by Beau Johnson
Batista punches in the address, his eyes narrowing as the intel comes on screen. He turns the tablet my way.
Jerome Jensen.
Lahey’s direct superior at Kingdale back in the day.
And me without my hat.
“Uncle Jerome?” She’s four, possibly five, and sleepily comes into the living room to see her uncle and Lahey gagged and zip tied. I look to each of them, to Batista, and realize it’s taking everything I had not to kill both men where they sat on the couch.
Batista scoops up the girl. “Come on, sweetheart. Your uncle needs to talk to these men. You show me your room.” She yawns, her blonde head down on Batista’s shoulder before they turn the corner to the stairs.
I turn back to Jensen.
He’s thin, almost gaunt, with receding grey hair and a slight, underset chin. He’s trembling too, same as Lahey, but Lahey would have to wait. I grab Jensen by the throat, push my gloved hand up under and follow him back onto the couch, the blade in my other hand going through his right eye until it’s stopped by bone.
There’s no sound, just a full-body release as Jensen goes limp. Lahey, on the other hand, he begins to have something of a crisis. Not as much of a crisis as the children each of them put in harm’s way, no, but as he would come to understand: the night was young.
Batista takes the child with him and leaves me with Lahey.
“We got lucky here, I think,” he says.
“Did we?” I say but fail to keep the tone from my voice. Stopping them has always been the easy part, far easier once you begin, but the getting here, through the Abrums and the Mapones, the Kincaids and the Ganks, it remained what it was, and lucky or not, choosing to continue or not, the detective would be wise to remember as much.
I turn back to Lahey, the man now down off the couch and into the space between it and the coffee table. Jensen’s body, now at a right angle, becoming a gift that kept on giving, albeit one that continued in ways it could no longer control.
“Funny thing about not lawyering up, Kyle,” I say. “It sends up certain flags. Not just concerning a man and how he might in fact be innocent, but how it can also reek of something not many of us have.”
He’s crying openly now, his eyes pleading every which way they’re able as snot bubbles play hide and seek against the gag. I take a seat on the coffee table. “I’m not sure if you were involved with that house on Kessel Street, the one owned by the Currs, but something tells me you might have been. It means I missed you somehow. Makes me think I could have missed others as well. You see where I’m going with this, Kyle?”
He did. So eager to speak he begins choking on his spit once I lower the gag. “No one. There’s no one else. Please. Pleassse.”
But it wasn’t enough. Been down the same road home to the same dominoes too many times before.
I reapply his gag and start with the index finger of his right hand, his eyes almost coming out of his skull when the pain hits. Four more times and I ask him the question a second time.
“He’ll kill me.”
“Kyle, what do you think I’m going to do?”
It was enough. Or he’d had enough. Either way, he gives it up. And I almost see relief on his face when I bring the knife back out. It wouldn’t last, of course, nor would I make his exit easy, but for one brief moment, I see it as he does, that things were finally close to ending.
I opt to disappoint.
It didn’t surprise me either, not once we get to the end. Edmonds—tanned, well-coifed, in khakis and a red polo shirt—no different than any other “upstanding citizen” we’d come across. Little league coach and neighbor of the year could be added to the tape, sure, but only if it came with an addendum: the man as predatory as they came.
“Man was buried deep, probably why he hasn’t run. A man thinks like that, makes me think he believes he’s untouchable.” What Batista also confirms is the road Lahey put us on: His name is Jon Edmonds. He had something on Jensen. Something big. He’s the one who had the Curr house set up. He’s the one! It was only supposed to be one time.
But it wasn’t one time, some of the recordings going back years. And men like that, I don’t just take them on, I strive to give them a little bit more of my time.
I endeavor to make them see.
“You good? Almost set?” I can’t say that he was, the man only a few minutes up from a ketamine-induced shutdown. It wouldn’t stop the show, no, but I wanted Edmonds aware for it all, even the beginning.
At six three, he stretched almost the entirety of the table. I had him vertical too, strapped at the forehead, chest, and thigh. With a full-length mirror in front of him and beside a camera—a camera much like the one Alex and I found on a tripod in the Curr basement—our exchange was already being recorded.
He tries again to move his head but finds he is unable. Tries to close his eyes but encounters the same result. Leaving him to embrace the only thing I’ve left him—to look on as I unmake him.
We take breaks, of course, but two days in, his body more muscle than skin, and despite the IV and fluids it pumped, he expires as I’m removing the last of his tongue.
I want to say it was enough, but it wasn’t and never would be. It was only what came next and how we went about stopping it. What we do, what we’ve done, it’s not a perfect solution. If I’m honest, it’s not a solution at all. But addiction comes in many forms, and no matter how you look at it, the lesser of two evils, it remained what I needed it to be. What it had to be.
Undeterred, we would not stop.
Back to TOC
JUDGEMENT FROM ABOVE
“Are they fucking serious with this guy?”
