Shame the Devil (20 page)

He had another drink. He was angry enough to get into a fight tonight, but he knew he’d lose. He never was all that good with
his hands, anyway. Charles always used to crack on him about that.

“Charlie,” said Wilson, staring into his drink.

Wilson flashed on the detective in the wheelchair, his son by his side. Thomas Wilson closed his eyes tight and brought the
cognac to his lips.

Bernie Walters pressed down on the scan button on the remote that was Velcroed to his recliner. He sipped his beer, watched
the channels flash by: the Spanish soap opera station, the cowboys and their girls doing some fancy line dance, the black-and-white
movie station, the show about the cops in Brooklyn with all the actors who looked too pretty to be cops… nothing on. He killed
his beer and lit a cigarette.

He put the empty in the carrier at the side of the chair and pulled a fresh one. He had gone through three already. Those
fancy triple-bocks he’d tried down at the Brew Hause had really messed up his head.

Nothing to do this week except work. He had switched to a sorter’s position since his feet had gone bad on him. Now that friendly
guy Mike Hancock, the one who looked like Magnum P.I., had taken his Bethesda route. He was happy for Hancock, who had a nice
wife and a couple of kids.

Walters remembered when it was all in front of him like that. He drank some more beer.

Yeah, there wasn’t much to look forward to this week.

There’s nothing to look forward to ever again
.

Well, there was his vacation. On Saturday he’d go down to the property with Dimitri, hang out, show him around, drink some
beer. Do some shooting in the woods, because that’s what Dimitri had asked to do. Spend the rest of the week down there by
himself.

As for tonight… he’d just get drunk tonight.

He’d get good and drunk, because when he was drunk he slept solid. He didn’t remember his dreams when he slept drunk. He did
hear Vance’s voice as a child, though, saying his name. He could never get drunk enough to stop that.

I love you, Vance. I was always proud of you, son
.

He wanted to be with Lynne, his wife, and he wanted to be with Vance. He was ready now. He knew that he could live on for
a good many years, and he knew that however long he lived, it was God’s decision, not his. Still, he was ready. Sometimes
he prayed to be taken.

Yes, he had thought of suicide, many times. He had thought of it but never once considered it beyond the thought.

The Lord said that it was a sin to take one’s life. Bernie Walters would just have to wait.

Dimitri Karras propped himself up on one elbow and kissed Stephanie Maroulis on the mouth. He looked at her lush figure on
the bed and ran his hand down her arm.

“I guess I’m not much good tonight,” she said.

“It’s okay.
This
is good. We can just do this.”

“You sure?” Stephanie smiled weakly as she reached down and brushed her fingers down the shaft of his hardening cock. “Because
you’re mouth is saying one thing and your body’s telling me something else.”

Karras grinned crookedly.

Stephanie turned and looked at the photograph of Steve Maroulis on the nightstand. “You know, it wasn’t like me to get that
way in the meeting. I’ve been doing pretty well up to now, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“But there was something about Bill Jonas being there that made me want to talk about it. About how it was for Steve, at the
end.”

“I know.”

Stephanie had told the group how her husband had been robbed many years before at an after-hours, high-stakes card game down
off New York Avenue, near the Henley Park Hotel. The gunmen had made the gamblers put their heads down on the carpet. Steve
had been the last to comply; he thought that if he were to put his head down, they’d kill him. His fear was so great that
he’d fouled himself that night. He had told Stephanie that putting his head down was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

“I didn’t mean to cry,” said Stephanie. “It’s just, when I was telling it, I could imagine seeing him there in that kitchen,
how afraid he must have been.… I couldn’t help myself, Dimitri.”

“I know,” repeated Karras. Her hair had fallen across her cheek, and he brushed it away. “I’ve been thinking of you these
last few days, Stephanie. What I mean to say is, you’ve been in my head. I know this is supposed to be a once-a-week thing,
us being together. But I was looking forward to seeing you tonight. I was hoping this night would come sooner, understand?
I’m not certain that I know what it means.”

