Redemption Road(78)

*

As hard as Elizabeth drove the car before, she pushed it to breaking now, turning off the crumbled road and onto a state highway, cars slashing past as the needle touched 105. The wind made so much noise she could barely think. But what could she think about anyway?

The girl wasn’t answering.

Screams. A dead phone. But, she’d heard other things, too. Hard voices and shouting and breaking wood.

Elizabeth dialed the house, but the line was off the hook. She tried the girl’s phone again, but that failed, too.

“Damn it!”

Three tries. Three fails.

Desperate, she called Beckett. “Charlie!”

“Liz, where the hell are you? What’s that noise?”

She could barely hear above the wind. “Charlie, what’s happening?”

“Thank God. Listen. Don’t go to your house!” He was yelling to be heard. “Don’t go home!”

“What? Why?”

“Hamilton and Marsh…” She lost a sentence or two, then he was back. “Word just hit the street. They have an indictment, Liz. Double homicide. We just found out.”

“What about Channing?”

“Liz…” Static. “Don’t…”

“What?”

“State police locked us out—”

“Charlie! Wait!”

“Don’t go to your f*cking house!”

Elizabeth hung up in numb disbelief. It wasn’t the warrant or that she’d be arrested. State cops were at her house, and so was the girl who’d saved her life, Channing, who was eighteen and hollowed out and liable to confess anything. Already, five minutes had passed.

“Too much time.”

She pushed the old car until the needle touched 110, then 115. She watched for slow movers and cops; squeezed the wheel hard and said her first real prayer in a dozen years.

Please, God …

*

But, it was over by the time she got there. She saw it from a block out: no lights at the house, no cars or cops or movement. She came hard anyway, locking up the brakes and rocking into the drive.

“Channing!”

She took the yard at a run, saw tire tracks in the grass, and the door broken in its frame. On the porch she hit the door with a shoulder, felt it rock on a single hinge. Inside, she found out-of-place furniture, dirty footprints, and the bathroom door, blasted off the hinges, too.

She was too late.

That was real.

She checked the house, anyway. Bedrooms. Closets. She wanted to find the girl, hidden maybe, or tucked away. But she was kidding herself, and she knew it. The warrant wasn’t for Channing, but they had a subpoena, and Hamilton and Marsh would use it, were probably talking to her now.

What happened in the basement?

Who pulled the trigger?

In a fog, Elizabeth stepped outside and wedged the door shut behind her. They had the girl, and the girl would talk. Whether from guilt or na?veté or the desire to help Elizabeth, Channing would eventually break.

Elizabeth couldn’t let that happen.

The shooting was too political, too racial. They’d burn her down to make an example.

“I saw it happen.”

The voice came from beyond the hedge, and Elizabeth recognized the neighbor who lived to the right, an elderly man with a ’72 Pontiac station wagon he polished on weekends as if it were made of something more precious than steel and paint. “Mr. Goldman?”

“Must have been twenty cops. Assault rifles and body armor. Goddamn Nazis.” He pointed and ducked his head. “Sorry about your door.”

“There was a girl.…”

“A small one, yes. Two tough old bastards hauled her out.”

“You saw her?”

“Hard to miss, really, hanging between them like she was, all bright-eyed and flushed and kicking like a mule.”

*

For a hard flat second Elizabeth didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t go to the station with a murder warrant on her head. It was beyond even Dyer to help her, now. Hamilton and Marsh had their indictment. That meant they’d pick her up and drop her in a hole. Even if she won at trial—which was doubtful—she’d be vilified by the national press, picked apart, and stripped to her bones. It was an angry nation and she was another white cop on the wrong side of a shooting. It couldn’t play otherwise, not with fourteen bullet holes in the floor.

And that was best-case scenario.

Worst case, Channing would talk. That meant time mattered, and not the kind that would be counted in days.

Hours, she thought. Minutes.

Would the girl even fight?

Elizabeth’s paralysis snapped like a glass rod. She started the car and had Channing’s father on the line before she reached the first turn. He would move heaven and earth, but his lawyers were in Charlotte. That would take time. So, she went the only place that made sense: around the city, across the river. Box bushes took paint off the car, but she found the old lawyer sitting in the same chair on the same porch. He offered pleasantries, but she shut him down before he could rise from the chair. “No time, Faircloth. Just listen, please.”

She started too fast, too shaky.

“Slow down, Elizabeth. Catch your breath. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. Sit down. Tell me from the beginning.”