She nodded, staring up too. “Going to Dead Rock. Prisoner transport.”
“Why not just drive them?”
“Most of the prisoners spending the rest of their lives up there come from pretty far away, lot of urban areas. Roads are pretty crappy around here and lots of places for ambush. Hard to bust your buddy out of jail thousands of feet up there.”
“I can see that.”
She turned to face him. “So what were you doing when you ran into Danny?”
Stone stared over at Willie’s pickup truck where his bag was in the back. “I was heading out of town,” he said a bit guiltily.
“Okay. Does this have something to do with Trimble wanting to write a story about you?”
Stone tried hard to look surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“Danny told me that you came along with him because a government car pulled into the town where you two got off the train.”
“I think he made a mistake.”
“If you’re in some kind of trouble—”
“I’m in no trouble, Abby.”
“I was going to say if you are in trouble, I want to help you.”
“Why? You barely know me.”
“You saved my son. And I can’t explain exactly why, but I feel like I’ve known you all my life.”
Stone looked down, stubbed the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe. “I appreciate the offer, Abby, I really do.”
“But you’re leaving anyway?”
He shot her a glance. “I didn’t say that.”
“But you didn’t not say it either. Everybody’s got problems. You have no obligation to stay here and help us. Hell, it’s not your battle.”
“Why don’t you just leave here? You’ve got plenty of money.”
“Run out of my hometown? No thank you. I’m not built that way.”
“But Danny left.”
“He didn’t want to go. I made him.”
Stone looked stunned. “What, why?”
“This is no place for him. What’s he got here? Work in the mines or the prison?”
“Is that all? Or how about the strange things happening here you mentioned?”
“It’s not your fight, Ben. If you need to move on, you move on.” She hesitated. Stone thought she was going to say something else. “I better go back and check on Danny. And I’ll look in on Willie too.”
She left him there. Stone sat down on a low brick wall. An hour later he was still there, trying desperately to make sense of what he should do.
As he watched, the miner brigade began pulling in for their methadone pop. He checked his watch. Not even five in the morning yet. He continued to watch as the bone-thin men climbed out of their rides and straggled into the clinic before leaving to pull twelve hours in the pits of hell, contorting their bodies way past all sane levels. That only led to more pain, and more painkillers, and the cycle just kept on spinning.
All so the lights remain on in this country.
He looked on a few minutes later as the zombie-eyed men headed out in their dusty Chevys and Fords.
I’m going to start using candles and cook my food over a fire.
Stone and Carr were one and the same. Long suspected, it was nice to have confirmation. Stone had fled Triple Six. A short time later an empty coffin had been put into the ground at Arlington with Carr’s name on the white marker.
Later that morning Knox poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it at his kitchen counter as his gaze ran over the personal items in the room that had been his wife’s. He hadn’t changed it much after her death. The home had been both of theirs, but it had really been Patty’s. Knox had spent more time in other countries than he had his own. It just came with the job. This was her space. In a sense, after her passing, Knox felt he was merely renting it.
The place he’d gone to in downtown D.C. was a news archive center maintained by the federal government. The feds burned a lot of money, without doubt, but some of what they purchased was actually useful. In his last days at Triple Six Carr had been assigned to a post in the Brunswick, Georgia, area with his official cover being that of an instructor at the then relatively new FLETC, or the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. From the daily logs that Knox had found, Carr was gone a lot from his post. On several occasions Knox had discovered that when Carr had been missing from FLETC, somewhere else in the world, a person of interest to the United States had died or disappeared.
Knox had canvassed the archives looking for one item in particular. After an hours-long search, but aided by his knowing the week span he was looking for, he found it. An obscure item in the local Brunswick paper detailed the disappearance of a local couple and their two-year-old daughter. A grainy photo of a woman was identified as Claire Michaels. Her husband, John, and their daughter, Elizabeth, had also vanished. John Michaels had been employed as an instructor at FLETC, the article said. There were rumors that some local federal cop-haters might have been involved and had targeted the Michaelses b
ecause of John’s occupation. Knox searched for additional stories or any possible break in the case,