Michael Koryta - The Prophet

Kent hadn’t slept in thirty hours, had gone from the biggest victory of his career to the most stunning of personal horrors, and he had nothing left in the emotional tank. He was emptied, or as close to it as he had been in many years.

“We’ve got all week, Colin. We’ll talk things through. Okay?”

He squeezed the boy’s shoulder, moved past the locker room without entering, and went into the parking lot to find Chelsea Salinas waiting at his car. He was a few steps away from her still, far enough that he wasn’t ready to speak himself, when she said, “How could you give him the name?”

“What?”

Her eyes were red and her usually mocha skin looked like a winter sky. She said, “You knew what he wanted to do, Kent. He’d told you. And you just gave him the name and stepped aside, you didn’t even think to warn me? I might have been able to help. You might have been able to help. Instead you just let him go out there and—”

Her voice was rising to a scream, and Kent put his hand on her arm and whispered, “Stop shouting, Chelsea. What are you talking about? What happened to Adam?”

She shrugged off his touch. “So far? Nothing. Soon, though? Soon you’ll get to visit him in prison. And you could have stopped it.”

He’d been lost from the start—this morning, the act of thinking was like wading against a strong current—but suddenly it took shape and he saw it clearly and was horrified.

“Sipes,” he said. That was it, just the last name, and she did not respond, but her eyes told him all that he needed to know.

“Where is he?” he asked. “Where is my brother?”

“He’s gone to talk to your sister,” she said. A tear had seeped free and was gliding over her cheek. “And, Kent? You damn well better help him.”

“How can I help?”

“By giving him an alibi. Whatever he says he was doing when Sipes was murdered, you better be prepared to back him up.” She saw something in his face that seemed to infuriate her and said, “Yes, you’d better be prepared to lie. You better lie your ass off, Kent, because it’s the only thing that might save him, and you owe him that much at least. You let him go on when you could have stopped him. I know you’ll never forgive either of us for driving away from Marie that night, but you let him drive away this time.”

“Chelsea, I didn’t have any idea—”

“Bullshit, Kent. He told you exactly what he intended to do.”

“And I told him not to do it. ”

“At first,” she said. “When Sipes showed up for you, though? What did you do then?”

“He offered to help. He offered—”

“You came to him for a gun,” she said. “And you were looking for one, all right, but you also were looking for someone to pull its trigger for you. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I didn’t think he would actually do this.”

She shook her head in disgusted disbelief. “It’s worse than what we did to you, Kent. It’s worse. Back then, we didn’t know what might happen. This time? You knew.”

48

SHE WAS NOT WRONG.

Kent accepted that as he drove. His instinct was to defend himself, to rationalize. The only thing he’d ever said to Adam about killing Clayton Sipes was to tell him not to do it, not even think about it. Those had been his instructions, and he could hide behind them if he wished.

Just as he’d hidden behind Adam since the moment Sipes arrived.

He would not do that now. There are different layers of honesty—the truth of what you said and the truth of what was in your heart when you spoke the words. They did not always share a path.

There were things that stood out to him from the day he’d revealed Sipes’s identity to Adam. The photograph of his brother with another man’s blood on him. The bruised and swollen hand. The way he’d not so much as blinked when he declared his disappointment that he’d not had the chance to kill Gideon Pearce.

I knew what he would do if he could, Kent thought. I knew that.

He remembered the unease he’d felt watching the old game film with Colin Mears. He hadn’t been able to explain it at the time, or hadn’t wanted to search deeply enough and honestly enough to do so. The reason was clear to him now, though. He’d watched the way they’d played that game—put Adam out there in front and let him do the hitting, let him do the savage work, with the understanding that if you stayed behind him you’d be untouched and unharmed—and he’d seen the truth of what he was doing with his brother and turned away from it.

I didn’t know he could find him.

That much was true. But he’d known damn well what Adam would do if he did find him.

Chelsea had requested an alibi. Kent could offer that, but he thought that he could offer one better. He understood things that Adam did not, and in those things was a chance at making this right, at removing his brother from a hell that belonged to Kent. He’d brought Grissom here, Grissom and Sipes both, and it was time to own that. There would be no more running, there would be no more turning away from the conflict. Any hitting that was left to do, Kent would do himself, the way he always should have.

Adam didn’t have words for Marie today. He’d done all of the right things, had knocked twice, had lit the right candles in the right order, but he couldn’t call up any words.

So he just sat on the floor, thinking about all that he had done. Rodney Bova, framed for a felony. Clayton Sipes, shot and left dead by Lake Erie. These things had always been horrible, but they’d had purpose. They were required acts, the only means of atonement that carried any weight in this world. What he had done was brutal, but it was righteous.

Now he had been told it was the wrong man. What did that leave behind?

“I’m sorry,” he told Marie finally. They were usually the last words he had for her, but today they were the only ones.

Someone knocked downstairs. At first he thought police, but then the knock came again and he realized it was not the front door but the side door. His family had always come and gone from the side door; visitors came and went through the front door.

Kent was here.

He got to his feet and left Marie’s room without extinguishing the candles. Went downstairs and through the kitchen and pulled open the door and saw his little brother standing there and wished he couldn’t see him, because Kent looked that bad. Looked wounded.

“Chelsea talked to you,” Adam said.

“Yeah.”

Somehow Adam wasn’t surprised.

“What did she tell you?”

“All there was to tell, I think,” Kent said, stepping inside. Adam closed the door behind him and moved to sit at the kitchen table. Kent joined him, sitting where their father belonged. Adam had always tried to keep Kent away from those long night sessions at the kitchen table, Scotch disappearing like water, bloodshot eyes taking aim at impossible targets. Adam would tell his brother to get his ass down to the field or the weight room or Walter Ward’s house. The position opposite their father at the table on those nights was Adam’s place, Adam’s burden. He’d tried to keep Kent away from it, and for a long time, he thought he had succeeded. But here they sat. Their father was gone, and Kent was where he’d been once, and the realization made Adam sad.

“I wish you hadn’t done it,” Kent said. He didn’t ask whether Adam had done it. Clearly, Chelsea had left him no room for doubt. “Adam, you should have—”

“I know what I should have done,” Adam said. “And what I shouldn’t have done. I put a bullet in an innocent man’s head, Kent. That’s where it stands now, am I correct?”

Kent nodded.