Brighter Than the Sun

  She stares for a while, her eyes glossy from the frozen December air around us. A quake runs through her body. “No. Davidson,” she whispers as my fingers drift down and deliberately brush over her breast. She flinches, but I feel the tiniest bit of desire radiate in an arc around her.

  We can’t have that.

  More than a little sorry for what I’m about to do, I lean in again and whisper into her ear, “Have you ever been raped, Dutch?” I would never actually rape her. I would never do anything to hurt her. Fortunately she doesn’t know that.

  She sucks cold air in through her teeth. Curls her hands into fists. Glances at her sister, who is terrified. Then she whispers a breathy, “No.”

  I can feel a raging sea of emotions tumbling inside her. Swirling and clawing and fighting for dominance. But there are few emotions that will overcome the natural instinct for survival.

  I tighten my hand around her throat. Force a knee between hers. Spread her legs to gain access to the most intimate part of her. Then I cup a hand at her crotch. Stroke her through her jeans. Touch her like I have the right.

  She grabs my wrist with both hands. “Please stop.”

  I do, but I keep my hand at her crotch.

  She presses a palm against my chest and pushes softly. “Please.”

  “You’ll leave?”

  “I’ll leave.”

  I wait a moment longer—studying her, memorizing every curve—before raising my arms and placing them on the wall behind her.

  “Go,” I say, my voice more of a bark, a harsh this-is-your-last-chance warning.

  She doesn’t hesitate this time. She ducks under my arm and sprints past her sister, grabbing her along the way. They hurry to put distance between us like frightened cats, and part of me wants to call her back. To fall at her feet. To finish what I started. That’s when I realize I may be more like Earl Walker than I’ve ever imagined.

  15

  I stay outside for the rest of the night, thinking. Contemplating the plan Amador and I had been going over for months.

  Earl was going to kill me. He wanted to. He can feel his grip on me loosening, and the tighter he closes his fist, the easier I slip through. He knows I am going to take Kim and leave him. I’ve been planning it for weeks now. Years, really, but the actual plan was set in motion a few weeks back.

  It’s time.

  But I can’t get back into the apartment the next morning. Earl has locked me out, and I don’t dare risk waking him by having Kim sneak out of the apartment to let me into the building. She was at the window of our bedroom most of the night, watching me. Struggling to stay awake. She finally fell asleep around 4 A.M.

  I tap lightly on the window just as the sun paints the horizon a brilliant orange. Earl will be asleep for hours yet. If there weren’t bars on the window, I’d get her out and take her with me, but I’ll just have to come back for her. Amador will be waiting.

  Kim raises her head, her lids heavy with sleep. She cracks the window, but I tell her to stop.

  “He might wake up,” I whisper.

  “You know he won’t. I’ll unlock the door.”

  “No. It’s okay. I can’t risk that landlady calling the police. I’m going to meet Amador.”

  She pushes her fingers through the crack. I reach up and weave them into my own.

  “She’s real, Kim.”

  Kim smiles. “I know. I told you she was.”

  “You did, didn’t you?” I say with a laugh.

  “You have to tell her.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Tell her you love her.”

  “Yeah.” I kick a rock off the crate with my bare foot. “I threatened to rape her. I’m not sure she wants to hear any professions of love from me.”

  “I saw. And I know why you did it. Let me go with you.”

  “He might wake up, love. I don’t want you caught in the crossfire. Besides, I still have some last-minute errands to run. I’ll be back.”

  “Here,” she says. She opens the window farther and hands me a clean shirt, shoes, socks, and a jacket.

  “Thanks. I’ll be back as soon as I can. We’re almost finished with the car.”

  She nods. She’s scared of Earl, but not for her own sake.

  I start to leave, but the niggling at the back of my neck stops me. I turn back to her. “If anything happens to me, get to Amador.” I take her hand again. “Find him. He’ll know what to do.”

  She nods again.

  I leave, knowing it’s too quiet in the apartment. Knowing something is wrong. Something is terribly, terribly wrong.

