Reprisal

Pendleton, North Carolina

Saturday morning and it was top-down weather.

Bill reveled in the warmth of the sun on his shoulders and the back of his neck as he pulled from a parking slot on Conway Street. Warm for late January, even a North Carolina January. He'd just picked up a bargain-priced CD of The Notorious Byrd Brothers and he was itching to play it. How long had it been since he'd heard "Tribal Gathering" and "Dolphin Smile," tunes they never played on the radio, especially down here.

He pressed the scan button on his radio—one of the old Impala's few nonvintage accessories—and stopped it when he heard someone singing a plaintive, countrified version of "Yellow Bird." A wave of nausea sloshed against the walls of his stomach as he was jerked back to the Bahamas, back to the two lost years he had spent among that cluster of tiny islands straddling the Tropic of Cancer.

He'd arrived in West Palm by train late on New Year's Day. First thing the next morning he rented a sixteen-foot outboard, loaded it up with extra gas, and followed one of the tour boats out toward the Bahamas. He ran out of fuel a quarter mile short of Grand Bahama and had to swim the rest of the way in. When he came ashore at West End, he sat on the beach for a while, barely able to move. He was now on British soil, which meant he had to add his native country to the things he had left behind.

Besides his life, he had only one other thing left to lose. He wrote William Ryan, S. J. on the wet sand, turned his back, and began walking.

His clothes were dry by the time he reached Freeport.

He experienced most of the next year or so through a haze of cheap rum. There were drugs too. Why not? What did he care? He didn't trust God anymore, at least not the God he'd been raised to believe in. And he didn't think of himself as a priest anymore, either. How could he? He could barely think of himself as human. Not after what he'd done. He'd smothered a child he'd loved more than anything in this world. Buried him alive. No matter that he'd done it out of love, to put the boy out of reach of the forces that were torturing him—he'd done it! He'd dug the hole and placed the child within and then he'd filled it.

An atrocity—The Atrocity, as he came to call it. And the memory of the weight of the dirt-laden shovel in his hands, the image of that small, struggling, blanket-shrouded form disappearing beneath the cascades of falling earth, was more than he could bear. He had to blot it out, all of it.

He lived in back-street rooms in Freeport on Grand Bahama, in Hope Town on Great Abaco, in Governor's Harbor on Eleuthera. His money didn't last long and he soon wound up on New Providence, bedding down on the sand each night—as hollow as the empty shells scattered around him—and during the day wandering Cable Beach selling bags of peanuts or shilling for the ride operators off Paradise Island, getting two bucks a head for every passenger he rounded up for the banana boats and five each for the parasails, spending it all on anything he could smoke, swallow, or snort to blot out the memory of The Atrocity.

He spent more than a year continually stoned or drunk or both. He recognized no limits. Whatever it took, he'd take. A couple of times he overdid it and nearly did himself in. More than once he seriously considered getting together enough stuff for a fatal overdose, but he kept putting it off.

Finally, his body rebelled. His flesh wanted to live even if his mind did not, and it refused to stomach any more liquor. He sobered up by default. And he found a clear head bearable. The Atrocity had receded into the past. The wounds it had left hadn't healed, but they had evolved from open sores to a cluster of steadily throbbing aches that flared only occasionally into agony.

And that agony plunged him again and again into the blackest despair. He was in a drugged stupor at the time, so he didn't remember the first anniversary of The Atrocity, but he'd never forget the second: He'd spent most of that New Year's Eve with the bore of a borrowed snub-nosed .357 Magnum pressed against his right eyelid. But he couldn't pull the trigger. By the time the sun rose on the new year, he'd decided to live a while longer, to see if he could set what was left of his life into some semblance of order.

He found he hadn't lost his knack with the internal combustion engine, so he managed to land a part-time job at Maura's Marina on Potter's Cay under the Paradise Island Bridge. His way with motors soon won him the respect and admiration of boatmen on both sides of the law, so when he began entertaining the notion of returning to the States, he asked the right people for advice and was shocked at how easy it was to buy a new identity.

Born again… as Will Ryerson.

They'd advised him to choose a name close to his own to make it easier to cover slips when speaking or writing the new one. Will Ryerson now seemed more like his real name than Bill Ryan ever had.

But Father Bill wasn't dead. Despite everything that had happened, the priest part of him still wanted very badly to believe in God. The Jesuit within him still pushed at the envelope of Will Ryerson's persona. So he'd made concessions to it. He'd begun to say his daily office again. He kept hoping he'd find a way to go back. But how? There was no statute of limitations on murder.

