Mortal Sin (29 page)

She sat beside him in miserable silence, and Rio turned on the radio and proceeded to ignore her the rest of the way home. When he pulled up in front of the old industrial building that housed his loft apartment, a black Camaro waited at the curb. When she saw the man leaning against the driver’s door, Kit’s stomach muscles clenched. She’d met Rio’s friend Gonzales before, and he reminded her of a greasy, slicked-up gigolo. All that ridiculous gold jewelry. And the way he looked at her, with those hard, cold eyes, gave her the creeps.

“What’s he doing here?” she said.

Rio turned off the ignition and released his seat belt. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m about to find out.”

They both got out of the car, and Kit waited on the sidewalk while Rio conferred with Gonzales. Then both men approached her. “We have business to discuss,” Rio said. “Gonzales is coming upstairs for a while. You’ll have to make yourself scarce.”

While they rode up in the elevator, Kit avoided making eye contact with Gonzales. She didn’t like this, but what choice did she have? It was Rio’s apartment, not hers, and he called the shots. All of them. She was getting a little tired of Rio calling all the shots.

He unlocked the apartment door, then patted her on the bottom. “Run along like a good little girl. Go to bed or something. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

She hated being sent to her room like a child, but it beat the hell out of pretending to be a gracious hostess to that gorilla Gonzales. Kit shut herself in the bedroom and changed into her pajamas. She’d just turned down the bed when she heard Rio’s explosion from the living room. Whatever Gonzales had told him, it hadn’t gone over well.

Curious, she tiptoed to the door, opened it a crack, and stood there listening. “How the fuck does he know who I am?” Rio fumed. “There’s no way he could know she’s with me. I’ve been so damn careful. No way!”

“Looks to me like somebody blabbed.”

“Nobody knows she’s here! Why the hell do you think I’ve kept her locked up and out of sight? Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Mildly, Gonzales said, “You want me to take care of it?”

“You were supposed to have already taken care of it.”

“You told me to give him a warning. You wanted him roughed up, you should’ve said so.”

“I thought a warning would be enough. He’s a freaking priest. They’re not supposed to be pushy. He should have backed off. Any other priest would have.”

“Doesn’t look to me like this one’s planning to back off,
amigo
. Not until he finds the girl.”

Kit’s heart began to beat double-time. This priest they were talking about was looking for her? She didn’t know any priest. That could mean just one thing. Aunt Sarah hadn’t given up on finding her. Rio had lied about that, too.

“Take care of him,” Rio said in a tight, controlled voice.

A shiver ran down Kit’s spine. “Permanently?” Gonzales said.

There was a long pause before Rio said, “Christ only knows how many of these flyers he’s put out on the street with my name on them. If we kill him now, the cops are apt to put two and two together and start sniffing around, looking for me.”

“Maybe it’s time to get rid of the girl. Women are seldom worth it,
amigo
. In the end, they all become liabilities.”

“Not yet,” Rio snapped. “I’ll get rid of her if and when I decide it’s time.”

“Hey, you’re the boss,” Gonzales said. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Work him over,” Rio said. “Work him over real good. Make the sorry motherfucker wish he’d never been born.”

Silence blanketed the church. At this time of night, there was no clattering of computer keys from the parish office in the north wing of the building, no distant whine of the ancient Electrolux that Dave ran twice weekly over all the carpets. Just a profound silence broken only by his own thoughts.

Clancy moved soundlessly toward the altar, lit a candle and spent a few moments in prayer. Hands braced against the smooth surface of the altar table, he opened his eyes and looked out over a vastness of crimson carpet and oak pews. He’d grown up here, had sat in one of those hard wooden pews every Sunday morning of his childhood, awed by the mystical powers held by the priest, the earthly incarnation of a God too gigantic and too powerful for a young boy to comprehend. Now, as a grown man and a priest, he still didn’t understand the immensity of God’s love. Now he was the one who carried that mystical power, and he never failed to be both humbled and honored by the privilege.

He loved it all. Loved the God-given power he held in his hands to guide men’s souls. He loved the stirring beauty and drama of the Mass, loved the pomp and circumstance and the familiar, comforting rituals. Loved the candles and the music, the sense of purity, even the vestments that changed according to season and function. Here, within the cavernous sanctuary that was Saint Bart’s, with the voices of two hundred souls rising to a ceiling as vast as the universe, he always found peace. He never felt closer to God than he did here, on a Sunday morning, as he led his flock in prayer. His faith was rock-solid, unshakable.

But the flesh was weak. He was living with one foot in the Church, the other in the secular world, and it was tearing him in two. Sarah and Kit were taking up all his time, all his thoughts. His part-time search for a missing girl had turned into a full-time obsession that was cheating his parishioners of his time and energy. And the situation with Sarah was getting out of hand. His duty as a priest was to lead his flock in the paths of righteousness, a duty that simply could not coexist with wining and dining a beautiful woman.

If I wasn’t impressed with you already, sugar, I wouldn’t be sitting here.

