Death of a Pharaoh by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t stop whimpering after the fight and Tony wrapped
his arms around him and comforted him until he slept. That night Tony cried for
the first time he could remember.
    He waited for
everyone in the hotel to go to sleep then whispered his plan to Manuel. They
coated his slim body with some old axle grease they found in a rusty tin can.
Tony held Manuel on his shoulders and he managed to wiggle through the bars of
the only small window. The same tire iron the promoter used to punish Tony now
blocked the door. Manuel struggled but eventually pried it open. They were long
gone by dawn.
    They hitched
rides, slept under the stars and snatched food whenever they could. Tony became
fiercely protective of his young ward and never let him out of his sight. It
took a month to make their way to the border near Ciudad Juarez. A week later,
they crossed over into the United States.
    At thirteen, Tony
ended up in juvenile detention and joined the Border Brothers, part of the Gran
Familia gang. The next year, they sent him to New York to help smuggle
chemicals for Meth super labs. He left Manuel with a Mexican family in Fort
Worth who promised to take care of him. He wired money every month. Tony proved
his worth in no time. They found that his fighting skills made him perfect for
collecting drug debts. Only problem, he wouldn’t kill and he knew that
eventually they would give him no choice. So he quit. He showed up at the
doorstep of a distant relative who took him in and gave him the stability he
had never known.
    Tony’s horrific
experiences made me feel ashamed that I often complained about my powers. Sure,
I had to see terrible things but unlike Tony, they hadn’t happened to me. I
found that if I concentrated on other things, like when you want a woody to go
away while daydreaming at school, I could block out some visions. Still, I
couldn’t walk around without getting close to someone and picking up shocking
details about people kids trusted like teachers, coaches, doctors and
especially priests. Why didn’t they just let them get married already? Some
days, I’d become saturated by the sheer volume of evil. I suspected cops and
social workers got to the same point where they had to disconnect emotionally
or they’d go nuts. My new friends saved me.
    Everything was
down for once in my life and I even looked forward to college or university; my
GPA was actually decent despite my problems. That was until the day I bumped
into Mr. Slomkowski. I had my earphones in and was busy selecting the next
track when I should have been watching where I was going. When I turned the
corner, I barreled right into him and he dropped a bag of groceries.
    “Watch where
you’re going!” he yelled his face flush with anger. He softened visibly when he
looked at me.
    Our hands touched
when we both reached for the same frozen pizza that had tumbled out of the bag.
I recognized the young boy in his thoughts; his picture was everywhere in the
neighborhood and even on the local news after someone snatched him two days
earlier. Volunteers plastered missing posters everywhere with a number to call.
His name was Samuel.
    In the vision, I
saw him tied to a bedpost and he looked terrified. The man was on his way home
to rape and murder him. He stopped to watch a bunch of the junior kids playing
a game of soccer in the schoolyard across the street. I suddenly realized that
he was shopping, just as he had done in the supermarket a few minutes earlier.
Except this time, he was looking for his next victim. I had to stop him but I
was at a loss for what to do? I didn’t know the man’s name or even where he had
the boy.
    On the spot, I
decided to follow him and I’d improvise the rest. He was on foot so he couldn’t
live very far. Seven blocks later, he took a smaller residential street. I held
back and watched him stroll half way up the block then turn into a
semi-detached with a one car garage and blue siding.
    A taxi had just
dropped off an