Free Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) by Mark Wheaton

asked as he cuffed Luis.
    Fighting to catch his breath after landing on his stomach, Luis couldn’t remember for the life of him what was in his pockets.
    “No, sir,” he said as the officer tossed his phone and keys into the grass.
    “Those keys to your mama’s place?” Domingo asked. “If she’s anything like mine, she’s going to be pissed , mijo .”
    Luis’s heart skipped a beat. The officer didn’t know how right he was. Sandra Chavez was so furious, she didn’t even come down to the station for two days. She finally arrived with a change of clothes and some toiletries to find her son exhausted and terrified. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had his share of run-ins with the authorities, but those had been school related. When it got so serious that he would have to be expelled, a representative from the disciplinary board had warned Luis there was an 80 percent chance he’d be behind bars within six months.
    An overachiever for the first time in his life, Luis had accomplished this in four.
    Luis was kept in the juvenile wing with several other prisoners who’d been in and out of state custodial care for most of their young lives. They treated Luis as if the beating of his life could come at any second. He lived in constant fear. The only relief came once a day when robbery-homicide detectives Ari Lin and Vincent Coai arrived to interview him. They asked about the robbery, his thus-far-unidentified cohort, and put out feelers about his connection to the Alacrán street gang.
    “Feel free to lie to us and prove to no one that cares what a stand-up guy you are,” Detective Coai said grimly. “Or give us a couple of yeses or nos and we’ll get you home by supper time.”
    Luis did neither. He said nothing for three days, no matter what was offered or threatened. The jailer came for him at the seventy-second hour, and he was released into the custody of his mother.
    “You’ll wish they kept you,” was all she said on the drive home.
    Though confined to his room, Luis was finally able to relax. He slept. He read and reread his comics. He waited. His mother didn’t talk to him even when she brought meals.
    Then there was Nicolas.
    About a year earlier the bishop from the local church—one regularly attended by Luis’s mother and her eldest son, but not at all by Luis—had come by the house. He told Sandra that Nicolas had approached him about receiving private instruction, as Nicolas believed he had a calling to become a priest. His bishop, a pre-retirement Osorio, had asked Nicolas to pray about this for two weeks and come back to him. When he did and asked again to receive instruction, with the goal of one day entering the priesthood, Osorio agreed, pending Sandra’s approval.
    She was thrilled.
    For the next twelve months Nicolas went to school, got even better grades than before, got a job working as a busboy to help pay for divinity school, and spent every other waking moment at church. He’d been a constant presence in his brother’s life up until then. That changed overnight.
    So when a knock came to Luis’s door two days after he’d been home, he was surprised to see who it was.
    “You okay?” Nicolas asked.
    “’Course,” Luis said, shrugging with as much disaffection as he could muster.
    Nicolas looked around Luis’s room, as if he might find the answer there. He finally pushed a few of Luis’s comics aside and sat on the bed next to him.
    “It’s not about letting these people into your life, it’s about letting them into your head,” he said. “Once you hear their voices when you’re about to make a decision instead of your own or, even better, God’s, you’re not living for yourself anymore. You’re living for them. And you might as well be living for the devil.”
    Luis was momentarily struck dumb. Then he laughed in his brother’s face. He didn’t know it then, but Nicolas’s words would be burned into his mind for the rest of his life.
    At the time, though, Luis