This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (23 page)

“I want to know who you sent after Chesterfield and those little girls,” I said, barely above the music.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said.

“You mentioned that already,” I said. “I got it. Let’s move on: who’d you send after Chesterfield and those little girls?”

“He’s dead,” Broughton said, his cheek flat against the desk. “His kids too.” When I lifted him by his hair, he made the mistake of looking down, and I felt his nose break when I slammed his face against his desk. Blood spread across either side of his desk like a Rorschach test.

“That wasn’t a nice thing to say,” I said. I took my gun off the guy sitting down and pressed the barrel firmly against the top of Broughton’s head. “Let’s try it again: who’s out there?”

“A guy named Pruitt,” Broughton said, his voice trembling under the nose of the gun.

“ ‘Pruitt’ who?”

“Bobby Pruitt,” Broughton said.

“He works here,” the guy in the chair said. “He bounces.”

“Is that true?” I asked Broughton.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Where’s he at now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Broughton said. I raised him by his hair like I was going to slam his face on his desk again. “St. Louis,” he said, spitting blood onto the desk. “He said he’s going to St. Louis.” I lowered his head down and let him lay his cheek against the desk.

“Is he following Wade Chesterfield?”

“I don’t know,” he said. I took the butt of my gun and cracked Broughton on his spine; his feet splayed in opposite directions behind his desk, and I had to grab the collar of his jacket to keep him from falling. I kneeled down toward the desk and spoke right into Broughton’s ear so he could hear me clearly.

“Your boy’s carrying around a picture of one of Wade’s little girls. If something happens to her, or if he touches either one of those girls, so help me God, Tommy, I will come back here and butcher you.” I stood up and cracked him on the spine again. His body convulsed. “Is he following Wade?” He muttered something, but I couldn’t quite make it out, and I bent lower to hear him.

“Yes,” he said. He was breathing heavy and sweating through his clothes, and I was afraid he might pass out if I didn’t turn him loose. I let go of his neck, and he crumpled to the floor in front of his chair. I looked over the desk at him. Blood covered his face and ran over his forehead and into his hair. He lay there with his eyes closed, facing the ceiling. The guy in the chair just sat there, waiting for whatever happened next.

“Is there something you want to say?” I asked. He shook his head. I thought about punching him in the face just to do it, but I had no idea why he was wired or who he was working for, and I figured I was probably in enough trouble as it was. I reached back and stuffed my .38 down into my pants waist, and then I opened the door and stepped into the dark, loud hallway.

I pulled the door closed and walked back toward the front of the club. When I came out of the hallway I looked toward the bar to see if anyone had noticed me leaving the office, and that’s when I saw what was on the TVs hanging on the wall: Sosa was trotting slowly around the bases in Pittsburgh, which meant that he’d hit a home run for the second night in a row and that Roc now owed me $2,000. My luck had finally changed, but that’s not what made me stop dead in my tracks; it was an ESPN graphic that showed the remaining games Sosa and McGwire had left to break Maris’s record. Their paths would cross in St. Louis on Monday afternoon, and something told me that Wade and those two little girls might just be there to see it.

C H A P T E R   25

A
 black Chevy Lumina started tailing me almost as soon as I turned out of the parking lot at Tomcat’s and made a left onto Wilkinson. It would hang back two or three cars and switch lanes when I did, trying to keep me in view. I tried not to pay attention to it and drive like it was any other Saturday night, but I knew it could be just about anybody in that car: Broughton and a couple of his thugs, the FBI, my own paranoia. My .38 was hidden beneath my seat, and I couldn’t decide whether to reach for it or use my heel to push it back even farther.

Wilkinson turned into Franklin Avenue when I got back into Gastonia proper, and by the time I’d turned onto New Hope Road the black Lumina was right behind me. When I pulled into my parking spot at Quail Woods the car pulled in parallel to my back bumper, making it impossible for me to leave. In my rearview mirror, I watched the driver open his door slowly like he had all the time in the world. He wore a dark suit and had a military haircut and was a little older and shorter than me. When the passenger climbed out I saw that he was tall and thin, and when he stepped into the light I realized it was Sandy. I watched him first in my rearview and then in my side mirror as he walked up to my window and knocked on the glass. The driver hung back like he was waiting to see how it went. I sighed and turned off the engine and rolled my window down.