They were. Jeramiah knew they were. Didn’t stop him from the path he was on. Me, I wasn’t surprised. Had seen it play out too many times, knowing it was only a matter of time before I saw it happen again. Last time it’d been Batista, Alex, and I, the three of us making our way through a foster agency that had an appetite that ran counter to most mandates and ended with a man named Edmonds. Hiding in plain sight, Edmonds proved slicker than most, little league coach and neighbor of the year circa 2001 being but a few of the credentials this man came to use as a mask. Like many before him, we spend time together, and courtesy of a full-length mirror and non-existent eyelids, he receives a front-row seat to a particular type of reduction, one that for two straight days I continued to implement one epidermal layer at a time. Looking back as I am, I must admit, I wish our time together had been longer.
But this scenario, the one giving Jeramiah fits, though not exactly the same, was close enough to stir these memories.
It would come to involve God, or what some men believe to be God, and it would also reaffirm a truth I have lived by for years: some men, they would always need killing. But others, they required a little something more.
“You may think you can judge me, but true judgment does not belong to you. My judgment will come from above.” Gareth John Kemp. Head deacon of Our Lady of Fatima and current shit-stain within our sights.
“It’s his face, Bishop. You can see it in his beady fucking eyes.” I can’t say Jeramiah is wrong, but what I could was this: the moment he sees the man’s interview, it would end no other way than it could. With one more piece of shit dead and buried in a long line of men who weren’t really men at all—not once you listed their deeds. And be it a foster home, orphanage, rectory, basement, or high-rise, it never stopped. One on top of the other, year after year, secret after secret, recording after recording, the amount of perversion uncovered astounding in ways not many get to see. It included how people like Kemp got away with what they did for as long as they did. They weren’t exactly the same as the man they were attempting to shield, not hands-on, but in time had become a brand of evil in their own right—participants who close ranks and allowed men like Kemp to carry on, the cloak of the church as powerful as the men who believed it would continue to protect them.
Did it
mean we’d be taking on the entire Roman Catholic church?
No. But it ensured the body count had begun to rise.
Our window of opportunity becomes larger due to Our Lady of Fatima itself, as it not only puts up Kemp’s bond but decides to send an archbishop along for the ride. Where Kemp was the shorter of the two men, Baldwin, who resists everything beyond the white Friar Tuck robe he comes to Culver in, was the heavier one. Kemp worked hard to keep his combover intact too, but Baldwin, from what I’d seen of the man, he couldn’t give a shit.
“Circle-jerk started half hour ago. Soon as both lawyers arrived.” We watch from the new van, and toward the setting sun, Jeramiah makes sure my attention is drawn to an inground pool that sat beyond a chain-link fence. It’s surrounded by patio furniture and a barbeque, but he goes on in detail about the pool only, explaining I should take care and perhaps look closer as to how it had already been prepared for winter. I’d say he did this without a smile on his face too, but no, I can’t.
We exit the van.
Walk across a well-lit street and up the sidewalk to a smaller bricked walkway that takes us past two tinted SUVs. The house itself was a two-story split-level, more brick than sandstone, with jutting walk-out terraces on three of its four sides. The church paid its people well, it seemed.
“You think it’s locked?” Jeramiah asks.
“Only one way to find out.”
We enter the house.
“Now, I want us all on the same page. I want us all to understand the reasons we are gathered here today.” They look at me like I’m possessed by the devil. It’s more the Glock and how I’m holding the weapon, of course, but seeing as they were apparent men of God, I adjust to the theme.
Cattle herded, we’re upstairs now, in the master bedroom, the four of them sitting on the edge of Kemp’s unmade bed, Jeramiah and me in front. Behind us sits a wall-mounted big screen and a walk-in closet with its light still on. To our left, a mirrored dresser leading to an en suite bathroom. On our right, the night, dark and starless, coming in through a pair of windows large enough to accept a man.
“Kemp here, he enjoys forcing himself into the mouths of altar boys. He also likes candlesticks shoved up his ass.” The next part I direct at the lawyers themselves. “And the two of you, you may not have had direct knowledge of this at the beginning, but this guy, he’s been aware of the deacon’s actions for some time. Since Hanson Falls, for those keeping score. But the four of you, together as you are, even a smart man can realize what it means.” Silence. All eight eyes sorting through the situation as best they could until the smaller lawyer—blue suit and glasses—finds the balls to not only speak but stand.
“My client—”
It’s as far as he gets, Jeramiah grabbing and feeding the man his glasses by way of his knee before feeding him the wall. Bleeding and wobbly, the man staggers to his feet and Jeramiah, circling, moves in from behind. The remaining three dirtbags watching it all play out from the bed, each of them now fully upon it, their mouths like caves. They watch as Jeramiah hooks into the man’s belt with one hand, the other grabbing onto the top of his jacket. They watch as he takes them forward, speed increasing as the inevitable becomes clear.
He takes the moment. Owns it.
And ejects Blue Suit from the top floor. The man taking on glass and gravity together, the concrete below in seconds releasing skin, screams, and bone in ways it wasn’t meant to.
Jeramiah turns back around, his eyes wild. Breathing heavy, he asks, “Okay, who’s next?”
I end up having to shoot Baldwin in the knee, but even suppressor-equipped, it doesn’t matter. The first attorney’s screams already creating everything we aim to avoid. It made finishing harder for Jeramiah as well, but trooper that he was, he gets the man and his robe up and over the window ledge regardless.
