The Exceptions

THREE


Sean doesn’t bother to raise the divider as he drives us out to Route 301. I’ve run the scenario through my mind enough times to come to only one possible conclusion:

“So,” I say, “someone recognized me in the Villages, you guys were somehow tipped off, and then you rushed down here to snag me before anybody—”

“I don’t think rush is the right word, Bovaro.” Sean looks off to his left. “You mind if I pick up a burger real quick?”

I must be on a different plan than the one used for Melody. I lean forward. “I’m thinking… you might want to get me a little farther away first?”

He pulls into the drive-thru for a McDonald’s that’s minutes from closing, puts his window down and orders, turns back to me. “You want anything?”

I sit back, wave my hand.

After he pays and pulls out, I say, “You have no business pretending to be a marshal, not even at Hallowee—”

“No one wants you, Johnny.” He brings a handful of fries to his mouth. One misses, falls to his lap. “Let me rephrase,” I think he says, “no one wants you dead.”

“Who was that guy at Mulleno’s?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

I squint, look at him in the rearview mirror. “Ask?”

“Just some guy.” He opens a straw, submerges it in his soda. I can hear the ice rattle in pulses as he gulps it down.

I lean forward again. “What crew was he with?”

“No crew, possibly a bowling league.” He laughs, then repeats, “Just some guy.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Saw him come out of a pub down the block, looked like maybe he was one and a half sheets to the wind. I offered him twenty bucks to play a practical joke on you.” Sean takes a bite of burger equal to one-fifth of the sandwich. Then, muffled: “Wouldn’t even take the twenty. People are friendly down here.”

“I don’t—wait, why?”

“You know, get your name out there, expose who you really are. It was something fake that I knew you’d make real by panicking, by doing what you’re doing right now: running.”

I put my hand on the front seat to steady myself. “Confusing new protection technique Justice is using.”

“Not Justice. Me.”

“Even worse. Why? Seriously, man, what the—”

“I did it so you could never go back. So that your life in the Villages was wiped out.”

“What is this, some sort of punishment? You want me to understand what Melody went through, is that it?” I punch the back of his seat. “I had a life there!”

Sean lurches forward a little, ignores my anger, takes another mouthful of burger. After a few seconds, he says, “That was no life. An existence, maybe. Not much more.”

“This doesn’t make any—”

“We’re moving on to bigger and better things, Johnny.”

I sit back and begin my tirade. “I want to know right now what’s going on. I still have my cell, you know. Maybe I should just—”

“You still keeping up the writing?”

I shake my head, slow my breathing while I decipher what he means. It hits me: my journals.

He was the one who read them, who left them out of order.

Sean holds the steering wheel steady with his knee, grabs more fries with his right hand and puts up the divider between us with his left hand. I reach forward to try to hold it down but it reaches the top before I can leverage my weight, closing the space between us.

“Why are you doing this?” I yell, then punch the divider with the side of my fist, crack the knuckles of my pinky and forefinger. I shake off the pain as he picks up speed.



We drive through the darkest hours of night, see no light other than passing streetlamps that drift by us like shooting stars. Through the smoky glass of my window I can barely make out the well-lit sign that reads WELCOME TO GEORGIA as we cruise by it at close to seventy miles per hour, realize we passed I-10, the connector to Jacksonville that would have returned us back to I-95, back to the Washington, DC, area. As bungling as Sean has appeared, I’ve been fooled every time, realize he always has some other plan in mind, acting the part of the marplot to fulfill an ulterior motive. And what else could I assume now: He’s gone rogue. His rage-filled partial confession in the conference room in Baltimore echoes in my head. “You will never take them down unless you break the rules,” he said. “You’ve got to do whatever it takes to make it stop,” he said. The only thing I don’t understand is the angle. I rest in knowing—trusting—that Sean’s tale of the old man playing a practical joke on me means Melody is still free, still safe. I’m just not sure what all of this means for me. One-in-five chance he’s driving me far away to make good on another of his comments from the conference room gathering: “How about we just take you out to a field and put a bullet in you.” But three years is a long time to hold that kind of anger, not to mention that even Sean would see the Everglades as the obvious choice for dumping someone—which would’ve been in the opposite direction.

I spend an hour trying to determine how many pages Sean could’ve read while I was in the shower my final morning at Safesite, what he might have determined by reading nothing but my handwritten adoration for the woman described in the text, the woman who can so easily be identified even though she is never mentioned by name, how the details and words she spoke just before her escape had seemingly replaced the dark ending I claimed to have dealt her.

Worse yet, the journals are now gone forever. My past and all of its documentation will never again be within reach.