God Is a Bullet
Authors: 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.”
—L
ORENZO
C
ARCATERRA
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.”
—W
ILLIAM
D
IEHL
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.”
—H
ARLAN
C
OBEN
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.”
—G
EORGE
P. P
ELECANOS
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.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80682-6
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
v3.1
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 the money coming in by giving the locals something they can depend on.
Edward Constanza
,
“Letter to the Editor,”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
1984
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.