The pain from his ribs was fading, and Clark imagined that the world was finally taking on a brighter hue. He felt heartened. For all that he’d spent years hating his abilities, being without them had frightened him. He leaned against the wall for a moment, taking in the sun.
His hearing was fading in and out. For a moment he thought he could hear Lois’s voice.
“So there’s nothing else that you can tell me about the murders?”
“The evidence was processed in Wichita.” It was Rachel’s voice speaking, and Clark stiffened.
“So there was no evidence that Clark committed the murders other than his relationship with Mrs. Holder and his proximity at the time of the murders?” Lois’s voice was brisk and efficient.
“My father saw Clark leaving the house,” Rachel said quietly. “He refused to arrest him without any real evidence, and that’s what lost him the election.”
The voices faded out, and Clark grimaced. Although it was flattering that Lois would want to defend him, all it did was stir up things up even more than they already were.
He stepped in to the police station just as Lois was leaving Rachel Harris’s office.
“So did you get the medicine?” Lois asked brightly.
“The alien story is a bust. Why are we still here?“ Clark asked in a low voice.
Lois looked startled. “There’s a story here, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with aliens. Simon has something that you lost at the time of the murders; ergo, he has some connection. The only way to figure it out is to take a closer look at what happened.”
“Leave it alone, Lois.” Clark stared at the floor. “You could bring a signed confession and nobody would believe you.”
“This isn’t just about clearing your name. If that’s all it was, we’d be on a plane back to Metropolis right now.” Lois stepped towards him, and said quietly, “This is about justice, about getting a killer off the streets. And it’s about getting some closure.”
Lois took his arm, and Clark was startled by the contact. She hadn’t touched him since the day of the date, except when he was sick. He was startled to realize how much he’d missed it.
He hadn’t been entirely without human contact in the intervening years; he’d craved it too much, that sense of connection with someone else. But it had never been right, and he’d always been careful to set the boundaries of his relationships very early, for fear of repeating his errors of previous years.
He hadn’t done that with Lois, and it was a surprise. Despite the completely business nature of their current relationship, he was enjoying it more than some romances of previous years.
“So where are we going next?” he asked, as Lois lead him out the door.
She smiled up at him, and he felt himself responding in spite of himself. “Wichita.”
**********
The knocking at the door caused Pete to cough in the middle of a deep inhalation. Franticly, he snuffed it out and hid the butt in a plastic bag in the tank of the toilet.
The banging at the door was even louder now. Pete staggered to his feet, pushing his way through the garbage strewn across the floor to reach for the door.
Before he could open it, he was shocked to see a tattooed forearm wrapping itself around his throat.
He gasped, or tried to.
“Pete, we need to have a little talk.”
************
Lois drove, and the trip passed in silence for almost half an hour before she spoke. It was a companionable silence, born of a growing and unexpected comfort with each other. It wasn’t something Lois was used to, this strange feeling of trust.
As the city lights of Wichita came into view on the horizon, Clark seemed to shrink into himself again. He turned away from her and sighed.
“You aren‘t having second thoughts, are you?” She glanced at Clark, who was staring outside the window at the passing sameness of the open fields.
“You were right. I should have been back before this,” he said, still not looking at her. “I’ve been running from it from so long that I didn’t remember how to do anything BUT run.”
“It can’t have been easy, having your life exposed like that.” Lois’s voice was quiet.
Clark laughed, and it was a short, ugly sound. “My life was always an open book...or at least that’s what people thought. Everybody thinks they know everybody else in small towns.” He sighed. “I think sometimes they resent me being able to keep the secret as long as I did as much as anything.”
“Keeping the secret like the other boys did?”
Clark’s head snapped around and he stiffened. “Where’d you hear about that?”
“I’ve been talking to people.” Lois said.
Again, Clark laughed mirthlessly. “Not in Smallville. That’s the one thing people don’t talk about. They don’t want to believe it, so they don’t talk about it.”
“How would you know what people talk about behind closed doors, Clark?” The thought that people would be cruel enough to say things where he could hear was repugnant.
Clark glanced at her withy a guarded expression. “Trust me. I had my ear to the ground for the couple of months I was in Smallville after the murders. I know exactly what people were saying about me. It’s part of what encouraged me to leave when I did.”
Lois frowned. “You were the first one on the scene that night. What made you leave Rachel’s house and go rushing over to the coach’s house?”
“I can’t explain that,” Clark said. He shifted in his seat and grimaced. “If you had any idea how many times I was asked that question...I just had this feeling that something was wrong.”
He was lying. When he’d told her he didn’t kill Delilah or the coach, he’d looked her straight in the face. He was looking away now.
Lois had hoped that they were past that part of their relationship. Everything worked so much better when he was honest with her.
