Altar of Bones (12 page)

Northern Virginia

R
Y
O’M
ALLEY
pulled the Caddy onto the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. He was so deep in the Virginia countryside, all he could hear was the wind blowing through the scrub pines. A light ground mist, like old gray lace, drifted past the windows.

He glanced down at the fuel gauge. The tank, barely a quarter full when he’d stolen the car, now hovered on empty. He could add gas to the growing list of things he desperately needed to keep himself alive. When he’d jumped out of his front window, he had all of sixty-three bucks in his wallet and a couple of credit cards, which were now worthless because to use them would be like putting a giant, blinking, neon green arrow above his head.

Dad’s gone, and now they’re going to come after us, because of what he did
.

Well, they had come all right, Dom. But who in hell were
they
?

Ry flicked on the roof light and looked at the answering machine sitting on the passenger seat beside him. At least it had a backup battery, so he didn’t need an outlet to hear the rest of his brother’s message. Yet his finger hesitated over the replay button.

Dad’s gone…
.

Ry felt the pain of his father’s death, hot and deep, and hearing Dom say the words out loud again was only going to make the hurt worse. But it had to be done.

He pressed the button, and his brother’s frantic voice once again filled the night, “Ry? It’s about Dad. He’s dead, and—”

A broken sob, shaky breathing. Then the clatter of Dom’s dropping
the phone, bar noises, and the operator breaking in, followed by that weird bit about a woman with red hair.

More harsh breathing, then, “Dad’s had a heart attack, Ry. Dad’s gone, and now they’re going to come after us, because of what he did. The big kill. I know I’m not making any sense, but I can’t … not over the phone. You need to get down here fast, Ry, and I’ll explain everything—I mean, I’ll tell you what Dad told me, which isn’t enough, not nearly enough. But for now just know there may be people out there who are going to try to kill us. Some red-haired woman, maybe…. Oh, God, I know how crazy that sounds. But if you’d heard him, if you’d looked into his eyes—he was scared for us, Ry. Really scared …”

Dom’s voice trailed off, then Ry heard his brother draw in a deep breath and go on, “God knows when you’ll hear this, and by then there’s a chance they’ll already have gotten to me. So as soon as I hang up, I’m going to write down everything Dad said and put it with Lafitte’s treasure. For now, just know that a woman named Katya Orlova made a film of what he did. She was a professional, from Hollywood, and Dad said she got it all, their faces and everything. But then she disappeared on him and took the film with her. So we need to find this Katya Orlova, Ry, because if any of this is real, then Dad was right—that film’s the only thing that will keep us alive.”

Another pause, then Dom, his voice thick and breaking again: “One other thing, Ry, you know, just in case … I lo—”

But then the machine beeped, cutting him off. It didn’t matter.

“I love you, too, Dom.”

R
Y PRESSED HIS
fingers into his eyes, as if he could push all feeling back down inside him, tamp it down deep. A terrible fear was in him that Dom was dead by now, too. They’d probably hit the rectory down in Galveston at the same time they’d come after him in D.C., and there’d been five guys, at least, in on the raid at his house, each with enough firepower to wipe out a small village. Against guys like that, his brother wouldn’t have stood a chance.

And Dad? A killer? Mike O’Malley had so rarely talked about the
first forty years of his life, before he’d met and married their mother, that it was a family joke. The man without a past. Only that didn’t seem so funny anymore.

As a father, he’d been tough on his sons, but never mean. Yet even as a young boy, Ry had sensed some secret, some interior life, was buried deep inside the old man that he kept walled off with a cold and pitiless ruthlessness. Like a volcano that looked dormant on the surface, but underneath boiled raging fires of havoc and destruction.

“Just who
were
you really, Dad?” Ry asked aloud, and in the old Caddy’s quiet emptiness, the words sounded broken.

He swallowed hard, clenched his eyes shut a moment longer, then forced them open. He had to get a grip so he could think. The first thing he needed to do was get down to Galveston and save his brother.

And please, God, let me not be too late
.

T
HREE HUNDRED MILES
and six hours later, Ry once again pulled off to the side of the road, this time about twenty yards shy of a tall, padlocked chain-link gate. The gate had razor wire strung along the top. A man stood in front of it, his feet splayed wide, a twelve-gauge shotgun cradled in his arms.

Ry opened the car door and got out slowly, his empty hands spread in front of him. “Nice to see you, too, Clee,” he said.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch. Lookit what the cat done drug in.”