“I’ve been thinking of you, too.”

Dimitri Karras awoke in the middle of the night, confused and oddly ashamed. He felt a strange sense of having committed a
betrayal. It was as if he were considering breaking a promise he’d made never to be happy again.

He walked barefoot down a hall to the darkened kitchen and found Stephanie’s wall-mounted phone. He dialed the number of his
old house and let it ring several times.

Lisa’s tired, fragile voice came through from the other side. “Hello.”

Karras did not answer.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”

He listened to Lisa breathing, and then there was a soft, final click.

Karras stood in the kitchen with the receiver pressed against his cheek. After a while he hung the phone in its cradle and
returned to Stephanie’s bed.

THE MORNING AFTER
he had spoken with Roman Otis, Frank Farrow phoned his boss and told him that he was going home to Wilmington to bury his
father, who had died in his sleep the previous night.

“You comin’ back, Larry? You were the best dishwasher we ever had.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got to look after my mother now. You understand.”

Farrow packed his personal belongings into a small duffel bag and threw the bedsheets stained with Grace’s blood in the alley
Dumpster. He paid off his landlord, telling her the same story he had told his boss.

Farrow drove the Taurus SHO southwest toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and rented a room in a motel on Kent Island. He registered
under the name of Louie Pino and paid cash in advance for a five-day stay.

The first day he kept to his room and read a paperback novel. That night he ate dinner at the bar of the Angler’s Restaurant,
a small locals’ spot in Grasonville that served delicious vegetable crab soup and soft-shell sandwiches. After dinner he drank
beer slowly until closing time and went back to his motel room with a Dundalk woman named Rita whom he had picked up at the
bar.

In the next four days he read two paperback novels written by Edward Anderson and A. I. Bezzerides, and at night he ate and
drank at the Angler’s with Rita and took her back to his room, where he made Rita’s eyes roll back in her head with his workmanlike,
rhythmic thrusts. Rita said nothing to anger him, and he did not hurt her.

On the fifth day he drove the SHO down the road, parked it behind a restaurant, removed its plates, and walked back to the
motel with his duffel bag in his hand. He had noticed that every morning a blue-collar man left his Ranger truck on the edge
of the motel parking lot, out of sight of the manager’s office, and was picked up by another blue-collar man. The two of them
would then go off together to their jobs. Farrow removed the Ranger’s plates, replaced them with the SHO’s plates, broke into
the pickup easily using a bar tool he owned, hot-wired the ignition, and drove northeast. A bumper sticker on the Ranger read,
“There Is No Life West of the Chesapeake Bay.”

He thought of his brother as he made open road.

Richard had always been somewhat of a follower. Frank had easily turned him against their father, a Beverly Hills lawyer,
at a very young age. But Richard could never go all the way like Frank. So as Frank began to seek perfection in his chosen
career of crime, Richard continued to stumble through the subworld of amateur criminals inhabited by the true lowlifes: meth-heads
and dope fiends, runaways and their pimps, street grifters, fences, and the like.

In the meantime, Frank did his reform school stretches and then two major jolts as an adult, where he fell in love with the
books in the prison libraries and made the contacts within the walls that would enable him to graduate to an ever higher level
of success outside. Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element
of any career criminal’s education.

When he had been released from his last sentence and done his parole, Frank was ready, and Richard, of course, was not. But
he had brought Richard along on that final job because that was what a brother was obligated to do.

Frank cracked the window and lit a Kool.

The Farrow brothers’ birth mother had died very young — Frank remembered her vaguely and Richard not at all — and their father
remarried quickly. To Frank’s mind, the father loved only money and its accoutrements. Frank hated him and his friends, and
he would always despise everyone like them. By the time his father married for the third time, there was no familial connection
that remained. Their father no longer considered Frank and Richard, who had been in serious trouble since their teens, to
be his sons. Frank and Richard had not had any kind of contact with him for years. For all Frank knew or cared, their father
was dead.