  I’m gone all day. Amador and I are almost finished with the car. We just need a fan belt, but the parts store nearby is closed.

  It’s okay, though. I’ve decided I need to see Dutch in the flesh one more time. I have to find her. I have to at least try to explain. But the one thing I never did in my dream was pay attention to her address.

  I go to the library. Use a computer there to look her up. Everything is real. Her name. Her mother dying at her birth. Her sister. Father. Uncle. Crazy-ass stepmother. It’s all real.

  They live in the Heights. I know that. I know every nook and cranny of her house. I know her neighborhood and where she learned to ride a bike. I know who her friends are. What her favorite foods are. Who she’s dated. Who she’s gone all the way with. But I don’t know her fucking address.

  I finally find one, but something is wrong. The entire day has been wrong, as though there has been a shift in the universe.

  I feel an urgency. I close my eyes and seek out Dutch. She is with her friends, and she’s fine until I show up. She catches sight of me out the corner of her eye and tenses, so I leave her to it. But if not her, then what?

  Kim. I straighten in alarm. He wouldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t.

  I run out of the library and all the way home. When I get there, they are gone. Earl has packed up and left with Kim. The landlady is pounding on the door, her abused hair—so bleached, it’s almost white—in tangles around her head. She turns toward me, but I duck back. She doesn’t see me. She unlocks the door. I wait for her to enter before walking past. It’s empty except for the usual suspects. Trash strewn about. A sock here. A T-shirt there. I stop. There’s a hole in the wall. The pictures from the latest encounter are in there. They are bad. Some of the worst. It took me almost two weeks to heal after that one.

  Bile burns the back of my throat. He took her. A hundred times, he’s threatened to kill her if I defy him. I never believed him.

  I leave out the back of the building before the landlady finds me. I don’t get far before falling to my knees. Before doubling over as my chest heaves. As my eyes water. I wrap my arms around my head and do something I rarely do. I cry. Deep sobs overtake me for several long minutes. I want to yell. No. I want to kill.

  My body shudders with emotion. But I resign myself to one thing: murder. He is going to die. If he touches her. If he does anything to her, he’s going to die.

  I’m not sure where to go first, but I know Earl’s haunts like the back of my hand. I start with the pool hall. From there, I go to his two favorite bars. His girlfriend’s house. Nothing. By the time the sun dips low on the horizon, I’ve exhausted almost every stomping ground I know of.

  I decide to try his friends. He actually has some. Well, two. Maybe three. More than I have, I guess.

  I am walking in the worst part of town, headed for a dive hotel off Central, when I feel someone following me. I don’t turn around. I can recognize the sound of a cop car a mile away. I contemplate running, because the cops inside are excited. I feel adrenaline rush through their veins like quicksilver. They were looking for me. How the fuck they know me, what I look like, who I am—it’s beyond me. But that whole uneasy feeling I’ve had all day begins to solidify. Something is definitely wrong.

  I am about two seconds from taking off when another cop car tears out of an alley in front of me. The same alley I was going to run into.

&nbsp
; I slow and almost head in the other direction when another one, an unmarked sedan, heads toward me, tires squealing, from a parking lot on my left. Before I know it, there are seven guns pointed at me.

  I am furious. I don’t have time for this shit. I need to find Kim.

  With jaw clenched so tight, it aches, I raise my arms. Fall to my knees. End up on my face as I’m tackled by Dudley Do-Right. Anger wells up inside me.

  A detective arrives on scene. It’s Dutch’s uncle. Robert. Bob. Whatever. He’s the one who interrogates me at the station. I say nothing. I neither confirm nor deny any of their charges. They give me a public defender who cares more about the ass he has on the side than he does about his clients. He lost respect for them years ago. Works, literally, for the weekend, when he can get shitfaced and fuck his latest achievement.

  He was slotted for hell two years ago, when he was driving while intoxicated and hit an elderly man. It wasn’t a bad hit. The guy could have been saved, but he left him to die in the street. I want to snap his neck. To send him down early. I don’t. Only because as much of a fucker as he is, he’s the only shot I have at freedom.