“Do you know who did it?” Lois asked casually.
Sharply, Clark said, “You don’t think I’d be the first one to the tell the police what I knew if I could?”
“Not if you were protecting someone,” Lois said. “You were pretty smooth that first time in Perry’s office. Acted like we’d never met...”
“You didn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d want to let the whole office know about your personal business.” Clark stared out the window again. “I thought you’d like the time to process the whole thing without having your dirty laundry shown to the world.”
“So our date was dirty laundry?” Lois asked archly.
Clark glanced at her, and his lip twitched. “Well, things might have gotten a little scandalous if we’d had a few more dates.”
“You think highly of yourself, don’t you?” Lois couldn’t help but smirk a little. “I can’t imagine what it’d take to scandalize Perry, but I think we’d have had to really worked at it.”
“Well, I’ve been around the world a few times. You wouldn’t believe what you can learn in little out of the way villages.” He smirked. “You should see me dance.”
Lois remembered a neck massage that night, and her skin tingled.
“You are an international man of mystery.” Lois said. “An enigma wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a question.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Clark said, his lighter mood evaporating. “And I don’t know how to prove any different.”
“I believe you.” Lois hesitated. “But there are a lot of questions that you just don’t have good answers for. That’s going to make a lot of people think you are lying. Doing it to protect someone...it fits who you are.”
“That’s what Sheriff Harris thought too.” Clark shook his head slightly, and looked out the window again. “It’s part of the reason that he leaked information to the papers; he thought he could pressure me into revealing who the real murderer was.”
“It didn’t work, I take it.”
“I’m not protecting anyone,” Clark said. “There’s no good excuse for murder.”
“Self defense,” Lois argued.
“What happened that night wasn’t self defense.” Clark stared at the floorboards. “I’ve gone over everything time after time. If I’d only gotten there faster. If I’d only...I never should have gotten involved with her in the first place.”
“I’m a hypocrite. I preached about doing the right thing the first night we met, and the first time I was tempted...”
“You said that it makes you less of a person.” Lois said. “Whether anyone else knows about it or not.”
Silent for long moments, Clark finally sighed. “I felt dirty. People called me white trash from the time I first went to live in a foster home, but I never felt that way until I started with Lilah.”
“I imagine that your time with Rachel didn’t make anything easier. You had a woman who loved you...”
“Rachel never loved me. She loved the idea of being with me. “I was the star player on the football team, a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and someone attractive to make a pass at. That’s all she saw. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to see.” Clark shook his head. “She never saw me at all.”
Clark glanced up at Lois. “I tried to push her away, but the more I pushed, the harder she pushed back. I had no idea she was telling people we were getting married until the end.” Clark grimaced. “I never would have let things get as far as they did if I’d realized.”
“So she never loved you.”
“I think she thought she did. Whether her feelings for me were real or not, that was never the issue. I shouldn’t have allowed things to get as far as they did.”
The city lights were visible in the distance, and they returned to that companionable silence. Clark still had secrets, but Lois was certain that he’d tell her when the time was right. Assuming, of course, that she hadn’t already found the answers for herself.
***********************
The shadows were thick and heavy in the alley around them. It was late evening, the only time Perry’s source had been willing to meet with them. Lois stumbled slightly on the doorstep.
“He could have let us take a look at the evidence,” Lois grumbled. “He didn’t have to be so touchy. So you’re a suspect in the case. We could have looked at it while he watched us!”
Clark didn’t say anything. He simply leaned back against the wall, his features still and fixed.
“It wasn’t a total loss,” Lois continued. “He promised to have a detective reopen the case and run some DNA tests. They didn’t have them back when the crime was committed.”
Glancing at her partner, she noticed that he hadn’t moved. “Clark, are you all right?”
His face was pale and his eyes were as expressionless as she’d ever seen them.
“They kept a lot about the case out of the press.” His voice was flat. “I hadn’t realized how bad it was.”
“What are you talking about, Clark?” Lois scowled at him. “You were in the same room I was, and we didn’t get within ten feet of anything.”
“He left one of the files open. I got a look at it when you were arguing with him.”
“No you didn’t! If there was something like that, I’d have noticed it right away.”
Clark chuckled. “When you get in an argument, you don’t notice much of anything.”
Lois scowled at him, and said, “We didn’t come here to argue about this. Let’s just go back to the car, and we can discuss it on the way home.”
Silently, Clark followed her. He didn’t speak a word as Lois unlocked the car; he simply slipped into the passengers seat. Lois noticed that he was moving easily now, with no sign of his recent pain.
She started the engine and pulled out into the intersection.
“Clark-” Lois began. “I...”
She didn’t have a chance to finish. The sound of her window shattering made her scream and swerve wildly.
She didn’t hear the shot until it was too late.
