Saint Homicide (Single Shot) (6 page)

Chapter 7

She stared at me, somehow neither surprised nor terrified. She simply regarded me as a fact, like something blocking her path.

I edged out a shaky “I came to find you.”

“Why?”

“To take you home.”

“Mother sent you after me in the middle of the night.”

“Yes.”

“And you tracked me all the way here.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not going back,” she said. “I left for a reason.”

“Why?”

I’d known her since she was twelve years old, but now she spoke to me as she never had before—as one adult to another. And not as relatives, either—more as former associates whose dealings had already concluded. “It’s not really any of your business, Daniel.”

“I can’t believe you’d do this,” I said. “Leave your mother, Jennifer, me. To go where?”

“Like I said, I have my reasons and I have my plans and they’re none of your business.”

“What about Jennifer?”

“Jennifer knows.”

“She knew you were planning to run away?”

“I didn’t
run away
. I left. Those are two different things. And, yes, she knows I left. I talked to her. Which you obviously didn’t, did you? And neither did my mother. Of course not.”

“You need to come home,” I told her. “You think that going off with this boy will make you happy but it won’t. It won’t. Only God can heal what’s broken inside of you.”

She smiled hatefully. “Do you hear yourself, Daniel? Of the two of us, I’m not the one with the romantic illusions. I’m not the one who thinks that one day everything’s going to be put back together again.”

“I wouldn’t know what to believe in if I didn’t believe in the promises of God,” I told her.

“See,” she said “that’s your problem. If you say you don’t believe in anything except an invisible man in the sky, then what you’re really saying is you don’t believe in anything.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I hadn’t given any thought to this moment. I’d just assumed she’d return home with me.

She glanced at the woods. “Did you just come from the woods?”

A roar went up from the building. Smoke seeped through its doors and couples slowly trickled out.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“This is the final round.”

“I see.”

Lynn slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She searched my face until I was uncomfortable and then she asked, “You
were
in the woods, weren’t you?”

I couldn’t face her, so I looked back at the barn. A young man, overweight and bald, was leaning against the door smoking a cigarette. “I was down there,” I told her.

“You saw me? Just now, in that truck?”

“Yes.”

She thought about that for a minute and stretched her back muscles, rotating her shoulders. “Well,” she said finally “you have anything you want to say?”

“No.”

“Am I going to hell?”

“I don’t know.”

She moved closer to me, seeming to feel my weakness and gain strength from it. “What’s wrong with you? You’re not acting like you.”

I stepped back. “What do you mean?”

“You’re always so sure, so annoyingly sure. I thought you knew everything there was to know about everything.”

“Maybe you’re right, Lynn. Maybe I don’t know anything.”

She shook her head as if she’d encountered a former millionaire begging for change on the street. I looked back at her and something terrible trembled to life in my body, like it had in the video store, like it had in the woods. It scared me.

Lynn watched me. She smiled condescendingly, as if she knew more about me than I would ever know about myself. It made me want to slap her.

“Oh my god,” she said. “You…you want to fuck me right now, don’t you?”

I looked at the dirt.

She said, “Did you always want to?”

“No.”

“Why now?”

“Does it matter why now?”

“I guess not.”

I looked back up at her.

Her eyes narrowed. Almost angrily, she said, “You want to go over to the woods with me?”

I couldn’t tell if it was an offer or an inquiry or a taunt. “I don’t know.”

She reached over and touched the back of my hand with one finger. The sensation swept over me like clothes falling off. She didn’t seem attracted to me, though. For her it was something else, like an experiment.

“Tell you what, Daniel. How about you and me go down to the woods?”

I said, “What about Randall?”

Lynn moved closer to me. “Randall’s fine.”

I nodded. The muscles in my thighs quivered as if they were overburdened with new weight. My body felt like a jumble of pieces barely holding together.

“You want to go down to the woods with me?” she asked softly.

Up by the barn, the young man in the overalls watched us, obviously listening for my reply. I turned away from him and said, “I think so.”

Lynn took my hand. Her hand was smooth and warm. “Come on.”

She led me down toward the end of the row, to a place in the shadows. The ground was uneven and dark, and her hand felt wrong in mine. I looked back up the long row of cars. Everyone was inside. We were alone.

I turned and she leaned against the car, moonlight shimmering on the windshield. She asked, “What do you want to do?”

“What do you mean?”

She rubbed her face. “Shit, I never thought I’d be explaining this stuff to you.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“You want to get in the car with me?”

“No.”

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Of God?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She sighed and crossed her arms. “I just never thought a whole lot about it. And now I’m not worried about it, I guess, because you’re here. Since my father died, you’re the only person who told me what to think about God.”

“Apparently, I didn’t do a very good job.”

She glared at me. “That’s not very nice.”

