Chapter 53
Luke
I’m not asleep. I don’t sleep much anymore. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon I haven’t touched.
My phone lights up. Marin.
“He’s gone,” she says.
I wait for more. There isn’t more.
“Gone how?”
“Gone as in not in the basement. Gone as in the column didn’t hold. Gone as in I went downstairs to check on him and there’s an empty pair of cuffs hanging off an iron post and no Charles.”
She doesn’t sound scared. She sounds like a woman who just found out the dog got through the fence again.
“How long?”
“I don’t know. An hour maybe. I fell asleep.”
I’m already pulling my boots on. Phone between my shoulder and my ear. Keys off the counter.
“He’s on foot,” I say. “Weak. Hasn’t walked more than four feet in weeks. He’s not getting far.”
“He doesn’t need to get far, Luke. He needs to get to a phone. Or a road. Or Mrs. Mather’s front door.”
“I’m on my way.”
I’m in the truck in forty seconds. The county road is empty and dark and I drive it the way I drive everything lately—fast, quiet, thinking three steps ahead of a problem I didn’t cause but somehow own.
Eleven minutes. I pull into her driveway. She’s on the porch in a t-shirt and sweatpants and bare feet, holding the taser in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Her hair is wild. No makeup. Just Marin at 2 a.m., furious and barefoot and hunting.
“Which direction?” I say.
“If he’s smart, he’s heading for Mather’s. If he’s stupid, he’s heading for the main road.”
“Which do you think?”
“Charles only thinks he’s smart. So he’s heading for the road.”
We take the truck. Brights on, crawling the county road at fifteen miles an hour. She’s leaning out the passenger window with the flashlight, sweeping the tree line, the ditches, the shoulder.
“There,” she says.
Half a mile from the house. Not even half a mile.
He’s sitting on the ground next to a fence post, legs out in front of him, breathing hard.
He made it four hundred yards and his body quit.
Too much time on a concrete floor, weeks of ibuprofen meals and potty chair shuffles, and his legs just said no.
He looks up when the headlights hit him. Squints. Doesn’t run. Couldn’t run if he wanted to.
I stop the truck. We get out.
Charles looks at me. Looks at Marin. Looks at the taser in her hand. Looks at the open road behind him—the road he almost made it to, the road that would have taken him to town, to a phone, to police, to the end of all of this.
A few miles too many short.
“You didn’t get very far,” Marin says.
“My legs—”
“Your legs have been in a basement for two weeks because you pissed the bed four times. Actions have consequences, Charles. But we all know that by now, don’t we?”
He’s shaking. Not from cold. From effort. From failure. From the look on Marin’s face, which is not the look of a woman who’s been outsmarted. It’s the look of a woman who has to drag the dog home again and is already thinking about a better fence.
“Can you stand?” I say.
“I don’t—”
I repeat myself making it clear it’s not really a question, if we both know the answer. “Can you stand.”
He can’t. His legs are rubber. I pull him up.
He leans against me—dead weight, unwilling weight, the weight of a man who ran out of body before he ran out of will.
Marin takes the other side. We walk him to the truck like two parents carrying a drunk teenager home from a party he wasn’t supposed to be at.
He goes in the front. Middle seat. Marin on one side, me on the other. She holds the taser on her lap. Casual. The way you’d hold a TV remote.
I drive.
Nobody speaks. The three of us in a row like a family portrait nobody asked for.
The road is dark. The truck smells like sweat and dirt and failure.
Back at the house, we get him inside. Down the stairs. Back to the basement. He doesn’t fight. He’s got nothing left to fight with.