Now Richard was dead, too. Frank didn’t dwell on it. He had loved Richard, he supposed, but he had no illusions of the afterlife,
and he was free of sentiment. He knew there was no spiritual world where the two of them would meet again. Richard was now
what all men were in the end: food for worms. Sentiment aside, though, Frank would have to kill the man who had killed his
brother; retaliation was a part of the personal code he had adopted long ago.

Frank was fascinated by the murder trials he had seen on TV. He’d watch the victims’ families, how they sat quietly in court,
their soft hands resting in their laps, waiting for a justice that would never fully come. He was sure that they thought of
themselves as good people. He only thought of them as weak.

Weakness. It separated him from the straights. This separation would keep him alive.

Frank parked the Ranger alongside the platinum Park Avenue in the lot of the New Rock Church. He checked the load on the .38
that Toomey had given him and holstered the gun against the small of his back. He reached into his duffel bag, retrieved a
pair of latex examination gloves, and fitted them onto his hands. He looked around the empty lot and down Old Church Road.
The road was clear. He stepped out of the truck.

Frank knocked on the door of the church and put his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. The door opened, and the Reverend
Bob stood in the frame.

“Larry?” he said, donning his salesman’s smile. “Why, I heard you had left town.”

“I’m back. Can I come in?”

“Certainly.”

The reverend stepped aside to let Farrow pass through, and shut the door behind them. Farrow walked slowly down the center
aisle of the church, allowing the Reverend Bob to get in front of him.

“Shall we go to my office?”

“Here is good,” said Farrow, stepping up onto the altar floor. He stood in a bar of light that entered narrowly from a glass
panel on the roof and widened as it fell.

“Well… okay,” said the reverend.

Farrow heard a catch in the reverend’s voice.

The reverend stepped up onto the altar and stood beside him. Frank looked at him, immaculate in his starched white shirt.

“That’s a Movado, isn’t it?” said Farrow, nodding at the reverend’s wrist.

“Yes.” The reverend smiled. “I bought it secondhand. Of course, a new Movado is a little dear for a man in my profession.”

“My father owned one of those. He was so proud of it, too. Always shot his cuffs around his friends, made sure they got a
good look at it. My brother and I stole it off his dresser one night. I gave it to some street kid outside the Whiskey, over
on the Strip.”

The reverend looked at him quizzically. “Why do you mention this, Larry?”

“My father fired our maid the next morning. A Chicano woman with four children. He was paying her twenty-five dollars a day.”

“Larry?”

“My name’s Frank Farrow.”

Farrow took his hands from his coat and dropped them at his sides.

The reverend looked at Farrow’s gloved hands and backed up a step. “What… what do you want?”

“I told you I’d be back. When I make a promise like that, I keep it.” The color drained from the reverend’s face. He looked
desperately around the empty church and back at Farrow. He tried to smile and use a tone of sincerity, but his voice shook
as it came forth.

“Listen… Frank,is it?”

“Frank Farrow.”

“Frank, I never meant to offend you or infringe on your privacy. I was only looking to bring another person into our congregation.
If you were ever incarcerated, it makes no difference to me.”

“You were right on the money, Reverend Bob. I’ve been in one kind of prison or another for the better part of my life.”

“Frank — atonement is everything in the eyes of the Lord. Whatever you did, you served your time.”

“You have no idea what I’ve done. And you shouldn’t have pried.” Farrow reached into his coat and drew the .38 from where
it was holstered in his belt line. “Get on your knees.”

Tears dropped instantly from the reverend’s eyes. He raised his hands as in prayer. His lip trembled violently, but he couldn’t
speak.

“On your knees,” said Farrow.

The reverend dropped to his knees on the altar. Urine spread across his crotch and darkened the thighs of his slacks. The
stench of it grew heavy in the church.

“Are you afraid?” asked Farrow.

The reverend nodded.

“It’s funny,” said Farrow, looking down at him. “I find that those the most afraid are those who believe in God. The same
ones who hide their eyes at horror movies are the ones who bow their heads in a place like this. And for what? Something that
does not, cannot, exist.”