“I guess not.”

“You got something to say to me? You want to preach me a sermon?”

“No.”

“Good, because I don’t need that bullshit.” Her voice grew harder and gathered momentum like a rock tumbling down a hill. “You think you know all about my life, but you don’t. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“You’re right, I don’t. I’m sorry.” She nodded and seemed to be calming down, but something made me add, “I’m just saying, this isn’t any way to live.”

She sprang off the car. “Fuck you. Fuck you for saying that. You know what your problem is, Daniel? You believed everything my father ever told you. And you think if you can just
believe
enough, then everything will be okay. But it won’t. Trying to save babies. Running after me. Why don’t you try to save yourself for a change? Why don’t you try working on yourself?”

She started to leave, but I grabbed her arm. I just meant to stop her, but when my fingers closed around her elbow, something horrible roared to life in me.

Years later, looking back on this, my most shameful moment, I can only conclude that Satan took control of me. I let the Devil get a foothold.

She yelled, “Let go!”

I jerked her back and she tried to slap me, but I caught her hands and wrestled her to the ground. She screamed, but I pushed up on her jaw with my palm and shifted my weight onto her pelvis. The more she fought the madder I became.

“Shut up,” I said. “Shut the fuck up.”

I tore at the belt on her jeans. She jerked her head away and my hand slipped loose from her jaw and she screamed again.

When I tried to clamp her mouth shut with both hands, she kneed me in the groin. My entire body collapsed in the middle.

I dragged myself away from her as she scrambled to her feet.

Then footsteps thudded toward me and something hard smashed into the back of my head.

“Motherfucker,” a man grunted. He stomped on the back of my legs and pulled me up by the hair. Moonlight glanced off his bald head just before he struck me in the face with a barrel of a handgun.

I fell to the ground and felt Lynn’s boot in my stomach. I gave up. I lay there bleeding at their feet.

Lynn shoved the young man. “Where the fuck were you?”

“I was back there,” he said. His voice was surprisingly high. “I was too far back, I guess. You okay?”

Her whole body seemed to rise and fall with each heavy breath she took. She glared at me.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “Please don’t…don’t tell Jennifer. It would kill her.”

“Shut up. Don’t you ever say my sister’s name.”

Randall took her hand. “C’mon, Lynn. Let’s go. We got enough money to leave on, now.”

She wiped dirt from her face and said, “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

They walked away, but after a few steps Lynn stopped.

She came back, and I covered myself because I thought that she was going to kick me again. Instead, she leaned over me.

“Now I know why she hates you,” she said. “You never see anybody else.”

Then she went back to him and they got in the car. As they bumped across the field, more people began drifting out of the barn, silhouetted figures in the doorway following shadows into the moonlight. Cars started. Trucks pulled away. It was ending.

Just up the hill, a navy pickup truck with a rusty cage in the back appeared from behind the barn and drove to a small clearing further into the woods, its headlights seeming to open a tight circle of trees beneath the starless sky. Inside this small enclosure, the vehicle stopped and backed up, its sickly red taillights illuminating a backhoe parked next to the edge of a deep pit. Men got out of the truck. Piled to the top of the cage in the back were the remains of the fallen dogs. The men threw open the cage door and watched as bodies thudded into the pit.

I turned away and ran all the way back to my car.

Chapter 8

             
As I neared the highway, warm in my own car, my inclination was to take the turn towards home. My body, cold and damp, shuddered beneath my bloody clothes. But something stopped me from returning to my house.

How could I go back there? What would I say to Jennifer, to Karen? How could I ever tell anyone about what had happened?

I slept in the park that night. It rained, and the black trees thrashed the gray sky for hours as I curled up tight and listened to frigid raindrops splash against the roof of the car.

Millions of them, splashing all night long.

I thought of the millions of babies who had died over the last few decades. Oddly, thinking about them calmed me, as it almost always did. Truly reflecting on an atrocity can be a clarifying experience. You know where you stand in relation to evil. Horror clears the mind of conflict, seizes the imagination, and demands action.

I was never good with babies. You probably don’t know that about me. Given what I’ve done for the unborn, most people naturally assume that I’m good with children. But I never was. They cry and make me nervous. I’m nervous enough by myself.

Perhaps the Lord put the responsibility on me to protect them
because
He knew I didn’t like them. When I’d see a baby I could only think about what He wanted me to do, that same thing that my unbelief had long screamed at me not to do. Two voices in my head…no, it was the same voice, my voice, but each time the voice would point out a different aspect of the situation. The unbelief  would tell me it was wrong, that killing was wrong and killing a man was as wrong as killing a baby.

But then the Lord said, I am the Lord your God. I’m telling you to go save those babies. Whatever you think is right doesn’t really matter.

