The Other Brother (31 page)

Chapter 61

id you miss me, baby?" 1' -

/ Naomi, looking as beautiful and youthful as when Theo had first met her thirty-some years ago, seductively wrapped her lithe arms around his neck. She slithered onto his lap. She wore a tight-fitting black dress as though ready for a night on the town.

"Huh?" Theo blinked rapidly and repeatedly. Naomi is dead. How could he be seeing her so young and alive?

She even smelled like he remembered from his youth. She wore a spicy fragrance, like jasmine.

Isaiah must have slipped him some kind of hallucinogen, though Theo didn't recall Isaiah puncturing him with a syringe or feeding him anything. But a drug was the only explanation. Naomi could not possibly be real.

However, he felt her weight on his lap, felt a feathery, tickling sensation as she traced her fingers across the back of his neck, could feel even her warm, minty breath on his face.

She was so real that he'd forgotten all about Isaiah. The boy had retreated to the shadowed corners of the room, Theo's Rolex glinting in his hand.

"Talk to me," Naomi said in the low, throaty voice that had seduced him the first time he'd met her. "Ain't you got something to tell me after all these years?"

Although Theo worried that talking to this illusion would give it an even firmer toehold in his mind, he found his lips forming words.

"I ... I don't know what to say," he said. "You look so ... so young"

Her smile bent into a frown. "That all you got to say to me? After what you did?"

His heart slammed.

Naomi dug her fingers into the meat of his neck. Her nails felt like talons. Pain sizzled down his spine and fanned through his shoulder blades.

"Ain't you gonna apologize to me?" she asked. "Don't you know what you did to me and my baby, you sorry nigga?"

"I was married!" Theo shouted. "You knew that when you met me. I told you from the beginning that we could never have a life together"

"But you left us. You living the good life down in Atlanta, kicking up your heels with your family, and we was starving. We might as well been dead to you"

"That's not true," he said.

She rose off his lap. She brushed off her dress as though being close to him had soiled her.

"Ain't no excuse for what you did," she said. "You wear them nice suits and use big words, but you just like all the other ones. A low-down, dirty dog"

He couldn't argue with her. In fact, he shouldn't argue with her. She wasn't real. In essence, he was arguing with his own guilty conscience.

"My baby here, he all growed up now." She smiled with pride. "You left him, but he made it. My baby's a survivor."

"I want to help him," Theo said. "He's lost his way, and I take the blame for that. I want to help steer him in the right direction."

Naomi sneered. "He don't want that. He came to take care of your sorry black ass. He promised me he would."

"Before you were gunned down-a situation you were dragged into because of him?"

"Fuck you!" Isaiah exploded out of the shadows. "I didn't kill Mama. You did!"

Naomi vanished as quickly as an image cast by a film projector. One moment she was there, fuming; the next heartbeat, she was gone.

Isaiah thundered forward.

"I didn't mean that," Theo said. "I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry-"

Isaiah punched him in the face. Theo's head rocked sideways and he tipped backward in the chair. The chair lost its balance and he crashed against the floor, landing hard on his shoulder, agony biting deep into his body.

Salty blood flooded his mouth, clogged his windpipe. He spat it out, sucked in a gasp of air.

Isaiah leveled the gun at Theo's head.

"Don't you ever say that again," Isaiah said.

Theo spluttered. "I'm sorry."

Glaring at him, Isaiah turned and walked to the toolbox in the corner. He dug inside.

Whatever he was getting out of there, it would mean trouble for him, Theo thought. A minute ago his heart hadn't seemed capable of beating any faster-but now it whammed against his rib cage at a more frenzied rate than ever.

Isaiah returned. Theo squinted at the small, pistol-like device in his son's hands. Was that a ...

"Taser gun," Isaiah said. "You ready for fifty thousand volts of electricity to snap, crackle, and pop through those wrinkled veins of yours?"

"Don't continue this." Theo was panting. "Whatever lesson you're aiming to teach me, I've learned, I swear it."

"I'm not trying to teach you anything. I'm doing this be cause I want to see you in pain. This is punishment for what you did to us "

"Please, no-"

Isaiah pulled the trigger. Two probes, trailed by wires, zipped from the gun's muzzle and hooked on the front of Theo's shirt.

And then the agony began.

Chapter 62

C azing into the makeup compact's mirror, Gabriel had once again seen enough.

He closed the mirror with a loud clap and stuffed it into his pocket. Pops had made some terrible mistakes, had mistreated Isaiah, but he didn't deserve to be punished like this. Isaiah had gone way too far.

Adrenaline flooded Gabriel's bloodstream, tightening his muscles, quickening his pulse. He was thankful that he hadn't called the police.

Because he wanted to handle Isaiah himself.

Power popped across his hands. But there would be no need to use his talent against Isaiah. Instead, he doublechecked that the shotgun was loaded and ready to fire. He had not fired the gun since last fall during a hunting trip with Pops and some family friends, but he was a good shot, with reliable aim from a respectable distance.

