Set You Free (21 page)

The sound of a walkie-talkie rises up right beside us. I press myself against the wall, pulling Tom with me. An officer steps out of a building on the other side of the alley. We’re in a dark area, but if he turns around and shines his light our way, this will all be over.

The officer says, “Moving north on Percy.” We push farther back against the wall. The officer turns and seems to be looking directly at us. Tom’s face is partially lit by the nearby streetlight. I try to pull him back, but I can already read his mind. It’s all over his face. I shake my head no.

He leans forward.

I pull him back. Mouth
no
again. I feel as if I’m about to cry. Somehow, I thought this part would be the easiest. Walk in, get Ben and Tom, and then leave. That all the other things before would be the hard parts.

Wrong again.

Tom looks down at Ben.

Pushes my hand from his arm.

He’s about to step out when the officer’s walkie-talkie reports. “Negative. Proceed south on Percy and meet up with C team.”

The officer turns and grumbles something before raising the radio to his mouth and saying, “Affirmative.”

“Ready?” I say to Tom.

“You two go first,” he says. “The fewer of us out at once, the better, right?”

“You’ll be right behind us?” I say.

“Yes.”

I take another look around the corner, see nothing, grasp Benny a little tighter and run. My legs feel like tree trunks. I stumble a couple of times and begin to wonder if I wasn’t more damaged in the car accident than I thought.

When I trip, Benny grabs me tighter.

“It’s okay, buddy, we’ll get you to your mom,” I say.

“I know you will,” he whispers in my ear. I lean back from him so I can look at his face. His eyes are all over the place,
full of the wonder of being out at night. Every moment for a five-year-old is like the first ever. He’ll forget all about what has happened here.

I hope.

We get to the car as a cruiser turns the corner. There’s a spotlight on the side, pointed toward the falls. The circle of light is quickly moving toward us, and I can’t get the keys out of my pocket fast enough. As I pull them past the lip of my pocket, they catch on something and slip from my hand, crashing to the asphalt.

“Under,” I say, setting Ben on the ground. He slides under the car without question. I follow him. We freeze there, huddled together as the cruiser pulls into the parking lot. The spotlight cuts across the car. I pull Ben closer to me. We cannot get caught here, is all I can think. Not now. Not this way.

I see Tom coming out into the light across the street.
No, Tom
, I say to myself.
Go back. Please just go back. It’s going to be okay.

He keeps walking. Not running, just steadily walking toward the cruiser. But then, as quickly as it pulled up, the cruiser tears off, the spotlight jumping around the falls as it goes.

I pull Ben out from beneath the car and unlock the door.

“Get in, buddy,” I say, and Ben scrambles inside.

As I’m putting Ben’s seat belt on, Tom comes up behind me and says, “Close.”

I slam the door. “We have to go.”

Tom swings around the front of the car and gets in the passenger seat. As we back out, I think of things to say to him. But everything that comes to mind sounds stupid. What he’s done is too kind for words. And he was still willing to do more.

So we drive in silence. I check the rearview mirror over and over again. Ben is looking out the window, then at the ceiling, then playing with his fingers in front of his face.

This isn’t exactly how I envisioned the trip. I thought it would be more heroic. More end-of-a-long-journey elation. Instead, I’m just tired, and I feel like crying. It’s too late, it’s been too long a day, and I’m an emotional wreck.

“Thank you,” I say to Tom.

“No problem,” he replies.

“Sure,” I say. “No problem. No big deal. Just another day in the life of Tom Saunders, international man of awesome.”

Tom laughs as we turn onto the Hamford Bridge, which takes us south, out of the city. “I sat there, Laur,” he says. “You did all the work.”

“Your name has been dragged through the mud again,” I say.

“I’ll change it,” he says. “Like, to Tom Jones.”

“Or Engelbert Humperdinck.”

“Maybe less elaborate,” Tom says. “Richard Taylor.”

“Where’d that come from?”

“A surf poster on the wall. He’s a tall dude with a million-mile smile,” Tom says. “It could give me something to work toward.”

