The Righteous (11 page)

This was crazy. Eduardo was a gentile, and a Lamanite to boot. What was she thinking? She should let Jacob question the man.

She stepped up to the door and knocked.

Gideon Kimball stared at the ATM machine with disgust. He had entered the PIN number three times. The first time, he’d thought clumsy fingers. The second, he’d known something was wrong, and the third he’d begun to curse his brother’s name.

He was three blocks west of the Strip, in an all-night booth next to a small casino. Perfectly situated to drain a bank account so as to feed a gambling mania. He needed two thousand dollars, but not for gambling. The machine would not cooperate.

Gideon dialed Taylor Junior’s number from his cell phone. His younger brother answered in that raspy voice that made Gideon grit his teeth. The saccharine sweet veneer did nothing to improve it. “Yes? What is the matter my dear brother?”

“You know damn well what’s the matter,” Gideon said. “This card doesn’t work.”

Someone rapped on the window. He turned to see a couple of punks, maybe nineteen, twenty, with hoods pulled up and baggy pants. One of them wore sunglasses, even though it was night. Gideon shook his head and motioned them to move on.

“Ah, well, you see,” said Taylor Junior. “There was a lot of money coming out of that account. I thought I would change the PIN. In case you’d lost your card.”

If Gideon could have reached through the phone to throttle his brother he would have done so. “Father authorized these withdrawals.”

“Yes, I know. Most of it, at least. Twenty thousand last Monday. Fifty thousand more on Friday,” Taylor Junior said. “But then you took out a thousand yesterday. That was
not
in my instructions. What was that?”

The money had come from one of several fat accounts that his father held, thinly disguised, in gentile banks. He wasn’t sure why his father hid the money, probably to avoid paying a full ten percent tithe to the church. But if someone looked hard enough the accounts could be discovered.

As for what he’d taken, Gideon had withdrawn the larger sums via bank teller. No ATM would dispense tens of thousands of dollars, not even in Vegas. He’d gone to the ATM for the smaller amount. But really, what was a thousand dollars next to the earlier seventy grand? No, the problem was that Taylor Junior didn’t know where the money was going, and he didn’t like it.

One of the guys outside the window knocked again, then cracked the door. “Are you done?” asked the one with the sunglasses. “Or are you in there jacking off?”

“Find another machine,” Gideon said over his shoulder. “Listen,” he continued, trying to reason with his brother. “What’s another couple of thousand? I was short. I needed the money.”

“That’s for Father to determine.”

The guy with the sunglasses wouldn’t give up. He sounded pissed, now. “You don’t get out of there and I’m going to come in and drag you out.”

Gideon turned to the men. His nose felt better, but his head still throbbed and he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. He knew he looked like hell. And was in a mood to match. “You step into this room and you’ll never walk out of here alive.”

The man eyed him, no doubt wondering. Crazy guy? Mob? Drug dealer? Dangerous types filled Las Vegas. Apparently deciding not to find out for sure, the two moved on.

Wise move.

Gideon still fumed from that humiliation with Jacob Christianson in Enoch’s apartment. Jacob had tried to call down some sort of priesthood power on him, and Gideon had actually stopped. Stopped dead, in fact, and he could not forget or forgive the way he’d faltered. A moment of weakness. It had made all the difference in the subsequent fight. One man and his teenage sister had defeated them.

God, how he hated Jacob Christianson. He’d hated the man since childhood. He had never managed to intimidate Jacob. The reverse, actually. How he wanted to crush Jacob, kill him, take his sister and oppress her.

Looking on the bright side, Gideon’s failure had reinforced his weakness to Father. That was a carefully cultivated image that masked an undercurrent of deception. Gideon had his own plans. They did not always involve Elder Taylor Kimball. And certainly not his most pathetic of sons, Taylor Junior.

“Trouble?” Taylor Junior asked. Hopeful, it sounded.

“Not anymore. Look, I need that PIN.”

“I don’t think you do. Look, I just got in. There was flooding at the Jameson Young farm and I’m cold and wet. I’m going to take a shower. Why don’t you take it up with Father next time you see him?”

“Good idea,” Gideon said. “Maybe while I’m at it I’ll tell him about the women’s panties. Wonder what account paid for those.”

