DEVIL’S KEEP

by PHILLIP FINCH

  Arielle said, “That’s Eddie.”

  Favor turned to Winston Stickney. It was an automatic gesture from their years in the field. Stickney was the wise man, insightful and sober. Stick always seemed to know what to do.

  He was having no part of it now, though. He held up his hands, shook his head.

  “It’s not my party, Ray. Do what you think is best.”

  Mendonza was looking at Favor, waiting for an answer.

  “Sure,” Favor said. “Call Eddie. Phones, cars, domestic flights.”

  Mendonza said, “What about paper?”

  Paper meant forged passports and supporting documents. To a Bravo team, it was a staple. Paper was as basic as air.

  “Why would we need paper?” Favor said. “To look for a girl gone lost? To scuba dive and lie on the beach?”

  “Just asking,” Mendonza said. “I guess it feels a little strange, the four of us going off somewhere without cover.”

  “We don’t need cover,” Favor said. “We’re going to do a little good deed and then we’re gonna have some fun. That’s all. No cover, no paper. No fucking tradecraft, we’re done with that shit.”

  He realized that his voice had risen. The others were looking at him. Staring.

  Favor took a couple of seconds, composed himself. When he spoke again he made sure that he sounded calm.

  “I just want to play it straight,” he said. “Agreed?”

  “Sure,” Stickney said.

  “Why not?” Arielle said.

  “Whatever you think,” Mendonza said.

  “That’s what I think,” Favor said. “It’s just a vacation, goddammit.”

  Arielle left them and went off to pack.

  Her home was about fifteen minutes away, but she didn’t have to go there. She had a bedroom at the converted lodge, a place to crash at the end of a long night of work. She kept clothes there, and an overnight bag that was always packed and ready to go. Favor often traveled on a few minutes’ notice to inspect property, and usually he wanted Arielle with him.

  When she got to the room, she spent a few minutes replacing winter clothes in the bag with some warm-weather pieces. Then she carried it to her office. She picked up a laptop computer—one of two that she kept in sync with the desktop machine—and she zipped it into a carrying case.

  She opened a desk drawer and removed a piece of electronic equipment about the size and shape of a paperback book: a black case dotted with a row of LED lights. At a glance, it resembled the broadband modem found in many American homes. It was in fact a compact satellite antenna: when connected to the laptop, and properly aligned with a data satellite, it provided a reliable high-speed Internet connection virtually anywhere in the world.

  Favor sometimes said that Arielle’s job was to be the smartest person in a fifty-mile radius, major research universities not excepted. It was a joke with a large kernel of truth. When he researched a new business opportunity, Favor was full of questions, usually esoteric and difficult. And when he needed to know, he went to Arielle. She had a gift for learning. She read rapidly and retained almost everything, and above all she knew how to find the answers she didn’t already know. The satellite antenna and her laptop allowed her to do it from anywhere.

  She slid the antenna into a pocket of the laptop case.

  On her way out, she paused at the top of the stairs. She asked herself: What will Ray need?

  She answered: Antibiotic ointment and dressings. It was exactly the kind of thing he would neglect.

  Looking after Ray Favor was not part of the job description. Yet she did it, probably more than was healthy for either of them. She didn’t consider herself the nurturing type, and she was definitely not self-sacrificing. It came down to two reasons:

  She cared for him.

  He had nobody else to do it.

  Their relationship was unique, as far as she could tell. They never married, but they knew each other far better and were far more intimate than most married couples. They had been lovers for the past dozen years, yet she had had others in her life, and Favor had had many women. They disdained sexual exclusivity and the jealousies that went with it, and they both resisted any infringement on their personal freedom. Still, they were mutually devoted.

  Arielle thought that they had proved themselves to each other so often, in so many different ways, that they needed no formal commitment. They didn’t need declarations of love. They didn’t even need a name for what they had. They just were, and they always would be.

  Arielle went to a supply room where Favor kept some first-aid supplies. She grabbed bandage squares and gauze, bandage tape and antibiotic ointment, and zipped it all into a pocket of her overnight bag.

  When she got to the gazebo, Favor and the others were discussing which vehicle they should take and who would drive.