“Rich, Rick, Dick,” I say. This is ridiculous, I think. But also so very calming. Which is when I realize that Tom is working his magic again. Trying to calm
me
down. To make everything seem normal somehow.

I reach over and take my brother’s hand. It’s not far, but as we drive off the bridge it seems like I’ve been driving for days, traveled hundreds of miles. I don’t let go of Tom’s hand until I have to downshift to turn in to a closed-down gas station.

“Well, Richard Taylor,” I say. “Thank you.”

“I think I’ll go with Rick,” he says. “It sounds cool.”

Erin’s Honda Civic is parked in the shadows of the building, and she is standing beside it, waiting. I slow down and pull in beside her, and she has the back door open and is gathering Ben into her arms before I have fully stopped.

“You’re okay, Ben,” she says. Ben starts to speak, but Erin hugs him closer. “I missed you so much, big guy.”

“Are we going on the adventure now?” Ben says.

I don’t know exactly what Erin has told Ben about all of this—how she explained everything that was going to happen. She’d told me she was going to tell him it would be an adventure. She and Tom bought throwaway phones so she could call Ben while he was hiding, but I don’t know if that happened.

“Yes,” Erin says.

“To the city?”

“To the city,” Erin says.

Tom and I get out of the car.

“Do the police have the files?” Erin asks.

“They do,” I reply. “They also have Jack. Detective Evans actually brought him in. I sent the files to every newspaper I could think of.”

“Will he be charged with anything? Will he go to jail?” Her eyes go round in the dim light.

“I couldn’t tell from the files. I didn’t have enough time. But it looks pretty bad.”

She kisses Ben again. “Jack can talk his way out of anything,” she says.

“There’s a lot of proof there,” I say, trying to reassure her. “There will be an investigation.”

Erin nods, but she doesn’t seem convinced. After everything she has been through, the years of living with Jack Carter and his lies, it must be difficult to believe she might actually be free.

“People don’t like corruption in politics,” she says. “These men in power try to help one another out of things like this, but people will hate him.” She inhales. “That’s almost enough. Thank you. A million times, thank you.” She gathers me into a hug, and I hold her tightly. She releases me and walks up to Tom, holding a car key out in front of her. “For you,” she says to Tom. Tom takes the key. “It’s around the corner. A blue Subaru.”

“I can’t…”

“You can take this. I have no use for it. I can’t drive it, and I don’t have time to sell it. If you don’t take it, it’ll sit right here in this parking lot until someone steals it.” She closes Tom’s hand around the keys. “Consider it a gift from the mayor for all your hard work and community involvement. You won’t be touched by any of this. You’ve saved us, and I can’t think of any way I can ever actually repay you.”

“My pleasure,” Tom says. She pulls him into an embrace, and they stay that way for a moment.

“Good luck,” she says.

“Same to you.” She darts around the front of the car to the driver’s side. “We have to go,” she says. “There’s no telling how long it will be before Jack convinces the police to let him go.”

“Take care, Ben,” I say.

He looks out the window. “You too, Lauren,” he says, in his little big-man voice. He holds a pack of Beyblades up. “So cool,” he says.

Erin opens the driver’s door and gets in.

I lean in the open passenger window. “Will you be back?”

“I don’t know,” Erin says. “Right now, I plan to. I’m going to send a report to the police, with a picture of Ben and me with a newspaper to show when it was taken and all that. It’ll explain that I’ve fled due to fear for my life. I’ll send pictures of my broken arm from last year.”

My face must have dropped. “You said—”

“A slip, I know. It wasn’t a slip. That was Jack. So were those bruises you saw. I’ll send all those photos to the media. But if that doesn’t work, I’m ready to disappear.”

“I hope I see you again,” I say.

“Thank you again, Lauren. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.” I step away from the car. As she backs out, I wave to Ben. His face is glowing. He’s tearing into the package of Beyblades. A moment later, they are nothing but taillights on the highway.

“What happened with Grady?” Tom asks. “Did he find you?”

“He did,” I say. “Just like you said he would.”

“So where is he?”

“Likely at the police station,” I say. “Or the hospital.”