But during these past three years in North Carolina he had found a new equilibrium. He was not happy—he doubted he would ever be really happy again—but he had come to terms with his existence.

And now, on this sunny Saturday morning, he spotted one of the few bright spots in his life strolling along the sidewalk. A slim knockout of a blonde trailing a wake of turned heads. Lisl. And she was alone. She was hardly ever alone anymore. He stopped at the corner, blocking her path as she stepped off the curb.

"Hey, girlie! Wanna go for a spin?"

He saw üer head come up, saw her upper lip start to curl as she readied a curt reply, then saw her smile. What a smile. Like the sun burning through low-lying clouds.

"Will! You've got the top down!"

"Perfect day for it. I'm serious about the spin. How about it?"

He was hoping she'd say yes. It seemed like an age since they'd had some decent time together to talk.

She hesitated for a second, then shrugged. "Why not? I'd have to be crazy to refuse."

He leaned over and pushed open the door for her.

"Been a long time, Leese."

"Too long," she said, sliding in and slamming it closed.

"Where do you want to go?"

"Anywhere. How about the highway? I want to go fast."

Bill headed out of town, wondering at the perversity of life. Here he was, a shabby, bearded, ponytailed, defrocked priest looking fifty in the eye, riding in a convertible under a perfect sky with a beautiful thirty-two-year-old windblown blonde. He felt like the high school burnout who'd just picked up the queen of the prom.

Maybe happiness wasn't an impossible dream.

"What are you grinning at?" Lisl asked.

"Nothing," he said. "Everything."

As he was overtaking someone on a bicycle, Lisl said, "Watch out for the geek."

Bill looked at her sharply. They'd passed this kid on his bike at least a hundred times in the past and she'd never made a crack like that. Although Bill didn't know his name, the kid was a familiar sight around town. He'd never spoken to him, but he could tell by his features, by the single-minded intensity with which he pedaled his bike, by his clothing and the incongruous fedora he wore every day, that he was mentally retarded. Bill could imagine the kid's mother making his lunch, stowing it in that dinky little knapsack on his back, and sending him off every morning. Probably worked at the Sheltered Workshop on the other end of town.

"Get up on the wrong side of bed this morning?"

"Not at all," Lisl muttered as they passed the kid. "They shouldn't allow mutants like that on the road."

"You're pulling my leg, aren't you? I don't know that kid, but I'm proud of him. Dressing himself, riding to work, and doing some manual labor probably taxes his abilities to their limit, yet he's out here on his bike every day, rain or shine, making it to work and back. You can't take that away from him. It's all he's got."

"Right. Until he has a spasm and gets hit by a car and his folks sue the driver for everything he's worth."

Bill reached over and felt her forehead. "You all right? Coming down with a fever?"

Lisl laughed. "I'm fine. Forget it."

Bill tried to do just that as they hit Route 40 and drove north, sailing along, talking about what they'd been doing, what they'd been reading, but in everything she said he detected subtle nuances of change. This Lisl was different from the woman he'd known for the past three years. She seemed to have calcified in the weeks since her Christmas party, as if she were building up a hard shell around herself. And all she seemed to want to talk about was Rafe Losmara.

"Any further word from the State Police on that weird telephone call?" he said, as much from a sincere desire to know as from a wish to move the conversation away from Rafe.

"No. Not a word. And I don't care. As long as I never have to hear that call again."

The way she shuddered reminded him of the old Lisl, and that was a relief.

Bill had been shaken up when Lisl had told him that the call was being investigated. And he still couldn't figure out how the North Carolina State Police had connected him with the call, or had wound up with that old photo of him. Had to be Renny Augustino's doing, especially since it sounded like the same photo the New York police had released five years ago. That one had been old even back then. Bill was now twenty pounds lighter and ten years older than the priest in that photo.

He was different in other ways too. That Christmas week in hell five years ago, plus the first year, the lost year of living on the edge in the Bahamas, had wrought their own set of changes. He'd hung out with scum during that year and had thought they were too good for him; he'd been cut and he'd had his nose mangled more than once in the drunken fights he'd started. Time had added deep furrows to his cheeks and alongside the scar on his forehead, and a bumper crop of gray to his hair. He was pulling that hair off his face now, usually tying it back, exposing the receding hairline at each temple. All that, plus the full beard, made him look more like a darker, heavier set version of Willie Nelson than the young, baby-faced Father Bill in the old photo. So he shouldn't have been surprised that Lisl hadn't recognized him. Yet he was. He wasn't used to good luck.