It was time to break things off with her. He’d allowed the attraction to go too far, allowed himself to believe in its innocence because that was what he wanted to believe. He’d thought himself capable of a friendship with a woman, but he’d grown far too comfortable with her, far too intimate. He’d begun dreaming about her, dreams that were disturbingly sexual in their nature. Before it went any further, before one or both of them got hurt, it was time to disengage.

He wouldn’t stop looking for Kit. That was a given. The girl was in trouble, and if he gave up on her, he’d never be able to live with himself. He’d keep searching until he found her. But the relationship with Sarah would have to end.

He had a five-day retreat coming up next week, and Bishop Halloran had made it clear that his attendance was mandatory. The retreat would afford him the opportunity he needed to clear his head and realign his priorities. While he was there, he would pray for the strength and the wisdom to find the right words to say to her. Somehow, he would make her understand he was withdrawing from their friendship not because of her, but because of his priesthood. Somehow, he would make her understand the inherent difficulty in a Catholic priest attempting to maintain a platonic relationship with a woman whose nearness made him ache deep inside.

He’d just stepped away from the altar when he heard a noise coming from the north wing of the church. He felt a prickling at the nape of his neck. Had he locked the door behind him when he came in? Or had he forgotten because he was in his usual state, his mind a million miles away from where it should have been?

It was probably nothing. A tree branch scraping against the side of the building. The closing of a car door out on the street. He moved stealthily along the dark, carpeted corridor that ran between the sanctuary and the wing housing the parish office. Light from the parking lot spilled through a window onto Melissa’s desk. Except for the computer and a black mesh cup that held writing utensils, the desktop was empty, smooth and shiny in the bluish light. A hushed bubbling sound came from the fish tank in the corner. The fish hovered, motionless, their fins swaying gently in the wake from the bubbler.

The door to his study was closed. That was odd. He was sure he’d left it open earlier. Clancy grasped the doorknob, cautiously opened the door, and stepped across the threshold.

He never saw it corning. Some hard object slammed into the back of his head with such force, his vision went red. Before he had time to react, he was hit again, this time across the shoulders, and he went down like a fallen oak.

Need to get up. Need to fight back.

But he was incapable of moving, incapable of thinking. His attacker crouched near his head, gagging him with the scent of cheap aftershave and affording him a first-rate view of a pair of shiny black boots with pointed toes. “We tried to warn you,
amigo”
the shadow said, “but you didn’t listen. This time, you listen.”

He knew that voice, understood now why they were here.

He tried to open his mouth to retort, but his mouth, like the rest of him, no longer seemed connected to his brain.

The first kick landed square in the middle of his diaphragm. White-hot pain shot through him, and all the air left his lungs. He gasped for breath, struggled to crawl away, but his limbs were incapable of following the instructions issued by his brain. Helpless, he lay on the hard, cold floor while they kicked him in the abdomen, the kidneys, the face. One well-placed kick to his nose brought a screaming pain that reverberated and magnified inside his head and sent a rush of tears to his eyes. He wet his lips, tasted his own blood. Cold fury enveloped him, fury at their audacity, fury at his own helplessness as he lay here and waited for them to kill him.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

But they didn’t kill him. Instead, when they tired of the game, Cheech knelt by his side again. “Just in case you were wondering, padre,” he said casually, “this is your last warning. We have to come visit you again, we kill you. And if you go to the cops, we kill the girl. Just think about how pretty she’ll look with her throat slit.”

Cheech turned and spoke a couple of words in Spanish to the other man, and they left silently, wraithlike, the scent of cheap aftershave lingering in the air behind them.

He wasn’t sure how long he lay there. It seemed to take forever to regain his breath. When he finally did, he hauled himself to his knees, struggled to his feet, and landed heavily on a chair. His ears were ringing, and his ribs felt like they’d been trampled by an antelope. He rubbed his temple and his hand came away bloody. Stupidly, like a movie running in slow motion, he looked down and saw that the front of his shirt was saturated with blood. It still flowed from his nose at an amazing rate, fat crimson drops that left a dark, wet spatter on the carpet.

He rose on shaky legs, swayed a bit before he got his bearings. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to cross the room, one laborious step after another. He snatched a fistful of tissue from the box he kept on the corner of the desk and pressed it against his face. Wincing at the contact between soft tissue paper and a nose that felt as though it had slammed into a concrete wall at eighty miles an hour, he wondered if there were some limit to the number of orifices through which a man could hemorrhage before he bled out and died.

He stumbled to the door. Outside, it was raining, a soft spring rain that seeped through his shirt and left dark blotches on the tissue box clutched in his hand. Like some aged sot, he walked with an unsteady gait to his car, parked in the shadows of the rectory. For an instant, he leaned against the door, folded his arms on the roof and rested his aching head on them. He tried to remember whether he’d locked the church, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember walking out the door. He’d been inside, then he’d been out here, in the rain, with no memory of how the transition had taken place.