The man stood, grinning, for a moment, then he broke open the shotgun and leaned it against a tree trunk. He came at Ry with his arms spread wide, and Ry braced himself. Cleeland Lewis had a cannonball for a head and shoulders like boulders. Ry was a big man himself—six-four and a shade under two hundred pounds of solid muscle—but when Clee’s enormous black hand smacked into his back, it nearly knocked him on his ass.

“Hey, man. Sorry about the welcome party,” Clee said. “I wasn’t expecting company today.”

“You must have one heck of a security system.”

Cleeland Lewis had a shady past and an iffy future, mostly having
to do with the ragged airfield he’d carved here out of the Appalachian wilderness. The small, twin-engine aircraft that flew in and out of Clee’s place did so under the radar, and in more ways than one.

“So you got video,” Ry said, “and what else? You got the place wired?”

Clee’s grin turned wolfish. He waved a hand at the dusty, battered old Caddy. “Let’s just say that if you hadn’t stopped that piece of crap where you did, I’d be scrapping what was left of you off the treetops.”

Then the grin slid away as he studied Ry’s face. “You in some serious shit, bro?”

“Yeah.”

Ry didn’t elaborate, but then Clee wouldn’t expect him to. They’d spent three hellish years together in Afghanistan, running special ops against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They would have died for each other, no questions asked, and more than once they nearly had.

“What you need?” Clee asked.

“Ammo for my Walther, and enough cash to tide me over until I can get at my own stash. Say, ten thousand, if you can swing it.”

Clee nodded. “Better make it twenty. And you’ll want more firepower than just that ol’ Walther of yours. ‘Cause sometimes you got a tendency to overestimate your talents.”

Ry almost smiled. Back in D.C. they’d come after him with everything they had, and he’d not only lived through it, he’d kicked their asses good. Now those fuckers were dead and he was alive, and there was no other feeling like that in the world.

“Also,” Ry said, “I’m going to need a plane.”

“Figured that.” Cleeland Lewis looked down at Ry’s feet, bare and cut all to pieces by the broken glass from his living room window. “Gonna need a pair of boots, too.”

Galveston, Texas

O
FFICER
B
EADSLEY
stood on the top step of the Sacred Heart Church, watching a big man come at him fast from out of the wet summer night. He planted his feet and unsnapped his holster.

“Hey, bubba,” he called out. The guy slowed, but he didn’t stop. The cop’s hand rested now on the butt of his Glock. “You see that yellow tape you just stepped over? The one that says
CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS
?”

“I’ve got a message for the monsignor.”

The big guy was close enough now for the cop to make out the black suit and white collar bands. He relaxed, took his hand off his gun. “Sorry, Father, I didn’t know it was you. I mean, I didn’t know you were a Father. The lieutenant told me to keep out the press and the ghouls, but that it was okay for you all to go on back in. The forensic guys are through in there.”

Officer Beadsley pulled open one of the church’s massive wooden doors for the priest to pass on through, but the other man hesitated at the threshold.

“They’ve taken the body away?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Long gone. No need to worry about that, Father. And the city’ll be sending out a cleanup crew tomorrow, for the, uh … blood and stuff.”

The priest’s face, he thought, looked pale and stark, as if drained of blood. Officer Beadsley struggled for something more to say, but all he could come up with was “We’ll get the guy who did it, Father. We’ll get him.”

R
Y
O’M
ALLEY STOOD
unmoving in the dark, heavy silence. The only light came from a pair of electric sconces flanking the large wooden crucifix at the back of the church, but it was enough for him to make out where more crime-scene tape had been set up around the confessionals.

Was that where it happened, Dom? Was that where they got to you? Ah, Jesus, did you even see it coming?

The only details Ry knew about his brother’s death were what he’d read in the
Galveston Daily News:
Dom had been shot in the head while hearing confession, and the police theorized the killer was a drug addict or homeless person because all the alms boxes were broken and empty.

But Ry knew better. He felt light-headed, almost sick, as he took in the signs of a struggle—pews knocked askew, the empty rings on the confessional door where the curtain had been torn off. Dom had fought back, but what chance did a priest have against an armed professional? Ry’s hands, hanging useless at his sides, clenched into fists because it was already done, over, and he’d gotten here too late.

Then he saw more tape stretched around a small chapel next to the sacristy. His footsteps echoed in the vaulted space. He breathed in the candle wax and incense before the other smell hit him hard in the face. Blood. It was the smell of his brother’s blood, and it nearly drove him to his knees.