Extraordinary Retribution (7 page)

Lopez noticed that smoke was rising from the other side of the house.
The chimney
. The memory was warm and clashing badly with the anxious feelings coursing through him. He focused on the chimney.
A fire in the fireplace!
Miguel was there and he was all right. He shook his head and smiled.
How I hate overreacting.
He stepped forward and began to walk around the cabin. Even in early May, it was cool as evening approached in the mountains. He wouldn’t mind sitting by the fireplace. Talking to Miguel. Finding out what all this was about.

Turning around the corner of the house, Father Lopez walked into a nightmare.

He came slowly to a stop as the back side of the cabin came into view, his feet becoming rooted to the earth, his arms dangling at his sides. His mind struggled to make sense of the scene presented to him by his eyes, but the shock of it, the absurdity of it, defied him. The rosary he had subconsciously grasped fell onto the ground beside his shoes.

Roughly a third of the cabin wall—a wall made out of solid timbers, and, from what he could see, reinforced inside by thick steel rebar—was gone. Not removed. The charred and fragmented edges testified that something horrific and violent had ripped the wall apart. Part of his mind noted that the smoke he thought was from the chimney gushed from the smoldering remains of whatever had caused the explosion in the first place. It was amazing that the entire structure had not burned to the ground.

Shards of glass and splinters of wood littered the ground around him, crunching loudly under his shoes. As his eyes passed over these remains, he also noticed metallic pieces. Bright shells in the dirt and grass. Lopez had hunted with his father in his youth. He was familiar with ammunition casings from several rifles and some handguns. These were larger. He assumed military grade.
There are so many
. It was as if a war zone skirmish had been picked up from some other part of the world and dropped recklessly into Tennessee. At his parents’ old cabin. Near his brother’s car.

Some detached part of his mind signaled that he could be in danger, but at that moment, it didn’t register with the rest of him. He moved deliberately into the cabin through the smoldering hole blown through the wall. The signs of violence were everywhere. The well-tended wooden interior was pocked with remnants from the explosion, as well as large imprints from the bullets that had been housed in the casings he saw outside. Furniture was overturned, lamps smashed. He followed the train of destruction from the entry area and living room into the kitchen and bedrooms. Blood was splattered on portions of the walls and floor, a red handprint on the side of a doorway.
Miguel’s?

He followed the trail of destruction along the floor, his eyes pausing on a shattered glass case, the shards piled around a small triangular object made of stone.
The Cherokee arrowhead
. The ancient markings of the Indian warrior were still visibly etched in the sharp rock. The arrowhead pointed forward to the back bedroom. To a human shape on the floor.

“Oh, God.”

The glass crunched under his feet as he entered the death chamber. It looked as though his brother had fought off his assailants for some time, finally being pushed into this corner of the cabin. It was here that he had put up his last stand. Here that his time on Earth had ended.

“Oh, Miguel.” Father Lopez fell to his knees beside his brother’s body. He wept.

11

L
opez sat on an old stump near his car, blood clotted on the inside of his palm from the sharp edges of the flint rock. He still gripped the arrowhead tightly.

His mind seemed to be unable to settle between the past and the present. One moment he would be talking to the officer, the next, seeing his brother’s body, and then the next, recalling the day long ago that as children they had found the Cherokee artifacts.

“I was too small, too scared to climb the cliff,” he whispered, his gaze distanced. “Miguel brought it down to me. I’d forgotten we’d left it out here.”

“I’m sorry, sir?” The officer looked perplexed.

Lopez shook his head. “Nothing. I’m sorry. What did you say?”

In the midst of his emotional fog, he was surprised at how fast the police arrived. Or was it that he could no longer track time properly, his brain misfiring, his body misfiring, just as his legs hardly seemed able to carry him? Yet, they were here, seemingly instantaneously after he called them, and he had to function, had to give logical facts and coherent statements. He had to be rational in hell.

