Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

Clemente model, 36 inches long and weighing 36.4 ounces, a gift from my high school coach in Rockville after I hit thirty-four home runs in thirty games my junior year.
    I slipped into a nook between the living room and the staircase. The killers could not get upstairs without passing me, and they wouldn’t see me until it was too late. I’d drop the first man with a tomahawk swing and pulverize the second one’s skull with an uppercut blast. I hadn’t crushed a baseball in decades. There was nothing like the sensation of hitting the ball square on its sweet spot, the thud of the wood generating maximum force, the satisfaction of slamming one out of the park.
    Abraham waged war. Abraham was a warrior.
    Joshua laid siege to Jericho. Joshua was a warrior.
    A priest must be a warrior.
    I must be a warrior.
    I couldn’t see the window from my hiding place, so I had to rely on sound and shadow. I heard a scratching noise, followed by a gentle thud. One of them was inside. The short one, I suspected. The second man made almost no noise. He had the first one to help him. The living room was small, and there was only one way to go.
    The night-light cast ghoulish shadows on the wall. The ghouls moved.
    They were upon me faster than I expected. I raised the bat with both hands high in the air. As soon as I saw the first man — the short one — I swung downward with all my strength. My left hand led, but the right arm seemed slow to react — of course it was; the prosthetic lagged — and then it just stopped. In midair. My left arm fought to bring the bat down but it wouldn’t move.
    My prosthetic arm was locked. It had malfunctioned.
    The killer saw me. He jumped back. The taller man with the fedora came into view. The three of us stood there for a couple of seconds, frozen in mutual disbelief. A priest, posing like an ax murderer for a wax museum, and two assassins, silencers attached to the barrels of their guns.
    The short one laughed. It was the deep, resonant laugh of a lifetime scoundrel and smoker, coarse enough to sand wood without touching it. The tall one chuckled like the calculating kind of person for whom genuine laughter was too frivolous. They raised their guns in tandem and pointed them at me, grins etched on their faces.
    Gunshots exploded. The floor shook. Pain racked my eardrums.
    I opened my eyes. I hadn’t even realized I’d closed them.
    The killers lay on the ground, the left sides of their chests riddled with multiple bullet holes.
    Manuel appeared in the stairwell, arms outstretched, clutching a gun with both hands. When he spoke for the first time, his voice had a youthful pitch, but his delivery was shockingly composed.
    “Leave my mother alone,” he said.
    When I saw Manuel’s arms stretched out, I realized how his appearance had changed and figured out what I’d failed to detect when we’d shared a glass of lemonade in the afternoon. His wrist was bare. His father’s gold watch was gone. He’d met the Aztecs to trade his father’s watch for a gun.
    By the time Maria arrived, hysterical, I’d removed my prosthetic arm from the socket and the gun from Manuel’s hands. I’d taken an EMT course and knew how to check for a pulse. I found none in either man. Manuel had shot each of them through the heart. They were dead.
    The rage I’d managed to build receded quickly. A sense of calm fell over me, as though I’d gone on a trip I’d detested and now I was back home.
    If the police saw that Manuel shot two men, he and his mother could be deported to Mexico. After all, he’d shot them with an illegal weapon, and he wasn’t an American citizen. In Mexico, they would die. In America, they would live.
    A priest I knew from seminary lived in upstate New York. He was a friend and kindred spirit. We would create new names and birth certificates. Manuel and Maria would start new lives. No one would know their past. Manuel’s father’s killers would never find them.
    I took the gun and wiped it down with the end of my cassock to make sure Manuel’s fingerprints weren’t on it. Then I fired two shots with my left hand into the wall behind the place where the killers had stood.
    Maria screamed at me, “What are you doing?”
    “Gunpowder and cordite leave burn marks,” I said. “Especially when fired at close range. If the burn marks are on my fingers, no one will bother checking Manuel’s hands. Why would they? It was my gun. I bought it from persons unknown.”
    A siren sounded