He reserved such cards for special occasions. Play them too often and they would lose their efficacy. Now was one of those times. The man he was meeting tonight did not accept credit.

Taylor Junior was quiet. No doubt weighing the threat behind Gideon’s words. And wondering how the hell Gideon knew about the underwear.

The truth was, Gideon didn’t know why his brother had ordered the women’s underwear. Maybe it was for a special girlfriend. Perhaps one of Father’s younger wives who liked to take off her long underwear—temple garments—once in awhile to feel sexy.

Or maybe the pervert liked to wear panties while he fondled himself. Gideon didn’t care. Taylor Junior had grown weirder and weirder about sexual matters over the years. Much of that was Gideon’s fault.

When Gideon was twelve and Taylor Junior eight, the two brothers had entered an extended period of struggle. Gideon had recognized the need to dominate his brother—at least that was how he framed it now; at the time he wasn’t conscious of motives—and set about bending Taylor Junior’s will to his own.

Once, when the two boys were swimming at Blister Creek Reservoir, Gideon had asked, “How long can you hold your breath under water?”

Taylor Junior had eyed him suspiciously, perhaps alerted by the overly-casual tone in Gideon’s voice. “I don’t know. Thirty seconds?”

They’d swam out to a place known simply as the Black Rock. It was about fifty feet from shore. Other kids climbed on the rock and dove in, or used it as a point of reference on swimming races. No adults around.

“Because, you know,” Gideon said, “the top swimmers can all hold their breath for a long time. Take the Olympics…”

“I don’t want to swim in the Olympics. That’s a worldly pursuit.”

“Come on,” Gideon scoffed. “Everyone wants to be in the Olympics.”

The truth was, Gideon knew, Taylor Junior had always been a little afraid of the water. He was a good swimmer when he could see the Black Rock, or when he stayed in shallow water. Get him into deep water, where your toes kicked at the colder, darker water beneath, and he would lose his nerve. The water was deep around the Black Rock.

“Now, I’m going to teach you how to hold your breath.” Quickly, he struck. He wrapped his arms and legs around Taylor Junior and used his weight to drag the boy under water.

Gideon was not so much bigger than Taylor Junior that he didn’t have to go under too in order to hold his brother down. But he was not panicking. That made a big difference.

Taylor Junior was crying when Gideon let him up a short while later. He swam for the rock, now some ten feet away. Gideon grabbed him before he reached the stone.

“Help me!” Taylor Junior screamed. But the only person on this side of the rock was Gideon’s friend Israel Young. Israel watched with a grin.

“That was pretty good,” Gideon said, treading water out of reach of his brother’s flailing arms. Whenever Taylor Junior swam for the rock, he would grab the boy’s ankle and pull him back. Otherwise, he stayed out of the way. “Let’s go for a minute this time. No, two minutes. Oh, and don’t scream. Your voice is so annoying it just makes people want to drown you.”

The younger boy was weak from the struggles and it didn’t take nearly as much effort to push him under a second time. This time Gideon was able to come up for air while keeping his brother under. When he let the boy loose a couple of minutes later, Taylor Junior screamed and coughed up water. He climbed onto Black Rock and sat there trembling and sobbing for a long time. Eventually, Father had to swim out to pry him loose and bring him back to shore.

Taylor Junior had told on Gideon, of course, but adults only listened to the whining of a child with half an ear. Gideon had been scolded and lost his dessert privileges for the night. A worthwhile trade.

It had been a good start. The second opportunity came a couple of weeks later when Gideon and Israel came upon Taylor Junior wandering by himself down a dry wash on the edge of Witch’s Warts.

“Hey, TJ,” Gideon said. “You want to play bounce with us for a little while?”

“What do you mean, bounce?” Taylor Junior asked with narrowed eyes. He’d already glanced behind him as if wondering whether or not he should run.

“That’s where we drop our pants and push our bodies next to each other and all bounce up and down at the same time.”

Taylor Junior wrinkled his face. “What? Why would we do that?”

They’d showed him. Taylor Junior, of course, hadn’t been the one doing the bouncing. He’d been standing unhappily in line while the other two rubbed their penises against his naked bottom. There hadn’t been any penetration; that wasn’t the point.

