Tyler toyed with the idea of getting Freddy to drop him back to the warehouse, to show up in his official capacity as a journalist. It would be quite normal for him to be there, and his newspaper editor wouldn't be best pleased if ‘The Baltimore Echo’ missed out on the big story of Carson’s Lemond’s demise in Baltimore! Still, he knew he couldn't do it; Sarah may not have ratted him out yet but if he was to show his face there brazenly like that it would no doubt send her furious and who knew what she would say then.
Tyler got Freddy to drop him to a storage facility where Tyler had a car stashed. He drove home in this, calling first his editor to tell him he was on the other side of the State looking into a story and explaining why he wasn’t going to be able to make it to Baltimore that night. Briggs was not happy but he grumbled and hung up saying he’d get someone else to cover it. Tyler didn’t give a shit how Briggs felt; he knew how talented he was and that he could get a job at any number of papers throughout the country if he really wanted to. Briggs would just have to put up with shit like this now and then if he wanted Tyler’s stories to adorn his crappy little paper.
Tyler was at home a few hours later when the call he’d been waiting for came. It wasn’t Spalding- though he did think he was going to hear from him real soon too- but Sarah. He hadn’t tried to call her knowing how busy she would have been with the warehouse mess.
“Listen you fuck!” she said as soon as he answered and Tyler was taken aback by her ferocity, “You give me one good reason not to ‘remember’ who I really saw in that warehouse tonight!”
“Sarah, I’m sorry...”
“Bullshit! One good reason, right now or I call it in.” She was playing serious hardball and the worst thing was he didn’t think she was playing, she was ready to do it if he didn’t tell her what she wanted to know. It was time to come clean, about all of it.
“Spalding contacted me to arrange a trade,” Tyler said, knowing full well the pain this would cause in Sarah’s heart. “Information that only I had in exchange for Carson’s life.”
“Why is Carson dead then?” she asked and this threw Tyler too; he would have expected her to be so focused on the fact Spalding was there everything else would have diminished into the background.
“I didn’t have the information he wanted,” Tyler said.
“What did he want to know?”
“He kept asking me ‘How many’ over and over,”
“How many what?” Sarah asked.
“That’s just it,” Tyler replied, “I don’t know and he wouldn’t be any more clear. I think he was playing with me and was going to kill Carson all along. He must have tipped you guys off too, so you’d show up and it would look like I was the one who killed Carson.”
“How can I be sure you’re not?” Sarah asked and her voice had never been colder.
“Sarah!” Tyler said, “You know I’m not capable of something like that.”
“I don’t know anything about you right now,” she said. Tyler didn’t say anything back to this and let silence fall before changing tack.
“He was there Sarah, Spalding was there, I saw him, spoke to him.” Sarah didn't say anything then and Tyler wondered what was going through her head. He didn’t say anything more but let this wash over her. It was a tactic that had served him well in the past with her.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said at last.
“What?” he asked.
“This secrecy, this chasing shadows, I can’t do it anymore, and it’s too much. I’m tired of it all.” Tyler was worried, she sounded serious and he didn’t know if he was going to be able to talk her out of this. He waited a moment longer. “I’m serious, this is the end of it all.” There was a death note of finality in her voice and he had to accept it as the truth.
“What about Spalding?” he asked.
“I’m still going to get him, but I just have to do it the right way, through my job.”
“They’ll never let you, Sarah,” he said.
“If I want it enough, I’ll make it work,” she said sounding almost like she was about to fall asleep. “And I do want it enough.” Tyler sensed defeat, but only in the battle- the war was far from over.
“You can only do what feels right at the time,” he said, by the way of explanation for his actions tonight and also her current feelings about working with him.
“I guess so,” she said.”
Chapter 43
IT SEEMED A LIFETIME before Megan and Ellie came to a road. They had been through hell across all kinds of inhospitable terrain to get here. Their clothes were soaked through from marsh and swamp, their skin was cut and nicked all over from thorny bushes and briars and they were covered in twigs and mud from so many obstacles they’d had to climb over or under on their way to freedom. They both thought it, but neither said it, that they must have taken the least optimal route out of the place. It probably would have been simplest to just follow the driveway off the land to find a road, but that was twenty-twenty hindsight talking. At the time they’d been scared and tired
