by Boston Teran
“GOD IS A BULLET IS A TRIUMPH FOR BOSTON TERAN … IT’S SO GOOD THAT IT TAKES MY BREATH AWAY.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A stunning debut … God Is a Bullet features one of the more demonic fictional villains you are likely to encounter.… It is that rare first novel you truly do not want to put down.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[An] astonishing literary thriller … Teran’s sparse, riveting, third-person style is perfect for his dark and philosophically mesmerizing story.… [Readers] will be drawn in by the pure poetry and clarity of Mr. Teran’s vision and the brilliance of characters and plot.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“God Is a Bullet is a stunner of a suspense novel, body-slamming its way down an uncharted rocky terrain of pain, fear, horror, bravery, and redemption.… Teran’s voice is fresh, unique, and explosive. He has delivered a work that is too good, too important, and too painful to be ignored.”
—LORENZO CARCATERRA
Bestselling author of Sleepers and Apaches
“COMPELLING, FASCINATING, AND UTTERLY BREATHTAKING.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“Gripping … From the first page, when a pair of sheriff’s deputies arrive at a crime scene at an isolated trailer in the California desert, the reader is mesmerized by this strange and compelling tale of ritual murder.… This is a novel of sheer unrelieved terror, and it doesn’t let go even after the last page is read.”
—The Globe & Mail (Toronto)
“The story is astounding, the characters are etched in my brain, the real-time style is riveting, and Teran’s dialogue is carved out of granite. It will be a long while before I get this story and these characters out of my head. It is just a terrific experience.”
—WILLIAM DIEHL
Bestselling author of Eureka and Primal Fear
“An edgy, stark tale of revenge and redemption that pulsates with raw energy and high suspense.”
—Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Stunning … Moves with the speed and brutal force of a .45 caliber slug.”
—The Flint Journal
“GRIPPING, CHILLING … PICK UP THIS BOOK, AND DON’T EXPECT TO BE ABLE TO PUT IT DOWN.”
—Style Weekly
“In a word: Wow. God Is a Bullet is a shotgun blast to the gut—a kick-ass, in-your-face tour de force from start to finish. Every page carries a fresh wallop and a nightmarish jolt. Boston Teran’s haunting words stay with you long after you turn the final page. I’m still stunned.”
—HARLAN COBEN
Edgar Award–winning author of Fade Away and One False Move
“What sets Teran’s work apart is the skill with which he hooks the reader and the relentless pace he sets in his tale.… A plot that unfolds at an adrenaline pulsing pace that will delight readers all the way to the conclusion.”
—The Advocate (Baton Rouge)
“An intense, emotional reading experience, an unrelenting thriller populated with full-bodied, deeply drawn characters. Boston Teran locates the heart beneath the darkness and delivers something human and true.”
—GEORGE P. PELECANOS
Author of The Sweet Forever and King Suckerman
“This is a fast-paced, stark narrative.… The constant debate about good and evil and the meaning of life gives an undercurrent of self-examination to Teran’s riveting first novel.”
—Booklist
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1999 by Brutus Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Special Rider Music: Excerpt from “Highway 61 Revisited” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc., copyright renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. Reprinted by permission of Special Rider Music.
Tiny Tunes Music and Zevon Music: Excerpts from “Excitable Boy” by LeRoy P. Marinell and Warren Zevon (Tiny Tunes Music/Zevon Music), copyright © 1976 by Zevon Music. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Tiny Tunes Music and Zevon Music, c/o Gelfand, Rennert and Feldman.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-80682-6
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Pearl Chapter 1
The Judgment Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
The Rite of Separation Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
The Rite of Transition Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Le Mort and The Rite of Incorporation Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
The Fool Chapter 69
The Cup and The Spear Chapter 70
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
According to Aztec myth, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was responsible for driving back the darkness—the moon and the stars—at the start of each day. He required strength for the struggle and he needed to be nourished with human blood.
Archeology Today
Blood and Family
Darkness and Death
Absolute Depravity
.44
Written on the back of
an envelope containing a
letter sent by the Son of
Sam to Jimmy Breslin
God and Satan, why they’re no different than the government or McDonald’s. Just franchises to keep th
e money coming in by giving the locals something they can depend on.
