This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (15 page)

“You think the break-in was related to this?” He looked around and then leaned toward me.

“Yes,” he said, “because they didn’t take anything—nothing except a picture of me and my wife.” He leaned back like he was out of breath; his face had turned white.

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I already told you: no police.”

“Okay,” I said. “No police. Why are you willing to talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe because you’re not a cop. I don’t know. I just wanted to tell somebody that I had nothing to do with this. Nothing. You can tell it to whoever you want, but I’m not getting mixed up in this with the police and all that.”

“I think you’re already pretty mixed up in it,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said. “The police are going to have to drag me in kicking and screaming. People who testify about stuff like this end up dead in the movies. That ain’t going to be me.”

We sat looking at each other for a second, and then I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. “I don’t believe your story, Mr. Kelly. At least not all of it.”

“You can believe whatever you want,” he said, “but that’s what happened.”

“I can tell you it didn’t,” I said. “Go in the bathroom and look at your beard. If Wade had put duct tape on your face tight enough to keep you from screaming you would’ve had to cut it out of your beard. Also, how’d you get your truck back so quick? Did Wade leave you an anonymous message about where to find it?” Kelly closed his eyes, and then he opened them slowly.

“It’s not my fault Wade took the money,” he said.

“I agree,” I said. “It’s not your fault. I’m not the one blaming you.”

“Wade’s a good guy,” he said. “He’s got a good heart. He just gets carried away and does stupid shit sometimes.” I looked at him for a second until the irony of what he’d just said had time to sink in. He sighed. “I know,” he said.

My heart was racing, but I tried to keep my cool. I knew I was sitting at a booth in Tony’s Ice Cream with one of three people who knew where the stolen armored car money was or at least where it had been on Friday afternoon. Kelly must’ve sensed the tension.

“Broughton’s going to have somebody looking for Wade, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And it’s going to be bad when they find him, isn’t it?”

“Probably worse than you can imagine,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said. He put his hands over his eyes, and then he dropped them to the table. “What should I do?”

I took the last bite of my cheeseburger. “Well,” I said. I swallowed and wiped my mouth with my napkin. “If I was you, I’d do one of two things. One, I’d get those letters back on my truck as soon as possible. Then I’d go back to work and act like nothing happened. The minute you start acting weird is the minute more weird stuff happens.” I balled up all my trash in the cheeseburger wrapper and picked up my drink. “Or, two: I’d pack up as much as I can, pick up the mother-in-law, and leave town until all this blows over.”

“How will we know it’s ‘blown over’?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess the day the cops stop calling and people stop kicking in your back door.”

“Great,” he said. “Thanks.”

I stood up from the table and tossed the balled wrapper and my soda in the trash can beside the booth. Kelly just sat there, his untouched burger on the table before him. I looked down at him. “Do you own a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Make sure it’s loaded and that you know how to use it. And if you’re not going to eat that cheeseburger then take it out to your wife.”

What was Mrs. Kelly thinking when she saw me jump in my car, start the engine, and tear out of the lot onto Franklin and head for my office? What was her husband thinking as he sat there in that booth, a cold cheeseburger in front of him, the biggest confession of his life over and done with, a wife waiting in the car with more questions than he’d have answers for?

When I got back to my desk, I picked up the cordless and dialed Sandy’s office. I sat down on the edge of my desk, and then I stood up again. “How’s it going?” I asked him.

“Fine,” he said. “Why?”

“Just calling to check on you,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “What’s up? I’m busy.”

“Just want to let you know that you can call in the cavalry.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I solved your case.”

“You found the girls?”

“No,” I said, “not that case.”

“You found Wade Chesterfield?”

“No, not that one either.”

“What the hell, then, Brady?”

“I found your money,” I said.

“What money?”

“The armored car,” I said. “I found out where it made its last deposit.” His chair squeaked, and I pictured him sitting up straight at his desk, grabbing a pen, and flipping a pad open to a clean page.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I told him what Kelly had seen: the unfinished basement, the bad drywall job, the money behind it. But I really got his attention when I told him who’d put it there.

