David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

“No, Frank.” Abatangelo leaned toward him. “Come on. Bear up. We’ll protect you. We’re almost in the clear now.”

“What do you think about,” he said, “right before they kill you? Do you know?”

“I said ease up, Frank. Come on.”

“It’s just…” He looked up, as though trying to fix on something in his mind’s eye. “I’ve waited, my God, you don’t know, waited so long. To get things clear. You have no idea.”

“Get what clear?” Abatangelo asked.

Frank turned to face him. For an instant the furious confusion seemed to melt away, the eyes warmed with light. Abatangelo saw, or thought he saw, at last a man, not just a whirlwind of battling schemes and terrors and impulses. Their glances met and held for a moment. It was, Abatangelo assumed, the way Shel must have seen him. He felt the sudden need for a camera, he wanted to take this picture, show it to Shel if or when they were ever reunited and say, “I understand.” But then just as suddenly the warming light vanished. Frank turned away, hands working inside his shirt again as his glance darted out the window. Abatangelo realized he would never know anything of real merit about this man, or Shel’s life with him. He would be grasping forever.

Frank said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

Her moments of lucidity dissolved quickly. She could not remember one moment from the next, but in an odd way she remembered the forgetting. Something always out of reach. Like the pain now.

Numbness owned her body while her mind squatted in fog. And yet old memories were welling up from nowhere, swirling round and round like home movies. Odd, she could remember the ancient past vividly, but the last few hours were an enigma. Because the pain was dulled, she did not feel frightened by this. Just sad. The sadness seemed borne upon the old memories and she knew it was a long time coming, this sadness.

You’re depressed, dear.

She licked her lips.

The man came over. He dampened a cloth and wiped her mouth. He brushed her hair off her face. Not kindly, more like he was drying dishes. The other one was kind, the small one. The one with the mark on his face.

He raped you.

No. I’d remember that.

Not the little one. This one.

The man grunted. The big one, she realized, what was his name. Humberto. Oom Bear Toe. And the little one is Cesar. Say Czar. See, this isn’t so hard. Humberto held her chin in his hand and studied her face, as though contemplating her skull.

“I am heartily sorry,” she said, “for all my sins.”

She closed her eyes. Now where the hell did that come from? A prayer, she realized, something Danny had recited for her once. Danny and a prayer and that godawful thing around his neck the Safford chaplain gave him. “Handed them out like suckers,” that’s what Danny’d said. It made her laugh.

Humberto let go of her chin and it dropped like a rock. “Fonny?” he said. “Ha ha. Fonny?” He grabbed the waist of her jeans and jerked her toward him.

No, she thought. Nothing is funny. God help me. I was just thinking about Danny. The Good Thief.

“Turn in here,” Frank said.

A muddy lane curved up through neglected pasture beyond a stand of walnut trees. Waxman put the Dart in park and stared past the gate as Abatangelo got out of the car. He unwound the chain from the gate posts, the metal so scaly with rust it seemed ready to crumble in his hands. There was a lock but it was just for show, having long ago rusted open. He tossed the lock and the chain into the grass beside the road and pushed back the cattle gate, waving Waxman through.

The tires slid in the muddy troughs the lane had become. Waxman downshifted to keep from skittering off into the grass. After a minute of this the car broke the crest of the hill and they peered through the tunnel the headlights created. What they saw was a deserted milking shed, perched atop a rocky knoll lower than the hill they’d just come over.

Frank said, “You’ll see now.”

Waxman descended into the vale and pulled as close to the shed as he could. The knoll was muddy and steep enough to discourage further progress in the car. Waxman lodged the gearshift in park and killed the motor, the headlights pointed uphill so that the shed lay squarely in the beams: a failing structure of crumbled rock and plaster with a sagging roof stripped of half its shingles. Waxman said, “Maybe we should wait here a minute.”

“No,” Frank said, and he opened his door. Abatangelo reached across the seat and caught him from behind, snagging him by the belt. “Whoa there, Frank. What’s this about?”

What Abatangelo got instead of an answer was an eruption of flailing arms and legs. Frank turned, punched, slapped and kicked, breaking Abatangelo’s grip on his belt and at the same time tumbling from the backseat. Abatangelo tried to reach through the onslaught for another firm hold but Frank toppled onto the ground outside the car and scrambled to his feet.

Abatangelo shot out after him, with Waxman shouting, “Stop it,” behind. He caught Frank twenty yards up the hill but Frank broke free again, tore off his jacket, flung it at Abatangelo, the whole time scurrying up the gravel toward the abandoned shed in the widening cone of light from the car.

Abatangelo gained ground, got a firm hold on Frank’s ankle and twisted him to the dirt. Then the blow hit. Frank had found a piece of shale the size of a hubcap, he brought it down so hard it broke in two as it hit the side of Abatangelo’s head. The blow forced a blackout of several seconds and even as he came to he could not see- his only sensations those of the cold mud beneath him, the pounding soreness near his eye, Waxman shouting from the base of the knoll, asking if he was all right.

He did not answer. Struggling to his knees, he dabbed once at his eye to stem the blood and looked up just as a massive flare of light seared the darkness. The sound came an instant later, or so it seemed. The impact sent him rolling back downhill amid a hail of soaring rock and wood and plaster. By the time he righted himself again a plume of smoke rose high above the shed. The roof crumbled and collapsed as flames darted upward against the night sky.

Glancing downhill, he saw Waxman struggling to his feet; he’d been knocked against the car by the blast. A smell of spent ether filled the air. Waxman started up the hill and Abatangelo, not waiting, headed toward the milk shed ahead of him. Aware there might be a second charge, he covered his face with his arm and crouched as he walked.

In time he reached the shattered burning doorway and found what remained of Frank’s body. The upper half of his torso had been shorn away by the blast and scattered in pieces that smoldered here and there. A tangled shred of a blackened arm. The lower portion of his body lay in a senseless tangle almost fifteen yards away, the fabric of his trousers aflame. One foot was shoeless, bent at an impossible angle from the leg. Abatangelo thought: As long as you tell the truth, you’re safe. We’ll protect you.

Waxman gained the top of the knoll. Appraising the scene, he muttered, “Good God,” then turned to Abatangelo. “How badly are you hurt?” Before he’d ended the sentence Abatangelo was skidding downhill in the mud and gravel and debris. He reached the car and opened the trunk, withdrew his camera, then headed back uphill, the camera in one hand, his flash in the other.

Waxman said, “You can’t be serious,” as Abatangelo reached the shed again. He shot the better part of two rolls, searching out body parts and looking for a window through which to shoot the burning interior of the milk shed. Coughing from the smoke, he got so close at one point his sleeve caught fire; he bent down, chafed his arm through the damp grass till the flame was out, and resumed shooting. Waxman scuttled behind.