  She said, “Slow down, hotshot. Let’s take a look at those dressings.”

  “The dressings are fine,” he said.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  “You think I can’t tell if the dressings are good? Think I haven’t been banged up often enough to know when I need fresh bandages?”

  “Ray,” she said. ”The shirt.”

  He opened the shirt.

  The G550 had twelve seats, first two occupied by the two relief pilots. Halfway back in the cabin, four of the seats were grouped around a table. The four of them gathered there once the plane was airborne at cruising altitude.

  They joked and laughed, drank champagne, and ate oysters and caviar before a meal of lobster bisque and tournedos Wellington.

  By now the time was past midnight on the West Coast. They dimmed the cabin lights. Mendonza and Stickney went to the back of the cabin and were soon asleep, reclining in their seats.

  Favor sat across the table from Arielle. She watched him fall asleep, his eyes gradually closing, his chest rising and falling in a measured rhythm.

  His body suddenly tensed. He mumbled an extended guttural sound. It could have been words or just a tortured groan; she couldn’t tell. His hands clenched the ends of the armrests.

  She knew that he was dreaming. And from the anguished expression on his face, she thought it must be one of those dreams.

  She was right: it was one of those dreams. Except Favor didn’t think of them that way. True, they came while he slept, and they came on their own relentless schedule, even though he desperately willed them not to come. So in that way they were like dreams.

  But dreams were supposed to be symbolic creations of the mind. These were real. Every moment came direct and unaltered from Favor’s life, selected with brutal logic, assembled in such a way as to inflict maximum pain. They were a personal library of horror, episodes of his history that he had always tried to push aside. Long avoided in his waking hours, the memories came roaring back to him in sleep. But even as he slept, some part of his mind was always conscious when they played out. The memories seemed to want this. They demanded his awareness. No matter how bad they were, he could not turn away.

  The one that played for him now as he slept in the Gulfstream’s cabin was the worst of the worst. It was so searing, and so shameful, that he had never told anyone. He was the only living person who remembered it, and he knew that he would take it to his grave.

  It begins with the voice of his mother, summoning him to attention.

  Oh, Raymond, she says, a sad sigh that pierces him through the heart. He is eight years old, in the living room of their little bungalow on the back side of his grandparents’ ranch. He’s looking into her eyes. Dark eyes, red rimmed and glistening with tears. She’s a beautiful woman. Long black hair and glowing pink skin and ripened-cherry lips. At eight, he doesn’t comprehend her this way. But thirty-six years later, as he dozes in the seat, the alert part of his mind sees her as she was, the way others must have seen her. A beauty.

  Oh, Raymond. Her tone is beseeching. He doesn’t know what she wants, and this scares him, because it is the most important thing he has ever done or
ever will do, and he has to get it right.

  Tell me what you want, the eight-year-old boy wants to say. But he can’t speak.

  Tell me, the sleeping adult says across the distance of decades.

  Pull the fucking trigger, says his father. It’s a few days earlier, a summer evening. The boy is holding a .22 rifle, crouching with his father beside a fallen log in a forest. (The sleepborne memories do this sometimes, bouncing back and forth in time and place, but never at random. There is always a point.) The boy squints down the barrel. He has handled guns for more than a year: his father insisted on it. First it was paper targets and tin cans, now live game for the first time. Ten or fifteen paces away, a chipmunk squats on a flat rock, facing the fallen log, nose twitching. The rifle has a notched sight at the top of the receiver and a thin blade sight at the end of the barrel, and the boy has lined them up with the plump patch of fur at the chipmunk’s throat.

  Shoot, his father hisses into the boy’s ear. His finger is at the trigger, touching the cool curve of steel. The animal’s small head fills his vision. Black eyes, dancing whiskers, and the perfect alignment of notch and blade and fur. His finger doesn’t move. Refuses to move. With a woodsman’s stealth, the father snakes his arm along the boy’s back and reaches around his neck. He takes the boy’s ear between thumb and forefinger, and he pinches, nails digging into his son’s flesh.

  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. H
e 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.”

  Harvest Day

  –5

  Eight

  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.