“They’re following me,” Adrian said. “They were at the farm, I think. Now, they’re at Crybaby’s.”
No response came, no voice or touch or flicker of humor. Adrian was alone in the night. He picked his way along the trail, his feet finding the rocks and muddy places, the deadfalls and the moss and the slick, black roots. The bank dipped where a creek trickled in. Adrian held on to a sycamore, the branch of a pine. He splashed through the creek and climbed the bank on the other side.
“What if they’re still there? What if they hurt him?”
They won’t bother the lawyer.
Relief flushed through Adrian like a drug. He knew the voice wasn’t real—that it was an echo from prison and the darkness and a thousand horrible nights—but for years it was all he’d had: Eli’s voice and his patience, his eyes in the dark like dim, small suns.
“Thank you, Eli. Thank you for coming.”
Don’t thank anybody but yourself, son. This little delusion is all yours.
But Adrian didn’t believe that, entirely. “First day in the yard. You remember?” Adrian clambered over a fallen tree, then another. “They were going to kill me for being a cop. You stood them down. You saved my life.”
More years on the inside than I could easily count. There were still a few who listened to me.
Adrian smiled at the understatement. There were men alive today who would kill or die for Eli Lawrence. Dangerous men. Forgotten ones. Until the day he died, the old man had been a voice of wisdom in the yard, an arbitrator, a peacemaker. Adrian’s life was not the only one he’d saved.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Eli. Eight years since I watched you die, and it’s still good.”
You’re basically just talking to yourself.
“I know that. You don’t think I know that?”
Now, you’re bitching at yourself.
Adrian stopped where the river widened. People would find it strange, how he talked to a dead man. But the world had grown strange, too, and every sound reminded him of that: the slide of the river, the scrape of pines. He’d known this land as a boy, fished thirty miles in either direction, walked every trail and climbed a hundred trees that hung above the water. How could it be so foreign, now? How could it feel so wrong?
’Cause you’re a goddamn mess.
“Hush now, old man. Let me think.”
Moving down the bank, Adrian slipped his hand into the river. That was real, he told himself, and unchanged. But the sky felt too broad, the trees too tall. Adrian climbed back to the trail and tried to ignore the ugly truth, that only he was different, that the world spun as it always had. He walked and considered that and realized, once, that he’d been standing still long enough for the moon to rise. He held out a hand and watched light spill through his fingers. It was the first moonlight he’d seen in thirteen years, and thoughts of Liz came, unbidden. Not because she was beautiful—though she was—but because the same moon had risen on the night he’d found her at the quarry, and then again on the night she’d made her first arrest. He imagined her in the light. The moon. Her skin.
Jesus, son. The first pretty woman you see …
Adrian laughed, and it the first honest laugh he could remember.
“Thank you, Eli. Thank you for that.”
You’re still talking to yourself.
“I know I am.” He started walking. “Most of the time, I know.”
The river bent west, and the trail with it. When it twisted again a mile later, Adrian turned away from the low ground and worked his way upslope until he found a dirt road that trended in the right direction. That was good for half a mile. When it, too, turned away from his path, Adrian crossed a band of woods, then a farm with a small, white house, brightly lit. A dog barked twice from the porch, but Adrian knew how to stay quick and quiet, and the night swallowed him before the dog got a good scent. Beyond the farm was a road that took him to an intersection three miles farther. Left would take him into the city. Right would lead to a subdivision on the flats beneath the mountain.
Adrian went right.
Francis Dyer lived right.