The White Road

I heard movement from the bed.

“What is it?” asked Rachel.

I turned to her and saw the shadows drifting across the room, clouds chased by moonlight, until they reached her and, slowly, began to devour her paleness.

“What is it?” asked Rachel.

I was back in bed, except now I was sitting bolt upright and I had pushed the sheets away from me with my feet. Her hand was warm upon me, flat against my chest.

“There was a car,” I said.

“Where?”

“Outside. There was a car.”

I stepped naked from the bed and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtain, but there was nothing there, only the road, quiet, and the silver threads of the water on the marsh.

“There was a car,” I said, for the last time.

And I saw the marks of my fingertips against the window, left there as I reached out the car, just as they, reflected in the glass, now reached out for me.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

I went to her and I held her, spoonlike, as she slipped softly into sleep.

And I watched over her until morning came.

3

ELLIOT NORTON CALLED me again the morning after the arson attack. He had first-degree burns to his face and arms. He considered himself pretty lucky, all told. The fire had destroyed three rooms on the second floor of his house and left a big hole in his roof. No local contractor would touch the work and he’d engaged some guys from Martinez, just across the Georgia state line, to fix up the damage.

“You talk to the cops?” I asked him.

“Yeah, they were out here first thing. They got no shortage of suspects, but if they can make a case I’ll retire from law and become a monk. They know it’s linked to the Larousse case and I know it’s linked to the Larousse case, so we’re all in agreement. Just lucky I’m not paying them for their opinion.”

“Any suspects?”

“They’ll round up some of the local assholes, but it won’t do much good, not unless someone saw or heard something and is willing to stand up and say it. A lot of folks will take the view that I shouldn’t have expected anything less for taking this on.”

There was a pause. I could feel him waiting for me to fill the silence. In the end I did, and felt my feet start to slide as the inevitability of my involvement became clear.

“What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? Cut the kid loose? He’s my client, Charlie. I can’t do that. I can’t let them intimidate me out of this case.”

He was turning the guilt screws on me and he knew it. I didn’t like it, but maybe he felt that he had no other option.

Yet it wasn’t only his willingness to use our friendship that made me uneasy. Elliot Norton was a very good lawyer, but I’d never before seen the milk of human kindness flow from him in his professional dealings. Now he had put his house and possibly his life on the line for a young man he couldn’t have known too well, and that didn’t sound like the Elliot Norton I knew. I wasn’t sure that I could turn my back on him any longer, even with my doubts, but the least I could do was to try and get some answers that satisfied me.

“Why are you doing this, Elliot?”

“Doing what, being a lawyer?”

“No, being this kid’s lawyer.”

I waited for the speech about a man sometimes having to do what a man has to do, about how nobody else would stand up for the kid and how Elliot had been unable to stand by and watch while he was strapped to a gurney and injected with poisons until his heart stopped. Instead, he surprised me. Perhaps it was tiredness, or the events of the previous night, but when he spoke there was a bitterness in his voice that I had not heard before.

“You know, part of me always hated this place. I hated the attitudes, the small-town mentality. The guys I saw around me, they didn’t want to be princes of industry, or politicians, or judges. They didn’t want to change the world. They wanted to drink beer and screw women, and a thousand a month working in a gas station would allow them to do that. They were never going to leave, but if they weren’t, then I sure as hell was.”

“So you became a lawyer.”

“That’s right: a noble profession, whatever you might think.”

“And you went to New York.”

“I went to New York, but I hated New York even more than I hated here, and maybe I still had something to prove.”

“So now you’re going to represent this kid as a way of getting back at them all?”

“Something like that. I have a gut feeling, Charlie: this kid didn’t kill Maria

I let it sink in. Maybe it wasn’t for me to question another’s crusade. After all, I’d been accused of being a crusader myself often enough in the past.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Try to stay out of trouble until then.”

He breathed out deeply at what he saw as a crack of light in the darkness. “Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

When I hung up the phone, Rachel was leaning against the doorjamb watching me.

“You’re going down there, aren’t you?”

It wasn’t an accusation, just a question.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You seem to feel some debt of loyalty to him.”

“No, not to him in particular.” I wasn’t sure that I could put my reasons into words, but I felt like I had to try, to explain it to myself as much as to Rachel.

“When I’ve been in trouble, when I’ve taken on cases that were difficult, and worse than difficult, I’ve had people who were willing to stand alongside me: you, Angel, Louis, others too, and some of those people didn’t survive their involvement. Now I have someone asking me for help and I’m not sure that I can turn away so easily.”

“‘What goes around comes around?’”

“I guess so. But if I go down, there are things that need to be taken care of first.”

“Such as?”

I didn’t reply.

“You mean me.” Invisible fingers traced thin lines of irritation on her forehead. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“No, I’ve talked about it. You just block your ears.”

I heard my voice rising, and took a deep breath before I spoke again.

“Look, you won’t carry a gun, and-”

“I’m not listening to this,” she said. She stormed up the stairs. Seconds later, I heard the door to her office slam shut.

I met Detective Sergeant Wallace MacArthur of the Scarborough PD in the Panera Bread Company over by the Maine Mall. I’d had a run-in with MacArthur during the events leading up to Faulkner’s capture but we’d settled our differences over a meal at the Back Bay Grill. Admittedly, the meal had cost me the best part of two hundred bucks, including the wine MacArthur drank, although it was worth it to have him back on my side.

I ordered a coffee and joined him at a booth. He was tearing apart a warm ci

“Found anyone you like?” I asked.

MacArthur chewed reflectively on a chunk of roll.

“How come all these women claim they’re ‘attractive’ and ‘cute’ and ‘easygoing’?” he replied. “I mean, I’m single. I’m out there, looking around, and I never meet women like these. I meet unattractive. I meet non-cute. I meet hard-going. If they’re so good looking and happy-go-lucky, how come they’re advertising at the back of the Casco Bay Weekly? I tell you, I think some of these women are telling lies.”