Last Man Standing

35

Kevin Westbrook had filled up all his sketchbooks and was now sitting and staring at the walls. He wondered if he would ever stand under sunlight again. He had grown used to the sounds of the machinery and the water running. It no longer affected his sleep, though he regretted growing used to this condition of his imprisonment, as though it were an omen that those conditions would become permanent.

The footsteps reached his ears over the other sounds and he retreated to his bed like an animal in a zoo cage as visitors approached.

The door opened and the same man who’d visited him earlier came in. Kevin didn’t know who he was and the man had never bothered to tell Kevin his name.

“How you doing, Kevin?”

“Got a headache.”

The man reached in his pocket and pulled out a bottle of Tylenol. “In my line of work, I always got some of this handy.” He gave two pills to the boy and poured him out a glass of water from the bottle on the table.

“Probably lack of sunlight,” added Kevin.

The man smiled at this. “Well, we’ll see if we can do something about that soon.”

“That mean I be getting out of here soon?”

“It might mean just that. Things are rolling along.”

“So you won’t be needing me no more.” As soon as Kevin said this he regretted it. That statement could certainly cut both ways.

The man stared at him. “You did a pretty good job, Kev. Real good, considering you’re just a kid. We’ll remember that.”

“Can I go home soon?”

“Not up to me, actually.”

“I ain’t say nothing to nobody.”

“Nobody like Francis?”

“Nobody means nobody.”

“Well, it won’t matter, really.”

Kevin instantly looked suspicious. “You ain’t hurting my brother.”

The man held up his hands in mock surrender. “I didn’t say we were. In fact, if things go okay, only people who need to get hurt are going to get hurt, okay?”

“You hurt all them men in that courtyard. You hurt them dead.”

The fellow perched on the table and crossed his arms over his chest. Though the man’s movements weren’t threatening, Kevin drew back a bit.

“Like I said, the people who deserve to be hurt are the ones who get hurt. It’s not always that way, you know that, lots of innocent people get hurt all the time. I had me enough lessons on that, and looks like you have too.” He eyed the wounds on the boy’s face.

Kevin had nothing to say to this. The man opened one of the sketchbooks and looked at some of the drawings.

“This the Last Supper?” he asked.

“Yep. Jesus. Before they crucified him. He’s the one in the middle,” said Kevin.

“I went to Sunday school,” the man said with another big smile. “I know all about Jesus, son.”

Kevin had drawn the painting from memory. He had done it for two reasons: to pass the time and for the sheer comfort of having the Son of God close right now. Maybe the Lord would get the message and send some guardian angels down to help one Kevin Westbrook, who desperately needed some type of intervention, divine or otherwise.

“This is good stuff, Kevin. You’re real talented.”

He looked at another picture and held it up. “What’s this of?”

“My brother reading to me.”

His pistol on the nightstand, his men outside the room with their own guns, his brother Francis would put a big arm around Kevin and draw him close to his massive chest and they would sit and read far into the night, until Kevin would fall asleep. He would awake in the morning and all the men would be gone and so would his brother. But the place they had stopped in the book would be marked; it was a sure sign that his brother intended to come back and finish reading it to him.

The man looked surprised. “He’d read to you?”

Kevin nodded. “Yeah, why not? Ain’t nobody ever read to you when you was little?”

“No,” he replied. He put the sketchbook back on the table. “How old are you, Kevin?”

“Ten.”

“That’s a good age, your whole life ahead of you. Wish I had me that.”

“You ever gonna let me go?” asked Kevin.

The man’s look managed to cut Kevin’s hopes right to nothing. “I like you, Kevin. You kind of remind me of me when I was little. I didn’t really have any family to speak of neither.”

“I got my brother!”

“I know you do. But I’m talking about a normal life, you know, Mommy and Daddy and sisters and brothers living in the same place.”

“What’s normal for some folks ain’t normal for everybody.”

The man grinned and shook his head. “You got a lot of wisdom in that little head. I guess nothing about life is normal when you get down to it.”

“You know my brother. He ain’t somebody you fool around with.”

“I don’t know him personally, but me and him do some business together. And I’m sure he ain’t somebody you want to fool around with, and thank you for the advice. But the thing is, we’re working together right now, sort of. I asked him real nicely to do something for me having to do with that Web London fellow, and he did it.”

“I bet he done it ’cause you told him you had me. He doing it ’cause he don’t want nothing to happen to me.”

“I’m sure he did, Kevin. But just so you know, we’re going to return the favor. Some folks real close to your brother want to cut in on his business. We’re going to help him out there.”

“Why you gonna help him?” Kevin asked suspiciously. “What’s in it for you?”

He laughed. “Man, if you were just a little bit older, I’d make you my partner. Well, let’s just put it this way, it’s a win-win for everybody.”

“So you ain’t answered my question. You gonna let me go?”

The man rose and went over to the door. “You just hang in there, Kev. Good things tend to happen to patient folks.”