CHAPTER

43

 

Tolman fell asleep before they crossed into Tennessee. Journey’s fingers hurt from where he’d clawed at the rocks, and his left foot was sore, but he held his leg as straight as he could with his right foot on the accelerator. He kept the old Camry pointed south through the night, then turned west on I-40 at Nashville, per Tolman’s scrawled instructions. Just past two thirty in the morning, he coasted into a truck stop in Jackson, Tennessee.

Tolman woke, and they both washed up in the trucker-sized bathrooms, then walked into the restaurant to order coffee. The layout was typical American truck stop: booths along three walls, tables in the center, a counter with stools. Homemade pies sat under glass at the counter. Classic rock played over the speakers.

“How do you feel?” Journey asked as they settled into a booth.

“Head still hurts, but not too bad. You?”

“I’m ready for you to drive,” Journey said. “My foot’s very sore, and I’m tired.”

“Thanks for driving.”

Journey nodded. “Now will you tell me where we’re going?”

“A little speck of a town in Arkansas called Gravelly. There’s someone there I trust. It’ll be safe, it’ll be secure, and the Glory Warriors would really have to be stretching to make the connection. The man who lives there is named Darrell Sharp. I knew him at the Academy. I got to know him because of the piano.”

“The piano?”

Tolman smiled. “We all lived on campus at the Academy. That was a requirement. But Darrell also rented an apartment in town. One day in class, I think it was Advanced Database Investigations, someone made a crack about him renting an apartment just for a piano.”

Journey looked at her.

“It was true.”

“So he was also a pianist,” Journey said.

“No. He can’t play a note. But his father was a concert pianist who taught at the University of South Carolina. His father had died of cancer the year before and left Darrell this piano. But not just any piano—a Steinway concert grand. He didn’t want to leave it in storage somewhere, and he didn’t want to sell it or give it away, so he kept it and hired professional piano movers to take it wherever he went.”

“Isn’t that expensive?”

“Very. But his father had done well as a concert pianist and left Darrell a decent trust fund. So anyway, after class I went up to him and asked him about the apartment and the piano. He offered to show me, so the next time we were both free, I went over and saw it. He let me play it. I’d just come off a year of trying to make a living as a musician, then coming to the realization that I wasn’t good enough to do that, so I went into the family business and applied to the Academy.”

“And you and he started seeing each other.”

“It’s not what you think. We didn’t really ‘date’ or anything like that. I just … went and played his piano. Sometimes he made dinner. A few times things went further.” Tolman stopped, turning the memories over in her mind. “But there was never anything beyond that. Then he graduated and joined the U.S. Marshals Service. His first job was in Miami. I was still at the Academy.”

Tolman had already downed a full cup of coffee, and she signaled the waitress for another. “Six months after Darrell got to Miami, he was sent on a prisoner escort. A major cocaine dealer who’d been a fugitive for more than five years had been recaptured in Key West. Darrell and one other deputy marshal were sent to bring him back. Some of the dealer’s ‘employees’ somehow broke through security and tried to blast him out during the transfer. Between the holding cell and the car, they broke him out. Darrell’s partner had his head practically blown off. They killed the DEA agent who’d found the dealer, and two local cops.”

“My God,” Journey said. He put down his coffee cup.

“Darrell ran around the opposite side of the truck, with them shooting at him the whole way. He got to one of the guys, knocked his gun away, but the guy turned around with a knife and slashed Darrell across his stomach. So there he was, bleeding from a belly wound. They scuffled, Darrell got to his shotgun and put a round through the guy’s neck. The two other guys turned on him, he rolled into a ditch, got around the other side of them, and shot them both. The dealer got into the middle of it and Darrell shot him, too.” Tolman looked down at the table.

“That’s eight people dead,” Journey said, counting on his fingers.

Tolman nodded but didn’t look up. Her eyes were far away. “Darrell was the only one of either the druggies or cops left alive. Bystanders corroborated everything, he received citations for bravery, newspaper and TV stories were done on him. But he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t even move some days. He’d go for a week or more at a time without talking. He was put on administrative leave and sent to a counselor.”

“Posttraumatic stress disorder.”

“PTSD and severe depression. He woke up crying one morning, and he couldn’t stop. He simply couldn’t stop crying. He had the presence of mind to drive himself to a hospital, and he spent three weeks in the mental health unit. He resigned from the Marshals Service the day he walked out of the hospital. Eventually he was awarded a disability pension. So there he was, retired on disability at age twenty-six. He found this remote place out in the woods in Arkansas, and just walked away from everything.”

“And you talked to him while all this was going on?”

“He called me from the hospital. I’d finished the Academy and joined RIO in D.C. by then. I went to Florida over two weekends and saw him in the hospital.”

“What does he do now?”

“He paints,” Tolman said. “The guy actually paints landscapes on cups and bowls and plates, and he sells them online. I haven’t talked to him in a couple of years now. He rarely leaves the house. He’s worried that people are coming to get him. He’s on meds, and he’s better than he was, but he’s not quite whole yet. He always feels that he’s on the edge of either killing someone or being killed himself. But I know his communications are secure, and I know he has weapons. We’ll be there in the morning.”

Journey looked at her. “And he’s going to just welcome us, with all our baggage, into his remote little life out there in the country?”

“He’s ready for us,” Tolman said. “Ready as he can be.”