Джеффри Дивер - The Goodbye Man

The driver, a man and the other woman joined her and gazed down at the corpse. Unlike the brunette, they glanced down without any reaction. Utterly nonchalant. The driver actually grimaced, irritated, as if the trip here had been a waste of time. He shooed the others back to the van. The brunette remained where she was, though, wiping tears. The driver strode up to her, taking her roughly by the arm. He was angry and he whispered something, his face dark. She bowed her head submissively, nodded. A reprimand. Why? For displaying emotion at the death of someone? Possibly a friend? She and Adam might have had a connection in the past.

The driver continued to whisper. More nodding. He glanced to the van and when he noted that the others weren’t looking his way, he moved his hand from her arm to her neck, the backs of his fingers. Then around to her throat, where, it seemed, he touched the chain or necklace. The hand then started down her chest. She turned abruptly and walked to the van. He frowned and called after her. Shaw caught the words “...or demerits.”

She paused, looking crestfallen, then continued into the vehicle.

Looking around once more the blunt man called out softly, so as not to draw the cops’ attention. Shaw caught what might have been two names: maybe “Jeremy.” Definitely “Frederick.”

Not far away there came a rustle and a snap of footfalls, as the man in the orange sunglasses trooped down the hill. Apparently he’d stepped away to look for Adam and Erick before learning of Adam’s death. Had he seen Shaw? Maybe. At the van he stopped and looked back. Shaw crouched. The man climbed inside. The engine started and the driver made a careful three-point turn and the curious assembly vanished back the way they had come.

Shaw climbed into the Kia and fired it up. He drove slowly back up Old Mill in the direction he’d come. He passed through Hope’s Corner and then five miles farther until he was out of Hammond County.

There he pulled over onto the shoulder and climbed out. He walked to the rear of the car and used the remote to pop the trunk. He looked down at Erick Young, who was blinking against the bright blue sky.

Shaw said, “Let’s get you out of there.”

He was driving fast, though only a few miles over the limit. He didn’t need to be stopped by any associates of Sheriff Welles, even if he had the apparent blessing, one might say, of the man. He was glancing in the rearview mirror; nobody was pursuing so far.

His mind returned to the brunette who, unlike her companions, had reacted with such shock and dismay to Adam’s death.

Who was she and what about the group she was with? Was it the retreat he’d heard about?

Hippies...

Erick, in the passenger seat of the Kia, whispered, “Why would he kill himself?” The young man was staring out the window. His hands were now zip-tied behind him. Shaw was still armed and didn’t want to risk a wave of desperation within the boy driving him to lunge for the weapon. Or to leap from a car in motion.

Saving Erick Young from the deputies had been a gamble, though he could hardly leave him to be found and arrested by Welles.

“Come with me,” Shaw had called to Erick, after Adam had jumped. “Fast.” He’d helped the shocked young man up the hill to his car and opened the trunk. “Get in and stay quiet. You stay with me and I’ll get you back to Gig Harbor. Your parents. Find you a lawyer.”

“Okay,” the young man had replied, his voice a whisper.

With yet another county between them, Shaw began to relax. He checked the navigation system on the car. It would be an hour and a half back to Pierce County. Shaw had plenty of gas in the car and water for them, and they didn’t need food. As for a restroom, it would be brush by the roadside. There was no unsuspicious explanation to a gas station clerk as to why your traveling companion was zip-tied when you carried no badge.

“They were going to hurt us, you said? The police?”

“That’s right. They weren’t interested in just arresting you.”

“Who are you?”

Shaw reminded him about the reward offered by his family, and the one offered by the county.

“Mom and Dad wanted you to catch me?”

“They wanted you brought in safe. Running with an armed fugitive was a stupid idea.”

“It’s just... I had to go with him.”

“Why?”

“I just did.” Looking at the pines zipping past. “He jumped,” Erick repeated. “Why would he do that?”

“Maybe he couldn’t take going to prison.”

“But we didn’t do it.”

The most popular defense in the world. Shaw asked, “Which part?”

“All of it. I mean, yeah, Adam shot those guys. But it was self-defense.”

This caught Shaw’s attention. “Tell me about it.”

“Okay, there’s this cemetery where I go to. To visit... Well, my brother died last year.”

“Mark. I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I kind of go talk to him, you know.” The boy seemed embarrassed. “Sounds stupid but I do.”

An image of Shaw’s own brother, Russell, floated into his thoughts. “No, not stupid at all.”

“I was standing by his grave and I was crying, I guess.” He glanced at Shaw and saw a sympathetic face. “Adam was there too. He walked over to me. He was... I knew he was kind of weird. But he seemed like he was worried about me. He asked if I was all right. I told him about Mark. And he didn’t say anything at first, then he pointed to a grave. It was his mother. He said when she died he got all fucked up.

“He said there was this group. They had a place in the mountains. It had helped him a lot. He said maybe him and me, we could go there together. You spend, I don’t know, three weeks or a month or something. Like therapy, I guess.”

Shaw remembered Adam Harper’s father telling about the young man’s improvement after spending some time away from Tacoma. This would have been what he was referring to.

“I thought, can’t hurt to try. Nothing else was working. He said it was expensive but I said I could get some money. School was out and I could take time off work, so I said, ‘Sure.’ Then, all that shit went down at the church.” He was breathing hard. “Oh, man...”

“Go on, Erick.”

“We were walking back to our cars and talking about when we could leave and go to this place when we saw the fire. We went to see what it was.”

“The cross in front of the church?”

“Uh-huh. Like the KKK, you know? These two men came out and one of them — the janitor, William, I heard — he had a gun, and he starts shooting at us.”

Shaw frowned. “He fired first?”

“Yeah. I’m on the ground and Adam’s screaming, like, ‘Stop, we didn’t do it!’ But he just keeps at it. Adam pulls out his gun, the one you got, and he shoots back and we run. I saw the news later and it didn’t say anything about them shooting first.”

If it had happened as Erick said, then the janitor had committed a felony; you can’t shoot a nonthreatening trespasser. If you weren’t preventing use of deadly force, it’s a crime to even display the gun, let alone pull the trigger. After the janitor was hit, he probably gave his gun to the lay preacher and told him to hide it. An unregistered weapon, Shaw supposed.

Shaw asked, “What was this group he was talking about?”

“It’s something Foundation. Up in the mountains somewhere, where we were headed. Some of them were coming to pick us up. I kind of lied when you asked. But Adam said there was nobody, so I didn’t know what to say.”

“You were saying its like therapy?”

“I guess. It’s expensive and you have to pay up front. That’s why we didn’t book outta town right away. I needed to get some cash together. At first I was thinking scam, you know. But Adam was all: no, it’ll really work. It helped him get over his mother’s death and there were some problems with his father too. Adam really wanted me to feel better. It was important to him.” His voice grew muffled. He was crying. Shaw pulled over, put his gun and holster in the lockbox in the trunk and helped Erick out. He rezipped his wrists in front of him and offered the boy a wad of napkins from the food he’d bought earlier.