In the meantime, Frank did his reform school stretches and then two major jolts as an adult, where he fell in love with the books in the prison libraries and made the contacts within the walls that would enable him to graduate to an ever higher level of success outside. Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal’s education.
When he had been released from his last sentence and done his parole, Frank was ready, and Richard, of course, was not. But he had brought Richard along on that final job because that was what a brother was obligated to do.
Frank cracked the window and lit a Kool.
The Farrow brothers’ birth mother had died very young – Frank remembered her vaguely and Richard not at all – and their father remarried quickly. To Frank’s mind, the father loved only money and its accoutrements. Frank hated him and his friends, and he would always despise everyone like them. By the time his father married for the third time, there was no familial connection that remained. Their father no longer considered Frank and Richard, who had been in serious trouble since their teens, to be his sons. Frank and Richard had not had any kind of contact with him for years. For all Frank knew or cared, their father was dead.
Now Richard was dead, too. Frank didn’t dwell on it. He had loved Richard, he supposed, but he had no illusions of the afterlife, and he was free of sentiment. He knew there was no spiritual world where the two of them would meet again. Richard was now what all men were in the end: food for worms. Sentiment aside, though, Frank would have to kill the man who had killed his brother; retaliation was a part of the personal code he had adopted long ago.
Frank was fascinated by the murder trials he had seen on TV. He’d watch the victims’ families, how they sat quietly in court, their soft hands resting in their laps, waiting for a justice that would never fully come. He was sure that they thought of themselves as good people. He only thought of them as weak.
Weakness. It separated him from the straights. This separation would keep him alive.
Frank parked the Ranger alongside the platinum Park Avenue in the lot of the New Rock Church. He checked the load on the. 38 that Toomey had given him and holstered the gun against the small of his back. He reached into his duffel bag, retrieved a pair of latex examination gloves, and fitted them onto his hands. He looked around the empty lot and down Old Church Road. The road was clear. He stepped out of the truck.
Frank knocked on the door of the church and put his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. The door opened, and the Reverend Bob stood in the frame.
“Larry?” he said, donning his salesman’s smile. “Why, I heard you had left town.”
“I’m back. Can I come in?”
“Certainly.”
The reverend stepped aside to let Farrow pass through, and shut the door behind them. Farrow walked slowly down the center aisle of the church, allowing the Reverend Bob to get in front of him.
“Shall we go to my office?”
“Here is good,” said Farrow, stepping up onto the altar floor. He stood in a bar of light that entered narrowly from a glass panel on the roof and widened as it fell.
“Well… okay,” said the reverend.
Farrow heard a catch in the reverend’s voice.
The reverend stepped up onto the altar and stood beside him. Frank looked at him, immaculate in his starched white shirt.
“That’s a Movado, isn’t it?” said Farrow, nodding at the reverend’s wrist.
“Yes.” The reverend smiled. “I bought it secondhand. Of course, a new Movado is a little dear for a man in my profession.”
“My father owned one of those. He was so proud of it, too. Always shot his cuffs around his friends, made sure they got a good look at it. My brother and I stole it off his dresser one night. I gave it to some street kid outside the Whiskey, over on the Strip.”
The reverend looked at him quizzically. “Why do you mention this, Larry?”
“My father fired our maid the next morning. A Chicano woman with four children. He was paying her twenty-five dollars a day.”
“Larry?”
“My name’s Frank Farrow.”
Farrow took his hands from his coat and dropped them at his sides.
The reverend looked at Farrow’s gloved hands and backed up a step. “What… what do you want?”
“I told you I’d be back. When I make a promise like that, I keep it.” The color drained from the reverend’s face. He looked desperately around the empty church and back at Farrow. He tried to smile and use a tone of sincerity, but his voice shook as it came forth.
“Listen… Frank, is it?”
“Frank Farrow.”
“Frank, I never meant to offend you or infringe on your privacy. I was only looking to bring another person into our congregation. If you were ever incarcerated, it makes no difference to me.”
“You were right on the money, Reverend Bob. I’ve been in one kind of prison or another for the better part of my life.”
“Frank – atonement is everything in the eyes of the Lord. Whatever you did, you served your time.”
“You have no idea what I’ve done. And you shouldn’t have pried.” Farrow reached into his coat and drew the. 38 from where it was holstered in his belt line. “Get on your knees.”
Tears dropped instantly from the reverend’s eyes. He raised his hands as in prayer. His lip trembled violently, but he couldn’t speak.
“On your knees,” said Farrow.
The reverend dropped to his knees on the altar. Urine spread across his crotch and darkened the thighs of his slacks. The stench of it grew heavy in the church.
“Are you afraid?” asked Farrow.
The reverend nodded.
“It’s funny,” said Farrow, looking down at him. “I find that those the most afraid are those who believe in God. The same ones who hide their eyes at horror movies are the ones who bow their heads in a place like this. And for what? Something that does not, cannot, exist.”
“Please,” said the reverend.
“Your journey is just beginning,” said Farrow with a smile. “You’re going to a better place. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling those old people out at the home, the ones who are about to die?”
“Yes, but -”
“But, what?”
The reverend looked up at Farrow with bloodshot eyes. “What if I was wrong?”
Farrow laughed. His laughter echoed in the church and then it was erased by the deafening explosion of the. 38. The reverend’s hair lifted briefly from his scalp and fragments of his brain sprayed out across the altar. He fell back; his head made a flat, hollow sound as it hit the wooden floor. A widening pool of blood spread behind it.
Farrow stood over the reverend and shot him again in the side of the face. He walked from the church.
Farrow drove a half mile down Old Church Road in the opposite direction of the interstate until he reached Lee Toomey’s house at the edge of the woods. Toomey was loading some cable wire into his utility truck as Farrow pulled the Ranger into the yard. Toomey’s eyes clouded when he saw that it was Farrow behind the wheel. He noticed the light yellow gloves on Farrow’s hands as Farrow stepped out of the truck and crossed the yard.
“Lee.”
“Frank. Thought you left town.”
“I didn’t. Where’s that family of yours?”
“Martin’s playin’ that TV game of his. My wife and daughter are in the kitchen, I’d expect.”
“Let’s walk into those woods a bit.”
Toomey spit tobacco juice to the side. “Why would we need to do that?”
“We won’t be but a minute. C’mon.”
They went in through a trail and then off the trail until they were out of the house’s sight line. Toomey leaned against the trunk of a pine and regarded Farrow as he lit a cigarette.