Taylor Junior had submitted to the bouncing, but had looked sullen and unhappy when the two boys grew bored and let him pull up his pants.

Gideon said, “You’re a fag, TJ.”

“Yeah,” Israel had said. “You just got bummed. Homo.”

Over the years, Gideon had taken whatever opportunity had presented itself to reinforce this impression. He had made Taylor Junior put on his sister’s panties. He had snapped him in the balls with a wet towel when he came across him getting out of the shower. It had worked to the extent that Taylor Junior played the same tricks on his own younger brothers and sisters. Gideon knew of at least two girls and a boy that he’d fondled over the years.

But that game had grown too fun, and Gideon had not been smart enough to leave it alone. Later, when they were teenagers, he had ordered gay porn delivered to the house in Taylor Junior’s name. He would collect the magazines from the mail and leave them around his brother’s room. Taylor Junior would search his room several times a day in paranoia. He must find them before someone else did.

And someone did discover the magazines. It happened when Gideon was back from college on Christmas break. Charity Kimball walked in while Gideon was thumbing through the magazine to see all the disgusting things that fags did and wondering how long it would take Taylor Junior to turn to faggotry.

Two hours later and Father was pushing Gideon from the car in the 7-11 parking lot with sixty bucks and a single change of clothes. A Lost Boy. He was two weeks short of nineteen. Tuition and rent due. No job or employment history. It had taken years to worm his way back into his father’s confidence.

But Gideon had never lost the ability to bend Taylor Junior to his will. One of those times was now, and Gideon’s brother reluctantly agreed.

“Okay, fine,” Taylor Junior said over the phone while Gideon sat in front of the ATM machine. But instead of giving the number, he recited a verse of scripture. “And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth. And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.” A pause. “It’s a mnemonic. The PIN is the chapter and verse. You do know the scripture, right?”

There were people who could recite entire chapters of Biblical or Book of Mormon scripture from memory. Most knew hundreds of verses at the very least. Gideon had never been one of those people and Taylor Junior knew it.

“Give me the damn number.”

“Look it up, asshole. You should remember the part about the Lord slaying the wicked. It is especially apropos.” The line went dead.

Gideon boiled with rage. He tried to remember the scripture. Something about reproving the meek and the breath of God’s lips. And slaying the wicked, of course. It should be easy enough to find from the index. But that meant returning to his apartment for a set of scriptures. He had no choice.

Gideon left the booth. He met the two punks in the street and gave them a ferocious glare as he passed. They stared back, but he could see fear behind their bravado.

His rage toward Taylor Junior only grew as he thumbed through the scriptures back at his apartment. He’d make his brother pay for this.

Here it was. 2
^nd
Nephi, chapter 30, verse nine. The PIN would be 2309. The mnemonic still meant nothing to Gideon. But he could remember a four digit PIN number that guarded an account with half a million dollars easily enough.

And then it came to him. The perfect revenge on his brother. Taylor Junior wanted this girl. Eliza Christianson. His first wife, so very important. And Taylor Junior had half-convinced himself that he loved the girl. The fool.

Gideon would take Eliza for himself.

The idea was perfect. It would punish Taylor Junior, while delivering a blow to Jacob Christianson and the whole miserable Christianson family. And Eliza herself was a good catch, pretty and intelligent. Perhaps overly headstrong, but that would be a pleasant challenge. A smile came to his face.

PIN fixed firmly in memory, Gideon left the apartment with his mood completely altered. Time to get that money, and with it buy the LSD for the temple.

#

Abraham Christianson called from Canada while Jacob was in the shower. The work at the Jameson Young house had left him wrung out, but a hot shower restored his spirits. It was still night and he hoped to sleep a few more hours.

He stepped out of the bathroom to see his cell phone blinking that he’d missed a call. He glanced at the clock. It was almost four in the morning. Abraham Christianson was a famous early riser, getting more work done by breakfast than many men accomplished in a day. Still, this was early even by Father’s standards.

“Ah, it’s you,” his father said when he returned the call. “How is the investigation going? Give me high level details, not specifics.”