Free The Prophet by Michael Koryta Page A

dry but closed, when Chelsea opened the driver’s door and laid a cool hand on the back of his neck. He eased out a slow breath, kept it from shuddering with an effort, but left his forehead on the wheel and his eyes closed.
    “It was five blocks,” he said.
    She rubbed his neck, silent.
    “Half a mile,” he said.
    Her fingers found a knot, kneaded it.
    “Rachel Bond was seventeen,” he said. “Did I know that? No. Should I have seen it? Yes. You would have. If you’d been there, if anyone but me had been there…”
    She stopped kneading, let her fingertip rest on the knot, gentle but steady pressure, like a doctor trying to draw infected blood. Something faded from him and into the touch, but not the right thing, or not enough of it.
    “Seventeen,” he said again.
    “Come inside,” she told him, and moved her hand away from his neck.
    He shut off the Jeep’s engine, climbed out, and followed her up the steps and through the door to see the snakes.

9
    T HE DESIRE TO KEEP calling the police caught Kent off guard, and it was impossible to shake. Every ten minutes his mind returned to it:
Maybe they know something more now. Maybe Salter will tell you. Maybe there’s some question you can answer that they haven’t thought of yet. Maybe you can ask them to confirm that Gideon Pearce had nothing to do with this.
    It was the last part, the ludicrous one, that stalked him with the most diligence, utterly absurd yet utterly relentless. The man who had murdered his sister in the autumn of 1989 died in prison years later, convicted of the crime, and rightfully so. The rational mind reminded Kent of this over and over, but the heart frequently shows nothing but disdain for rationality, and his heart called forth the question time and again.
    Two murdered girls, separated by twenty-two years. How many people had been murdered in this country since 1989? This state, this county, this town? They weren’t all linked. But in Kent’s heart these two were.
    He did not call the police. If they needed him for anything, they would call. Until then, he would serve only as a distractionand a hindrance. So he turned to football, to the best of his ability. They had lost a practice during a playoff week, and while it had been the right thing to do, it was also a costly thing. The team didn’t meet on Sundays, just the coaches, and that meant player preparation would not begin until Monday. Kent’s team was already forty-eight hours behind the opponent. Forty-eight of 144 prep hours gone before they even started. That was the sort of thing that lost you football games.
    The burden of making up that lost time belonged to him.
    At the start of his coaching career, he’d spent hours charting plays and breaking those plays down into percentages, until he could show Walter Ward that he understood an opponent’s tendencies better than the opponent did.
    “They blitzed thirty-six times when the ball was between the twenties,” he’d inform Ward. “But if it was in the red zone, they never brought pressure on first down. Not once.”
    Ward believed in precision, he believed in preparation, but he often dismissed Kent’s detailed scouting reports with a flat smile, altering his own game plan little. If they
just played Chambers football,
he’d always say, things would work out fine.
    These days, under Kent’s leadership, Chambers football meant being the most prepared team in the state. And thanks to computers, the ability to understand your opponent was available in a way it had never been before. The team subscribed to a database called Hudl that was used for sharing game video. It wasn’t a cheap program, but one of the boosters, a dentist named Duncan Werner, covered the cost. Kent loved Hudl. Not only could he easily watch video for every situation he desired, but also the stat breakdown was remarkable.
    Blitzes by field position
was one click away.
Blitzes by down and distance
was another. Want to know the percentage of