Altar of Bones (11 page)

He let the curtain fall into place again, but the fear had come back, like a punch to the gut.

Why was the church suddenly so quiet, so empty? Something wasn’t right—

The door to the confessional box on the left creaked open, startling him. He heard the rustle of clothing, the hum of an indrawn breath. He smelled jasmine, faint and sweet.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession … rather I should say, my last
real
confession, in a church, before the presence of God, was a long, long time ago.”

A woman’s voice, low and quiet, and so compelling he turned toward it to look through the mesh screen, but he couldn’t make out her face, just a hat and a cloud of long dark hair, and he thought,
Okay. You’re gonna be okay
.

“Our Lord is everywhere,” he said, “not just in a house of worship. But I’m sure He’s pleased you are here all the same.”

She nodded and her mouth parted on a soft sigh. “Oh, Father, you are so right. Time is an earthly concept and God is truly everywhere. He sees all. So I guess what I really need to know is, will He absolve every sin? Even the terrible ones? Provided a girl is sorry enough, of course.”

“Would I be sitting in this stuffy, dark little box on such a fine summer’s evening if I didn’t believe in God’s mercy?”

Her laugh was delightful, soft, but something about it was off, as if this was some sort of game to her, a play to act out—and he knew then that he was not okay, not okay at all. Had known it instinctively all along.

He went utterly still. He felt her intensity, felt the impact of each separate word as she said, “I have blood on my hands.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“The first time I killed for him,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken, “I used a knife and it was messy. The blood, it got everywhere and later I showed him the blood smeared on my skin, so he would know what I would do for him, the lengths I could go, how I would kill for him. I think it shocked him, but he also liked it. It excited him.”

Hot bile rose up in Dom’s throat. “Listen to me. You don’t want to do this.”

“Actually, I do. I really, really do. I’ve never killed a priest before,
and I wonder what it feels like.” She sighed. “You know what I’ve come for, Father. Give me the film, and I promise I’ll let you live.”

Liar
.

“Don’t you have it backwards?” Dom was surprised at how calm he sounded now. “As long as I have the film, you can’t do anything to me. Right now it’s hidden in a safe place, but if anything were to happen to my brother or me—”

“Yes, yes,” she said, impatient now. “I know the drill. But the thing is, Father, I don’t believe you
do
have it. Shocking, I know—what with you being a priest and saying as much right here in church, in the presence of God. But then some of you guys have been known to diddle little altar boys in the presence of God. So what’s a lie or two compared to that?”

Dom gripped his hands so tightly together he could feel the throb of the pulse in his wrists. He had to convince her that he had the damn film, had to or he would die.

“Okay, so you don’t believe me, but what if you’re wrong? Can you really afford to take that chance? Imagine the film played in an endless loop on every TV set throughout the country. This man you work for, kill for—it would destroy him. And then he would destroy you.”

She was silent, and he felt the evil in her like a poisonous cloud. The one tenet of his faith he’d always had a hard time believing in was the existence of the devil, until now.

“Do I believe you?” she began to chant. “Do I believe you not? Believe you, believe you not … Swear to me you have it, and I will believe you. But only if you swear on pain of your immortal soul.”

Do it, Dom. Come on, man, you want to live, don’t you?

He felt her move and he raised his head. He saw her hand come up and he sucked in a sharp breath, but in the next instant he realized that whatever she held was too small to be a gun.

Dom heard a click and suddenly his father’s voice filled the confessional: “You better pray to that God of yours Katya Orlova isn’t long dead, because only she knows where the film really is. You and Ry, you’ve got to find her and get it back, and you got to do it fast.”

She shut off the recorder and made a little tsking noise with her
tongue. “You’re a mean man, Father, to go and spoil my fun like that. You see, I planted a bug in your daddy’s hospital room. A very good one, actually, state-of-the-art, and I got every word of his so-called confession, so obviously I’ve known all along that you never had the film.”

She laughed again, and Dom couldn’t understand how such a sweet sound could come from such a depraved heart. “I wanted to see if I could get a priest to swear to a big fat lie and imperil his immortal soul just as he was about to die, but you wouldn’t do it, would you? What a disappointment.”

She heaved a mock sigh and dropped her hand back in her lap. “
Such
a disappointment. Why, you’ve almost gone and ruined my day, Father, and the thing I’m wondering is—do you really believe God is such a stickler for the rules? I mean, don’t you think that once you got to the Pearly Gates, you could’ve just explained that there were extenuating circumstances involved? … No? Well, at least now, after I kill you, if you find yourself in heaven, you’ll know that you’ve earned it.”

He saw her through the mesh screen, saw her bloodred mouth move as she spoke the familiar words of the Act of Contrition, “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee …”

He saw her hand come up again, and then he saw the gun.

Washington, D.C
.

T
HEY CAME DOWN
the hall from the kitchen as a unit, covering for each other, laying down a field of fire. But one of them was still going to have to be the first through that door, and then Ry would kill him. He knew he was going to die, but he damn well wasn’t going to die alone.

