John Saul - Brain Child

Slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on Alex, she began backing around, pulling Carolyn with her. “What is it, Alex?” she asked. “What do you want?”

“Venganza,” Alex whispered. “Venganza para mi familia.”

“Your family, Alex?”

Alex nodded. “ Sí .” Again he began moving forward, backing Cynthia and Carolyn Evans slowly toward the wall.

He could see the wall as it had been that day, even though they’d plastered over the damage and tried to wash away the blood of his family. But the pits from the bullets were still there, and the red stains were as bright as they had been on the day he’d watched his family die.

And now, the moment was finally at hand.

He wondered if the gringa woman would face death with the bravery of his mother, crying out her defiance even as the bullets cut the life out of her.

He knew she wouldn’t.

She would die a gringa’s death, begging for mercy. Even now, he could hear her.

“Why?” she was saying. “Why are you doing this? What have we done to you?”

What did my mother and my sisters do to deserve to die at the hands of your men? he thought, but it was not the time for questions.

It was the time for vengeance.

He squeezed the trigger, and the quiet of the afternoon exploded with the roar of the shotgun.

The gringa’s face exploded before his eyes, and new blood was added to the courtyard wall. Then, as with his mother before her, the woman’s knees gave way, and she sank slowly to the ground as her daughter watched, screaming.

As Alex squeezed the trigger a second time, his only wish was that the courtyard was as it should have been, and he could have watched as the blood of the gringas disappeared into the dust of the hacienda.

José Carillo turned up Hacienda Drive, and shifted his battered pickup truck into low gear. Listening to the transmission’s angry grinding, he hoped the truck would last long enough for him to begin the job at the hacienda. With the amount of money that one job would produce, he would be able to afford a new truck. But he was already late, and worried that he might lose the job before he ever got it. He pressed on the gas pedal, and the old truck coughed, then reluctantly surged forward.

It was on the second curve that he saw the boy coming down the road, a shotgun cradled in his arms, his face and shirt covered with blood. He braked to a stop and called out to the boy. At first the boy hadn’t seemed to hear him. Only when José called out a second time did the boy look up.

“You okay?” José asked. “Need some help?”

The boy stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and continued down the road. José watched him until he disappeared through the gate in the wall whose vines had just been torn down — something Jose’s gardener’s eyes had noticed as he’d come up the hill. Then he forced the truck back in gear.

He was already inside the courtyard before he saw the carnage that lay against the south wall.

“Jesús, José, y María,” he muttered. He crossed himself, then fought down the nausea in his gut as he hurried into the house to find a telephone.

Alex stared at himself in the mirror. Blood still oozed from the cut over his eye, and his shirt was growing stiff.

He’d already examined the shotgun, and knew that he’d fired three shells.

The last two were now in the chambers.

And though he had no conscious memory of it, he knew where he’d been when the voices began whispering to him and the images from the past began to flood his mind. He also knew where he’d been when it had ended.

When it began, he’d been on the hillside overlooking the hacienda, remembering María Torres’s stories of the past.

And when it ended, he’d been walking away from the hacienda, and the smell of gunpowder was strong, and he was bleeding, and though his body was in pain, in his soul he felt nothing.

Nothing.

But tonight, he was sure, he would dream again, and see what he had done, and feel the pain in his soul.

But it was the last time it would happen, for now he knew why it had happened, and how to end it.

And he also knew that he, Alex, had done none of it.

Everything that had been done, had been done by Alejandro de Meléndez y Ruiz. Now all that was left was to kill Alejandro.

He changed his shirt, but didn’t bother to bandage the cut on his forehead.

Picking up the shotgun, he went back downstairs and found the extra set of keys to his mother’s car in the kitchen drawer.

He went out to the driveway and started the car. He shifted the gear lever into reverse, then kept his foot on the brake as a police car, its siren screaming, raced up the hill past the house.

He was sure he knew where it was going, and he was sure he knew what its occupants would find when they reached their destination. But instead of following the police car and trying to explain to the officers what he thought had happened, Alex went the other way.

His mind suddenly crystal clear, he drove down the hill, through La Paloma, and out of town. It would take him thirty minutes to reach Palo Alto.

“I’m telling you, something’s wrong,” Roscoe Finnerty had been saying when the phone on the kitchen wall suddenly rang, and he decided it could damned well ring until he’d finished what he was saying. “The kid said he parked across the street from Jake’s. It’s right here in my notes.”

“And my notes say he parked in the lot next door,” Tom Jackson replied. He nodded toward the phone. “And we’re in your kitchen, so you can answer the phone.”

“Shit,” Finnerty muttered, reaching up and grabbing the receiver. “Yeah?” He listened for a few seconds, and Jackson saw the color drain from his face. “Aah, shit,” he said again. Then: “Yeah, we’ll go up.” He hung up the phone and reluctantly met his partner’s eyes. “We got two more,” he said. “The chief wants us to take a look and see if it looks like the other two. From what he said, though, it doesn’t. This time, it’s messy.”

But he hadn’t counted on its being as messy as it actually was. He stood in the courtyard wondering if he should even try to take a pulse from the two corpses that lay against the wall. On one of them, the face was gone, and most of the head as well. Still, he was pretty sure he knew who it was, because the other corpse had taken the shotgun blast in the chest, and the face was still clearly recognizable.

Carolyn Evans.

The other one, judging from what Finnerty could see, had to be her mother. “Call the Center,” he muttered to Jackson. “And tell them to bring bags, and not to bother with the sirens.” Then he turned his attention to José Carillo, who was sitting by the pool, resolutely looking away from the corpses and the bloodstained wall they rested against.

“You know anything about this, José?” Finnerty asked, though he was almost certain he knew the answer. He’d known José for almost ten years, and the gardener was known only for three things: his industriousness and his honesty and his refusal to involve himself in violence under any circumstances.

José shook his head. “I was coming up for a job. When I got here …” His voice broke off, and he shook his head helplessly. “As soon as I found them, I called the police.”

“Did you see anything? Anything at all?”

José started to shake his head, then hesitated.

“What is it?” Finnerty urged.

“I forgot,” the gardener said. “On the way up, I saw a boy. He looked like he’d been fighting, and he was carrying a gun.”

“Do you know who he was?”

The gardener shook his head again. “But I know where he went.”