Kin

I can’t do this by myself. S’why I came to find you.”

She hugged him lightly and stroked his hair. “We’re outta time, Pete.”

The sirens increased in volume, and over her shoulder Pete saw a cruiser swing into view at the far end of the street, lights flashing. “They’re comin’.” He felt Louise nod, then she pushed him away.

“Hurry, now, but don’t run. You don’t want to draw them on you, okay?”

“They’ll follow me.”

“No. They won’t. The only two people around here who’ve seen you with me are dead. You won’t be involved.”

“Why can’t you come with me? I don’t understand.”

“Because I didn’t do things right. I never have, and like always, I gotta face the music now.”

“No, you don’t. Come with me. We can—”

“If I go, they’ll come after me and dog me for the rest of my days. I don’t want that, for either of us. If I stay, they won’t bother with you. There’ll be no reason to.”

Tears in his eyes, “Please come…” he said, one last time, but knew it would change nothing. The pain in her eyes hadn’t been there the first time she’d left him. It was there now and he knew it was because this time it was for good. He would never see her again, and the thought almost crippled him. But the police car was close enough now that he could hear its tires sizzling through the slush, so he bent low, kissed her, and without another word, crossed the street. As he walked, he looked down at his fingers, at the smudges of blood on the tips. It reminded him of the night they’d found Claire. He had held his hands out to the rain to cleanse them, and afterward it had made him feel bad, as if he’d washed a part of her away. Though it was snowing now and he could simply reach down into the slush to clean them, he closed his hands instead. This blood he wanted to keep for as long as he could because although Louise had said she’d never lied to him, he knew now in his heart that she had, just this once, and only to protect him from the hurt.

It’s not my blood.

As he started to turn the corner into the car lot, he cast a final glance back at her, and saw that she was rocking slightly.

In his head, he heard her singing him to sleep.

* * *

Despite what she had told the boy, Louise did not believe she had ever found her road. She had only found the end of the one she had stumbled blindly along her whole life. The wrong one. It saddened her to think of so many squandered chances and wasted possibilities. She could have been something, had always known she was meant to be something and had tried her damndest to show the world what she was made of. But in the end, she realized she would not be spoken of in the same breath as Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, or Joyce Brant, because none of them had been thieves and murderers. Her singing voice would not be remembered, only the violence, the death, and her frantic attempts to set a boy on the road that might turn out to be his own eventual end, simply because he’d asked her to. It was all he wanted and she had agreed, partly out of guilt, and partly because she’d wanted him to follow his goal to its finish, no matter how misguided a goal it might prove to be.

She began to hum, a sweet melancholy tune that had been with her since her mother had sung it to her as a child. The name seemed so important now, but the fog in her mind obscured it. As her vision grew dim, she raised her head, and wondered if the snow had grown heavier, or if her time was almost at an end. The cold was gradually giving way to warmth, and that at least was good. It allowed her to be calm and focused in whatever time she had left.

She heard the squeak of brakes and the whoop-whoop stutter of the siren as the police car pulled up alongside her. More wails rose in the streets and alleys, a thousand echoes like dogs howling at night. Doors cracked open. Holsters were unclipped, guns drawn. She did not acknowledge those sounds, or the voices that barked at her, filling her ears with commands. She was dying, and had no use for them.

“Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to stand, real slow.”

Louise smiled, and opened her coat.

Momentary silence, then someone said: “Get the medic. Now.”

She shook her head. Too late.

Steam rose from the slash in her stomach where the pawnbroker had dug his boxcutter into her. The sudden shock of it had made her muscles tense, including the one in her trigger finger, and she’d left Rag with a bullet in his shoulder. The pain had made even the simplest of tasks seem monumentally difficult, and she feared grabbing fistfuls of money and padding the wound would deny her the time she needed to get back to Pete and set him on his way. She should have died quickly—the wound would not stop bleeding—but she’d refused. She had left the boy once before. She would not do it again. Not until she’d seen him off.

It seemed only right.

She laughed at that, but it was short and made her double over with pain. Nothing in her life had been right, and it had culminated in the sheer wrongness of the past few hours. She had killed two men, and lost the one she’d been betting on to free her. And her son, a boy who was not her blood, but shared her heart, she had sent away, to fight for all that remained.

“There’s a gun in her pocket,” a man said gruffly.

Arms grabbed her, stopping her from sliding to the frozen ground as her heels failed to find purchase on the slick concrete. But still the mirth leaked out in airless chuckles, trailing from her in clouds that swept around the hard faces of the men, diffusing them, making them unreal.

“Take it easy. She’s hurt bad.”

Maybe, she thought, this was my road. Maybe it was all I was supposed to do. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

She didn’t know, and was too tired to think about it any longer.

“Can you stand, Ma’am?”

Tired of trying to keep myself together.

All that was left were the colors.

The gray.

Tired of trying to hold myself in.

The white.

“She’s passing out.”

The red.

Then nothing.

PART THREE

-30-

Elkwood, Alabama

October 2nd, 2004

“Sheriff McKindrey?”

McKindrey jumped, and put a hand to his chest, though the only thing he was likely to suffer today was heartburn after the burritos and refried beans he’d put away not an hour before. Still, the jolt had been enough to remind him that three beers combined with the soft chuckling of the water in the creek had made him drowsy, and persuaded him there was no need to be on his guard. Hell, even if a catfish nibbled on the bait currently floating around out there on the end of his line, he wasn’t going to be fussed, and the slight chill to the breeze hadn’t been enough to penetrate his languor. To him, the act of fishing was simply that: an act. The peace and quiet, the