  I’m up for murder. Earl Walker was beaten to death with a baseball bat, stuffed into the trunk of the junker he drove, and set on fire. Along with eyewitness testimony by way of Sarah, his fiancée-slash-ATM, who was more in fear of him than in love, and the discovery of Earl’s ring, which they found in my jacket pocket, the same jacket Kim handed me through the bars, it’s a pretty easy conviction.

  The killer is that Detective Bob knows I didn’t do it. He knows, but the evidence is too overwhelming. Too stacked against me.

  I want to ask about Kim, but I don’t dare. If she’d been with Earl—if she’d been killed, too—I would be up for her murder as well. So I bring out Alexander. Eyes down. Mouth shut.

  I sometimes wonder who did it. Who killed the monster. Not that I give a shit.

  I am in jail for a week before Amador comes to see me. He brings Kim and I almost pass out, I’m so relieved.

  Good girl. She did as I told her.

  They are both worried. I feel tension pulled tight in Amador’s gut. Kim’s lids are almost swollen shut from crying. That, combined with the blue under her eyes from lack of sleep, makes her look like a victim of physical abuse. The guard on duty eyes Amador, wondering if he’s been beating her.

  She puts one hand on the glass as she holds the phone with the other. I do the same. Tears fall freely down her face.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  She scoffs and does her best glare. It’s not that great a glare. “I know, shithead. You have to tell them.”

  “The detective on the case knows, but the evidence says otherwise. There’s nothing he can do.”

  Her heart speeds up. “What do you mean?”

  “Kim, they don’t know about you. They don’t know I have a sister. They asked about my family. About any other children. I told them it was just Earl and me, so Sarah must not have said anything about you. And you can’t tell them. You can’t come back here.”

  “What? No. No.”

  “Give the phone to Amador, sweetheart.”

  “No!” she yells. She is coming unglued. It’s unusual for her. She is always so quiet. So painfully shy. “Reyes!” she says as Amador wraps an arm around her shoulders. Not to comfort her, but to hold her down. To keep her from getting them kicked out.

  He pries the phone out of her hand. She immediately grabs the counter in front of her, her knuckles as white as the Formica covering the surface. Amador knows the score. We’ve talked about it.

  “Give her everything,” I say to him.

  He nods. “The place is already set up. She’ll be fine.”

  Again, I’m flooded with such a sense of relief, I almost lose my composure. I’m shaking and cursing myself for it. I don’t want Kim to see the emotion running rampant through me.

  We don’t have much to discuss. With Amador’s help, I’d been planning to get Kim away from Earl for weeks, so everything has already been set up. She will be with a good family. She will go back to school. And somehow I’ll figure out how to get her some money.

  “Okay, give her the phone again, and then you know what to do.”

  “I do.”

  “Ammo, I don’t know how to—”

  “Don’t even think about pulling that emotional crap on me.” His eyes are flooding with tears and he fights them tooth and nail. “I have your back. You know that.”

  I nod. “I’d kiss you if I could. Full on. Tongue and everything.”

  He laughs, and the movement causes a tear to escape. “Now you tell me. We could have been happy together, pendejo.”

  I realize my face is wet. “I love you, man.”

  “I love you, too. Just get out.”

  “I’ll try,” I lie. There’s no getting out. I won’t admit to something I didn’t do just to get a lesser sentence, but there’s no way I don’t go to prison.

  He passes the phone back to Kim. She doesn’t say anything. Her face is so pale, she almost looks like one of the departed.

  “You don’t know me. When you leave here today, don’t you ever come back.” I want to add the rest. I want to tell her that no one will ever hurt her because of me again. Not ever. But I can’t get the words past the lump in my throat.

  She is completely silent. Her jaw is trembling. I’m not sure she could talk if she wanted to.

  “I love you,” I say.

