A False Dawn (29 page)

SEVENTY-NINE

“It’s okay, Max,” I said.  “I’ll be right back.  No barking.” I locked her in the house, shoved the Glock under my belt, and stepped out the screen door into the dark.

I tried to put myself exactly where Santana sat.  I’d drive by the home, not too fast or too slow, see if lights were on, maybe a car in the drive.  Then I’d return with the headlights off, park a good distance away, move stealthily under the cover of darkness, and enter the home.  It was all about surprise.

But I wasn’t Santana.  And I couldn’t be sure how he would plan the assault.  If surprise was part of it, I’d already removed that element.  I jumped up to a low-hanging limb of a live oak tree and pulled myself to a thick branch.  I climbed another ten feet until I had an open view of the road from both east and west directions.

The moon was higher, the soft light almost beaming through the tree limbs.  Shadows from the oaks connected like gnarly fingers interlacing across my yard.   

A horned owl called out, its series of hoots traveling up from the river.  The call seemed to come from somewhere near my dock.  Horned owls always sound like they are chanting,
who’s awake…me too.
  I wondered if it was the same owl that had captured the cardinal, the owl that had pointed me in the direction of Angela.  If it was, maybe the bird would point me toward Santana.

The owl called out again, stopping after only two hoots.  I’ve heard these owls often, and they always finish their statements.  This one stopped in mid-sentence.

I saw the headlights in the distance, three-quarters of a mile away, coming toward my house slower than the speed limit.  I touched the Glock and watched the car.  The interior was too dark for me to make out whether Santana was behind the wheel.

It was a Ford.  The driver kept the same speed while the car passed my house. But before the road began to curve, I could see the brake lights tapped.

The driver slowed and turned around.  The headlights went off.  The car moved stealth like, inching its way back toward my house.  Within about fifty yards of my driveway, the driver pulled the car into a wooded area, state property.   

There was no movement.  I saw a tiny orange glow.  The diver must have used the car lighter to light a cigarette.   Why would Santana be smoking if he were about to kill me?  Calm a nicotine itch?  Something didn’t feel right.  I dropped from the tree and stayed in the shadows to move toward the car.  I stepped every few feet to simply listen.  Nothing.  Not a sound from a horned owl.  Not even a sound from a mosquito.  In less than a minute, I’d slipped up on the car and approached the driver from the rear.

The window was open.  He was a silhouette in the moonlight.  He tossed out the cigarette, the red ash sparking in the night.  Dumb move.

I came up from a crouch and touched the barrel to Santana’s left ear.

“Put both hands on the wheel!  Now!”  I ordered.

Santana immediately lifted both hands to the steering wheel.  I jerked open the door.  “Get out!  It’s over, Santana.”

“Don’t shoot, man!  Who the hell’s Santana?”

A young black man was visibly shaking.

EIGHTY

I thought of Max alone in the house.  I held the gun in the man’s face.  “Don’t even think about lying to me.  If you do, I’ll shoot you between the eyes.  How’d you get this car?”

“Dude gave it to me!”

“What dude?”

“Don’t know his name.  I work at Riverside Marina.  Dude rented a boat today.  He said he’d give me two hundred dollars to drive his car down this road at midnight and park right past that house back there.  Said for me to keep the lights off, and about one o’clock he’d come meet me.  I’d get another hundred, and he’d drop me back at the marina.”

“At one o’clock, you would have been dead and your body dropped right here.”

“What?  The dude seemed real cool, man.  Didn’t seem like no crazy sex shit.”

“His clothes, what color?”

“Lemme think…black…yeah black shirt and pants.”

I thought about the man in the boat I’d seen earlier.  “Give me the keys.”

“What?”

“Give them to me.”

“No problem, man.  What’s this shit all about?”

“Start walking.”

“It’s after midnight.  I’m a black man walkin’ in dumb-fuck nowhere.”

“It’s the only way you will live though the night.  Move!  Walk the opposite direction from the house.  There’s a crossroad five miles west.”

He looked at me, shook his head, and started walking west.

#

AS I APPROACHED MY HO
ME, I knew why the owl had stopped its night call.  It had seen something.  Something coming up
from
the river.  I melted in the dark shadows next to the trees and crept down to my dock. 

I almost didn’t see it.  Tied up behind the weeping willow tree was a boat.  I could tell it was a small boat.  In the moonlight, I knew it was the boat I’d seen earlier.

Santana was at my home.

EIGHTY-ONE

I stayed in the dark of the tree line next to my property, moving closer to my house.  I knew that locks would not keep Santana out.  Where was he?  On the porch?  Hiding somewhere in a room?  Or was he behind the next oak tree?

