All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 133

133

Saint stood in sunlight despite the frost, crystals that sheened the lot like jewels on that most precious of mornings. She drove a year-old Bronco, the thing so big her grandmother told her she looked like a raisin atop a monster truck, but it made shorter work of their white street as record snow fell.

The James Connor Correctional Facility sat in tracked soybean fields, built low so it could not be glimpsed from the highway.

Heavy locks turned and he appeared.

She smiled.

He smiled.

Patch walked with a slight limp. The bullet had passed through his thigh, nicking the bone but missing every nerve and major blood vessel.

The surgeon had said he was lucky. Patch knew that luck was born from her hours spent at the shooting range, hitting nines with her eyes closed.

“Hey, Saint.”

“Hey, kid.”

He opened his arms and she stepped into them, pressed her head against his chest and squeezed till he called for mercy. He wore a khaki shirt, his hair close cropped, his eye still bright.

She wore perfume, a little makeup, her glasses exchanged for contact lenses.

They rode those miles on Interstate 44 with Patch watching passing trucks and gas stations, leaning water towers and distant silos iron against a pale washed sky. Now and then she looked at him and fought the urge to

ask if he was okay, because she did not know how you could spend six years caged and leave without bearing some kind of difference.

They ate lunch in a diner of ragtag patrons by the Will Rogers Turnpike, where they ordered burgers and fries, and she could not help but think of every major and minor thing he had missed. He had lost a little weight, still so handsome the waitress added a smile as she fetched their order.

“How’s Norma?” he said.

“Still there.”

Saint had tried to visit him more than a dozen times, though Patch would not see her, or return her letters, though still she wrote them. A hundred pages of nothing, of telling him of her small life, of how she had moved to supervisory special agent, which didn’t mean all that much more than she could afford to rent a bigger apartment to rattle around in. How she had moved departments, worked fraud for two years, wrapped a major case, handled dozens of indictments and pleas. How she walked up the stone steps and into the courthouse on State Avenue and watched a young judge hand out sentences that would lead many to die in prison. How she knew she had done a good thing but felt a cold detachment.

She wrote of how she thought of getting a pet, maybe a Maine Coon or a Ragdoll, but settled on a small aquarium. How she played piano again.

Looking back she was not surprised he had not replied.

A couple of hundred yards from the Kansas line they broke the swells of a snowstorm that slowed them into Missouri.

“I saw you in the newspaper,” he said.

“I saw in you in a couple, too.”

He smiled. “They called me a pirate.”

“They did.”

“The Gower homicides. You work murders now?”

“Yes.” She hadn’t leaned all that hard on Himes, just told him she wanted to do something meaningful. He saw through it. That she wanted to stay better connected to the missing dead girl.

“There was a television set,” he said, and she glanced at him though he kept his eyes on the drift of snow.

“I got to see it, you know. Hubble breaking the sky. Couple guys hollered when that wall came down in Germany.”

“How come?” she said.

“Prisoners don’t like walls, Saint.”

“Right.”

“I thought of Monta Clare a little, Misty and…damn we were so young, right? When it all happened we were all so young. I see all those boys heading to Iraq, like didn’t we learn nothing from…”

She touched the brake for a tractor, knew his mind had found his father.

“And then I was sitting there when the reporter cut to a courtroom…the man was shackled, Bible resting across his lap. We were all watching it because something was shifting, you know. The people that said they were innocent, which was most of them, they sat there quiet after. Tommy Lee Andrews.”

She could not keep the concern from reaching her face.

“DNA,” he said.

She was quiet a long time.

“We can go back,” he said.

She lightly cleared her throat. “I once told you no good can come of any of this.”

“Is the Tooms farm even still standing?” he said.

“It’s empty. No one will buy it, after they heard. The bank owns the land.”

He leaned back and for a moment he was fourteen and Nix was driving them back from the hospital, his hopes still clinging to the margins.

“The color has gone,” he said, and she waited for him to go on. “When I look back. I know there were summers, but I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t cold, when it wasn’t winter. I wrote Tooms again.”

“You wrote the judge, too,” she said, because Heinemann had called her.

“Rare that a victim testifies on behalf of the perpetrator.”

“Almost as rare as a cop testifying on behalf of a bank robber, after she

shot him.”

Saint smiled.

“If Tooms dies he takes her with him,” Patch said.

“He doesn’t know where he buried her.”

“Bullshit.”

“If we don’t find anything new, what will happen?” she said, and he could hear the way she lightly held her breath.

“A strand of hair. Something that gives us a shot. Eloise Strike. Her father, Walter, he wrote me in there. Said his wife passed, so now he doesn’t have a reason not to start looking again.”

“What will he find?” she said.

“Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s what keeps him from dying, too. Hope is —”

“Hope is expectation. Anyone that tells you less is lying to themselves.”

As they drove into Monta Clare he stared at the streets like he expected something to have changed.

“My grandmother tended the yard…and we painted the windows last summer,” she said, quiet as they pulled onto Rosewood Avenue.

He took her small hand in his. “What you said during the trial and all, and after what you’d been through. Getting me moved closer. I wouldn’t last in a Texas jail.”

“Charles Vane set fire to one of his own fleet and sent it toward Governor Rogers’s forces during a brutal dogfight. Pirate blood. You go

down swinging.”

He smiled. “We go down swinging, kid.”

“Stealing my lines.”

She looked up at the old house, still standing, the only blight on that

street, in that town.

“What happened to him?” Patch said.

“The same thing that happens to all pirates.”

“I don’t like my chances, Saint.” He climbed out, then stopped and turned. “Edward Low. Fearsome. Some reckon he was hanged in France.

But one story has it he escaped to the Caribbean and saw out his days on the beach, in paradise.”

She stayed at the bottom of the path as he walked to the door, and felt it

each time he limped.

“Patch.”

He turned.

“What I said about hope…I still hope you’ll find your paradise. Entirely and absolutely.”

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