Free Whistler's Angel by John R. Maxim Page A

dead.”
    “I’m aware of that, Adam.”
    “And you want to talk about my hands?”
    “No, Adam, the subject is not being foolish. I will leave you to give it some thought.”
    His father left him in custody, declined to post bail, and flew back to Europe by himself. While he was in Geneva, and could prove that he was, the brother whom Whistler had hurt the less severely was released from the hospital and vanished. The second brother, whose facial bones he’d shattered, would face months of reconstructive surgery. That one, being kept, was the luckier of the two. A day later, the two drug dealers were found, both suspended from a pipe in their basement. The brother who had vanished was also found dead. He’d been left to bake in the trunk of a car that was parked near the drug dealers’ house.
    The police questioned Whistler to ask him what he knew. That was the first that he’d heard of it. They declined to give details of how the drug dealers died, but the newspapers said that the scene was horrific. They had choked to death after being multilated in a way that was meant to send a message. Whistler could guess what the mutilations were. He guessed that they’d choked on the same body part that they’d used to take their pleasure with Alicia.
    The second brother soon vanished as well, but as far as Whistler knew, he might have survived. His wealthy parents had put guards on his room until they could arrange to have him airlifted elsewhere. They went with him, but they wouldn’t have had much to come back to. Their Brentwood home, where those parties had been held, was burned to the ground in their absence.
    These reprisals, their brutality, had shocked Whistler at first. Well, not shocked, perhaps, but surprised. Of course he knew who and what his father was by that time, but he’d never known his father to be cruel. He’d once heard his father reprimand an associate for maiming, then killing a man who’d betrayed him. “If you have to kill, kill. Don’t get personal about it. Do it quick, do it clean and be done with it.”
    He could not imagine that his father had specified a painful and horrifying death. Not even for what had been done to Alicia. But the twins, who had also watched Alicia grow up, might have had ideas of their own. Donald, especially, had been fond of Alicia. He had built her a dollhouse made entirely of wine corks when she was about eight years old. And as Whistler learned later, leaving people in car trunks was something of a signature of the twins. All this, however, was again just a guess. Neither they nor his father would speak of it again. All his father would say was, “It’s done with.”
    Whistler, at the time, was still sitting in a jail cell. He had, as he was sure that his father intended, an incontestable alibi. But he was still charged with felonious assault, with intent to commit grievous harm. Other charges were added. Another assault. An inmate had attacked him while he was in custody; tried to stab him with a prison-made shank. That time, of necessity, Whistler used his feet and he used his plaster cast as a club. He took a few cuts as he went for the man’s knees. He managed to connect and when he had the man down, he crushed the man’s knife hand with his heel.
    His father, at last, arranged for his bail. His father said he’d try to get the charges thrown out. The complainant had, after all, disappeared and the jail fight was clearly self-defense. The prosecutor, however, would not let him off, but he had a proposal of his own. If Whistler would enter the military service for an enlistment of not less than three years, all of the charges would be dropped.
    Whistler learned, much later, that he could have gotten off. The enlistment condition was his father’s idea. His father had thought that it would help him grow up. He thought that it might also keep him out of harm’s way until the twins, or whomever, cleaned up some loose ends. The attack by that inmate was