Читать книгу Sunrise Crossing - Jodi Thomas - Страница 16

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GALEN STANLEY PULLED the truck he’d rented in Liberal, Kansas, into the motel just outside Crossroads, Texas. The twilight rain was threatening to freeze over. He’d been driving for hours and was ready to stop.

The trail was cold.

His body felt every bit of his almost fifty years as he climbed from the huge rig. He could have slept in the back of the cab, but tonight, this close to the town he grew up in, he needed silence and a roof over his head.

He’d taken this assignment not because it was easy or had much chance of being successful, but because when he’d seen one of the locations he’d be checking out, he knew it was a sign telling him it was time to go back.

Back to the place he’d run from over thirty years ago. He’d been a traveler ever since.

As much as he hated to admit it, his gypsy blood sometimes whispered through his veins. He believed in signs and curses. In the past thirty years, he’d cheated death one too many times to not know that it would eventually find him. Maybe this place where it all began would be the place it all ended.

The loneliness that always weighed on his broad shoulders seemed heavier tonight. Maybe it was the knowledge that there would be no one to come home to. Not before, not now, not ever.

When he walked into the motel lobby, a sleepy old man in overalls climbed out of his recliner and limped the five feet to the counter. He didn’t look too happy at being pulled from his TV program.

“You got a room?” Galen didn’t bother to smile.

“Sixty a night for truckers. Breakfast is included.”

Galen nodded and pulled two hundreds from his wallet.

“Name?” The old man moved to a computer that looked twenty years old. “And I’ll need ID, address and an email if you got it.”

“Gabe,” Galen lied, as always. “Gabe Santorno.” He passed him a driver’s license with that name, along with an address in Denver that was simply a mail drop.

“One night, Mr. Santorno?”

“No. Two.” He hadn’t been this close to Crossroads in years. It was time he stopped working long enough to look around.

The old man chuckled. “You planning to take in the sights, stranger?”

Gabe raised his head and looked directly at the man. His gaze hardened. Fear flashed in the clerk’s eyes.

The old man lowered his gaze first. “Just making conversation, mister. Your business is your own.”

Gabe took the key and rolled his shoulders, forcing himself to relax. “Call me Gabe,” he said in a low tone. “And no, I don’t want to take in the sights. I just want to sleep. Tell the maid to skip my room.” The place didn’t look like it would have turndown service anyway.

“Then have a good night, Gabe.” The clerk was trying to act as if he wasn’t bothered, but he kept his head down. “If you sleep through breakfast, there’s a café in Crossroads a few miles down the road that’s worth eating at. Some say it’s got the best chicken fried steak in the state.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” Gabe turned to leave, then added, “Old man, you were smart not to reach for that gun you’ve got beneath the counter.”

“What makes you think I’ve got a gun?”

Gabe smiled. “You’d be a fool not to out here on this lonely stretch of highway, but I mean you no harm. I’m just a trucker passing through.”

As he walked away, he heard the old guy whisper, “You’re a hell of a lot more than that, Mr. Santorno, but it’s none of my business.”

Gabe parked the truck on a side lot and walked back to his room with his one suitcase. All he owned, all he needed was in one bag. It had been like that since he was seventeen. He’d wanted it that way.

Once inside, he locked the door and checked the windows. Then Gabe tried to relax. He stood in the shower until the water turned cold. He had a week’s worth of stubble, but he didn’t bother to shave. A man with a bit of scruff is more forgettable, he decided. And that was exactly what he wanted to be. Forgettable.

Standing wrapped in a towel, he forced himself to stare into the mirror. Scars crossed over his body like lines on a road map. Some were more than thirty years old, and some were from his army days. One, on his left shoulder—a souvenir from his last job—wasn’t quite healed. He didn’t care about any of them. He’d given up caring about anything or anyone years ago.

An army sergeant told him once that he fought like a warrior angel in a hurry to get to the afterlife. Maybe he was, but hell didn’t want him and heaven didn’t seem ready to take him in. He’d be fifty on his next birthday, and his black hair was salted with gray. One day soon, he’d lose his edge and the warrior would fall.

Gabe laughed. When that day came, he wanted to be buried in the Crossroads cemetery. Maybe that’s why he took this assignment. Maybe it was time to visit what would someday be his last resting place.

He slept until ten, then dressed in black and slipped from the back window of his motel room. The rain had stopped but the road would still be slick. As he jogged the two miles to the little town, Gabe tried to push aside the last time he’d been in Crossroads, but the memories kept flooding back.

He’d been barely seventeen and dumb enough to believe in love. Jewel Ann Grey had been a year younger and even wilder than he was. He’d loved to say her name as if it were one word.

Even though there had been bad blood between the Stanleys and the Greys for years, he and Jewel Ann had run away together one night, full of dreams for their future. Their only crime that night was loving each other.

A few hours later, her father, leading a small caravan of pickups, caught up with them. He’d brought a truckload of relatives set on teaching Gabe a lesson for thinking a Stanley boy could marry a Grey girl.