“Tommy Broughton?” he asked. “I haven’t heard that name in a while.”

“Now you know why: he’s been busy in his basement. It looks like he owns a club too.” Then I told him how Wade Chesterfield had gotten himself involved.

“Jesus,” he said. “This guy must be an idiot.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not if he manages to disappear. It worked for the driver of that armored car.”

“
Might’ve
worked,” he said. “Jury’s still out. I don’t know if Broughton’s capable of murder, but he knows people who are.”

“Case solved.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “On what information? I can’t tell the FBI that I leaked all that info to you and you came back and busted this thing wide open. I can’t even tell Sarge that. I
like
my job.”

“You better move on Broughton, though,” I said. “You know how he is; he’s lost a whole lot of money, and it’s been a few days. He has to figure somebody’s onto him. He might feel the need to hit the road.”

“We’ll figure out a way to start watching him,” he said. “If he’s dumb enough to hide millions of dollars in a wall then I’m sure he’s done something stupid along the way. If he has, we’ll find it.”

“Take another swing at talking to Lane Kelly,” I said. “Find him before
he
does something stupid.”

“I’ll bring him in,” he said. “But there’s one thing you should keep in mind.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The FBI’s going to have to be in on this,” he said. “I’m sorry, but your volunteer work just got a lot more complicated.”

Easter Quillby

C H A P T E R   15

W
e spent all day Wednesday in a hotel outside of Charleston. Early that morning, a taxi had dropped us at the garage in Myrtle Beach where Wade had left the car. It looked like they weren’t even open yet, but Wade knocked on the door until we finally heard a lock turn on the other side. He’d already told me and Ruby to stay outside so nobody would see us. A few minutes later, his car pulled around the building; it was light blue instead of red like he said it would be. He stopped in front of us and got out and opened the back door. “Ruby, get in,” he said.

“Why isn’t it red?” she asked.

“Get in,” Wade said again. “Hurry up.” I went to climb in behind her, but Wade stopped me. “You’re getting in front.”

No one said anything until we were out of the Myrtle Beach traffic and turning onto the highway. Wade had been checking his rearview mirror every few seconds like he was worried that somebody might be following us. He looked over at me, and then he looked back at the road. “How could you do it, Easter?” he finally said.

“Do what?” Ruby asked. Neither one of us had told her about me calling Marcus.

“Nothing,” Wade said. I looked out the window as we drove up over a bridge on the highway: the land was flat as far as I could see, and the grass was dry and brown-looking. Skinny pine trees ran along the road beneath the bridge. In the side mirror, I could see Ruby’s face where she was looking out her window too.

“What color is our car?” she asked.

“It’s primer,” Wade said.

“What color is that?” Ruby asked.

“It’s not a color,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

Once we got to the hotel, Wade told us to stay in the room with the door locked, and he walked across the parking lot to Bojangles’ to get us something to eat. The parking lot was full of tractor trailers. Last time I’d eaten something from Bojangles’ I’d walked up there with Ruby and Mom—Mom walking down the sidewalk counting money and pushing nickels and dimes around in her palm, saying, “Y’all go ahead and tell me what you want, and I’ll let you know if you can have it. I ain’t going to wait for y’all to make up your minds once we get up to the counter and you see pictures of all that food and I have to say no.” A couple times I climbed off the bed and looked out the window to see if I could see Wade coming across the parking lot, but all I could see was a bunch of tractor trailers and the highway off in the distance.

When Wade came back with our food, me and Ruby ate sausage biscuits sitting on our bed while Wade ate sitting on his. Me and him still hadn’t hardly said a word to each other since the night before. All he’d said to us was “Don’t touch anything” after he hid his bag under the bed when we checked in and “Keep this locked” before he closed the door behind him.

After he finished eating, Wade stood up and tossed his wrapper and napkins into the trash can. “Y’all sit there and watch some TV,” he said. “I need to step out for a little bit.” He walked around to the far side of the other bed and bent down, and I knew he was getting something out of that gym bag.

