Wiley Cash - This Dark Road to Mercy

Brady Weller

At first my eyes had been locked on McGwire at the plate, but now I watched him as he rounded first. When he crossed second base, my eyes lifted to the Jumbotron in the center field, and that’s when I saw them just before the screen changed to replay McGwire’s swing. My hand immediately went to my back pocket, and without looking at it I unfolded the copy of Chesterfield’s mug shot. In slow motion, the screen showed McGwire’s home run flying just fair and bouncing off the skybox before dropping into the stands. In those couple of seconds, I got a quick glimpse of two girls who looked like Easter and Ruby, and then I saw Wade dive for the ball.

Beside me, an elderly man with binoculars stood by the upper-deck railing behind home plate. “Can I borrow these?” I asked, lifting the strap from around his neck without waiting for him to answer. McGwire had crossed home plate by the time I found them out in the left field, just two rows up from the wall. I pushed the binoculars back toward the old man and pounded down the stairs to the concourse tunnel.

It was empty; everyone inside the stadium had stayed at their seats or gone down the tunnels to watch McGwire at bat. I turned to my right and ran through the stadium faster than I’d ever run in my life, trying to remember the section number they’d been sitting in when I found them through the binoculars, slowing to look down the tunnels to get my bearings from what I could see of the stands. Each tunnel was a flash of sunshine and green grass and deafening cheers.

When I rounded the third-base line for the outfield, I took the first tunnel on my right, and when I saw the yellow foul pole I pounded down the steps toward the field, the grass rising up like the flat face of a green mossy lake.

The girls were alone.

Pruitt

Her picture was in my hand when her face appeared on the Jumbotron, but my eyes were focused instead on Wade Chesterfield where he stood beside her.

But by the time I found them in the stands he was walking up the steps away from their seats.

The concourse was empty, everyone still cheering inside the stadium, the roar carrying down each tunnel where the light crossed my face and my feet hammered the cement on the way toward him. My hand reached back and cradled the gun against my waist, holding it to make certain it didn’t work itself free.

He probably heard someone running down the concourse toward him and thought they were rushing back to their seats to see the celebration, but if he’d looked up instead of ducking into the bathroom at the top of the stairs he would’ve seen me bearing down on him.

Wade stood in the first stall on the left, inside the empty restroom, his back to me, wiping at his shirt with toilet paper. My heart pounded in my chest and the blood surged through my body, and I felt a trail of it trickling from my nose and down onto my lips.

I stepped into the stall, and he turned around to see me standing right in front of him.

“Hey, Wade.”

He tried to squeeze past me, but my arms locked around his neck and pulled him back into the stall. He squirmed around so that his back was against my chest, and his feet pushed off from the toilet. We stumbled out of the stall and fell toward the sinks. My shoulder slammed against a bank of automatic hand dryers, turning a few on, the hot air blowing down my arm and across his face. He thrashed around trying to get free, but my arms tightened around his neck and lifted him off the floor, part of me hoping to feel his body go slack so that it would be done. “Do you remember me, Wade?”

“Wait,” he said, his voice barely able to make it all the way out of his mouth. “My girls.” He was covered in the smells of the ballpark-ketchup, mustard, beer, sweat.

“Where’s the money, Wade?” My hold on his neck loosened so he could get enough air to answer. But he squirmed free and faced me, his eyes looking right into mine. My hands flew to either side of his face, my thumbs forcing themselves into his eye sockets. He screamed out and closed his eyes as tight as he could, his fingers reaching out blindly, clawing at my face. His hands came away from me covered in the blood from my nose, and his fingers slid down my arms and to my wrists.

Suddenly there was the sound of my sunglasses hitting the concrete, and the dim light was now brighter in my eyes. My hands turned him loose and my knees bent so that my fingers could sweep the floor. Wade rushed past me, knocking me backward to the ground, the gun coming loose from my waistband and my hand sending it sliding across the room.

I grabbed hold of Wade’s ankles and pulled him to the floor, my body on top of him and my hands covering his just as his finger closed around the trigger and squeezed off a round. It skipped off the floor and ricocheted into the ceiling. The noise was deafening.

I got to my feet just as voices echoed outside in the concourse, and then a set of hands were on my shoulders, another set grabbing Wade and pulling him free. Someone yelled, “Gun!” before my fist crushed a jaw, teeth tearing into my knuckles.

“Let’s get some help in here!” another voice screamed.

Wade was still underfoot when my shoulders squared to the two guys in orange vests in front of me, my eyes trying to scan the floor for the gun. And then the Mace hit me, and they were on top of me. And in a few seconds there were others.

“Stop!” someone screamed, but they weren’t talking to me. From out in the stadium came the sound of people cheering once the game restarted. But my ears caught another sound: it was the echo of Wade Chesterfield’s footsteps running away from me down the concourse.

Easter Quillby

When I saw Wade again he was standing just outside the tunnel at the top of the stairs leading down to our seats. I figure he’d stopped walking toward us when he saw the man sitting beside me. Even if Wade didn’t know who Brady was he probably knew exactly why he was there. Something must’ve told him that it was all over, that somebody’d found us and we’d be going back to North Carolina, back to Gastonia, and after that, who knew where.

I don’t know how long he’d been standing there when I turned around and saw him, but his eyes were red like he’d either been crying or was fixing to. He waved at me, and I waved back, and that was it-he was gone. I waited a few more minutes-until the bottom of the second inning when the Cardinals were up to bat-before I told Brady that I didn’t think Wade was coming back. He asked me if I was sure, told me we could wait just a little bit longer, but I knew there wasn’t any use. I was ready to let whatever was going to happen just go ahead and happen.

Brady Weller

Gastonia had exploded by the time I brought Easter and Ruby back to town on Tuesday afternoon, a full week after they’d gone missing. The armored car heist was all over the news again, and so was Tommy Broughton’s mug shot. It wasn’t just the local news covering the story; cable news was back in town too, and CNN and the morning programs had live feeds going around the clock showing agents up at the house on Calder Mountain, tossing chunks of drywall out the doors of the basement and carrying out black trash bags that I knew were slam full of millions of dollars. The only thing they couldn’t find was the missing driver of that armored car. He could’ve spent the past six months weighted down at the bottom of the Catawba River, or he could’ve been relaxing on a beach somewhere in Mexico, far away from Tommy Broughton and the mess he’d gotten himself into. But I knew Broughton would eventually cough him up; he wasn’t smart enough or hard enough to keep that kind of secret.