“Go ahead and step out, Brady,” Sandy said.

“Jesus, Sandy, really?”

The driver pounded my car’s trunk once with his fist. “Get out,” he said. “Now!”

I rolled my window up, opened the car door, and stepped out. Sandy backed away. “Do you have a weapon on you?” he asked. He looked me up and down like he was sizing me up.

“Who’s your angry friend?” I asked, nodding toward the back bumper where the driver was still standing.

“Agent Barnwell,” the guy said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Oh,” I said, turning to look at him. “Welcome to Gastonia.” I turned back to Sandy. “I’ve got a .38 under my seat, and I’ve got a license to carry it.”

“I told you he had a gun,” Barnwell said. Sandy looked at him, and then he ducked down and reached under my seat and felt around until he found the gun. He opened the cylinder, dumped the bullets into his hand, and dropped them into his pocket.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I said.

“No it’s not,” Barnwell said. He walked around the other side of the car, so I couldn’t see him without turning my head. “We’ve got some questions for you.”

“I’m ready when you are,” I said, my back still to him.

“Not out here,” he said. “Inside.”

I turned to face him. “What makes you think I’m letting you in my house?”

He smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “We can do it down at the police station if you’d like,” he said. “Give you a chance to see all your old friends. Detective Sanders was just telling me on the way over about what a huge fan club you’ve got down there.” I looked at him for a second, and then I turned back to Sandy.

“Y’all have to take off your shoes if you’re coming inside,” I said. “I won’t get my security deposit back if you track bullshit everywhere.” I turned and looked at Barnwell and took my keys out of my pocket. “And you’d better move your car before one of my neighbors sees that you don’t know how to park. Director Freeh’s not going to appreciate you getting his car keyed.”

The inside of my apartment was dark, and I flipped on the lights and Sandy and Barnwell followed me into the small kitchen.

“Nice place,” Barnwell said, looking around and smiling.

“Thanks,” I said. “I love hosting parties.”

“You mind if we go into the living room and sit down?” Sandy asked. “We just need to talk for a bit. It won’t take long.” They followed me into the living room, and I turned on the light on the ceiling fan and sat down in the recliner. Barnwell looked around the room, and then he took a seat on the sofa beside Sandy.

“Y’all see Sammy get fifty-eight tonight?” I asked, but they just sat there staring at me. I looked at Barnwell. “You not a big baseball fan?”

He pulled out a pad and pen from inside his jacket. He flipped through the pad until he found an empty page. “What were you doing at Tomcat’s tonight?” he asked.

I shrugged and raised my eyebrows. “Having a four-dollar beer,” I said. “That’s what you should be investigating.”

Barnwell looked up from his pad. “How do you know Tommy Broughton?” he asked.

“The same way Sandy knows him. We used to run into him from time to time. You meet all kinds of people in this line of work,” I said. “Gangsters, thugs, FBI.”

Barnwell laughed and closed his pad. “You’re a piece of work, Weller,” he said. He looked over at Sandy. “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” He stood up from the sofa and walked past me and stopped at the sliding-glass door. He pulled back the curtain and looked out onto my tiny, cluttered patio. He acted like he was looking at something, even though I knew it was too dark out there and too bright in here for him to see anything besides my rusty, old grill and folding chairs. The curtain swished closed when he let it go, and then I felt his hand rest on the back of the recliner. I looked up and saw him staring down at me.

“That was cute,” he said. “Turning up the music: they teach you that in alarm school?”

“No,” I said. “I saw it on
Law & Order
.” Barnwell snorted again, and then he looked at Sandy. “I can’t believe you got to work with this guy,” he said, smiling. Sandy was leaning forward, staring at me. “We should take you down to the station and let you do some stand-up,” Barnwell said. “Maybe you could sign some autographs for your fan club.”

“They’re a devoted bunch,” I said. I stared at him until he looked away.

“Brady,” Sandy said, “what the hell were you doing there tonight?”