 I stepped out from cover and started for the porch, and I was blinded by all of my floodlights.  My backyard was like a Friday night high school football field.

“You move and you die.”  Santana’s voice was calm.  It was more of a matter-of-fact than a death threat.  “Throw the gun toward the river, and I won’t snap your dog’s neck.  Remember that I have a gun pointed directly at your chest.  Come on your porch, O’Brien.  We’re going to sit down to hear you speak your last words on earth.”

I tossed the Glock and came up the steps entering the porch.  Santana sat in a rocking chair, holding Max in his lap, her eyes wide.  He pointed a pistol at me and kept the other hand clapped on the back of Max’s neck.  She was nervous, her tiny body trembling.  She looked at me with pleading eyes.

“No reason to hurt my dog.”

“Dogs were my competition for food.  As a child, I used to have to compete with them for scraps from garbage cans.  Let’s make this quick, O’Brien.  I have other matters to attend to.  Places to go, but I wanted to hear your last words, especially since you mentioned Josh Brennen.  No one, at least no one alive, knows that Brennen is my father.  How did you find out?  Doesn’t matter.  You’re about to die, so the secret remains with me.  The bastard son, as you called me.”

“That’s what he called you.”

“How did you know him?”                                                      

“We had drinks together.  He always spoke his mind around me.  Funny how too much single malt can open a man up.  Open up his most hidden secrets.”  I slowly inched closer as I spoke.  The spearhead I found was sitting on the table where I had left it.  It was the best thing that I had to a weapon. 

“That’s far enough,” he said, standing.

“Let Max go.  Let her go outside.”

He lowered Max to the porch.  “Let’s hear what the old man told you.”

Max looked up at me.  “I’ll put the dog outside.”

“Don’t touch the rat!  What did he tell you?”

“He told me you’d never cut it in his world.  He said he wouldn’t be surprised if you had a dozen bastard brothers and sisters.”  I inched closer to the table.  “He was proud of his conquests with the dark-skinned women.  He said no matter how you tried, Santana, you could never be better than Richard.”

“He’s the weak son!  The gay son!”

“And you were the Guatemalan bastard child!  Richard fit in.  You, Brennen said, never would.  Never could.”

I was less than five feet from the spearhead.  “He told me that the only thing you two had in common was the color of the eyes.  He said you may have had his eyes, but you’d never have his balls.  Never be the man he was.  He loathed you, Santana, no he pitied you.  Said you’d never be more than a tomato picker.  Said you didn’t have the intelligence to cut it in his world.  He never even knew your mother’s name.  Called her a brown whore.”

“You’re a liar.”  He kicked Max in the side like he was kicking a football.  I sprang for his gun -- a second too late.  The shot tore into my gut with the force of a baseball bat hitting me at full swing, knocking me to the floor.  I rolled toward the table, grabbed the spearhead, and came up, hitting Santana hard in the center of his forehead.  The sound was like an axe striking a piece of treated lumber.  Blood squirted.  I slashed out again with the spearhead, the thrust tearing his shirt, exposing his chest.  Looking back at me were two large tattoos of cobras.  Eyes glowing like coals.

He wears the mark of serpents on his body

Santana laughed.  “You can’t kill me!  Survival is what I do.  A gut shot is a slow, painful way to die, O’Brien, but it’s most fitting for a detective like you.  When you see my old man in hell, tell him his tomato picking bastard son said fuck off.” 

My eyes couldn’t focus.  Santana stood over me.  “I might just sit here in this rocker and watch you die.  That’s the part I enjoy the most.  All that nasty bacteria flooding your bloodstream. You’re swimming in your own blood and shit, O’Brien.  By the time they find you, your dog will have starved to death, or maybe the rat will eat your body. ”

My mind was spinning.  The frogs and cicadas sounded like they were in my brain.  They changed their singing into chanting, pulsating chants like an angry crowd at a boxing match.  I felt a darkness closing in on my consciousness.  Then I heard Max’s frantic barks, almost like howls.  I crawled on my hands through the stickiness of my own blood.  My mind was racing and a dimness enveloping me as I crept toward the kitchen.    I shook the encroaching dark shadows from my mind and tried to sit up.
 
Max’s barking was growing weaker or I was fading.  I wasn’t sure which.   I stood, held my hands to my wound, and limped into the kitchen.  My long bow was in the corner with the single arrow next to it.  I picked them up and staggered out the back porch door.  Max went ahead of me.  Barking and limping down to my dock.

