying in the back of the car, lying horrified in the stink of it, Channing made herself a promise that, live or die, scared or not, it wasn’t going to be like the last time. She would kill first, or she would die. She swore it twice, and then a dozen times.

Two minutes later, a silo blotted out the sun.





27

Elizabeth drove through the morning fog and felt as stretched and thin as a character in an old movie. Everything was black and gray, the trees ghostly in the mist, and only the road gritty enough to be real. Everything else seemed impossible: the man beside her and the way she felt, the cool, damp air, and hints of swamp beyond the road. Maybe it was the silence or the invisible dawn, the sleeplessness and uncertainty, or the delusory nature of what she was doing.

“This is very hard for me.”

Elizabeth glanced right and knew Adrian was speaking of trust. They’d slept in separate rooms and woken to awkwardness and unexpected silence. He was embarrassed by what she’d learned, and she was undone by the memory of his skin. It wasn’t the tactile nature of it that haunted her dreams, not the ridged scars or the hard planes or even the resilience of it. She’d dreamed of minute tremors, and of the will it took to force that kind of stillness. She’d seen so many victims over the years, people ready to break or run or simply fold. But he’d stood perfectly still, only his eyes moving as she’d asked him to trust and then touched the most damaged parts of him. Those were the dreams that held her down, long visions of nakedness and heat and reluctant faith.