Devil's Keep (11 page)

I said shoot, boy.

The boy doesn’t flinch. This would be a mistake. As he watches the scene play out in his head, the adult Ray Favor knows that the father is a classic bully, insecure and unhappy and frightened, who slinks from
the strong and turns his self-loathing outward to heap upon the weak. The eight-year-old understands none of this. He knows only that his father is an asshole.

The edges of the fingernails dig deeper into the boy’s ear, breaking skin. The boy’s vision becomes liquid, blurred. He blinks to clear it, and finds notch and blade still aligned with paunchy fur.

Pull the trigger, pussy.

The boy squeezes. The gun cracks. The chipmunk flips back and out of sight.

The father hops up, steps over the log, and walks to the rock. He bends down, picks up the limp body of the chipmunk, turns it over like a farmer inspecting a clod of dirt. He motions to the boy—
Come here—
and the eight-year-old Raymond Favor leans his rifle against the fallen log and stands and walks toward him. His father is holding the carcass out, displaying it.

Lookit here. You did that.

The boy forces himself to look. He sees that the animal has been gutted. The bullet entered beneath its throat and traveled the length of its body, ripping open the underbelly and tearing out the viscera. The body is a pelt, though the head is intact, the small black eyes vacant.

Zipped it right open. Not bad for a little puke.

The boy begins to sob. He doesn’t know why. Even the adult Ray Favor can’t say why, exactly. It’s the screeching pain at his ear, it’s the humiliation, it’s the dead black eyes, it’s an asshole for a father.

The father. His face curdles at the sight of the tears. He bellows:
This? You cry for this? This is a rodent! This
is a turd! This is nothing!
He grabs the boy behind the head, shoves the carcass into his face. The bloody underside. Rubs it into his face. The father’s outrage builds.
Spittle flies from his mouth as he shouts.
This is nothing! Nothing!
He cuffs the boy, a hard backhand swipe that knocks him to the ground.

The father bends. Unties one of the boy’s sneakers. Pulls out the lace. Pushes one end into the mouth of the carcass, threads it out through an eye socket. He ties it around the boy’s neck.

Wear this ’til I tell you to quit. You’ll learn.

Now the boy is in bed, saying his prayers. He feels a caress at his cheek. His mother’s hand. She’s touching the spot where the father struck him. The bruise is mostly faded. She bends to kiss him. It’s a supreme act of motherly love, because he stinks of death. The chipmunk is rotting on the shoestring around his neck, the odor overpowering in the summer heat.

The father won’t allow him to remove it.

Now his mother stands over the boy. Stares down in pity. Her face becomes resolute. She reaches down, unties the shoestring, pulls it away.

This is defiance. It means trouble. She knows it; the boy knows it.

She leaves the room with the string and its stinking pendant.

The boy waits for upheaval. It happens in a hurry.

It starts with shouts—his father’s. Then an anguished scream—his mother’s. The boy listens. He tenses in his bed, but he doesn’t panic. He has heard this before, too often, and as bad as it sounds, somehow everything has
always come out right. No broken bones, sometimes even an awkward lull for a few days before the next outburst.

More shouts. The scuffling sounds of struggle. A heavy thump, a crash—this is
not
usual—and then a long scream of terror that he has never heard before.

The boy bolts out of bed and runs to the living room. He stops at the entryway, arrested by what he sees.

His father is holding a shotgun. It’s a twelve-gauge Remington, and the boy knows that it is always loaded with buckshot. And now it’s pointed at his mother.

Both of them, father and mother, turn to look at the boy when he appears. She is sprawled on the floor. The father stands astride her waist, holding the shotgun low, its muzzle inches from her face.

Just inside the entryway, where the boy stands, is a small table with a lamp. There is a single drawer in the table.

Inside the drawer of the lamp table is a Colt .45 pistol. The boy has never fired it, but he knows how it works. He knows all about the pistol. He knows that his father keeps a round chambered, hammer cocked, safety on. The father has taught him these things the way other fathers teach their boys to throw a baseball.

The boy opens the drawer and picks up the pistol, holding it with both hands, and he raises it. Notch and blade align with his father’s chest.

A sneering grin spreads across the father’s face.
He turns toward the boy but keeps the shotgun trained on the mother’s face, holding it pistol-like at her head.

This is rich,
he says.
This is just too perfect.

Without disturbing his aim, the boy crooks the thumb of his right hand, pushing the safety off.

Go ahead,
says the father to the son.
I want to see this.

The boy looks at his mother. Meets the dark beautiful eyes, full of love.

Oh, Raymond,
she says, a sorrowful sigh.

He searches her face, trying to understand. What does she mean? What does she want?

Oh, Raymond, put the gun down
—is that it?

Oh, Raymond, I’m so sorry you had to see this.

Oh, Raymond, you’ll only make it worse.

Oh, Raymond, please protect me.

It could be any of these. Or more.

The boy wants to know how he should react, what he’s supposed to do. It’s the biggest moment of his life. He has to be sure, he has to get it right.

Pull the fucking trigger,
his father says. The boy hesitates. His gaze jumps from his mother’s eyes to the target at the end of his gun sights. Back to his mother’s eyes, where he searches once more for a cue. Nothing there: she’s purely terrified, the shotgun’s muzzle inches from her face.

His father shoots. The shotgun roars. The beautiful face is instantly transformed to bloody pulp.

The father jacks a fresh round as he swings the gun toward his son.

The boy pulls the fucking trigger. The pistol
bucks, the father falls.

The boy puts down the pistol and goes to the phone and calls his grandparents at the main ranch house a couple of miles away.

