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