Wade lifted the chain on the door and looked back at me. “Lock this behind me,” he said. “And don’t open it for nobody. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

He opened the door and stepped outside and closed it behind him. I climbed off the bed and locked the chain on the door. I turned the doorknob and yanked on it to make sure it was locked.

I flipped through the channels until I found some cartoons, and then I looked over at Ruby. “You want to watch this?”

“I want to go back to the beach,” Ruby said.

“Well, we ain’t going to do that,” I said. “Not today anyway.”

She climbed down from the bed and walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

As soon as I heard the bathroom door lock, I scooted across the bed and dropped down to the floor and felt around under Wade’s bed. My hands found the gym bag and pulled it out far enough to see the zipper. The room was suddenly too quiet, and I realized that Ruby hadn’t made a sound from the bathroom. I turned up the TV and unzipped the bag, but I stopped when I saw a bunch of hundred-dollar bills. I knew without even having to look that the bag was full of them, and that was why Wade had broken into our room and taken us in the middle of the night. That man who’d been hiding out in the woods was searching for this money, and that’s why he’d come looking for Wade. My heart was beating in my ears and my skin had gone cold.

I pictured myself reaching into that bag for one of those bundles of hundred-dollar bills, beating on the bathroom door until Ruby came out, and then going outside and catching a taxi that would take us all the way back to Gastonia, far away from Wade Chesterfield, and far away from this bag of money that he’d hidden under the bed in a hotel room with us in it.

The teddy bear Wade had won for us was sitting on our bed, and I took a packet of money over and stuffed it down in the bear’s overalls. When the toilet flushed, I ran around the bed and dropped to my knees and zipped up the bag and pushed it back under the bed. Ruby walked into the bedroom just as I made it back to our bed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I crossed my legs Indian-style and looked at the TV like I was interested in those stupid cartoons.

“You look mad,” she said. “Your face is red.”

“Well, I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m just sunburned.” That part was true. But Ruby wasn’t sunburned at all. Her skin was an even darker brown than it had been that morning, and her hair looked even thicker after being in the ocean with me and Wade. She climbed up on the bed and sat beside me.

“I don’t feel like watching cartoons,” she said.

I tossed the remote on the bed in front of her. “Put on whatever you want to,” I said. “I don’t care what you watch.” I picked up the bear and held it to my chest, and I leaned back against the headboard and closed my eyes and thought about how much I hated Wade for sneaking into our room and convincing us to go with him. I couldn’t believe that it all had happened just two nights before, and I couldn’t believe that in just two days I’d gone from hating Wade, to wanting to believe in him, all the way back to hating him all over again.

A key turned in the lock a little while later, and Wade tried to open the door and walk into the room, but the chain was still on and it only opened a little bit. He closed the door and knocked.

I climbed off the bed and slid the chair over and looked through the peephole. Wade was staring right back at me. “Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s your dad,” Wade said. “Open the door—hurry up.”

“Who?”

He cracked the door again. “It’s me, Easter,” he said. “Open the door.” I hopped down from the chair and moved it back under the table, and then I undid the chain. Wade walked in with a bag from Eckerd’s in his hand. “Hey!” he said like everything was just fine.

“Where’d you go?” I asked, but what I really wanted to know about was the bag of money he’d stuffed under the bed, but that question was going to have to wait until we were alone.

“I went shopping,” he said, smiling. “I got us some disguises.”

“Disguises?” Ruby said. She climbed down off the bed. Wade pulled out a little box of something and handed it to me.

“What’s that?” Ruby asked.

“It’s hair dye,” I said, looking at Wade. “What’s this for?”

“It’s for you,” he said. “You’re dying your hair brown.”

“Am I dying mine too?” Ruby asked.

“No,” Wade said. “That’s for you, Easter, but I got something for you.” He pulled out a pair of pink sunglasses, and Ruby put them right on. “Now,” Wade said, “you have to make sure you wear those glasses whenever we go somewhere. I don’t want anybody to know I’m traveling with the world-famous Ruby Chesterfield.”