Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

246 :: JOHN R. MABRY
On the way back toward the Friary, Richard felt as if he
were slogging through tar. He thought of Toby, and was just
beginning to recognize his own grief at the loss of the dog—
“their” dog. He multiplied that grief by millions and millions
of Mr. Kims, and realized that no evil of this magnitude had
been visited upon the planet since the Angel of Death had
swooped over the Egyptians.
Wandering down Spruce, he heard a small crowd of men
cursing loudly in Spanish. He crossed to the east side of the
street and followed the voices. As if in a dream, Richard
walked through a gate into someone else’s backyard, where
several large, angry Latino men were arguing. Richard didn’t
understand the Spanish, but he did understand their confusion
and their rage. An empty collar attached to a chain lay
on the ground, illuminated by a blue porch light.
An enormous, muscled man with his head shaved bald and
tattoos adorning his neck was still yelling. He noticed
Richard, and yelled at him for a while. In an almost dissociated
state, Richard reached up and touched the man’s cheek.
“I’m sorry, miho,” he said. The man’s face went through
many rapid changes, from rage to confusion to fear, to
remorse. “Who, padre, who did this evil thing? My Feo! He’s
gone! Who took my Feo?”
Richard didn’t think about it. If he had, he never would
have done it. It was as if he were watching someone else’s
hand pull out a pen and a scrap of paper; someone else
scrawling an address to a house in the lower Haight. “Here,”
he said, handing the paper to the man. “The people at this
address—they did this.”
The man looked at the paper, back at Richard, and nodded.
“Vamanos!” he cried, and a small army of Latino men
and boys paraded to the front yard, to waiting cars, armed
with garden tools and baseball bats.