Redemption Road(11)

“Can we discuss something else?”

“I think you’re lying about what happened in the basement. How’s that for something else?”

Elizabeth looked away.

“Your timeline’s off, Liz. The state police aren’t buying it, and neither am I. The girl is squirrelly with details, which makes me think she’s lying, too. You’re missing an hour. You emptied your weapon.”

“If we’re finished…”

“We’re not.” Dyer leaned back in his chair, unhappy. “I called your father.”

“Ah.” A world of meaning was in the sound. “And how is the Reverend Black?”

“He says the cracks in you are so deep God’s own light can’t find the bottom.”

“Yeah, well”—she looked away—“my father has always had a way with words.”

“He’s a good man, Liz. Let him help you.”

“Attending my father’s service twice a year doesn’t give you the right to discuss my life with him. I don’t want him involved, and I don’t need help.”

“But, you do.” Dyer put his forearms on the desk. “That’s what’s so heartbreaking. You’re one of the best cops I’ve ever seen, but you’re a slow-motion train wreck, too. None of us can look away. We want to help you. Let us help you.”

“May I have my shield back or not?”

“Get your story straight, Liz. Get it straight or these state cops will eat you alive.”

Elizabeth stood. “I know what I’m doing.”

Dyer stood, too, and spoke as her hand reached for the door. “You drove by the prison this afternoon.”

She stopped with one hand on the knob. When she turned, her voice was cold. He wanted to talk about tomorrow and the prison. Of course, he did. Just like Beckett. Just like every cop out there. “Were you following me?”

“No.”

“Who saw me?”

“It doesn’t matter. You know my point.”

“Let’s pretend I can’t read minds.”

“I don’t want you anywhere near Adrian Wall.”

“Adrian who?”

“And don’t play dumb with me, either. His parole came through. He gets out in the morning.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

But she did, and both of them knew it.





3

It was a paradox of life behind walls, that where any day could end in blood, every morning contrived to start exactly the same. A man woke and, for two beats of his heart, didn’t know where he was or what he’d become. Those few seconds were magic, a warm flicker before reality walked across his chest, the black dog of remembrance trailing at its feet. This morning was no different from any other: stillness, at first, then memories of all the things that came with thirteen years in a box. Moments like that were bad enough for most.

For a cop, they were worse.

For a cop like Adrian, they were unbearable.

He sat in the dark of his bunk and touched a face that no longer felt like his own. A finger sank into a nickel-size depression at the corner of his left eye. He traced the fracture line to his nose, then across to where long scars gathered in the hollow of his cheek. They’d healed white, but prison stitches weren’t the greatest. If time inside had taught him one thing, though, it’s what really mattered in life.

What he’d lost.

What he had left.

Stripping off rough sheets, he did push-ups until his arms shook, then stood in the dark and tried to forget the feel of blackness and quiet and memories scratched through to white. He’d come inside two months after his thirtieth birthday. Now, he was forty-three years old, scarred and broken and remade. Would people even recognize him? Would his wife?

Thirteen years, he thought.

“A lifetime.”

The voice was so light it barely registered. Adrian caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and found Eli Lawrence in the darkest corner of the cell. He looked small in the dimness beyond the bunk, his eyes dull yellow, his face so dark and seamed it was hard to tell where the old man ended and blackness began.

“He speaks,” Adrian said.

The old man blinked as if to say, These things happen.

Adrian closed his eyes, too, then turned his back and wrapped his fingers around metal bars so warm they seemed to sweat. He never knew if Eli would speak or not, if the yellow eyes would open or blink or stay closed so long the old man faded into the dimness. Even now, the only noise in the cell was Adrian’s breath and the sound his fingers made as they twisted, slick and wet, on the metal. This was his last day inside, and dawn was gathering beyond the bars. Between there and the place he stood, the hall stretched gray and empty; and Adrian wondered if the world outside would feel just as blank. He wasn’t the man he’d been and had few illusions about the fact. He’d lost thirty pounds since conviction, his muscles hard and lean as old rope. He’d suffered inside, and while he hated the prisoner’s lament—that I’m not responsible, that it was not my fault—Adrian could point at other men and say, This scar came from him, that broken bone from the other. Of course, none of that mattered. Even if he screamed from the tower that it was the warden who did this or a guard who did the other, no one would believe him or even care.