Redemption Road(97)

“You tell the warden you’re alive because of Eli Lawrence, and that it won’t be like this the next time. Tell him if I see him, I’ll make it personal. I’ll make it like it was for me.” The guard nodded, but Adrian wasn’t finished. “Daughter or not, the same thing goes for you. Do you understand?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

Adrian stood and studied Liz’s posture, her face. Her fingers were still white on the pistol grip, but he could live with that. What mattered was that she was there at all, that she’d come back when she didn’t have to, and that she’d exercised restraint where no other cop would have. It was a small thing in a large world, but in the dim light before the old station Adrian felt less alone than he had in a long time, not at peace but not destroyed, either. He wanted Liz to understand that, to know she meant something to him and that it wasn’t something small. “You have questions,” he said. “I’m not sure I can tell you everything, but I’ll try.”

“That would be nice.”

“Will you come with me?”

“What?”

“You said it yourself. I have to leave this place.”

“Where would we go?”

“It’s a secret,” he told her, and Liz looked down the darkened road. Secrets were dangerous; both of them understood that. But he could tell that she was hurting, and that her life, too, was at a crossroads. “Please,” he said; and she looked at him with those clear and telling eyes. “I’m tired of being alone.”

*

They took Elizabeth’s car because cops had found Preston, and the gray car would by now be flagged. Adrian directed her to a road that went east, and they rolled through the night in silence, small towns sliding past, the emptiness between them black and flat and whiskered with pine. “Tell me I’m not crazy,” Elizabeth said, once.

“Maybe the good kind,” he said, and that seemed to fit. She was alone with the man who’d saved her life. He was wanted for murder, and wind was in her hair and nothing else mattered. That was crazy, but she thought it needed to be. Everything else she loved was beyond her help. Channing and Gideon and Crybaby. They’d face prison or heal or die, and Elizabeth could affect none of it. Circumstance had stripped that power from her and left her here with this man, in this place of darkness and speed and screaming wind. She could touch the moment and the man beside her, and that was it. Her own wants were strange to her. Was she a cop or a fugitive, a victim or some peculiar, new thing?

What about the feelings in her chest?

She risked a glance, but Adrian’s eyes were closed, his face tilted up so wind lifted his hair and streamed it backward. She felt a moment’s connection; and that was the thing, she decided, the one thing she knew for sure. Adrian had a story, and she was going to hear it, to know what and why and if anything remained of what she’d once thought to love.

“Tell me the story.”

“When we’re not moving,” he said. “Once we’re still.”

“Okay.” She frowned and felt the road through the wheel, the hum of rubber, and the movement of old springs. “Then tell me one true thing.”

“Just the one?” Humor rose in his eyes, a flash quickly gone.

“It’ll do for now.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m happy that you came.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s the truth.”

She let him have the moment and the silence that followed. It was his game, and she’d agreed to play. Tomorrow, after all, was time enough for reason. Not to say they didn’t play things smart. They stayed off the main roads and watched for cops, passing like ghosts through one small town and then another. After a final, long stretch of empty road, he said, “This’ll do.”

He meant a low-rent motel, lit up in the night ahead. Elizabeth slowed the car, then turned into the lot and drove past a dozen old cars brushed with road dust and red neon. The motel was low and long, with an empty, concrete pool and lime stains seeping from the mortar. “What town is this?”

“Does it matter?”

They were on the edge of something small, but there were a hundred towns like that in the coastal plains, some of them wealthy, most of them poor. This felt like the latter. “Get us two rooms.” Elizabeth parked in front of the office, dug some bills from her purse, and handed them over. “Try for something in the back, preferably at the far end. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Adrian took the money but didn’t move. Pale blue doors stretched off to the left. Ten feet away, an ice machine rumbled and clanked. “Where are you going?”

“Do you trust me?”

He looked at the motel, frowned.

“Twenty minutes,” she said, and waited until he got out of the car. When he was gone, she drove into town and found what she expected to find: silent streets and shuttered buildings, small men passing bottles in brown paper bags. There were no restaurants, so she bought beer and food at a convenience store that smelled of fried chicken and sweet tobacco. When she took change from the woman behind the counter, Elizabeth asked, “What town is this?” The woman named the town, and Elizabeth visualized a map in her head. Halfway to the coast. A lot of empty space and skinny roads. The name sounded right. “What’s here?”