  It is the final crack that breaks the dam. She bursts into tears again, and Amador has to carry her out. Literally. But she’ll listen to me. She knows not to get in touch with me. She’s so much stronger than she thinks.

  It’s the last glimpse of her I get for a very, very long time.

  16

  I spend months in jail awaiting trial. They say I’m incarcerated. I say I’m free at last.

  Detective Bob interrogates me several times. Practically begs for me to give him something. He knows I’m innocent. I’m not sure how, but he does. I’ll give him that. I don’t say much. I never say much. What could I say that would contradict the evidence against me.

  He tries, but his hands are as tied as mine. He gives up about two months in.

  The trial doesn’t take long. Despite the incompetence of my defense lawyer, five people on the jury think I’m innocent. Three are female and want me more than they want their next breaths. Two are male. One wants me as much as the women do. One hates cops with every ounce of his being. Never believes a thing they have to say. I could’ve been a serial killer, and he would still believe me innocent.

  But the evidence speaks for itself, and I am convicted. Naturally.

  I don’t take shit from anyone in jail. For the most part, they leave me alone, but there’s always one who has to prove what a badass he is. Fights become a fairly regular thing. Short but sweet. They allow me to let off steam. To rage. To vent, as it were, while kicking a piece of shit’s ass. Not many things are so satisfying.

  I’ve gained a reputation, however, and now I’m the target of every wannabe out there. That’s okay. Keep me on my toes. I can say one thing about Earl Walker: He taught me how to throw a mean punch.

  But it’s gone beyond that. People are starting to talk. They say I’m not human. They say I move like an animal. They say I’m more predator than prey.

  I’ve gotten to know several inmates. Some are pretty cool. One is really cool, and I do something I rarely do: I tell him he’s slotted for hell. I tell him why. I tell him he can still beat it. He needs to confess. He needs to make amends. He needs to turn his life around. To help others. He’s on that path anyway, but it’s almost as hard to get out of a sentence to hell as it is a sentence to prison.

  Surprisingly, he believes me. He stands up, tells the guard he needs to see his lawyer. He is going to confess his sins. To do his time. To help others.

  It was back when he was doing drugs. He shot a pharmacist during a robbery. The man is in a wheelchair to this day. He
cleaned up his act, for the most part, afterwards. He’s in jail because of a bad situation gone worse. But he’s never hurt anyone else.

  Even so, amends must be made. Nothing he can ever do from now on will make up for what he did then, but if he admits his sins and helps others, the brand of hell will eventually fade and wither away altogether. He can still be saved.

  If only I could.

  17

  After I’m convicted, I’m immediately transferred to a prison for physical and psychological testing. A few weeks later, I’m transferred to the state pen. I’m the youngest of the group. The men being transferred with me are a mixture of fresh and seasoned. The seasoned ones are nervous. Anxious. Pissed. The fresh ones are scared shitless. One is so scared, he’s shaking. I want to tell him to chill, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’s going to be somebody’s bitch either way.

  Word of me has spread to prison. One of the more seasoned inmates wants me, but he doesn’t know yet about my rep. By the time I’m released into gen pop, they call me the Devil’s Breath. But shot callers like nothing more than a challenge in their mundane lives, and my very first day is met with a price on my head.

  I’ve just sat down with my lunch tray when I feel it. Three men are headed toward me from different directions. They have homemade shivs and are going to put me in the hospital if not in the ground. The New Mexico Syndicate, a notorious gang, is looking for a coup. They want to put me in my place.

  I wait until they get a little closer. One guard, a kid as new to all this as I am, has noticed the activity. He is alarmed. Calls for backup. But they are on me before he gets out the words.

  I deflect a shiv, twist the guy’s arm, and because I’m feeling particularly testy, snap his neck before he even knows what hit him. I do the same to the other two. One realizes what is happening and tries to back out, but I’m not in the mood to let him. He is an especially nasty specimen who was branded for hell when he molested the girl next door and then took her to a wooded area to strangle her so she wouldn’t tell on him. I break his back first, let the pain shoot through his system, then snap his neck.