Michael Koryta: The Prophet

He no longer believes this, though. Consideration has shown him its weaknesses and ultimate insignificance. The question and its answer mean little. What matters, what Zane was unable to see—he was an impulsive man was Zane—is in the removing of the question from the mind entirely, and replacing it with certainty.

There is no God.

You walk alone in the darkness.

To prove this, to imprint it in the mind so deeply that no alternative can so much as flicker, is the goal. This is power, pure as it comes.

Bring him the hopeful and he will leave them hopeless. Bring him the strong and he will leave them broken. Bring him the full and he will leave them empty.

The prophet’s goal is simple. When the final scream in the night comes, whoever issues it will be certain of one thing:

No one hears.

What he has been promised in Chambers, Ohio, is strength and resiliency. He has looked into a confident man’s eyes and heard his assurance that there is no fear that will not bow to his faith.

The prophet of hard times, who has looked into many a confident gaze in his day, has his doubts about that.

1

ADAM HAD HIS SHIRT LIFTED, studying the lead-colored bruise along his ribcage, when the girl opened the door. She turned her head in swift horror, as if she’d caught him crouched on his desk in the nude. He gave the bruise one more look, frowning, and then lowered his shirt.

“Want a lesson for the day?”

The girl, a brunette with very tan skin—too tan for this time of the year in this part of the world—turned back hesitantly and didn’t speak.

“If you’re going to tell a drunk man that it’s time to go back to jail, you ought to see that the pool cue is out of his hand first,” Adam told her.

She parted her lips, then closed them again.

“Not your concern,” Adam said. “Sorry. Come on in.”

She stepped forward and let the door swing shut. When the latch clicked, she glanced backward, as if worried about being trapped in here with him.

Husband is a good decade older than her, Adam thought. He hasn’t hit her, at least not yet or at least not recently, but he’s the kind who might. The charges probably aren’t domestic. Let’s say, oh, drunk and disorderly. It won’t be costly to get him out. Not in dollars, at least.

He walked behind the desk, then extended a hand and said, “Adam Austin.”

Another hesitation, and then she reached forward and took his hand. Her eyes dropped to his knuckles, which were swollen and scabbed. When she removed her hand, he saw that she was wearing bright red nail polish with some sort of silver glitter worked into it.

“My name’s April.”

“All right.” He dropped into the leather swivel chair behind the desk, trying not to wince at the pain in his side. “Somebody you care about in a little trouble, April?”

She tilted her head. “What?”

“I assume you’re looking to post a bond.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s not it.” She was holding a folder in her free hand, and now she lifted it and held it against her chest while she sat in one of the two chairs in front of the desk. It was a bright blue folder, plastic and shiny.

“No?” The sign said AA BAIL BONDS. People who came to see him came for a reason.

“Look, um, you’re the detective, right?”

The detective. He did indeed hold a PI license. He did not recall ever being referred to as “the detective” before.

“I’m… yeah. I do that kind of work.”

He didn’t think he was even listed in the phone book as a private investigator. He was just AA Bail Bonds, which covered both his initials and gave him pole position in the Yellow Pages as people with shaking hands turned pages seeking help.

The girl didn’t say anything, but looked down at that shiny folder as if it held the secrets of her life. Adam, touching his left side gingerly with his fingertips, still trying to assess whether the ribs were bruised or cracked, said, “What exactly brought you here, April?”

“I’d heard… I was given a referral.”

“A referral,” he echoed. “Can I ask the source?”

She pushed her hair back over her left ear and sat forward in the chair, meeting his eyes for the first time, as if she’d summoned some confidence. “My boyfriend. Your brother was his football coach. We heard from him that you were a detective.”

Adam said, “My brother?” in an empty voice.

“Yes. Coach Austin.”

“Kent,” he said. “We’re not on his squad, April. We can call him Kent.”

She didn’t seem to like that idea, but she nodded.

“My brother gave you a referral,” he said, and found himself amused somehow, despite the aching ribs and bruised hand and the sandpaper eyelids that a full week of uneven hours and too much drinking provided. Until she walked in, he’d been two minutes from locking the office and going in pursuit of black coffee. The tallest cup and strongest blend they had. A savage headache had been building, and he needed something beyond Advil to take its knees out.

“That’s right.” She seemed unsatisfied with his response, as if she’d expected the mention of his brother would establish a personal connection. “I’m in school at Baldwin-Wallace College. A senior.”

“Terrific,” Adam said.

“It’s a good school.”

“I’ve always understood that to be true.” He was trying to keep his attention on her, but right now all she represented was a delay between him and coffee. “What’s in the folder?”

She looked down protectively, as if he’d violated the folder’s privacy. “Some letters.”

He waited. Could this take any longer? He was used to fighting his way through personal stories he didn’t care to hear about, used to deflecting tales of woe, but he did not have the patience to tug one out just so he could begin deflecting it.

“What precisely do you need, April?”

“I’d like to get in touch with my father.”

“You don’t know him?” Adam said, thinking that this wasn’t the sort of problem he could handle even if it interested him. How in the hell did you go about finding someone who’d abandoned his child decades ago? It wasn’t like chasing down a guy who’d skipped out on bail, leaving behind a fresh trail of friends, relatives, and property.

“I’ve met him,” she said. “But he was… well, by the time I was old enough to really get to know him, he was already in prison.”

Adam understood now why she’d gone to the trouble of telling him that she was in a good school. She didn’t want him to form his understanding of her from this one element, the knowledge that her father was in prison.

“I see. Well, we can figure out where he’s doing his time easily enough.”

“He’s done. He’s out.”

Damn. That would slow things down.

“What I’ve got,” the too-tan-for-October girl said, “is some letters. We started writing while he was still in prison. That was, actually, your brother’s idea.”

“No kidding,” Adam said, doing his damnedest to hide his disgust. Just what this girl needed, a relationship with some asshole in a cell. But Kent, he’d have found that a fine plan. Adam’s brother had gotten a lot of ink for his prison visits over the years. DRIVEN BY THE PAST, one headline had read. Adam found that a patently obvious observation. Everyone was driven by the past, all the time. Did Kent’s past play a role in his prison visits? Of course. Did that shared past play a role in Adam’s own prison visits? Better believe it. They were just different sorts of visits.

“Yes. And it was a wonderful idea. I mean, I learned to forgive him, you know? And then to understand that he wasn’t this monster, that he was someone who made a mistake and—”