“What happened?” Tom says. His face is twisted in concern.

“JJ tried to ram us. Don’t worry—he’ll be okay.”

“You can explain why this all happened the way it did?”

“I can try,” I say. And then I do something I haven’t done since we were kids. I wrap my arms around my brother and hold on tightly. He feels so different, so much like a man.

“When did you get so big?” he says to me.

“Me! What about you? You need a shave,” I say, holding him away from me. “You’d better go.”

“Wish me luck,” he says. I want to hold on to him and try to make up for all the times I pushed him away. I wish there
were a crevice we could walk through and find ourselves ten years in the past. Farther, maybe. I would just need one little shift. One day when I stood up for him.

For myself.

The day my mom sent him away. The day everyone thought he was one thing, and I took the easy route. I went along with them. I let everything I knew about Tom disappear in this fog of speculation and figured I could never know for certain.

Of course I knew.

I knew because Tom told me. He told me what he was doing with that kid. Asking him about a sand castle. That was it.

The relief I felt when he moved across town will stay with me forever. The ease with which a problem disappeared. But he was never a problem. He’s my brother.

I feel as though I’m about to cry because everything is coming at me at once.

“I want to go with you,” I say.

“I’ll be back,” he says. “Or…I don’t know, I’ll send for you. Don’t worry—I’ve gotten pretty good at looking out for myself.”

He smiles again, then turns away.

I watch him walk to the car. He presses a button on the fob, and the lights flash.

“Sweet,” he says. He turns around one last time before getting in the car. “Until we meet again,” he says.

“See you, Rick!”

My cell buzzes. I pull it from my pocket.

Where are you?
It’s Detective Evans.

On our way.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Detective Evans isn’t an idiot.

She’s been blinded by her beliefs, certainly.

She’s been tricked. She understands that now.

But she’s not an idiot.

“You were witnessed leaving the scene of an accident,” she says to me. “Where did you go?”

“I went to look for Tom.”

“Had your brother contacted you?” she asks. She looks disheveled, which is a first.

“No.”

“So where did you go?”

“To the warehouse district.”

She shakes her head. “No, you didn’t. We have officers there. No one saw you in that area. How did you get there?”

“I borrowed a friend’s car,” I say.

“Where did you actually go?”

“I just said—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

“Stop lying,” she says. “I can’t take any more lies. Where is Benjamin Carter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know,” she says, slamming a fist onto the table. “Where are they?”

“Have you found Joe Fisher?” I ask.

“Where did you get that information?” she demands.

I don’t want to lie to her any longer. So I take the only route available to me. “I can’t tell you that, and you can’t make me. The information is accurate. It’s all true. Our mayor has been using his influence for his own financial gain. His son was involved in the death of Michael Brent, the street racer. His daughter is dating a dealer. The Carters are not who everyone thinks they are.”

“You said you knew where Tom was. That you would be bringing him in.”

“He still might show,” I say. “I mean, anything is possible.”

“I’ve passed the place where I ask nicely, Lauren,” she says.

What can you say to a statement like that? I give her a little shrug. “The truth is, I don’t know.”

She reaches out and grabs my phone. She won’t find anything on it. I reset it before I drove to the police station.

I also put a password on.

Detective Evans holds the phone out to me.

“Unlock it,” she says.

“Why?”

“Do it.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what you have been texting your brother. Lauren, this is very serious now.”

I decide not to respond. She has completely lost her cool.

“Have you had contact with your brother?” she says.

I don’t respond. I don’t have to. It’s over now.

“Lauren, have you had contact with your brother?”

“You know what? I don’t think he’s coming, and I’m pretty tired, so I think I’ll go home.” I stand up. “Sorry it didn’t work out for you.”

“If you are withholding information, you can be prosecuted,” she says.

“What kind of information? What could I possibly know?”

“Where did you get those files?”

“They’re real, right?” I drop the
USB
drives on the desk. “I guess you can have the originals. Every newspaper in the state will be sending people to little Resurrection Falls to see what is going on. There are files in there that could link people much higher up than our mayor. So I would hold on to those if I were you.”