Redemption Road(63)

“Thank you, Eli. Thank you for coming.”

Don’t thank anybody but yourself, son. This little delusion is all yours.

But Adrian didn’t believe that, entirely. “First day in the yard. You remember?” Adrian clambered over a fallen tree, then another. “They were going to kill me for being a cop. You stood them down. You saved my life.”

More years on the inside than I could easily count. There were still a few who listened to me.

Adrian smiled at the understatement. There were men alive today who would kill or die for Eli Lawrence. Dangerous men. Forgotten ones. Until the day he died, the old man had been a voice of wisdom in the yard, an arbitrator, a peacemaker. Adrian’s life was not the only one he’d saved.

“It’s good to hear your voice, Eli. Eight years since I watched you die, and it’s still good.”

You’re basically just talking to yourself.

“I know that. You don’t think I know that?”

Now, you’re bitching at yourself.

Adrian stopped where the river widened. People would find it strange, how he talked to a dead man. But the world had grown strange, too, and every sound reminded him of that: the slide of the river, the scrape of pines. He’d known this land as a boy, fished thirty miles in either direction, walked every trail and climbed a hundred trees that hung above the water. How could it be so foreign, now? How could it feel so wrong?

’Cause you’re a goddamn mess.

“Hush now, old man. Let me think.”

Moving down the bank, Adrian slipped his hand into the river. That was real, he told himself, and unchanged. But the sky felt too broad, the trees too tall. Adrian climbed back to the trail and tried to ignore the ugly truth, that only he was different, that the world spun as it always had. He walked and considered that and realized, once, that he’d been standing still long enough for the moon to rise. He held out a hand and watched light spill through his fingers. It was the first moonlight he’d seen in thirteen years, and thoughts of Liz came, unbidden. Not because she was beautiful—though she was—but because the same moon had risen on the night he’d found her at the quarry, and then again on the night she’d made her first arrest. He imagined her in the light. The moon. Her skin.

Jesus, son. The first pretty woman you see …

Adrian laughed, and it the first honest laugh he could remember.

“Thank you, Eli. Thank you for that.”

You’re still talking to yourself.

“I know I am.” He started walking. “Most of the time, I know.”

The river bent west, and the trail with it. When it twisted again a mile later, Adrian turned away from the low ground and worked his way upslope until he found a dirt road that trended in the right direction. That was good for half a mile. When it, too, turned away from his path, Adrian crossed a band of woods, then a farm with a small, white house, brightly lit. A dog barked twice from the porch, but Adrian knew how to stay quick and quiet, and the night swallowed him before the dog got a good scent. Beyond the farm was a road that took him to an intersection three miles farther. Left would take him into the city. Right would lead to a subdivision on the flats beneath the mountain.

Adrian went right.

Francis Dyer lived right.

When he got to Dyer’s house, he checked the name on the mailbox, then rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he peered through the window, saw lights inside and things he remembered: pictures of Dyer as a rookie and the day he made detective, leather furniture and Oriental rugs, rowed guns that looked the same as the last time they’d gone hunting together as partners and friends. That was hard to see because it reminded Adrian of laughter and hot sun, of quiet competition and bourbon drinks and dogs that lay panting and wet when the birds were rowed on the tailgate and the last gun put away in the back of the old truck. It drove home the sad fact that he and Francis had been friends, once; and it reminded him of the trial and disappointment, and of the unpleasant truth that had split them apart.

Everything Francis had said at Adrian’s trial was true. Julia had a face that could drive a man to do bad things, and Adrian was, in fact, obsessed. He’d fallen so hard and fast that even now the memory dizzied him. But, it was more than the face. It was visceral, electric, needful. They’d both been unhappy, and their first meeting delivered a shock of energy so strong it could have lit the city. Recognition. Desire. The need that even now he felt. They’d fought it, and not just because they were married. Her husband worked for the county and was helping with an embezzlement case that ran into the six figures. Money had been disappearing for years: $5,000 here, $10,000 there. The total was $230,000 at best count. Real money. A serious case.

After a week, it barely mattered.

After a month, he was lost.

Adrian slumped on the porch, feeling her death as if it had happened days ago and not years.

“Ah, Julia…”

It had been so long since he’d allowed the luxury of remembrance. It was hard in prison because it made him soft when he could not afford it. Besides, she was dead, and death was forever. So, where did that leave him now? Out of prison and alone, sitting before an empty house and suddenly full to bursting.

Thirteen years!

They filled him up, all those years, all the suffering and pain, the hours to think of things he’d lost and pieces that didn’t fit.

“Francis!”