“Meet me there.”
Elizabeth took a final look at the scene, at beams of yellow light and the two guards, down and broken. “Are they going to die?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Elizabeth struggled with the answer. Adrian seemed cold and untouchable and every bit a killer. He pointed the gun at Preston, and she hesitated: lawyer in the back, half-dead prison guard bubbling in the dust. Would Adrian do it? Pull the trigger? She honestly didn’t know.
“Time’s wasting, Liz.”
Shit.
He was right. Only the lawyer mattered. “Brambleberry Road,” she said. “Thirty minutes.”
Elizabeth reversed down the drive and sensed Adrian’s stillness as he watched her go. She braked at the tarmac and in a swirl of dust saw him dragging Olivet by the collar, over the gravel and into the gloom, heading for the same gray car.
She waited for a shot that didn’t come.
Behind her, the lawyer was dying.
Adrian propped Olivet against the front tire, just behind the burning lights. He was hurt, but nothing like Preston. That meant a broken orbital and bloody nose. Maybe a cracked rib, based on the way air whistled past his teeth. Adrian had seen worse, experienced worse. He put the muzzle against the guard’s heart and used just enough pressure to keep him upright. The man was crying.
“Please, don’t kill me.”
The words put an unfeeling twist on Adrian’s face. How many times had he begged, only to be cut again, beaten again? He thumbed the hammer and thought about blowing Olivet’s heart through an exit wound the size of a grapefruit.
“I have a daughter.”
“What?”
“A daughter. She’s only twelve.”
“That’s supposed to save you?”
“I’m all she has.”
“You should have thought about that before.”
“I’m sorry-”
“Don’t.”
“You don’t know the warden. You don’t understand.”
“You don’t think I know the warden?” The night darkened as Adrian loomed above the guard. “His face. The sound of his voice.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Were other prisoners killed? Others besides Eli Lawrence?”
“I’m sorry about the old man. He wasn’t supposed to die. None of it was supposed to be like this.”
“Yet, it is. You tortured Eli. You tortured me.”
“I did it for my daughter. We needed money. Child care. Medical stuff. I was going to do it just the once, one time, and that was it. But they wouldn’t let me go. The warden. Preston. You don’t think I have nightmares? That I hate my life? Please. She’s everything. She’ll be all alone.”
A girl. Twelve years old. Did that make a difference? After all he’d suffered, Adrian had two of the five men responsible and could cut the number to three. Preston dead. Olivet, too. That would leave the warden and Jacks and Woods. If he moved fast enough, he could kill them, too. Tonight. Tomorrow. Temptation was a burn, and though Eli chose this time to be silent, Adrian knew what Eli would say if he decided to speak.
Let the hate go, boy.
Freedom. Fresh air.
That’s enough.
It’s everything.
Here was the brutal irony. Adrian had never killed anyone. Not as a cop, not in the yard or on the cellblock. He’d pulled thirteen hard years and had more reason than most to kill a whole host of men. But, he felt the old man out there, the yellowed eyes and patience, the simple kindness that had kept him alive when any other man would have lain down and quit.
Don’t do it, son.
But, the gun didn’t move. It pressed so hard against Olivet’s chest Adrian felt the man’s heart beat against the metal.
“Please…”
The trigger tightened under Adrian’s finger. It was too much, too many years. It had to happen, so the trigger had to move. Olivet must have seen the decision in Adrian’s eyes, for his mouth opened, and in the stillness of that final moment, of the long, hard second that would be his last, a noise rose in the darkness beyond the field.
“Sirens,” Olivet said. “Police.”
Adrian turned his head and saw lights far away. They were blue and thumping and moving fast; but he had time if he wanted it. A minute. Ninety seconds. He could pull the trigger; take the car.
Olivet knew it, same as him. “Her name is Sarah,” he said. “She’s only twelve.”
Elizabeth passed the cops two miles over the bridge, but didn’t slow. They blew past her in the other direction: two patrol cars and an unmarked unit she swore was Beckett’s. They were moving fast-maybe eighty on the narrow road-and she knew they were going for Adrian. At speed like that there had to be a reason, but stopping or turning was not an option. Nothing mattered but the lawyer.
Reaching back, she found his hand. “Hang on, Faircloth.”
But no answer came.
She flew through town and hit the hospital parking lot at speed, the slick tires squealing as she bumped over the curb and rocked to a stop at the emergency-room door. Suddenly, she was inside and yelling for help. A doctor materialized.
“Outside. I think he’s dying.”
The doctor called for a stretcher, and at the car they lifted him. “Tell me what happened.”
“Trauma of some kind. I’m not sure.”
“Name and age.”
“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 fuckin’ 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.