Edward Constanza,
“Letter to the Editor,”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
1984
THE PEARL
1
FALL 1970
It is 7:23 on a Sunday morning when the Sheriff’s Department in Clay, California, gets the call a woman has been murdered. The boy is at a pay phone by the entrance to the freeway. His dirt bike lies ten feet away, along the shoulder where he’s dropped it. The wind weaves sand through the still-spinning tire spokes. He has to cup his hand over his ear to hear the officer’s questions above the passing trucks. He relates a series of horrifying images, and after he hangs up he sits in the dirt and cries.
Two Sheriff’s Department patrol cars speed out Route 138, Palmdale Boulevard, and then take the hard turn onto Route 15 heading northeast. They drive without sirens through Barstow, passing the ghost mining town of Calico, all clapboard and tin just north of the freeway.
Two deputies in one car. A sergeant in the other. They ride in black silence. After all, this is the country of Charles Manson and The Process and Sunset Boulevard witchcraft. It is the country that spawned such phrases as “Thou shalt kill” and “Helter Skelter.”
At the Calico Road exit they find the boy by his dirt bike. He is a wispy excuse for twelve, and he holds the sergeant tightly as he is led to the patrol car. He guides them north, pointing the way up through Paradise Springs Road.
The wind grows worse, blowing its poisonous alkali chlorides and carbonates down from Inyo County and China Lake. Moving up through the Mojave Desert they pass the Calico Early Man Site, where scattered on the shores of ancient, dry Coyote Lake are the oldest known remains of our ancestors in North America. Here a solitary core of studied diggers found rudimentary tools of stone and arrows, fossilized fletchings, and puzzle parts of clay jugs. The crude trappings of commerce, the crude trappings of war.
The patrol cars move off the main road and onto a broken trail that traverses a forgotten playa set between the Calico Mountains and the Paradise Range. Their vehicles rock and heave over the sifting climb of slow dunes.
The boy’s hand comes up and points again. His legs arch onto the seat in an almost fetal position. Ahead, the sergeant, one John Lee Bacon, makes out the antiquated silver-hulled trailer where the woman lives, shining dully through the dust. They pull up and stop, and as the three sheriffs step out of the vehicles they unsnap the guards on their pistols.
The blowing sand is like cut glass against their skin. The trailer stands before them, defined by a garden of bottle art mortared into cement stalagmites, rusting chassis, old chairs, and pitted road sign warnings within a labyrinth of cholla and creosote and yerba santa plants that the woman has grown for their powers of healing and poison.
Sergeant Bacon is twenty-four years old, but his ax-thin face already shows the early signs of dissipation. He orders one of the sheriffs to track his way around the trailer; the other will follow as a back-up.
The little they know of the woman has come from the boy, who occasionally rode his dirt bike across the playa to charm her out of a soda, and what they’ve picked up over their radios. She is called Hannah by those who know her. She has no last name. No driver’s license. She has lived there as long as anyone remembers. Her skin is honey-colored black. Her hair is white and hangs in bush locks almost to her waist. She is known to walk barefoot for miles singing out loud, unafraid of snakes, cleaning the desert floor of debris. Some say she is mad, others are more pitying and call her harmless and eccentric. Occasionally she would be seen in the churches of the surrounding towns drinking beer from the bottle and laughing at the locals.
As they approach the screen door they hear the nickering of mobiles hung somewhere in the distance. Off-key brass and stone notes in a twilight chorus. John Lee can feel the sweat creeping out between his thumb and the hammer of his pistol.
They enter cautiously. The windows and air vents in the ceiling have been left open and the sand swirls around the frayed furnishings and unwashed dishes. The wind curls the edges of snapshots, taped to the walls, of passersby who once wandered across the barren plat and were caught by the woman’s camera. A confusion of faces going back generations. Faces spotted up between wind-furled clippings from magazines and cookbooks, between pages of poetry and bits of humor. The wind tears at the backs of some of the clippings and they float away. But it is the stench that overwhelms the sheriffs.
“Sergeant?”
John Lee glances at the deputy, who points to the floor. John Lee walks over to him and kneels down. He sees an arterial line of blood, dried the color of cheap wine and flecked with sand, running the length of the trailer toward a sheet hung across the bedroom doorway. The sheet lifts and turns like an apparition, then falls away. Through the sand both men can see the sheet had been hand-painted with a heraldic lily and a rose.
John Lee stands and starts for the bedroom. The deputy follows. They step carefully past the tracings of blood that have pooled out where the floor wasn’t level.