“No,” Barnwell said before I could respond. “No more questions.” He stepped in front of me so that I couldn’t see Sandy anymore. “If you do that again, if you piss on this investigation again, I will do everything in my power to bury you,” he said. “You can take that to mean anything you’d like, but you should know that I mean it. We don’t need you out there playing cop. Those days are over.”

“What he’s saying, Brady, is that we’ve got everything under control,” Sandy said.

“It seems like it,” I said. “Y’all are really doing a great job.”

Barnwell laughed and walked back over to the sliding-glass door and stood staring at the closed curtain, his hands making fists in his pockets.

“Brady, I’m telling you: don’t do this again,” Sandy said. “That’s not going to help anybody: not those girls, not us, and definitely not you.”

Barnwell turned around and pointed at me. “You pull some shit like that one more time and I won’t come back here looking to talk,” he said. “You’re in the way, Weller, and I’ve been on this case for too long for you to waltz in and blow it here at the end.”

“In the way of what?” I asked. “Finding the money or finding those girls?”

“We think we’ll find both of them if you let us do our jobs,” Sandy said, standing up.

“I hope so,” I said. “I also hope you know what’s out there.”

“We know more than you think,” Barnwell said.

“I doubt that.”

They both stood there looking at me, but then Sandy reached into his pocket and brought out a closed fist that held the bullets he’d taken out of my .38. He lined them up slowly one by one on the coffee table. When he was finished he looked up and smiled. “Have a good night,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

I kept my seat and watched them leave, and I didn’t move until I heard the car crank and pull away from my apartment. It was only then that I walked to the small hall closet, opened the door, and pulled down my old suitcase from the top shelf.

Easter Quillby

C H A P T E R   26

T
he first night after leaving Charleston we pulled off the highway at a rest stop in North Carolina. We got out and used the bathroom and got some snacks and some Cokes from the vending machines and went back to the car. Wade pulled around back behind the bathrooms, hoping we could stay there for the night, but just as we got settled in a man in a uniform came and knocked on the windshield with a flashlight and told us we couldn’t spend the night there. Wade rolled the window up without saying anything, started the car, and pulled back onto the highway.

Friday morning I woke up with the light hitting my eyes through the windshield. When I sat up I saw that the sun was just rising and that Wade had covered me and Ruby with a couple of sweatshirts dotted with paint stains and one of his old coats. It was chilly inside the car, and I knew it was early by the way the light looked outside—all soft and glowing.

The car sat in a paved parking lot surrounded by mountains that were covered in fog; that fog could’ve even been clouds for how high it seemed like we were. Ours was the only car in the parking lot. I slipped my shoes on as quiet as I could and wrapped one of Wade’s sweatshirts around my shoulders, and I opened the door and slipped out and pushed it shut behind me. Wade was laying across the front seat, his eyes closed and his arms pulled up inside the sleeves of his T-shirt.

A little sidewalk ran around the edge of the parking lot, and just beyond it a guardrail kept you from getting too close to the edge. I walked right up to it and leaned against it and looked down into the valley, where the fog was thicker than it was up where we’d spent the night. When I was in the fifth grade my class took a field trip to Crowders Mountain in Gastonia, and that seemed like the tallest thing I’d ever seen, especially after we hiked all the way to the top. But now, standing where I was standing and seeing what I was seeing, I realized that I’d never seen anything like these mountains before.

Behind me, a car door opened and closed quietly, and when I turned I saw Wade standing there looking around like I’d just been doing a few minutes before.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We’re on the Blue Ridge Parkway,” Wade said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a road that runs through the mountains from Virginia clear down to South Carolina.” He rubbed at his eyes. “It’s the country’s most visited national park,” he said, his words turning into a yawn that finished with him stretching his arms over his head.

“You wouldn’t know it right now,” I said, looking around at all the empty parking spaces.

“It’s early,” he said. “People will be up here soon enough to check out the leaves.”

I hadn’t noticed the leaves yet. You could see their color through the fog in the valley right below us: gold and red and some green here and there. It seemed like the fog couldn’t cover the tops of the tall mountains, and up on top of them almost all the leaves were gold. I couldn’t believe that just last night we’d been down in Charleston, where the air was salty and hot and sticky, and now we were up here looking at these mountains, my breath coming out of my mouth like smoke every time I breathed.