Redemption Road(95)

“Faircloth Jones. Eighty-nine, I think.” Doors slid open. The gurney clattered as they rolled him inside. “I don’t know his next of kin or emergency contact.”

“Any allergies? Medications?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I need to know more about what happened.”

The doctor was confident and sure, Elizabeth the opposite. “I think he was tortured.”

“Tortured? How?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

The physician scribbled a note as the stretcher rolled. “And, you are?”

“Nobody.” She stopped at a second set of sliding doors. “I’m nobody.”

He didn’t argue. There was too much to do, too many ways a man that age could die. “Room four!” he yelled.

Elizabeth watched them go.

When she returned to her car, she slipped behind the wheel and felt how the nurses stared after her. The doctor may not have recognized her, but others did. Would this make the papers, too? Angel of death. Tortured lawyer. For an instant she cared, but only for that instant. She got out of the car and walked back inside, approaching the first nurse at the first counter. “I need a phone.”

The nurse pointed, terrified.

Elizabeth crossed the gleaming floor and lifted the courtesy phone from its cradle. Her first instinct was to call Beckett, but he was at Adrian’s farm—she knew it. Instead, she called James Randolph.

“James, it’s Liz.” She eyed the nurse, the security guard, who looked just as nervous. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me everything.”

*

James Randolph had never been shy or slow. The phone call took less than a minute, so that when Elizabeth left for Brambleberry Road, she knew everything Randolph did about the grim, dark underbelly of her father’s church. It turned the world upside down.

New victims linked in death.

More bodies in the place she’d learned to pray.

She saw it as if she were there, but Randolph’s final words haunted her more deeply.

The whole world’s looking for him, Liz.

Every f*ckin’ body.

He was talking about Adrian, and why not? Fresh bodies on the altar. Nine more under the church. Elizabeth had to ask herself again how much she trusted him. She said it was an easy question—that he was still the same man and that nothing real had changed. But she saw Preston’s face when she closed her eyes and wondered if, even once, he’d begged for mercy.

Every f*ckin’ body.

Elizabeth turned onto Brambleberry Road and checked the pistol on the seat beside her. It was not the Glock she preferred, but when she pulled behind the old gas station and got out of the car, the gun went with her. She told herself it was smart, and only reasonable; yet the safety moved under her thumb. It was the silence and the darkness, the still trees and the scrub and the gray car bleeding into night as it sat under a tree at the back of the lot. The place had been old when she was a kid and was ancient now, a dirty cube on an empty road, a scratch mark that stank of chemicals and rust and rotting wood. Elizabeth understood why Adrian chose it, but thought if it came to dying, the old gas station was as good as any place she’d ever seen. Maybe it would open in the morning, and maybe not. Maybe a body could lie beside it forever, seasons rolling one across the other until the old bones and concrete looked like a single patch of broken pavement. That’s exactly how the place felt. As if bad things could happen here. As if they probably would.

“Adrian?”

She stepped over shattered glass and cinder block to where a sliver of light spilled through a crack at one of the rusted doors. Up close, she saw a pry bar and twisted metal. The lock was broken.

“Hello?”

No one answered, but she heard water running beyond the door. Opening it, she saw a single bulb above a grimy sink and a metal mirror. Adrian stood over the smudged porcelain, washing his hands in water that ran red. His knuckles were swollen and split, and Elizabeth felt her stomach turn as he pulled a bit of tooth from beneath the skin and dropped it in the sink.

“It’s just what prison does. It’s not who I am.”

She watched him work more soap into the cuts and tried to put herself in his shoes. How would she fight if every fight were to the death? “Crybaby didn’t deserve what happened to him,” she said.

“I know.”

“Could you have stopped it?”

“You don’t think I tried?” He was looking at her in the mirror, his face blurred in the filthy metal. “Is he alive?”

“He was alive when I left him.” Adrian looked away, and she thought she saw something soft. A blink, maybe. A flicker. “What did they want with you? Those guards?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s personal.”

“And if Crybaby dies? Is that personal, too?”

He straightened and turned, and Elizabeth felt the first real fear. The eyes were so brown they were black, so deep they could be empty. “Are you going to shoot me?”

Elizabeth looked at the gun, forgotten in her hand. It was pointed at his chest, her finger not on the trigger, but close. She tucked it away. “No, I’m not going to shoot you.”

“May I be alone, then?”