The full moon was at a forty-five-degree angle to my back.  The moon and floodlights illuminated my entire yard in a soft light that carried beyond the river.  On the dock, I could see Santana untying a boat.  The look on his face was of disbelief and then amusement.  He said, “Are you a walking dead man?”

 I notched the arrow shaft in the bowstring.   I kept inching closer.  I was about seventy feet behind Max as she approached the dock barking. 

“I like your fighting style, O’Brien.  You rise from the grave, break out an antique killing tool, and you want to do battle again, but it is your last fight.”

I was now close enough to see the red eyes of the snake tattoos on his chest.

He pointed his pistol at Max.  “Your dog will be dead before you could ever shoot that thing.   You’ll probably miss me by twenty feet.  It’s dark.  You can barely stand.  You’re bleeding to death inside.  Am I looking a little blurry to you right now, O’Brien?  My, you don’t seem well.  You’ve resorted to a primitive bow.  You’re dying.   Say goodbye to your noisy dog.”

My mind played back Joe Billie’s voice. 
Keep both eyes open, block everything else out but the spot—then let go.

Santana pointed the pistol.  I pulled the bowstring back to the side of my cheek, elevated the tip of the ancient arrowhead, focused on his chest, and let go.  The arrow hit dead center between the snake eyes.  Santana fell backwards into the river.  He tried to swim on his back against the current.  His body jerked like electric jolts alternating through his limbs.  Only the feathers on the shaft protruded out between the tattooed snakeheads.  His arms flailed, slapping the water.

There was a loud splash from the water’s edge.  In the moonlight, I could see a large alligator swimming fast toward the dying man.  The gator attacked Santana in the midsection, its jaws and teeth popping ribs, bone, and cartilage like twigs.  The animal lifted Santana out of the water, tossed its massive head back, and rolled.  

I wobbled back to the dock.  I could feel vomit rising.  My legs felt like they weren’t part of my body.  My eyes couldn’t focus.  I stumbled, dropped the bow, and fell next to Max.  She was crouched in the grass, and I couldn’t tell if she was hurt.  I crawled to her and held her trembling body in my arms. “You’re okay now…hold on Max…”

 I coughed blood.  The murkiness swirled in my brain.  The sound of crickets faded.  Lying on my back, I clutched Max to my chest as a meteor shower burst across the dark purple sky, the afterglow locked in my retinas, the silence of heaven’s fireworks falling on my ears.   I watched a gray cloud slowly consume the moon, the light fading like a dying flame at the end of a match.

It was now very dark and a cool wind blew across the river sending a chill through every nerve in my spine.  I felt my body shivering.  The ink silhouettes from the river were rising all around me.  I was soaring with no horizon.  No control.  Tumbling from an abyss and freefalling through a black hole where no one kept records.  I was the product of my being, falling or soaring on the sum of who I was.  There were no limbs to break my fall.  There was only the sense of absolute nakedness.  Nothing could be concealed or cancelled.  Nor did I care to try.  Planet Earth had been here five billion years.  My life, as it ended, was less than one second of Earth’s existence.  In this scope of things, did my moment, my comma in time, mean anything?  My mind was no longer attached to my body.   Maybe it never was.

Sherri stood on the bowsprit of our sailboat, her hand reaching out toward me, the wind blowing through her hair.  God, she was beautiful.  I tried to call her name, to tell her I loved her, but I had lost my ability to speak.  There was the sound of a woman’s voice.  Someone far away singing.  Then a dark fog came off the sea from nowhere, and I could no longer see Sherri.    

There was a cool sensation deep inside my gut, like a drug was being released inside the skin.  I opened my eyes and saw Joe Billie kneeling next to me.  In a slow motion voice, a strange voice, I heard myself say.
“You’re not real…you’re a dream…none of this is real…” 

He watched me without speaking, and he looked at the wound in my stomach.  The sensation in my bowels went from cold to fire and back to coolness.

 The darkness rose again.  I was below the surface of the ocean at night trying to swim to the lights of my boat.  I held my breath and kicked.  I was rushing toward the light at the top.  In a second I would breathe!  I broke through the translucence and gulped in air.

#

THE LIGHTS FROM AN AMBULANCE
and police vehicles raked across the limbs of the live oaks.  I could hear a helicopter circling, and my thoughts dissolved to the dark valley of Afghanistan at sunset, the choppers like black locusts against a purple sky.

Lifting me onto the stretcher, a paramedic said, “You’re gonna make it!  Hang in there.  Your dog will be okay, too.”