Corey smiled. “Wow. I couldn’t have made up anything better than that myself. That sounds perfect.”
“The truth tends to have that quality,” Otis said.
Corey left the house to return to his car. As he dashed through the rain, he heard a siren warbling in the distance, and a cold finger of fear slid down his spine. He reached the BMW and waited inside for a minute, foot poised on the gas pedal, ready to blast away from the curb if he saw flashing beacons.
The siren faded somewhere far away. He dragged his hand down his sweat-filmed face. If this continued much longer, he was going to wind up a basket case.
He veered around the corner as Otis was backing his truck out of the garage and onto the street in front of his house. Corey nosed the sedan into the vacated parking spot.
They met at the garage door and shook hands.
“Thank you so much, for everything,” Corey said. “You don’t realize how much you’ve helped me. I promise to pay you back as soon as I can.”
“Do not concern yourself about that, son,” Otis said.
“To put your mind at ease, I’m innocent-for this thing, anyway. You’ll see.”
Otis’s eyes glinted. “None of us is innocent, Brother Webb. We’ve all of us sinned every day, every one of us. But do we seek forgiveness for our sins? That is the question I submit to you.”
His incisive gaze cut to the depths of Corey’s soul, and Corey had the unsettling feeling that Otis knew everything he had done-every terrible, secretive deed. Corey turned away and gazed into the rain-swept evening.
“Listen,” Corey said, still not meeting his eyes, “when I first moved in with you, I never told you about what happened in Detroit. You knew I was in trouble, of course, but you didn’t know how deep. I-”
“I simply offered you a fresh start,” Otis interrupted. “The same as was once given to me when I encountered ‘deep trouble’ in the jungles of Cambodia. You don’t owe me an accounting of your past misadventures.”
Corey glanced at him. “But I have to tell this to someone. I’ve been carrying this around for years.”
“Confess it after you’ve come to terms with my question. Do we seek forgiveness?”
“You know I’ve never been religious, Reverend.”
“Forgiveness may not always begin with us petitioning God for His mercy. It may begin with us. Right here.” He tapped his heart with a thick finger. “Sometimes, we must forgive ourselves for our sinful acts before we are capable of accepting absolution from others.”
“I do believe church is now in session.”
“You know I can never resist a little preaching.” Otis clasped his hand again and gripped his shoulder. “Be blessed, Brother Webb. I’ll be praying for you.”
41
Sitting on the mattress with a wad of tissue she dampened with a dribble of the water from the bottle, Simone did her best to clean the bite wound on her ankle. Leon’s teeth had punctured the skin and drawn blood. She could only hope that it didn’t get infected.
What the hell had come over him? What did he mean about Corey betraying him? What had happened at the mall?
Most of all, she wanted to know when they would be released. Or would they now?
Ink-black shadows had pooled in the bedroom. It was still drizzling outside, the clouds dark and thick. She guessed that it was midevening by then.
Her need to see Jada had become an ache in her breast. If she had only knocked Leon out. .
She flung the tissue aside. What good did it do to worry about it? She had surrendered the pipe, her weapon of last resort. Now, she had nothing.
Head bowed between her knees, she dug her fingers into her hair, as if she could massage her brain cells. She ran the situation through her mind over and over, but came up with nothing, no way out. So long as she was handcuffed, and Leon had a gun, and his partner guarded Jada, she was at his mercy.
Her sense of powerlessness nearly surpassed her fear. She’d been raised to be an independent woman, fully capable of fending for herself in a hard world. Even though she’d been married for a decade, she retained a degree of self-sufficiency, and never let herself lean too heavily on Corey for things that she could do on her own. At least, that was how she had long viewed herself. But maybe she had come to rely on her husband more than she had realized.
Maybe her mistake was that, deep down, she’d trusted Corey to somehow pull them out of this, that she’d given up her own power in hopes of a rescue.
She snapped up as footsteps neared the doorway. By the time Leon came inside, she had gotten on her feet, jaws and hands clenched.
“Stay away from me,” she said.
Leon said nothing. He carried what appeared to be some sort of small, camping lamp. Eyes downcast, avoiding her glare, he placed the lamp near the mattress and sat on the floor beside it.
He switched it on. Soft golden light filled the room, pushing back the shadows.
She studied him carefully. A nasty purple bruise marked his temple; she could not resist feeling a spark of pride. Silent, gazing blankly at the wall, legs drawn up to his chest, shoulders rising and falling slowly, Leon appeared to be a defeated man.
She’d recognized in him the classic signs of hyperactivity, a symptom of bipolar disorder. He had been manic since yesterday, at least. Perhaps he had plunged into a depressive state.
But she was hesitant to draw that assessment. She’d also spotted in him the qualities of a psychopath, and psychopaths were nothing if not skilled at manipulating perception.
She slowly sat on the mattress, keeping several feet between them. He was quiet, looking into the shadows beyond the lamplight. Then he finally spoke.
“My mama. . she used to beat me,” he said, in an uncharacteristically soft, measured tone. “She said I looked and acted just like my daddy, and she hated the ground that man walked on and the air he breathed.”
Simone paused, mulling over her response. His subdued demeanor reminded her of clients who came in to her office, seeking help, but she was reluctant to assume the role of therapist with a man who had kidnapped her and her daughter-and who had attempted to rape her barely a half hour ago. Psychotherapy worked by the therapist establishing a dialogue that helped the client develop expanded awareness of irrational and harmful patterns of feeling, perception, and behavior, and for that breakthrough to occur, the therapist herself needed to have an open mind and spirit, but she had no interest whatsoever in helping Leon become more aware of anything. If she had the weapon and opportunity, in fact, she very well might have killed him.
But this could be a chance to establish a rapport with him that she could turn to her advantage. His mother, she believed, was his Achilles’ heel.
She said, “Your mother beat you because she said you were like your daddy? That doesn’t sound fair at all to me.”
Grunting, he twisted around and hiked up the back of his shirt, exposing his lean, muscled back. There were faint, dark, dime-sized marks scattered across his flesh, from the small of his back all the way up to and across his shoulder blades.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “She did these with her cigarettes when I was a too small to fight back. Pinned me to the bed and branded me with her Newports.”
“That’s terrible, Leon.”
“Mean, crazy bitch.” Sneering, he flipped his shirt down. “Like it was my fault that I reminded her of my old man.”