The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly Page A

MacArthur a date.
    Louis appeared to consult some kind of mental calendar.
    “Meet you down there,” he said.
    “We’ll meet you down there,” corrected Angel.
    Louis glanced at him. “I got something I got to do first,” he said. “Along the way.”
    Angel flicked at a crumb. “I got nothing else planned,” he replied. His voice was studiedly neutral.
    The conversation seemed to have taken a turn down a strange road, and I wasn’t about to ask for a map. Instead, I called for the check.
    “You want to hazard a guess as to what that was about?” Rachel asked as we walked to my car, Angel and Louis ahead of us, unspeaking.
    “No,” I answered. “But I get the feeling that somebody is going to be very unhappy that those two ever left New York.”
    I just hoped that it wouldn’t be me.

    That night, I awoke to a noise from downstairs. I left Rachel sleeping, pulled on a robe, and went down to find the front door slightly ajar. Outside, Angel sat on the porch seat, dressed in sweatpants and an old Doonesbury T-shirt, his bare feet stretched out before him. He had a glass of milk in his hand as he looked out over the moonlit marsh. From the west came the cry of a screech owl, rising and falling in pitch. There was a pair nesting in the Black Point Cemetery. Sometimes, at night, the headlights of the car would catch them ascending toward the treetops, a vole or mouse still struggling in their claws.
    “Owls keeping you awake?”
    He glanced over his shoulder at me, and there was a little of the old Angel in his smile. “The silence is keeping me awake. The hell do you sleep in all this quiet?”
    “I can go beep my horn and swear in Arabic if you think it will help.”
    “Gee, would you?”
    Around us, mosquitoes danced, waiting for their chance to descend. I took some matches from the windowsill and lit a mosquito coil, then sat down beside him. He offered me his glass.
    “Milk?”
    “No thanks. I’m trying to give it up.”
    “You’re right. That calcium’ll kill ya.”
    He sipped his milk.
    “You worried about her?”
    “Who, Rachel?”
    “Yeah, Rachel. Who’d you think I was asking about, Chelsea Clinton?”
    “She’s fine. But I hear Chelsea’s doing well in college, so that’s good too.”
    A smile fluttered at his lips, like the brief beating of butterfly wings.
    “You know what I mean.”
    “I know. Sometimes, yes, I’m afraid. I get so scared that I come out here in the darkness and I look down on the marsh and I pray. I pray that nothing happens to Rachel and our child. Frankly, I think I’ve done my share of suffering. We all have. I’m kind of hoping the book is closed for a while.”
    “Place like this, on a night like tonight, maybe lets you believe that could happen,” he said. “It’s pretty here. Peaceful too.”
    “You thinking of retiring here? If you are, I’ll have to move again.”
    “Nah, I like the city too much. But this is kind of restful, for a change.”
    “I have snakes in my woodshed.”
    “Don’t we all? What are you going to do about them?”
    “Leave them alone. Hope they go away, or that something else kills them for me.”
    “And if they don’t?”
    “Then I’ll have to deal with them myself. You want to tell me why you’re out here?”
    “My back hurts,” he said simply. “Places on my thighs where they took the skin from, they hurt too.”
    In his eyes I could see the night shapes reflected so clearly that it was as if they were a part of him, the elements of a darker world that had somehow entered and colonized his soul.
    “I still see them, you know, that fucking preacher and his son, holding me down while they cut away at me. He whispered to me, you know that? That fucking Pudd, he whispered to me, rubbed my brow, told me that it was all okay, while his old man cut me. Every time I stand or stretch, I feel that blade on my skin and I hear him whispering and it brings me back. And when that happens, the hate comes flooding back with