The body of his older brother lay shattered on the floor of his parents’ cabin. One look had been enough. The damage to the form was beyond what he would have imagined, even in a fight to the death. It took all the control he possessed to describe it to the police.

“Yes, I found him like that,” he said, after the officer repeated the question.

“Did you disturb the body? Move it? Check to see if he was alive?” the officer asked as his partner walked through the cabin. The light had almost faded outside, and the officer squinted at his notepad as he wrote.

“God, no,” said Francisco, emphatically. He felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. “I didn’t need to check him. I could see part of his face. The rest, his head, his torso—
God in heaven
, it was all over the walls.”

The police officer coughed uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lopez—ah, Father Lopez. I know this is difficult, but it is necessary. So, you saw nothing, no one on your drive up or afterward in this area, acting suspiciously?”

“Nothing. There was nothing. Just this,” he said, gesturing toward the cabin.

“Did your brother have any enemies? Recent fights? Anyone who would want to harm him?”

Father Lopez paused. “No. No one.”

The officer looked skeptical. “Are you sure?”

“He’s been acting very strange of late.”

“In what ways?” Father Lopez felt officer’s eyes as sharp knives, inquisitive, cruelly intense in his concentration on the answers.

“It’s hard to explain. Like he was worried about something, terribly anxious, almost hysterical at times. He was talking about strange things, what his life was amounting to, that sort of thing. His wife said he was obsessed with the obituaries, reading them online even from many different newspapers. Then, he left in a hurry one day, taking
weapons
, and came up here. To a deathtrap.”

“It sure doesn’t seem like a robbery,” agreed the officer. “Any history of mental illness?”

“No.”

“Did he mention any names recently? Call anyone unusual?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“OK, sir, that’s really all we can do now. We’ll have forensics up here very soon. This is an official crime scene, and we will have to ask you to vacate the premises until the investigation is complete.”

Lopez shook his head. “I don’t want to stay here anymore.” He continued grimly, “When can we have the body, for the funeral?”

“That will depend on forensics, and an autopsy is mandatory in a homicide investigation, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I want the monsters who did this caught,” he said with a vehemence and anger that frightened and surprised him. Until now, he had felt devastation at his brother’s death, shock and horror at its manner. When contemplating the murderers, suddenly, there was rage—powerful, irrational, and hot. What scared him the most was that he felt completely unrepentant about it.

“So do we, Father Lopez. This kinda thing doesn’t happen around here. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise you.”

Lopez nodded, too consumed with his own emotions to reply. The officer’s partner picked that moment to exit the cabin, and the two men spoke out of earshot. Lopez stared at them, not caring so much what they said, but that he felt they shared his desire for justice. They were in their mid-thirties. Old enough to have been around and young enough to carry on active duty. In fact, both were trim and athletic, in contrast to the many local and state troopers Lopez was used to encountering—Dunkin’ Donuts shareholders. They were unusually intelligent, he was glad to see. These were probably the two best detectives in the area, and he felt fortunate that they would be handling the investigation.

The policeman who had taken down his testimony returned.

“Sir, I suggest that you get some rest. There’s nothing you can do now except get in the way of the investigation. Go home to your family. I’m sure this will be difficult news, but it’s better you are with family at this time. Believe me, I’ve seen this before.”

Father Lopez nodded.
Family.
He had only an empty house to return to. And his brother’s widow.
Dear God, how am I going to tell Maria?

He looked toward the house a final time. The memories of childhood were blotted out, erased, burned away with fire. The cabin had transformed into an evil thing, a monster that had consumed his brother. It looked more like a mausoleum than a vacation home. The arrowhead was all that was left to him. It was an artifact of violence.

I’m so sorry, Miguel. God have mercy on your soul.

Forty miles away a rundown Ford Mustang lurched recklessly into the parking lot of an emergency room in Knoxville. The driver had remembered that the University of Tennessee Medical Center had the only level one trauma center in the area. Somehow, he had remembered this, despite losing dangerous amounts of blood and struggling to maintain consciousness on the drive from the mountains. The Gatlinburg hospital might have done the job properly, or maybe not. He had stemmed the bleeding the best he could and taken a calculated risk to place expertise before expediency. He knew it might cost him his life.