As Gabe ran on the gravel beside the road, memories of that night pounded across his mind. He’d compacted them into short blasts, like hits to his heart. The details were gone, but the pain was still there.

It had been dark and rainy, like tonight. He’d pulled over when her relatives flashed their lights, thinking he’d talk to them. Only his own dad had been just behind the Greys and there had been no talking to either man that night.

It was probably the only time the two families had ever got together. Jewel Ann’s father pulled her away, not caring that he ripped her clothes as she fought.

Gabe’s dad had shoved her relatives aside as he came after his own son with a bat.

Two of Jewel Ann’s uncles held him while his old man beat him. Her screams, as they forced her to watch, hurt worse than the blows. His dad had always been a cruel man, and he proved it that night. Once Gabe started bleeding, his old man put his hand against the wound, not to stop blood, but to make sure it flowed over his fingers. Then he took a break from the beating so he could spread blood over the girl’s breasts.

She’d screamed until she passed out. Even her father’s slaps wouldn’t wake her.

They took her home, but his dad stayed long enough to cuss his son and tell Gabe that if he ever came back he’d kill him. Even after Gabe could no longer move or even try to fight, the blows kept coming, breaking skin and bones.

His dad left his only child in the ditch, covered in blood and mud. In his mind his son had dishonored the family, and there would be no coming back home.

Gabe knew he’d die if he didn’t move, and pure rage made him get to his feet. Slowly, he limped to a truck stop a few miles down the road. It was almost dawn by the time he reached the place. There was no one to call, no use in reporting the crime. Everyone in town was afraid of his dad—even Gabe’s mother.

He hid in the back of a truck with Colorado tags and slept as it drove north across three states.

When the trucker found him later that night, he dropped Gabe off at the hospital. When the doctor realized how much blood he’d lost, he said it was a miracle Gabe was still alive. He had broken ribs, a broken arm and a concussion. And after they sewed up his cuts, he also had forty-seven stitches crisscrossing over deep bruises.

It wasn’t a miracle he’d lived, Gabe thought. It was determination. He’d spent the days in the hospital changing, hardening, so nothing would ever hurt him again.

In the midnight moonlight Gabe reached the Crossroads cemetery and pulled out his flashlight. The trees that he remembered as being small were overgrown now and permanently bent by the wind.

The Stanley family graves were there, near where the canyon dropped down off the flat land at the back of the cemetery. It wasn’t an ideal spot—on rocky ground and hard to get to by car. But Gabe always thought it had the best view of Ransom Canyon.

The facts about his parents were carved in the headstones: His father had died a few months after he’d beaten his son almost to death. His mother had died ten years later. There were no other graves in the family plot, even though it could have held a dozen more. To his knowledge, there were no more Stanleys. Only him.

He moved to the Grey family plot, looking for one name: his one love, Jewel Ann. Even in his mind, when he said her name, he said it fast as if it were one word.

There were six Grey graves dated the same year he’d been beaten. Two were names of the men he remembered holding him down that night. Jewel Ann’s uncles. No new graves since. What was left of the Grey family must have moved on. After all, both families had roaming in their blood, so it would have been unusual for them to stay on this land for so long.

Jewel Ann Grey’s grave wasn’t there. If she was dead, she hadn’t died here. Somehow that gave him comfort.

Gabe liked to think she’d married someone acceptable and moved on, but that night had probably damaged her as much as it had him.

He clicked off the flashlight and walked along the canyon’s edge, knowing one missed step on the shadowy edge might be his last, but he’d walked this close to danger so many times it felt comfortable.

Below, he saw a few lights from a little lake community. He remembered there being only a few houses near the water, but now the shadows of homes surrounded the lake and spread up the valley almost to the north road.

As he climbed above the cemetery, he could see the lights of town. Crossroads had grown, maybe even doubled in size since he’d left. It slept so quietly, Gabe had trouble believing anything bad could ever have happened there. The high school was twice the size it had once been, and there was a huge sports complex that had been only a grass field when he was in school. The main street had another block of businesses, and what looked like new housing ran along the east side.

Gabe veered onto the north road and shifted from a jog to a run. He wanted to see if his home was still standing. The place had had three generations of Stanleys who’d lived in it before he did. His dad had never repaired or painted anything, so it looked terrible when he’d lived there as a kid. Now it might only be rubble.

He saw the trees that had been big years ago. They now framed the house on three sides, hiding it from the road almost completely.

As he neared, Gabe was drawn to a sliver of light coming from a building behind the old house. A barn that hadn’t been there in his childhood.

Silently, he moved closer. The house might be dark and look like the perfect setting for a horror movie, but there was movement from what appeared to be a new barn.

For a while he stood watching the inside of the barn through the sliver of light. A young couple worked side by side. The man was tall and lean with dark hair. The woman was small, but it didn’t take much to realize that she was more skilled than the man.

He couldn’t tell if they were even talking. He only saw them cross the light as they worked. They were obviously comfortable with each other, for they often moved close together.