The Prophet

by Michael Koryta

  The words didn’t come easily. He prayed for their health and thanked God for the opportunity to be surrounded by this group for another week. Kept it short, then tried to disappear from the field, but didn’t make it. Colin Mears caught him before he could, and told him that he wanted to be benched.

  It would have mattered, once. It would have been extremely important, a star player suggesting that he no longer deserved to be on the field during a playoff game. This morning Kent looked at him and could hardly register why anyone might think that this football field and what happened on it was significant.

  But it is, he reminded himself, thinking of the days after Marie disappeared, of the long walks to watch film with Walter Ward, of the hours spent wearing his shoulder down to rubber, flinging a football at nothing. It had mattered to him then, and it mattered to Colin now.

  “We’re not benching you, son,” Kent said.

  “I’d like you to. Please. I’m not helping the team out there anymore. You know it, Coach, everyone does. I promised we’d win state for her. I promised that. I’m not going to help us. I wish I could, but I’m not going to.”

  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.

  “Great.” Adam took a deep breath. “He was a piece of shit. A predator. But I deal with the same kind of people all the time. I’m not putting a gun to all of their heads. I wanted him because of what he’d done. Only he never did it. So what I’m left with…” He ran a hand over his face, falling silent.

  “We will keep you clean,” Kent said.

  “Clean?” Adam looked up. “A bit late for that, Franchise.”

  “I mean with the police. We can’t change what you did, no. We can change who knows about it, and what happens because of it. We can still control that much.”

  “I don’t even know if I want to,” Adam said. “But regardless, I’ll take care of myself. Chelsea probably said you needed to help me. I’ve decided I don’t want that, though. Stay away from the wreckage, Kent. I’ll take care of—”

  “If we can find him, we can keep you out of prison,” Kent said.

  Adam stared at him. “Find who?”

  “I know who it is, Adam. This time I really know. I spent the whole night with the FBI.”

  “Tell me,” Adam said, and then he listened as his brother explained the whole thing, the sociopath who’d impersonated a minister, who’d walked in and out of the prisons in which he belonged and sought recruits. Found one. Clayton Sipes.

  Adam lit a cigarette but couldn’t smoke it. The inhalations were too hard, so he set it back in the ashtray and let it burn itself out.

  “They believe Grissom killed Sipes,” Kent said. “Right now, there’s not even a doubt in their minds. You’re not a suspect.”

  “It’ll change fast. Bova was already suspicious, and if he starts talking, and at some point he will, they’ll get to me. When they realize I knew about the house where Sipes was staying, they’ll begin to press. Then it’s a matter of whether I can hold up against the pressure.”

  “How long did you follow him before… before you killed him?”

  “Bova?”

  “Sipes.”

  “I never followed him. I found him and I killed him.”

  Kent frowned. “Sipes was staying in Cleveland.”

  Adam shook his head.

  “No,” Kent said. “I’m not wrong on this. They told me they got to Grissom through evidence found in an apartment in Cleveland. That’s where Sipes was living.”

  Adam looked at him for a long time. Said, “He was in Cleveland?”

  “Yes.”

  “He had to have a place to operate here. Did they not mention that yet?”

  “No. It’s not a long drive, Adam. He probably just—”

  “How did they find the place in Cleveland?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Find out.”

  “Adam, why does it matter?”

  “Find out.”

  Kent called his contact with the FBI, got an immediate answer, and Adam listened to one side of the conversation. Kent played it well. Surprisingly well. Led with questions about Grissom, about the security plans for his family, said that no, he had not heard from Grissom, but, yes, he did have one question. How did they know where Sipes was staying? From his end, Adam couldn’t hear the answers, but he could get a sense that it had something to do with a phone. He hadn’t searched Sipes, not for a phone or a wallet, not for anything. Why would he have? There had been nothing left to hunt once Sipes was facedown in the rocks.

  “Who did he call?” Adam asked when Kent hung up.

  “Dan Grissom, for one. The same number I have for him, the one he only uses for messages. And his landlord. Promising money for rent. I guess they’d been threatening eviction. Maybe that’s why he came to Rodney Bova. Looking for cash?”

  “That would be consistent,” Adam said, and his voice sounded distant even to his own ears. “So he was staying in Cleveland?”

  “Yes.”

  Adam got to his feet. Kent said, “Where are you going?” but he didn’t answer. He went outside, unlocked the Jeep, and found his camera. Came back inside, turned on the display and clicked backward through his recent photographs, then passed the camera to Kent.

