Read Online The Man Who Killed His Brother by Stephen R. Donaldson - Free Book Online Page A

him. The rape laws around here are pretty tough.” That’s one advantage of living in a state where some of the old Spanish traditions and values still carry weight. “We’ll put him in jail. He won’t get out until he’s too old to even think about doing something like this again.”
    She nodded her head once, sharply. “Yes.”
    “Good.”
    I got up to check on the man. He was groaning louder and moving around a bit now, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He was a white dude—an Anglo all dolled up in the kind of cowboy-tourist finery no self-respecting Westerner
would wear. That made him a hit-and-run rapist, the kind that never gets caught because by the time the cops go looking for them they’re already in some other part of the country, bragging about how those “Mex chicks” couldn’t get enough of them. “Not this time, ace,” I muttered at him. Then I went back to the woman and asked her name.
    She said, “Teresa Sanguillán.”
    “Well, Teresa Sanguillán.” All of a sudden, I was trembling—reaction, I guess—and I had to fake a hearty tone to keep my voice from quavering. “I’m afraid you’ve got a long night ahead of you. We’d better get on with it.”
    She didn’t respond. The brief look she cast down at her clothes said more than enough.
    I groped mentally for a second, then shrugged off my jacket and handed it to her.
    Her eyes snagged momentarily on the butt of the .45 under my left arm, but then she took the jacket. I turned my back and went to look for the knife. I found it a few feet away, snapped it closed and dropped it into my pocket. Then I started to rouse the dude.
    While I was shaking him to his feet and she was getting herself covered as best she could, I asked her how she’d happened to run into this clown.
    I liked her—she had spunk. Now that her fear was over, she was just mad. But it was a controlled mad, cold and vehement. I was glad about that, because it meant she wasn’t going to back out on me, refuse to press charges. In a tight, even voice, she told me she worked as a domestic out in the Heights, where a lot of professional people live. She was on her way home to her mother and two younger sisters, but the bus she had to take didn’t go into the old part of town, so every evening she had to walk this way home in the dark. The Anglo had been on the bus with her, and when she got off he followed her, giving her some sort of speech about how girls weren’t safe on the streets alone at night. It only took him three blocks to start treating her like a hooker, and when she gave it to him to understand that he was mistaken, he turned nasty.
    The whole thing made me want to hit him again. While
I was getting him up, I saw his penis still hanging out of his open fly. I was tempted to leave him that way. But on second thought, for the sake of Teresa Sanguillán’s dignity, I tucked him in and zipped him up. Then I lifted him to his feet and dragged him along. The three of us went out to the street.
    In that part of town, you can’t find a unit at night if you go looking for it with a bloodhound. I didn’t feel much like lugging the dude all the way back to Cuevero Road in hopes of spotting a cop or a working phone booth, so we went on down Eighth Street and turned in at the first bar we came to. The few lethargic drinkers in the place looked at us with only momentary interest despite our far-from-tidy appearance. The barkeep knew me and let us use his phone. First I called the cops. Then Teresa called a friend who had a phone, so the friend could take a message to her mother. Then we went back outside to wait. It would’ve been nice to sit down in the bar for a rest, but considering the shape I was in, I didn’t want to stay in such close proximity to all those bottles.
    It was an easier decision than it should’ve been, almost twenty-four hours since my last drink. I was wearing my white armor—knight rescues maiden—which helped. But that was only part of it.