They turn the sheet back. The small grotto of a bedroom is filled with shells and fossil stones. The air is poisoned with flies and their noses begin to burn from the vile odor of rotting flesh. Then they see her, lying on her side at the foot of the bed.
One moment taints John Lee’s dreams forever. He will see it all in fragments over and over again. The gas-bloated frame. The skin where it has burst apart and the open lesions rank with white maggots leeching pink-brown muscle. The bullet wound to the side of the skull that leaves shards of bone with blood and brain jelly trailing up the wall like the spanning wings of a bird. The eyes driven from their sockets by the concussion of the shot. The knife wounds across the back and chest that leave bloody chevrons on the woolly white seaman’s sweater. The skin sluiced in bizarre patterns that border on ritual. And in a wrinkled turn of her coarse garment, a single pearl.
It will all become an indelible part of his subconscious.
All that night Homicide and Forensics units hunt for evidence, but the sand had beaten them to it, papering over whatever tracks and prints might have existed.
There is one slim lead. A son named Cyrus. Hannah had taken care of a child she’d found abandoned on Fort Dixon Road. He was a tall boy with large hands and brooding yellow-green eyes, and as he got older he carried himself like some solitary acolyte. Twice he’d been sent to juvenile hall in Los Angeles for possession of narcotics and assault. But this just dead-ends. The boy had run off three years before, when he was seventeen, and had not been seen since.
By morning the newspapers get word and they rush the playa in their Jeeps and Travelalls. They’re hungry for a story, and this one reeks of lurid headlines.
One reporter, while wandering the playa, discovers in a dry riverbed a few hundred yards from the trailer a totem of sorts. Granite and limestone boulders squared up block by block form what resembles a primitive furnace. Etched into the rock are prehistoric signs. A bird. A bull. A tree. Symbols of earth and air, fire and water. And in the center is a snake devouring itself. The sign of Ourabouris. The same sign that is discovered during the autopsy to have been tattooed on Hannah’s shoulder. All this the news draws up in squalid detail. Hannah’s death is christened “The Furnace Creek Cult Murder.”
THE JUDGMENT
2
NOVEMBER 1995
Case’s screams tear at her very bones and wrack the hallway outside her small apartment in the rehab house. She crouches on the bathroom floor before the toilet. She is only twenty-nine, but the free fall back into her two-hundred-dollar-a-day habit has left her gaunt. Her skin is yellow, her arms marked with blue-black welts. Two days off the junk. The third is always the black hole. A pure moment of hell before the resurrection.
Her stomach heaves in spasm. A guttural sucking out of the air. The woman in the apartment next door, trembling from the horrid screams, calls down to Anne.
Anne rushes
through the dark hovel of the living room toward a crease of light, where she sees Case clawing at the white floor tiles, digging her chewed fingernails into the grouting.
Anne sits and tries to cradle Case in her arms. Case’s head jerks toward her in jarring lurches.
She was a small girl again. Not more than ten. A street runaway with small pointed breasts. She was naked and she was being carried by four of them like some vestal virgin. She was taken and forced inside the skinned torso of a dead cow. There was blood everywhere. She could feel the sweet sticky hourglass of the cow’s ribs press up against her own. The weight of its breastbone forcing air out of her. She felt as if she was going to suffocate and she gagged.
She vomits before she can reach the toilet. Anne tries to press twenty milligrams of Robaxin into Case’s hand for the spasm, but she knocks the pills away and they twirl across the bare tiles.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ go at this straight up.”
“What!”
“I’m gonna go at …”
“Why! Why suffer the withdrawal?”
Case rocks back and forth. “You’re not gonna hear any of that ‘It’s not my fault’ shit, or ‘Nobody should blame me’ or ‘How can I help but be a heroin addict’ and ‘It’s not so friggin’ bad.’ I want to suffer.” She gasps. “Get it. Fuckin’ A. I want to feel it all. I want to fuckin’ bleed so I’ll know …”
Anne stares at her, frightened. Case grabs hold of Anne’s face, twisting her fingers through the woman’s dreadlocks. “I want it to cut me to ribbons. Then I’ll know.”
Cyrus clawed one hand onto her vagina and the other around her ass and he dragged her from the bloody carcass. She hung in his arms. He smeared his hand in the blood that covered the floor. He wiped it across his mouth and tongue and then he kissed her and pressed his tongue far enough into her mouth to make her choke. She retched and he pulled back and held her by the hair and whispered, “You are born again.”