George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

In the next four days he read two paperback novels written by Edward Anderson and A. I. Bezzerides, and at night he ate and drank at the Angler’s with Rita and took her back to his room, where he made Rita’s eyes roll back in her head with his workmanlike, rhythmic thrusts. Rita said nothing to anger him, and he did not hurt her.

On the fifth day he drove the SHO down the road, parked it behind a restaurant, removed its plates, and walked back to the motel with his duffel bag in his hand. He had noticed that every morning a blue-collar man left his Ranger truck on the edge of the motel parking lot, out of sight of the manager’s office, and was picked up by another blue-collar man. The two of them would then go off together to their jobs. Farrow removed the Ranger’s plates, replaced them with the SHO’s plates, broke into the pickup easily using a bar tool he owned, hot-wired the ignition, and drove northeast. A bumper sticker on the Ranger read, “There Is No Life West of the Chesapeake Bay.”

He thought of his brother as he made open road.

Richard had always been somewhat of a follower. Frank had easily turned him against their father, a Beverly Hills lawyer, at a very young age. But Richard could never go all the way like Frank. So as Frank began to seek perfection in his chosen career of crime, Richard continued to stumble through the subworld of amateur criminals inhabited by the true lowlifes: meth-heads and dope fiends, runaways and their pimps, street grifters, fences, and the like.

In the meantime, Frank did his reform school stretches and then two major jolts as an adult, where he fell in love with the books in the prison libraries and made the contacts within the walls that would enable him to graduate to an ever higher level of success outside. Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal’s education.

When he had been released from his last sentence and done his parole, Frank was ready, and Richard, of course, was not. But he had brought Richard along on that final job because that was what a brother was obligated to do.

Frank cracked the window and lit a Kool.

The Farrow brothers’ birth mother had died very young – Frank remembered her vaguely and Richard not at all – and their father remarried quickly. To Frank’s mind, the father loved only money and its accoutrements. Frank hated him and his friends, and he would always despise everyone like them. By the time his father married for the third time, there was no familial connection that remained. Their father no longer considered Frank and Richard, who had been in serious trouble since their teens, to be his sons. Frank and Richard had not had any kind of contact with him for years. For all Frank knew or cared, their father was dead.

Now Richard was dead, too. Frank didn’t dwell on it. He had loved Richard, he supposed, but he had no illusions of the afterlife, and he was free of sentiment. He knew there was no spiritual world where the two of them would meet again. Richard was now what all men were in the end: food for worms. Sentiment aside, though, Frank would have to kill the man who had killed his brother; retaliation was a part of the personal code he had adopted long ago.

Frank was fascinated by the murder trials he had seen on TV. He’d watch the victims’ families, how they sat quietly in court, their soft hands resting in their laps, waiting for a justice that would never fully come. He was sure that they thought of themselves as good people. He only thought of them as weak.

Weakness. It separated him from the straights. This separation would keep him alive.

Frank parked the Ranger alongside the platinum Park Avenue in the lot of the New Rock Church. He checked the load on the. 38 that Toomey had given him and holstered the gun against the small of his back. He reached into his duffel bag, retrieved a pair of latex examination gloves, and fitted them onto his hands. He looked around the empty lot and down Old Church Road. The road was clear. He stepped out of the truck.

Frank knocked on the door of the church and put his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. The door opened, and the Reverend Bob stood in the frame.

“Larry?” he said, donning his salesman’s smile. “Why, I heard you had left town.”

“I’m back. Can I come in?”

“Certainly.”

The reverend stepped aside to let Farrow pass through, and shut the door behind them. Farrow walked slowly down the center aisle of the church, allowing the Reverend Bob to get in front of him.

“Shall we go to my office?”

“Here is good,” said Farrow, stepping up onto the altar floor. He stood in a bar of light that entered narrowly from a glass panel on the roof and widened as it fell.

“Well… okay,” said the reverend.

Farrow heard a catch in the reverend’s voice.

The reverend stepped up onto the altar and stood beside him. Frank looked at him, immaculate in his starched white shirt.

“That’s a Movado, isn’t it?” said Farrow, nodding at the reverend’s wrist.

“Yes.” The reverend smiled. “I bought it secondhand. Of course, a new Movado is a little dear for a man in my profession.”

“My father owned one of those. He was so proud of it, too. Always shot his cuffs around his friends, made sure they got a good look at it. My brother and I stole it off his dresser one night. I gave it to some street kid outside the Whiskey, over on the Strip.”

The reverend looked at him quizzically. “Why do you mention this, Larry?”

“My father fired our maid the next morning. A Chicano woman with four children. He was paying her twenty-five dollars a day.”

“Larry?”

“My name’s Frank Farrow.”

Farrow took his hands from his coat and dropped them at his sides.

The reverend looked at Farrow’s gloved hands and backed up a step. “What… what do you want?”

“I told you I’d be back. When I make a promise like that, I keep it.” The color drained from the reverend’s face. He looked desperately around the empty church and back at Farrow. He tried to smile and use a tone of sincerity, but his voice shook as it came forth.

“Listen… Frank, is it?”

“Frank Farrow.”

“Frank, I never meant to offend you or infringe on your privacy. I was only looking to bring another person into our congregation. If you were ever incarcerated, it makes no difference to me.”

“You were right on the money, Reverend Bob. I’ve been in one kind of prison or another for the better part of my life.”

“Frank – atonement is everything in the eyes of the Lord. Whatever you did, you served your time.”

“You have no idea what I’ve done. And you shouldn’t have pried.” Farrow reached into his coat and drew the. 38 from where it was holstered in his belt line. “Get on your knees.”

Tears dropped instantly from the reverend’s eyes. He raised his hands as in prayer. His lip trembled violently, but he couldn’t speak.

“On your knees,” said Farrow.

The reverend dropped to his knees on the altar. Urine spread across his crotch and darkened the thighs of his slacks. The stench of it grew heavy in the church.

“Are you afraid?” asked Farrow.

The reverend nodded.

“It’s funny,” said Farrow, looking down at him. “I find that those the most afraid are those who believe in God. The same ones who hide their eyes at horror movies are the ones who bow their heads in a place like this. And for what? Something that does not, cannot, exist.”

“Please,” said the reverend.

“Your journey is just beginning,” said Farrow with a smile. “You’re going to a better place. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling those old people out at the home, the ones who are about to die?”