Traffic began to slow as the road became more crowded.

"Where's everybody going?" Lisl said.

"It's a warm sunny Saturday. Where else would everybody be going?"

Lisl sank back in the seat. "Of course. Big Country."

The giant amusement park cum African safari complex had opened a few years ago and had quickly become the biggest attraction on the eastern end of the state. The locals loved all the new jobs and the boost to the economy, but nobody liked the traffic jams.

"Want to go? We haven't been to the safari in a long time."

"No, thanks," she said with an emphatic shake of her head. "I'm not in the mood for crowds."

"No," he said, smiling, "I can see that you aren't."

Maybe she had PMS.

They finally came upon one of the contributing factors to the traffic jam—a stalled station wagon, an ancient Ford Country Squire, just like the one St. Francis used to own. The hood was up and a man in jeans and a flannel shirt was leaning over the engine. As they passed, Bill saw the stricken looks on the faces of the four kids in the back, the naked anger and resentment on the face of the overweight woman in the front passenger seat, and then he got a look at the man staring in bewilderment at the dead engine before him. Something in the fellow's eyes caught Bill in the throat. He read it all in a heartbeat—a laborer, not much dough but he'd promised to take the wife and kids to Big Country for the day. A rare treat. And now they weren't going anywhere. The tow truck and ensuing repairs would probably eat up much of his spare cash, and even if it didn't, the day would be spent by the time they got rolling again. If the man's eyes had shown plain old anger or frustration, Bill could have kept going. But what he saw in that flash was defeat. One more footprint on the back of an already struggling ego.

Bill swerved onto the shoulder in front of the wagon.

"What are you doing?" Lisl said.

"I'm going to get this guy going again."

"Bill, I don't want to sit here and—"

"Only be a minute."

He hurried over to the wagon. He knew the Country Squire engine like he knew his Breviary. If it wasn't anything major, he could fix it.

He leaned on the fender and looked across the engine at a man who was probably ten or fifteen years younger but didn't look it.

"She die on you?"

The fellow looked up at him suspiciously. Bill expected that. People tended to be leery of offers of help from bearded guys with ponytails.

"Yeah. Died while we were stopped during the jam. She cranks but she won't catch. I'm afraid I don't know much about cars."

"I do." Bill started spinning the wing nut on the air filter cover. When he'd exposed the carburetor he said, "Get in and hit the gas pedal. Once."

The fellow did as he was told and Bill noticed right away that the butterfly valve didn't move. Stuck. He smiled. This was going to be easy.

He freed the valve and held it open.

"All right," he called. "Give her a try."

The engine turned and turned but didn't catch.

"This is what it was doing before!" the driver shouted.

"Just keep going!"

And then it caught. The engine shuddered and shook and then roared to life with a huge belch of black smoke from the rear. These engines tended to do that. To the tune of children's cheers from the wagon's rear compartment, Bill ran to his own car, popped the trunk, and got some spray lubricant from his work box. He lubed the hinges on the valve, replaced the cover, and slammed the hood.

"Get that carburetor cleaned and that choke checked out as soon as you can," he told the man, "or this'll happen again."

The fellow held out a twenty to him but Bill pushed it back.

"Get those kids an extra hot dog."

"God bless you, mister," the woman said.

"Not likely," Bill said softly as they pulled away.

He returned the waves of the smiling kids hanging out the rear window, then walked up to his own car. N

"There!" he said to Lisl as he started the Impala. "That didn't take too long."

"The Good Samaritan," she said with a sad shake of her head.

"Why not? It cost me nothing but a few minutes of doing the kind of thing I like to putter around with in my spare time anyway, and it literally saved the day for six people."

Lisl reached over and touched his hand.

"You're a good man, Will. But you shouldn't let everyone who comes along take advantage of your good nature. They'll eat you alive if you do."

Bill turned off at the next exit, looped on the overpass, and got back on the' freeway heading south toward town. He was baffled by her attitude.

"No one took advantage of me, Lisl. I saw a fellow human being who needed a hand; I had no place I was hurrying to, so I lent him one. That's all. No big thing. I come away feeling a little better about myself, he goes away feeling better about other people. And somewhere inside I have this hope that I've started some kind of chain letter: Maybe the next time he sees someone who needs a hand, he'll stop. That's what it's all about,

Lisl. We're all in this mess together."