  “Is that him?”

  It was a picture of the man who’d left the house at 57 Erie Avenue just before Adam began to drive away and spotted Sipes in the window. Sipes had been looking out at the street, and Adam had thought at the time he might be keeping an eye on things, checking his safety. Maybe not, though. Maybe he’d been watching his messiah depart.

  Kent was staring at the display window of the camera.

  “Is it him?” Adam repeated.

  “Yes.” Kent’s voice was barely audible. He moved back through a few pictures, then went forward again, to the close-up of the man who’d left the house. “That’s Dan Grissom. When did you take a picture of him?”

  “Thursday morning.”

  Kent looked up. “Just before…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where was he?”

  “With Sipes. It’s the place where Sipes was staying.”

  “Not in Cleveland.”

  “No. So if he had a place in Cleveland, and Grissom is missing, then…”

  Neither of them said anything for a minute. Kent was staring at the camera, and Adam thought that he was trying to place the house. Kent would not know that house, though. Kent would not know the street. They’d been on it a few times, when they were kids, when the steel mill was still alive and their father worked there. But in the years since, Adam doubted that Kent had ever had occasion to drive back through. He’d coached some fine players from the neighborhood—Erie Avenue was home to hitters, the kind Kent liked—but he would not recognize the houses. It was not his world.

  “Do you know whether Sipes was staying there alone?”

  “I don’t. Bova went there in the middle of the night. I was at your house, so I didn’t want to leave. I waited until morning and then I went to check the address out. This guy came out and drove away, and Sipes stayed behind. I got him then.”

  The phrase made Kent grimace, but he said, “This has to be where he is. Sipes would have come to him, not the other way around.”

  “You think?”

  Kent nodded. “Control is big to Grissom, according to the FBI. It’s critical.”

  “I wonder if he’s gone now. If I scared him off by killing Sipes.”

  “Yeah,” Kent said. “I wonder.” He finally set the camera down, and now his attention was on Adam and his face was thoughtful. “Can I have that gun back?”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason I wanted it before. In case I need protection.”

  “Bullshit, Franchise. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Kent was silent. Adam spread his hands. “Come on, Kent.”

  “I’m thinking,” his brother said, his brother who was on the front page of today’s paper with his arms upraised, signaling victory, “that if Grissom is dead, he takes the Sipes case with him. They’re already assuming he’s responsible for that. If he’s around, they’ll have to investigate it hard, because he won’t admit to doing it. He may know damn well that you did it.”

  Adam shook his head. “Stop.”

  “I can do it,” Kent said. “I’m the right one to do it. In so many ways.”

  “Stop talking like me,” Adam said. He’d never mea
nt anything more.

  “He’s taking pictures of my family, Adam. Last night I got home and found photographs of a murdered girl beside photographs of my daughter.”

  Thirty minutes earlier, Adam had thought his ability to feel righteous fury had been extinguished, probably for good. He’d been sure of it. But it rose now like a rogue wave.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll take him down. I went this far to do it, I might as well finish.”

  Kent was shaking his head. “Let me.”

  “Hell, no. Kent, look at what you’ve got to lose. Look at what I’ve got—it’s already lost.”

  “I could get away with this. You can’t. After the night I’ve spent with the FBI, if I say he approached me and I killed him in self-defense, everybody buys it. Everybody.”

  “Stop,” Adam said again.

  Kent fell silent. They looked at each other for a long time, and then he said, “At least let me give the address to the police, Adam. Don’t let them get it from you. If it comes from you, everyone is looking at it different. If it comes from me, they’ll believe it.”

  “How will you claim you got it?”

  “I’ll say he called my cell. They’re hoping that he will. They don’t have it tapped, though, so they can’t record what’s said.”

  “They’ll know whether a call came in.”

  “Then I’ll call myself from somewhere. A pay phone, someplace in that neighborhood, whatever. What happens after that, they will believe.”

  Adam felt sick, listening to him. He’d always hated their differences. He’d hated Kent for the way he approached Marie’s murderer, going into the prison and praying for the son of a bitch. It had seemed, back then, that no response could be worse. There was one, though.

  This was worse.

  “We’ll give the address to the police,” Adam said, “and let them take it from there.”

  “That’ll end with you in prison. Maybe with Grissom there, too, but definitely you.”