And, of course, He was right. Alone and forsaken in my car after a night of failure and disgrace, I watched the rain and realized that I was Jonah in the whale. I’d been running from the one thing I was always bound for. While I was getting into fights about stickers and trying to save an unsavable, wicked whore, that abortionist was killing babies.

I was so filled with shame at this realization that I felt ready to burst.

One person can’t speak for another, of course, and I can only imagine the lies the Devil must tell in order to turn a man into a butcher of unborn children. I don’t envy that man his Judgment Day. That’s his to answer for.

But that night it finally occurred to me that I had to answer for mine.
What are you going to say at Judgment?
I wondered.
That you had more sense than to do that which He gave you to do?
There is a way that seems right to man but which in the end leads to destruction. Those are words from the Bible, but I’d never thought much about them until that night. God blindfolds us and spins us around and then demands we walk in a straight line. I think the only way you can walk that line is to take Him by the hand and let Him lead you. We want so much out of God, but in the end there’s only one thing He really wants from us.

Obedience.

*

When the sun woke me in the park the next morning, birds sang in the trees. A little pond sat close by, and steam wafted off it as if it had been freshly created. While the birds sang, I bathed myself in those waters. The sun shone through gray clouds and even though it was quite cold, I felt warm. I wrapped my clothes around a rock and sunk them to the bottom of the pond. Naked, I climbed into the car and drove to Karen’s house.

She would still be sitting with Jennifer at our home, so I let myself into her house with the spare key she hid on the top of a tall post at the corner of the back porch. I stopped in Lynn’s bedroom, looked at her unmade bed, its sheets twisted together like a coil of snakes, and thought how sad it was that some people never see beyond this world of flesh.

I walked down to Karen’s room. I found Brother Peter’s old clothes still hanging neatly in the closet. I dressed in the black suit he wore when he preached funerals. Then I searched the top of the closet until I found his little silver pistol. I had to rummage around for the clip, but I found it in Karen’s dresser under some shirts. I made sure it was loaded and slipped it in my pocket.

I thought about going to see Jennifer one last time. I knew I would never see her again in this world. But I decided against it. I saw no reason to delay my task. There was nothing I could think to say to her that would not be better said in heaven.

*

The death clinic wasn’t open yet, so I sat down in the damp ditch behind the lot and waited. While I waited, my mind was
calm and empty.

I heard a car drive into the parking lot. I looked over the edge of the ditch and saw a black woman in blood-colored nurse’s scrubs get out of a maroon Mazda. I sat back down and listened as she unlocked the door of the clinic and start pressing buttons to turn off the alarm. After she went in, a security guard I had not seen before drove up. He was a black man carrying a large cup of coffee and a newspaper. A few minutes after he walked inside, a white woman drove up. Skinny, with short curly hair and bad skin, she was, I think, the nurse I’d seen the day before.

Fifteen minutes later, the BMW drove up.

To that point I’d not been scared at all. Not all morning. But fear seized me when he finally appeared. I lay against the muddy edge of the ditch. My hands shook. I felt the unbelief prodding me,
Don’t do this!
I heard him shut off the car and open his door. I looked straight up at the sky crowded with smooth gray clouds drifting along like the bottoms of battle ships. I heard his shoes on the pavement.

Don’t, Daniel!

He dropped his keys on the asphalt, and I peeked over the ditch and watched him bend over and pick them up. When he straightened up he grunted and rubbed his lower back.

I shook, and my throat was dry.
Lord, I do believe
, I prayed.
Help my unbelief
.

Then, very clearly it came. He said,
Stand up. Shut out the unbelief and believe. Believing is doing. A faith without works is dead, and this is the work I’ve given you.

I closed my eyes. When I was seven and standing in the pew beside my father, I had felt God calling me down the aisle to be saved. I asked Father to go down with me, but he shook his head and said, “You must go alone,” and so I crept out of the pew and walked past the other adults and prayed with the preacher. That was what this was. It was terrifying because it was abandonment, but it was abandonment
to
Him, and it was the purest feeling on earth once you did it.

I stood up.

The abortionist saw me. He was holding out his keys to turn on his car alarm. When he saw me, he did not immediately put together what was happening. He looked down at his car as if—just for the briefest of moments—he thought I might be there to steal it. Then he saw the gun.

I walked toward him, and he dropped his keys and turned around.

Just walk down the aisle.

He started running for the building, and I raised the gun level with his back and pulled the trigger, and the crowded sky seemed clearer than it had ever been, so clear that it opened to what was above it in the Heavenly realms. I could see the Lord’s Throne surrounded by all the saints of all the ages, and I saw angels beautiful and singing like those birds at the pond, and in the middle of all of it was God Himself, looking down on me, smiling and saying,
Well done Thou good and faithful servant
.