rumble of thunder passed through the sky, an few fat droplets of rain
began to fall, and neither the storm his tears could be restrained.
She lay only five or six feet beneath him, and he was overcome by an
urge to claw his way down to her. He knew flesh would have
deteriorated, that he would find only bow cradled in a vile muck of
unthinkable origin, but he was to hold her and be held, even if he had
to arrange her skeleton arms around himself in a staged embrace. He
actually rip at the grass and tore up a few handsful of topsoil. Soon,
however, he was wracked by powerful sobs that swiftly exhausted him and
left him too weak to struggle with reality any way She was dead.
Gone.
Forever.
As the cold rain fell in greater volume, pounding on Candy’s back, it
seemed to leech his hot grief from him and fill him instead, with icy
hatred. Frank had killed their mother; he must pay for that crime with
his own life. Lying on a muddy grave and weeping like a child would not
bring Candy one step closer to vengeance. Finally he got up and stood
with his hands fisted at his sides, letting the storm sluice some of the
mud and grief from him.
He promised his mother that he would be more relentless and diligent in
his pursuit of her killer. The next time he got a lead on Frank, he
would not lose him.
Looking up at the cloud-choked and streaming sky, addressing his mother
in Heaven, he said,
“I’ll find Frankie, kill him, crush him, I will. I’ll smash his skull
open and cut his hateful brain into pieces and flush it down a toilet.”
The rain seemed to penetrate him, driving a chill deep into his marrow,
and he shuddered.
“If I find anyone who lifted a hand to help him, I’ll cut their hands
off. I’ll tear out the eyes of anyone who looked at Frankie with
sympathy. I swear I will. And I’ll cut out the tongues of any bastards
who spoke kind words to him.” Suddenly the rain fell with greater force
than before, hammering the grass flat, crackling through the leaves of a
nearby oak, stirring a chorus of whispers from the Eugenias. It snapped
against his face, making him squint, but he did not lower his eyes from
Heaven.
“If he’s found anyone to care about, anyone at all, I’ll take them away
from him like he took you from me. I’ll break them open, get the blood
out of them, and throw them away like garbage.” He had made these same
promises many times during the past seven years, but he made them now
with no less passion than he had before.
“Like garbage,” he repeated through clenched teeth.
His need for vengeance was no less fierce now than it had been on the
day of her murder seven years ago. His hatred of Frank was, if
anything, harder and sharper than ever.
“Like garbage.
” An ax of lightning cleaved the conclusive sky. Briefly a long, jagged
laceration gaped open in the dark clouds, which for a moment seemed to
him not like clouds at all but like the infinitely strange and throbbing
body of some godlike being, and through the lightning-rent flesh he
thought he glimpsed the shining mystery beyond.
Clint DREADED the rainy season in southern California. Most of the year
was dry, and in the on-again-off-again drought of the past decade, some
winters were marked by a few storms. When rain finally fell, the
natives seemed to have forgotten how to drive in it. As gutters
overflowed, the street clogged with traffic. The freeways were worse;
they looked like infinitely long car washes in which the conveyors had
broken down.
While the gray light slowly faded out of that Monday afternoon, he drove
first to Palomar Laboratories in Costa Mesa. It was a large,
single-story concrete-block building one block west of Bristol Avenue.
Their medical-lab division an any blood samples, Pap smears, and
biopsies, among other things but they also performed industrial- and
geological-samples analyses of all kinds.
He parked his Chevy in the adjoining lot. Carrying a plastic bag from