The grandparents are good people. They will persuade the sheriff, a friend, to call it a murder-suicide. They will raise the boy, they will love him. But they will never look at him quite the way they did before.

While he waits for his grandparents to come, the boy takes a seat in a chair near his mother’s body. He angles the chair so he doesn’t have to see her face. He sits and looks down at the father. That doesn’t bother him a bit. The father is on his back, looking up at the ceiling, his eyes unblinking. There’s a hole in the front of his shirt, dead center through the shirt pocket on his left side. Heart shot. Already blood is darkening the front of the shirt and pooling beneath the body.

The boy sits there and stares at what he’s done. And a thought comes to him that will return a thousand times more in the years that follow.

What’s in him is in me,
he tells himself.

What’s in him is in me.

What’s in him is in me.

Arielle wondered whether she should wake him. But before she could decide, a wracked shudder passed through his body, and he snapped awake. She looked away so that he wouldn’t know she’d been staring at him, but he caught her anyway.

“What?” he said. “Hey, it’s nothing, I’m fine. You
worry too much.”

It was morning in Manila, 7:10 a.m., when the call from Alex Mendonza came in to the cell phone of Edwin Santos. The phone was, in fact, one of three that Santos carried at all times.

Each represented a niche in his life, a certain level of significance.

The first phone he used for communicating with the employees and managers of the seven businesses around Manila that he owned and supervised. He ran a taxi and car service; a bakery; a ready-to-wear manufacturing company; a travel agency; two restaurants; and a beer garden. This was the busiest phone, and the one he was most likely to ignore if he was otherwise occupied: the internal workings of the businesses were important, but they could usually wait. And he paid others to deal with emergencies.

The second phone was dedicated to the customers and potential customers and suppliers of his businesses. It represented cash in hand, and he would always leave the first phone to answer the second.

The third phone carried the fewest phone numbers but the most important. They included his few close friends, his attorney and accountant, and
his less conventional business contacts, representing discreet understandings, unwritten but mortally binding agreements, and an intricate balance sheet of obligations and payments in kind.

His twenty-year-old daughter, Anabeth, had a dedicated ring tone on each phone. He would drop any of them to pick up her call.

The call from Mendonza came over the third phone as Santos was finishing breakfast with Anabeth in their apartment on President Quirino Avenue in Manila. The phones were lined up on a side table, each plugged into a charger. A meal with Anabeth came along too seldom, so he had turned off the ringers on the first two phones but not the third—never the third.

He reached for it, recognized the number. Anabeth threw him a look of reproach, and for a moment Santos considered putting the phone aside. But Mendonza had paid well a year earlier, and Santos had once enjoyed working with the four Americans. He was never sure exactly what they were doing, but he knew it wasn’t ordinary. They had expected tact and discretion and loyalty; he liked that, and he liked high stakes, and now he hoped that this call might bring him more of the same.

He put up an apologetic hand to his daughter and took the phone into another room.

They exchanged pleasantries before Mendonza said, “Eddie, we’re coming into Manila late tonight. We can use your help, if you’re free.”

“ ‘We’? All four?”

“The gang’s all here.”

“Wonderful,” Santos said. “I’m always available for you.”

“We’ll need four phones and a couple of cars with good drivers. Tickets on an early flight to Tacloban for Alex Mendonza and Raymond Favor.”

Santos said, “Using your true name? And who is Raymond Favor?”

“You knew him as Jules. Real names all the way this time.”

“No paper? No safe house?”

Mendonza laughed and said, “None of that. We don’t need it. We’re on the straight.”

Santos felt vaguely cheated. It was not so much the money as the camaraderie, the shared experience. He said, “I see. This is business or pleasure?”

“A lot of pleasure, I hope, but we have a small chore to take care of first.”

“I’ll be glad to help any way I can,” Santos said, trying to sound sincere. But he didn’t feel much enthusiasm anymore. Four phones, a couple of cars, and plane tickets? Anybody could do that.

Mendonza told him that they would arrive at the general aviation terminal after midnight; he would call later with a more specific time.

“It’ll be great to see you again,” Mendonza said.

“Yes, thanks. You, too, of course,” Santos said. He clicked off, and went into the dining room. Anabeth was gone from her chair.

He said, ”Beth? Where are you? I’m done.”

She came in from her room, carrying a book bag.
She attended Assumption College, one of the nation’s most exclusive schools, a Catholic women’s university. It was a school for the daughters of Manila’s elite, and Santos qualified neither by birth nor bankroll.

But she was a very good student, and in her senior year the brother of a certain Mother Superior in the order had required a certain intervention to avoid a public scandal. Eddie Santos had been happy to use his connections, and his daughter’s application was accepted shortly after.

He said, “Come, finish breakfast. I’m sorry I left. It was nothing.”

“That’s okay. I should be going anyway,” she said. She pecked him on the cheek and started for the door.

He said, “How are you fixed for cash? Can you use a little money?”

That stopped her and brought her back. He took some cash from his pocket, decided not to count it, and pressed it into her hand.

Anabeth counted it, though.

“Thanks,” she said, and she turned and left.

He watched her walk out the door.

Unusual among Filipinos, Santos had little social life or extended family. Anabeth was his family. After her mother died, when Anabeth was three, Santos had thrown himself into work. A devoted
yaya
—a babysitter—had raised her until she was sixteen. Santos was devoted to her, but now that she was grown, he realized that he had missed much of her growing up, and that the
lost time could never be reclaimed. She seemed to leave his presence much too easily these days.

Now another morning gone. Damn.

He picked up the phones from the table, dropped all three into his pockets, and he followed his daughter out the door.