Queued patients and family members stared in growing concern as the car rolled past the circular drive and onto the sidewalk, barely coming to a stop before plowing into the entrance of the ER. Their concern turned to dismay as the car door opened and a creature from a horror film stumbled forward. Covered in blood, perspiring fiercely as from a great fever, the zombie shuffled through the automatic doors. Several people screamed, and orderlies and nurses turned and darted toward the injured man. As the first staff reached him, he collapsed forward, barely caught by a stocky male nurse who struggled to break his fall.

“Martha! Katherine! Get a gurney over here now! Trauma patient, massive blood loss, severe injuries! Now!”

The patient groaned, and the nurse stared in surprise as a fist was raised near his face, the crumbled remains of a sheet of paper within it. He dislodged the paper, and the man’s hand dropped. Unfolding it as the other physicians sped to help, he read out loud what he saw.

“Shrapnel leg and back. Potential spinal damage. Gun shot, right shoulder. Penicillin allergy. Blood type O+.” Several faces stared at him and the paper.

“Cut the shirt open!” he yelled.

Another nurse slit open shirt along the back and pulled the fabric to the sides. She inhaled sharply. “
Jesus.”

“Sir, can you hear me?” the male nurse asked the man. There was no response. The bloodied figure was unconscious.

12

F
ather Lopez stared forward, his dark hair matted and dripping, his thick eyebrows furrowed and beading with water. He took the incense from the altar boy, swinging it in the downpour, going through the motions with coals that were now extinguished and drowned. The censer seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. The earth itself seemed to pull with greater intensity, the gravity belonging to a supergiant like the planet Jupiter, and even his priestly robes seemed to be made of lead. He glanced over at the casket they would soon lower into the mud.
How will they hoist that thing?
He shook his head.
I’m going mad.

The weather decided to mirror his emotional state with four straight days of showers, including the day of the funeral. He had been rocked from one heartache to another, finding his murdered brother, breaking the news to his destroyed wife and children, and discovering himself as the organizational center for the family’s grieving. His brother’s wife was not capable of handling the arrangements, and his parents were too old. It fell on his shoulders, and the weight was a heavy one. It was one thing to carry the sorrows of others second hand. Now he had to be mourner and priest. Not for the first time, he questioned the Church’s stance on celibacy. Not because of sex; he had learned years ago how to channel that drive into other actions. But because of something far more difficult to control. Each night he returned to an empty house, stale and still. He ached to have someone to go home to when the sun fell.
You can’t hold prayer in your arms.

The funeral was well attended. His brother had been a local hero in the Hispanic community, and he had won admiration and friendship in all his endeavors. Besides the family, there were old high school classmates, war veterans, neighbors, and even the odd local politician. All were soaked in the downpour, struggling in the strong wind to hear the words of the service.

Father Lopez had called a priest friend to assist. He had given up trying to carry that load by himself. As the second priest spoke, he looked over the scene: his brother’s casket, family, friends, and others. Lopez knew every face: Madison, Alabama was not a big place. Faces old and young. Many heads were bowed from grief or weather. Forms huddled together, playing out a ritual to the dead that archeologists had shown was shared even by humanity’s Neanderthal cousins. Irrational. Emotional. Superstitious.
Pagan
, thought Father Lopez. Did not the Church teach that death was only sleep? Did he not believe in the Resurrection? If so, why the grief? Why the black colors of mourning?
Damn the theology
, it was
necessary
.

At the edge of the mourners, like a light in a sea of dark gray, a pair of bright eyes flashed toward him.
Such intensity.
There was a magnetic pull deep inside him, but all he could see at first were the eyes, the face and body shrouded under a raincoat and hood. He felt nearly in a trance, the eyes drawing him in like some spell.