Time slowed as it always did in the thickest part of a firefight, when one second felt like a lifetime and every detail seemed etched in glass. He saw the curtains billow from the breeze coming through the busted window, heard the creak of a floorboard in the hall. Broken glass on the shelf above his head tinkled as it settled. His eyes flickered up and he saw—

The grenade
.

He’d stuck it on the top shelf of the bookcase, next to a potted fern—
a souvenir from his first operation in Afghanistan, Soviet-made and at least twenty years old.
Was it still live?

The first guy burst into the room. Ry shot him between the eyes. He reached up and grabbed the grenade off the bookshelf, while shooting the hell out of the doorway. He pulled out the ring pin with his teeth, but kept his thumb down on the safety spoon.

A second guy came through the door, the barrel of his Uzi leading the way, spraying an arc of fire. Ry dove toward the window. Bullets whined all around him, and the whole world seemed to disintegrate into pieces of glass and wood and metal. He let go of the spoon, counted,
One thousand, two thousand …

He slung the grenade sideways, saw it hit the floor and roll. He vaulted over the desk, snatching up the answering machine with one hand and pumping bullets back at the doorway with the other.

He jumped feetfirst through what was left of the bay window, just as the room behind him exploded into fire and smoke and flying shrapnel.

R
Y HIT THE
ground hard. The spike-haired kid came around from behind the pizza van, firing another damn Uzi. Ry shot wildly back at him and got lucky. The kid spun around in a crazy pirouette, blood gushing from his throat.

As Ry scrambled to his feet, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A big guy with a blond flattop and a semiautomatic handgun was darting between two parked cars. Ry fired and kept firing until the hammer of his gun snapped on an empty chamber and the big guy was dead, draped over the hood of a white Prius.

Car alarms shrieked as Ry ran across the street toward the pizza delivery van, cutting the hell out of his bare feet on the broken window glass.

The pizza van still had the key in the ignition. As he drove away, Ry looked back at what was left of the place he’d called home for the last five years.

Dammit. He’d loved that little house.

He drove the pizza truck six blocks to a parking garage, dumped it, and found a car old enough to hot-wire without setting off any more
alarms—an ‘82 Cadillac Seville. Forty minutes later he was off the belt-way and heading for a private runway deep in the hills of West Virginia. He needed to get down to Galveston, needed to find out what in hell was going on, but he had to get off the radar first.

He looked at the answering machine lying next to him on the passenger seat.

Dom
, he thought. He prayed his brother was still alive.

Galveston, Texas

F
ATHER
D
OM FLUNG
himself out of the confessional box. He heard a spitting noise and felt a sting, like the flick of a whip end, across the side of his head.

He tried to get up, to run, but the confessional’s purple velvet curtain was wrapped around his legs. He kicked, twisted, but he couldn’t get loose. He could hear the girl laughing and waited for another bullet to hit him, kill him.

He clawed at the curtain with his hands, heard a ripping noise, and he was free. He ran down the nave of the deserted church toward tall wooden doors that shouldn’t be closed, but were.

The girl’s voice echoed in the vast, vaulted space. “They’re all locked, Father. There’s no way out, but up, up, up and away into heaven … or not as the case may be.”

Dom ran between the pews into a side chapel that held racks of burning votive candles and threw himself at the door that led into the sacristy.

“Ixnay on that one, too, Father. When I said they were all locked, I meant them
all
. I’m efficient in that way.”

He was trapped beside the small altar within the chapel. She came toward him, moving in and out of the shadows cast by the cathedral’s tall columns. She held the gun down by her side now. He still couldn’t see all of her face, just that smiling red mouth.

“What kind of monster are you?”

“What a mean thing to say. I just happen to like what I do. Most people hate their jobs, and I imagine that contributes to all manner of the sinning that you, as a priest, have to put up with.”

Dom watched her come, his mind racing. He could feel blood streaming down his neck from the gash in his head, saw it splatter on the marble floor.

“Whereas I,” she said, “am a purist in everything I do. Like fucking, for instance. And killing.”

“Wait,”
Dom cried. “Okay, okay, you’re right. I don’t have the film, but that makes me even less of threat, not more. Come on, even if I talked, who would believe me? You don’t have to do this.”

She shook her head. “Father, Father. You just don’t get it, do you? But then wusses like you never do. It doesn’t matter that you’re a nice person, that you don’t deserve to die. No amount of pitiful whimpering and begging ever stops people like me. Another gun sometimes does, but then wusses never have guns.”

She was nearly upon him now, walking on her high, spiked heels through his blood on the floor. Dom saw her hand come up. He grabbed the heavy bronze candelabra from the altar and threw it at her head.

She flung up her arms to protect her face. Her shoes slid on the blood, and she grabbed at one of the iron votive racks to break her fall. The flimsy racks buckled beneath her weight, and she pitched forward, right into the rows of burning candles.

Dom ran. He was almost past her when he heard a whoosh and saw a burst of flames out of the corner of his eye.

Her screams, raw and terrible, stopped him. He turned back and saw the straw hat and brown wig burning on the floor beside her. And she wasn’t screaming anymore, she was laughing. Her hair was the red of sacramental wine.

She raised the gun and pointed it at the space between his eyes. “You should have kept on running.”