Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“The district attorney will soon begin to seek charges against your brother for helping a wanted felon escape from the authorities,” Stark said. “He will be sentenced for that felony and spend quite some time behind bars.”

They’d made it up into the hills. The road looked down on the desertlike slope of the mountain.

“And you, Thomas Beerman, will testify at your brother’s trial that it was he who suggested and financed the escape. It was he who masterminded everything.”

“You crazy.” Thomas found the words even in his silence.

“If you don’t do it,” the billionaire warned, “he will still be convicted, and everyone you know will be destroyed along with him.”

“But why? Why would you do this?”

“Because it will break your brother’s heart to see you turn on him. And I want to do to him what he has done to me.”

When Stark leaned forward, and Thomas was nearly blinded by the light off his skin. He averted his eyes — Kronin thought he was crying — and wondered about the moon.

The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise... He remembered the words he’d spoken to his brother. Now he realized that he was wrong. They were entering a sharp curve over a steep incline. Thomas pushed both his normal and shorter leg against the door, propelling himself against the steering wheel. Terry grunted and tried to keep the steering wheel straight, but Thomas’s hands were too strong for the self-proclaimed assassin. There was no way to stop the car from careering off into free flight. Thomas was weightless. He floated into the backseat. Stark was yelling and so was the man he called Terry. When the Rolls hit the first boulder, Thomas slammed into Kronin’s belly and smelled the acrid stench of the fat man’s belching breath. He also felt a severe pain in his good leg. It felt wet and he thought of blood, but then they hit the second hard rock and then the third. No one was crying out now, and darkness was all around them. Then suddenly there was a wrenching sound of metal tearing, and Thomas was dimly aware of flight and then light. There was a flash of heat across his face, and he remembered the fear in Stark’s face when the big man realized that he was about to die.

He was in a hospital bed once more, looking at the light through the window again. He turned his head to the left and there was someone there. Clea — her hands clasped together and her eyes too sad for tears.

“Hey,” Thomas said.

“Hi. How are you?”

“That depends. Am I gonna die?”

“No. They said that you’re really banged up but that there’s nothing life-threatening.”

“Did I lose my leg?”

“You lost a lot of blood, but the doctor says that the leg’ll be fine,” she told him. “He also said that he might be able to fix the other leg with a hip replacement.”

“And are you still moving out here to live with me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“You will?”

“Of course. Why would this accident make any difference?”

“Does your sister have a gap between her front teeth?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Stark.”

“What about him?”

“He told me. He said... he said...”

“He said what?”

“He knew about her. He had a picture of her. He knew about everybody I knew, and he was going to hurt all of them unless... He wanted me to testify that Eric helped me to escape from the police.”

“Stark’s dead. So’s his driver.”

“They’re dead and I’m not?”

Clea stared at Thomas, not comprehending the meaning of his question.

“You were thrown clear,” she explained.

“But we crashed. The car crushed in around us.”

“You were thrown clear. After that the car fell on its back and then the gas tank blew.”

“So the pictures were burned?” Thomas asked.

“Yeah, I guess. Everything burned.”

“I killed them.”

“Don’t be crazy, Tommy. It was an accident. The police think that it was because of dirt on the road. The driver hit the brakes and slid off the side.”

“I grabbed the steering wheel,” Thomas said.

“I would have too, but you couldn’t stop it. You’re lucky that you weren’t killed with them.”

Clea went over to Thomas and kissed him, but in his mind he was still in that careening car, crashing into boulders, counting out the last beats of his life...

“Really?” Eric said that evening when he and Thomas were alone in the hospital room. “He wanted you to testify against me?”

“I think that he planned to marry Raela one day. He said that you stole her from him.”

“And then you grabbed the wheel and ran the car off the mountain?”

“It was the only thing I could think of. I murdered him, Eric. And I didn’t even lose a leg or nuthin’. And everything burned up; even the steering wheel melted. The pictures all burned. What should I do?”

“What do you wanna do, Tommy?”

This set off a series of thoughts that went all the way back to Thomas’s earliest memories: Eric running fast; Eric laughing out loud; Eric falling and rushing into Branwyn’s arms yelling for her to make the pain go away. He remembered a recurring childhood dream about a wasp as big as a horse chasing him, intent upon stinging him in the chest, in his heart. He ran into a cave that was too small for the hornet to get into, but the enraged insect jabbed its stinger in after him again and again. It stung Thomas in the hand and the leg, in his eye and mouth, but it never got him in the chest and finally it died from all that stinging. That was always when Thomas would wake up, after the wasp had defeated itself. In the dream he never left the cave.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not your fault, man. You had to do it.”

In his mind Thomas emerged from the cave. The huge insect lay dying, vibrating its wings in sporadic fits. The stinger had come loose from the abdomen, with the slick entrails following after.

“It’s like nuthin’ makes any sense anymore,” Thomas said to Eric. “Like I fell out of a airplane but then I was okay.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to die if you fall like that.”

For some reason Thomas thought about Alicia then. He remembered struggling with the heavy cinder blocks that he and Pedro used to make her tomb. She was dead. She fell over the fence and never got up again.

That afternoon and night Thomas had four visitors.

The first was Clea Frank. She came into his room and sat next to his bed.

“I love you,” she said. “I just came by to tell you that I’m going back to New York to pack, but when I come back we’ll get a place together and you’ll go back to school or whatever you want and I’ll finish my degree.”

Clea kissed Thomas and said something, but he’d been on painkillers and fell asleep, missing her words. He remembered her reassuring tones, though, and he felt that maybe things might be okay.

When he woke up again, Raela was standing there.

She gave him a serious look and then sat down next to him.

“Eric told me what happened with my father,” she said.

Thomas didn’t question why his brother would do such a thing. He didn’t utter a sound. He wondered, dispassionately, if the girl had come to get revenge, not because she was angry but because it was the right thing to do.

“He told me about the pictures and his wanting to send him to jail,” she said. “I believe it because that would have been just another day of business for my father. He destroyed people and businesses all the time. He sent men to jail, and then he’d come to my room and tell me how they’d begged and cried. He said that he was building a great treasure and that it would one day be mine.”