“Kill the cripple and the boy,” one of the men whispered, “but not the woman. She’s dessert.”
Images of the killers raping Maria and then strangling her with their bare hands flashed before me. I slipped out from behind the curtain and headed straight for the kitchen closet. Swinging the door open just a smidge so the rusty hinges wouldn’t squeak, I thrust my good hand inside in search of my Hillerich & Bradsby bat. No luck. I felt the broom and mop handles but no stick.
Another crack in the adjoining room told me the window was half gone. I had thirty seconds, if that. I lowered my reach and got the fire extinguisher. Better than nothing, but not what I wanted. I raised my hands six inches and grasped again. Pay dirt. The cold, hard wood felt good as soon as it hit my hand.
I pulled the bat out of the closet. It was a vintage 1967 Roberto Clemente model, 36 inches long and weighing 36.4 ounces, a gift from my high school coach in Rockville after I hit thirty-four home runs in thirty games my junior year.
I slipped into a nook between the living room and the staircase. The killers could not get upstairs without passing me, and they wouldn’t see me until it was too late. I’d drop the first man with a tomahawk swing and pulverize the second one’s skull with an uppercut blast. I hadn’t crushed a baseball in decades. There was nothing like the sensation of hitting the ball square on its sweet spot, the thud of the wood generating maximum force, the satisfaction of slamming one out of the park.
Abraham waged war. Abraham was a warrior.
Joshua laid siege to Jericho. Joshua was a warrior.
A priest must be a warrior.
I must be a warrior.
I couldn’t see the window from my hiding place, so I had to rely on sound and shadow. I heard a scratching noise, followed by a gentle thud. One of them was inside. The short one, I suspected. The second man made almost no noise. He had the first one to help him. The living room was small, and there was only one way to go.
The night-light cast ghoulish shadows on the wall. The ghouls moved.
They were upon me faster than I expected. I raised the bat with both hands high in the air. As soon as I saw the first man — the short one — I swung downward with all my strength. My left hand led, but the right arm seemed slow to react — of course it was; the prosthetic lagged — and then it just stopped. In midair. My left arm fought to bring the bat down but it wouldn’t move.
My prosthetic arm was locked. It had malfunctioned.
The killer saw me. He jumped back. The taller man with the fedora came into view. The three of us stood there for a couple of seconds, frozen in mutual disbelief. A priest, posing like an ax murderer for a wax museum, and two assassins, silencers attached to the barrels of their guns.
The short one laughed. It was the deep, resonant laugh of a lifetime scoundrel and smoker, coarse enough to sand wood without touching it. The tall one chuckled like the calculating kind of person for whom genuine laughter was too frivolous. They raised their guns in tandem and pointed them at me, grins etched on their faces.
Gunshots exploded. The floor shook. Pain racked my eardrums.
I opened my eyes. I hadn’t even realized I’d closed them.
The killers lay on the ground, the left sides of their chests riddled with multiple bullet holes.
Manuel appeared in the stairwell, arms outstretched, clutching a gun with both hands. When he spoke for the first time, his voice had a youthful pitch, but his delivery was shockingly composed.
“Leave my mother alone,” he said.
When I saw Manuel’s arms stretched out, I realized how his appearance had changed and figured out what I’d failed to detect when we’d shared a glass of lemonade in the afternoon. His wrist was bare. His father’s gold watch was gone. He’d met the Aztecs to trade his father’s watch for a gun.
By the time Maria arrived, hysterical, I’d removed my prosthetic arm from the socket and the gun from Manuel’s hands. I’d taken an EMT course and knew how to check for a pulse. I found none in either man. Manuel had shot each of them through the heart. They were dead.
The rage I’d managed to build receded quickly. A sense of calm fell over me, as though I’d gone on a trip I’d detested and now I was back home.
If the police saw that Manuel shot two men, he and his mother could be deported to Mexico. After all, he’d shot them with an illegal weapon, and he wasn’t an American citizen. In Mexico, they would die. In America, they would live.
A priest I knew from seminary lived in upstate New York. He was a friend and kindred spirit. We would create new names and birth certificates. Manuel and Maria would start new lives. No one would know their past. Manuel’s father’s killers would never find them.