Gabriel scrambled through the wet, clotted underbrush. As he drew closer to the cabin, moving in a circle around the perimeter of the property, thunder bellowed through the woods, the rumble echoing Gabriel's booming heartbeat.

He found a spot to hide. Near an immense pine tree, about twenty yards or so from the cabin's front door. Hunched between the pine and a thick grove of shrubs, he had a line of sight to the porch and a partial view of the bedroom in which Isaiah was performing his sick deeds.

Now he had to draw Isaiah outside.

He dipped his hand into his pocket and grasped a golf ball. Focusing on one of the front windows, he flung the ball toward it.

The ball fell several feet short of the window, bouncing into a heap of leaves and twigs beside the porch steps.

He fished another ball out of his pocket. He threw it.

The ball hit the window with a loud crack!

That'll bring the asshole out of there.

Gabriel lifted the Mossberg to his shoulder, slid his finger to the trigger, and waited.

Chapter 63

-,rack! -d j

Isaiah was in the bedroom standing over his father, who twitched on the floor like a crack head suffering a serious jones, when the noise rang out from the front of the cabin.

"What the fuck was that?" he asked no one in particular. It sounded as though someone had broken a window with a rock.

He retracted the Taser's electrodes. His eyes rolling drunkenly, saliva foaming from his mouth, teeth locked in a grimace, Pops's limbs continued to spasm. He'd been thrashing so hard that he'd loosened the ropes that bound his ankles and wrists to the chair.

Isaiah hated to be distracted from his quality time with his dad. But he had to investigate the noise. It could be the police. Or Gabriel.

Whoever it was, God help them. Isaiah was in no mood for nonsense.

Turning from his father, Isaiah went to the toolbox and dropped the Taser inside. He retrieved the Glock, ensured that it was loaded, and jammed another magazine in his pocket. He headed toward the doorway.

"Be back soon, Pops," he said. "Sit tight."

But Pops was unconscious, a puddle of spit spreading on the floor underneath his head.

Isaiah's suspicions were correct: one of the living room windows was cracked. A spiderweb of fractures spread outward from a small rupture in the glass.

Someone had done this deliberately. It could have been a bunch of kids playing pranks, but he doubted it. He'd been living in the cabin for a week and he'd seen fewer than a dozen people moving around the mountain paths near the house, and none of them had been children.

Intuition told him that Gabriel was responsible.

Isaiah moved down the short hallway to the bathroom. He popped inside and looked at the mirror.

At first he saw only his own reflection. Then he concentrated on seeing Gabriel, thinking maybe he could summon the vision on demand.

Several seconds later he was rewarded with a clear view of little brother.

Gabriel was hunkered between a tree and some shrubs. Dressed in a camouflage vest like a black Rambo, he had balanced a shotgun on his shoulder.

"You must think I'm stupid," Isaiah whispered. "Think I'm gonna walk outside to check out the window so you can pop me? You gotta be better than that to smoke the kid."

But he had to give it to Gabriel. His little brother had balls, coming up here like this, all alone. It was stupid, but brave. Isaiah could respect him for that.

All the same, he had to take care of Gabriel once and for all. It was time to show little brother what the real world was all about.

Isaiah smashed the butt of the Glock against the mirror. Shards fell away from the frame and clinked into the sink. Being careful not to cut himself, he picked up a crescentshaped sliver of mirror. It would help him keep tabs on Gabriel.

He darted into the kitchen. At the far end of the room, a door gave access to the backyard.

Isaiah opened the door and slinked outside.

Chapter 64

' - idden between the pine and the bushes, shotgun held at -the ready, Gabriel waited for Isaiah to emerge from the front door.

About a minute or so after he threw the ball, he saw a faint shadow move behind the broken window-as though Isaiah was assessing the damage and he tensed his trigger finger, expecting Isaiah to storm onto the porch, a perfect target. But after another minute, nothing had happened.

"Damn," Gabriel said. "He knows something's up"

He fumbled out the makeup compact. Focused on seeing Isaiah in the mirror.

"Shit"

Isaiah was no longer in the house.

He was outside. Creeping through the forest.

He'd seen through Gabriel's lame ploy and had flipped the script. Gabriel looked closely in the mirror and thought he saw Isaiah carrying a jagged mirror in one hand, too.

Damn it! I underestimated him.

In Isaiah's other hand, he gripped a mean-looking pistol.

From what Gabriel saw, he was unable to determine from exactly where Isaiah was walking, or where he was going. He could be twenty feet away, sneaking up on him. Or in the woods on the other side of the driveway.

Gabriel whirled around.

The only noises were the drizzling of rain against leaves and brush, the soft sigh of the wind, and his own frantic breathing.

Where was Isaiah?

Gabriel glanced in the mirror, hoping to catch a clue.

Gunfire rang out. Splinters exploded from the pine tree beside him.

Gabriel took off running.