"Why do you need to feel better about yourself?"

The question caught him off guard. Lady, if you only knew.

"I… I think everybody does, a little. I mean, how many people don't feel they could be better or do better? I like to feel I can make a difference. I don't mean changing the world—although, come to think of it, if you make a change for the better in one person's life, you have changed the world, haven't you? An infinitesimal change, but the world, or at least a part of it, is better for your passing." He was pleased with the thought.

"If you want to be a sacrificial lamb, I'm sure you'll find plenty of people standing in line for a piece of you."

"But I'm not talking about sacrifice. I'm talking about simple good fellowship, acting like just another crewman on Spaceship Earth."

"But you're not a crewman. You're an officer. Think about it, Will. Can any of them do anything—really do anything—for you?"

He thought about that, and was frightened by the answer. Who out there in the world could help him? Was there anyone who could put his life right again?

"No," he said softly.

"Exactly. Primes stand alone. We're islands. We have to learn to exist apart from the rest."

Bill stared straight ahead at the road. Lisl, you don't want to be an island. I know what it's like. I've been an island for five years, and it's hell.

And then something she'd said struck a discordant note in his brain.

"Primes? Did you say Primes? What's that?"

She then launched into this involved dissertation on Primes and "others," punctuated everywhere with the phrase "Rafe says."

"What a load of elitist bullshit!" Bill said when she was through. "Does Rafe really believe that garbage?"

"Of course," she said. "And it's not garbage. That's your cultural conditioning speaking. Rafe says—"

"Never mind what Rafe says. What does Lisl say?"

"Lisl says the same thing. You and I and so many others have been conditioned to deny who we really are so that we can be more easily used. If you look around you, really look at the world, you'll see that it's true."

Bill stared at her.

"What's the matter with you, Leese?"

She turned on him, her face contorted with anger.

"Don't say that to me! My parents always said it and I don't want to hear it ever again!"

"Okay, okay," Bill said soothingly, startled by the outburst. "Be cool. I'm not your parent."

He spent the rest of the ride back to town trying to explain the shortcomings of Rafe's perverted egoism, how egoism in itself wasn't wrong, but when it refused to recognize the validity of all the other Fs around it, the result sacrificed not only logic but compassion as well.

But Lisl wasn't having any of it. She'd bought into Rafe's philosophy completely.

Slowly, a deep unease wormed through Bill.

What was happening here? It was almost as if Rafe had been reshaping Lisl from within—right under Bill's nose.

He saw how it had happened. Someone as vulnerable as Lisl was a sitting duck. A poor self-image, emotionally battered, and suddenly there was this enormously attractive young man telling her she's not the ugly duckling she's always considered herself, but a swan. A little love and affection to ease the deep emotional pains from her divorce, a little tenderness, a little patience, and Lisl opened up to him. But having her physically wasn't enough, apparently. He'd gone on to seduce her mind as well. Once her defenses were completely down, he began to fill the vacuum of her valueless upbringing, whispering a twisted philosophy that offered an easy road to the self-esteem she'd been denied for most of her life. But it was false self-esteem, gained at others' expense. And during the course of his remodeling job, Rafe had made himself Lisl's sun; she revolved around him now, her face turned always toward him, only him.

As they pulled into town, Lisl asked Bill to drop her off at the downtown lot where she'd left her car.

"Thanks for the ride, Will. It was great. But I want to get you and Rafe together real soon. He'll open your eyes. Wait and see—it'll be the best thing that ever happened to you."

She waved, then turned and headed for her car. Bill felt a terrible sadness as he watched her go.

I'm losing her.

Not losing her body, not her love—they weren't the important things for Bill where Lisl was concerned—but her mind, her soul.

Rafe. What was he doing to her? His involvement here seemed almost… sinister. But that had to be Bill's latent paranoia rearing its head. There was no plot here. Rafe was simply drawing Lisl into his own warped view of the world. Warped people tended to do that.

But in doing so he was turning Bill's only friend in the world •into a stranger. Bill wasn't going to allow that. Lisl was too innocent, too decent a person at heart for him to sit back and watch all that was good within her get sucked down the black hole of a philosophy like Rafe's.

He had to help her fight back, even if she didn't want to fight back.

Bill knew he was late coming to the battle. He hadn't even known it was being waged until today. But he could not sit on the sidelines any longer.

The first order of business was to learn a little more about Rafe Losmara.