“Okay. Fine. Sure. Whatever.” He was angry, but it seemed everyone was. “Three hours.”
“Yep.”
“Don’t be late.”
Late? Maybe. Elizabeth wasn’t even sure she’d show up.
Dropping into the car, she thought she was out clean. But Beckett filled the open window before she could put the car in gear. He leaned in, looking swollen in a tight suit. She saw scratches on his wedding ring; smelled shampoo that was probably his wife’s. Everything about him was earnest and heavy. The stare. The sound of his voice. “You’re in a strange place,” he said. “And I get that. Channing and the basement, state cops and Adrian. Hell, the boy’s blood’s not even dry.”
“I know all these things, Charlie.”
“I know you do.”
“Then what are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying people don’t think straight when they get twisted up. That’s normal, even for cops. I just don’t want you to do anything stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Bad men. Dark houses.”
He was trying to help, but that was the hard edge of Elizabeth’s world: bad men and the things that happen in dark houses.
*
Putting the prison in her rearview mirror, Elizabeth took her time driving back to the city. She wanted a moment’s quiet, but thoughts of Gideon in surgery made that impossible. A .32 was a small bullet, but he was a small boy. Did she blame Nathan Conroy for shooting him? No. Not really. Did she blame Adrian? What about herself?
Elizabeth pictured Gideon’s mother, as she’d been—tall and clear-eyed and elegant—then pictured her son in the dark, lying in wait with a loaded weapon in his pocket. Where did he get the revolver, and how did he get to Nathan’s? Did he walk? Hitchhike? Was it his father’s gun? Jesus, did he really plan to kill a man? The line of thought made her nauseous, but maybe it was a delayed reaction to sight of the boy’s blood, or that she’d had three cups of coffee after two days without food, or that she’d barely slept six hours out of the last sixty. Slowing at the river, she pulled onto the verge and called the hospital to check on Gideon’s status.
“Are you family?” she was asked.
“Police.”
“Hold for surgery.”
Elizabeth held, and as she did, she watched the water. She’d grown up near the river and knew its moods: the gentle slide in August, the hard rush that followed winter storms. She’d taken Gideon fishing at times, and it was their place, their thing. But today the river felt different. She didn’t see the sycamores or the willows or the ripples in the current. She saw red banks carved away, wounds in the earth.
“You’re asking about Gideon Strange?”
Elizabeth played the cop card again and got all the information available. Still in surgery. Too early for a prognosis.
“Thank you,” she said, then crossed the river without once looking down.
*
It took twenty minutes to reach the derelict side of things, a seven-mile stretch that began with empty storefronts and ended with shuttered factories and mill houses in their second century. The textile industry had left even before the downturn, same with furniture and the bottling plant and big tobacco. Now, the east side of town was paved with empty factories and broken dreams. As a young cop, Elizabeth had cut her teeth on the east side, but it was worse now. Gangs had moved north from Atlanta, down from DC. Drugs ran up and down the interstate, and bad things multiplied with the trade. Much of the violence happened on the seven-mile stretch, and a lot of poor but decent people were caught in the middle.
That included Gideon.
Turning onto a narrow street, she worked the car between cast-off furniture and old cars until a chalk-yellow house slid past and the hill steepened. Shadows crept out the deeper she went. Cars got rustier; grass disappeared. By the time she bottomed out, the road was in full shade, a ribbon of asphalt running beside a cold stream that broke white over gray stone and bits of shattered concrete. Gideon hadn’t always lived in such a desolate place, but when his mother died, Robert Strange started drinking, and the whirl of it took him down. A good job became an occasional job. The drinking got worse. There were drugs. The only mystery was how he managed to keep Gideon in his life at all. But that, in the end, was no mystery. The system was stretched, and Elizabeth loved the boy too much to break the last bit of his heart. Every time she got social services involved, Gideon would beg her to leave him with his father.
It’s my father, he’d say. He’s all I have left.
Other than a few months in foster care, he’d gotten his wish. In exchange, Elizabeth stayed involved. She made sure his clothes were clean, that food was on the table. That worked until it didn’t. Now, Gideon was fighting for his life, and she had to face the hard question.