The White Road

And then he said something strange.

“Some things you can’t leave in the past,” he said. “Some things follow you all through your life.”

That was all he said. Seconds later, she heard the sound of the shower from the bathroom, and knew that it was time to leave.

It was the last time that she and Elliot had made love.

But Elliot’s loyalty to Landron Mobley had gone beyond simply helping him out when he needed a few bucks. Elliot was representing his old friend in what could have turned out to be a very nasty rape case, a case now rendered null and void by Mobley’s death. In addition, Elliot appeared willing to destroy a long-standing friendship with Earl Larousse Jr. in order to defend a young black man with whom Elliot had no apparent co

There had to be some mistake.

The sound of the cell phone pulled me away. I recognized the number on display immediately. The call was coming from the safe house. I picked it up on the second ring. There was no speech, just a tapping, as if somebody was banging the phone gently on the ground.

Tap-tap-tap.

“Hello?”

Tap-tap-tap.

I picked up my jacket and ran for the parking garage. The gaps between the taps were growing longer now and I knew for certain that the person at the other end was in trouble, that somebody’s strength was fading, and this was the only way that he or she could communicate.

“I’m on my way,” I said. “Hold on. Just hold on.”

There were three young black guys standing outside the safe house when I arrived, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. One of them was carrying a knife and he spun toward me as I ran from the car. He saw the gun in my hand and raised his hand in acquiescence.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer, but an older guy behind him did.

“We heard glass breaking. We didn’t do nothin’.”

“Keep it that way. Just stay back.”

“Fuck you, man,” was the reply, but they made no further move toward the house.

The front door was locked so I made for the rear of the house. The back door was wide open but undamaged. The kitchen was empty but the ever present lemonade jug now lay shattered on the floor. Flies buzzed around the liquid pooled upon the cheap linoleum.

I found the old man in the living room. There was a sucking hole in his chest and he lay like a black angel lost in his own blood, red wings spreading outward from behind. In his left hand he held the phone while the fingers of his right scraped at the wooden boards. He had scraped so hard that he had torn the nails and drawn blood from his fingers. He was reaching for his wife. I could see her foot in the doorway, the slipper pulled back from her heel by the pressure of her bent toes. There was blood on the back of her leg.

I knelt by the old man and clasped his head, looking for something with which to stem the flow of blood from the gunshot wound. I was shrugging off my jacket when he reached for my shirt, gripping it tightly in his fist.

“Uh ent gap me mout’!” he whispered. His teeth were pink with blood. “Uh ent gap me mout’!”

I didn’t tell.

“I know,” I said, and I felt my voice break. “I know you didn’t. Who did this, Albert?”

“Plateye,” he hissed. “Plateye.”

He eased his grip on my shirt and reached again for his dead wife.

“Gi

His voice faded.

“Gi

I let his head rest on the floor, then stood and moved toward the woman. She lay face down with two holes in the back of her dress: one low to the left of her spine, the other higher, close to her heart. There was no pulse.

I heard a noise on the floor behind me and turned to see one of the boys from outside the house standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Stay out!” I said. “Call 911.”

He took one more look at me, his eyes falling to the body of the old man, then disappeared.

No noise came from upstairs. The couple’s son Samuel, who had driven Atys to the house earlier in the week, lay naked and dead in the bathtub, the shower curtain clenched in his hand and the water from the shower head still beating down upon his face and body. He had taken two shots in the chest. When I searched the four rooms above I could find no trace of Atys, but the window of his room was broken and tiles had been dislodged from the kitchen roof. It looked like he might have jumped, which meant that Atys might still be alive.

I went back downstairs and was standing in the yard when the police arrived. My gun was back in its holster and I was holding my license and permit. Naturally, the cops took my gun and my phone away and made me sit in a car until the detectives arrived. By now, a crowd had gathered and the uniforms were doing their best to keep them back, the lights on the Crown Vics casting firework glows across the faces and houses. There were a lot of cars because the Charleston PD assigned only one officer to a car, with the exception of the safe streets unit, two officers from which had arrived on the scene within minutes of the call. The mobile crime scene unit, an old converted bookmobile, had also pulled up by the time a pair of detectives from the violent crimes unit decided that they wanted to talk to me.

I had told them to find Atys Jones and they were already looking for him, although not as a potential victim but as a suspect in two further murders. They were wrong, of course. I knew that they were wrong.

At a gas station in South Portland, the hunched man stood over the Nissan and filled the car with twenty dollars’ worth of gas. There was only one other vehicle at the pumps: an ’86 Chevy C-10 with a busted right wing that had cost its new owner the grand total of eleven hundred dollars, half down with the rest to pay by the end of the year. It was the first car Bear had owned in more than half a decade and he was hugely proud of it. Now, instead of bumming rides to the co-op, he was there waiting each morning when they opened up, music blaring from the Chevy’s ti

Bear hardly glanced at the other man close by. He had seen enough strange men in prison to know that the best thing to do in their presence was to mind his own business. He gassed the car with money borrowed from his sister, checked the pressure on every tire, then drove away.

Cyrus had paid the bored gas station attendant in advance and was aware that the young man was still watching him, mesmerized by Cyrus’s crooked body. Although used to the revulsion of others, Cyrus still considered it bad ma