It left Kemp as the last man to go, and up beside him, I say, “Never again. You will never touch another child again.” And then he’s gone from me, the man fighting off Jeramiah the only way he could but Jeramiah proving what he already had. Kemp’s trailing screams cut short when he too hits the bottom of the drained pool.
Not all of them succumb either, Baldwin as well as the second lawyer surviving by way of patio furniture of all things, but as we learn, become quadriplegics in the process. The other two, however, Kemp and Blue Suit, I see the impossible positions they rest at as we head back to the van. How what remained of their faces appeared to be ingesting the concrete with jaws far larger than normal.
No one comes back from angles like that, I tell Jeramiah.
Not even men who believed in God.
Back to TOC
PRECAST AND REINFORCED
Christ, it’s set at seventy-eight degrees in here! How the hell do you even sleep? You mind if I turn it down? Yeah, I’m gonna turn it down.
Okay, where was I? Oh, yes. You and your buds were huge back in the day. Huge! I mean, you being who you were, and then the four of you fucking up the pavement like you did? Crazy.
Not many people know the real reason you ended up eating patio furniture that day, though, do they? Nah, not the story behind the story. Still, you’re here, I’m here, and since that pretty little nurse of yours isn’t due back until later this afternoon, we might as well just get to it, right? I’ll take them wide eyes as a yes, my man. Five years ago, it’d still be your Grace, I believe. Or would a “his Eminence” have been in order? It ain’t five years ago though, is it, Baldwin? Nah, we both know it isn’t. Maybe we go a step further and discuss why you and the big guy upstairs parted ways? You know, contrary to your persistence of the fact?
Oh, you disagree.
I think that means you and I are going to have to count the ways then.
I won’t start with how you ended up in that chair, either. I think we’ll save that little tidbit for later. We’ll start with Hanson Falls. You remember Hanson Falls? Of course, you do. It’s the first recorded instance you—and by you, I mean the entire fucking Catholic Church as a whole—circle the wagons around Father Kemp. Not quite a deacon yet is the good reverend at this point in time, am I right? Didn’t stop him from puttin’ his dick into children though, did it? Nah, not Kemp. But you guys, as I said, you draw them wagons. You secure ’em tight. In time, the whole incident turning into what you and men like you have worked out to a science long before any of those altar boys are even born. Hell, before their grandparents’ grandparents are even born.
And maybe it was money, and more than likely it was, but the bottom line is this: it went away. Life, as they say, going on.
Until it doesn’t. Until Culver. Until your man Kemp is accused of the same crimes again. The man’s track record being what it was, you’d think this right here would be the perfect time for he and you to part ways, but no, not Our Lady of Fatima. Not when the Church has the chance to look like something other than what it didn’t wish to portray.
Your problem, however, is the city you choose to transfer Kemp to. Chance held a part in the coming proceedings as well, yes, but the same could be said of the very men who put you in that chair.
Ah, struck a nerve, have I? Good. But this next part, it’s more of a gift than anything. I mean, can you honestly tell me you never once wondered about the men who did this to you? Who they were? Well, Baldwin, am I the mid-morning intruder for you!
It’ll have to be the condensed version, of course, our time left together being what it is, but I will tell you it involves a man named Rider and how he once had a sister. Like Kemp’s victims, this man’s sister is run aground, raped, and murdered, and Rider, he chooses a route most do not as a response.
He finds help along the way too, men who hold similar type views, and in an art-imitating-life kind of situation, the son of the man who had Rider’s sister killed becomes an ally, and one no one, least of all Rider, saw coming. I know, right? Would suck to be anyone on the receiving end of what those two brought to the table.
I kno
w. I know. A little too on the nose. What can I say—me and subtlety, we’ve never been roommates.
Either way, it brings us back to that swanky chair of yours and how your ass got to be in it. It means we kept tabs, Baldwin, and once we realized you’d been relocated, within our reach, so to speak, particular plans were put back into motion. And I know you know you weren’t the only one to survive that night by the pool, but what I don’t know is if you’re aware that the other guy who survived, that lawyer you brought in to defend Kemp, he ate a bullet last year. Not by his own hand. No, that’d be impossible. But eat he did, regardless.
To my point, it leaves you as not only the sole quadriplegic to remain, Baldwin, but a man who understands that precast or reinforced, poured concrete holds a very specific taste. I mean, I wasn’t there, but that night had to be a shitting-my-pants scenario like no other. And the anger those men embraced, to hoist you and your shit friends up and through those windows—it had to be a special kind of rage.
Anyway, it brings us to now.
And here, my man, is where we are going to change things up some. Most times I do this, I pause right around here to introduce that fella I mentioned earlier, Rider. He’d come in, I’d say a little bit more, maybe leave with a quip or two. Not today, Baldwin. Today there will only be me. And I don’t want you to think I’m some second-stringer either. Nah, far from it. Also, you being transferred to this facility as you were, I want you to know it’s the only reason I’m able to be here with you as I am, opening us all to the opportunity of taking the only thing you have left to give.
Little hint: it ain’t the colostomy bag. Neither this ventilation machine nor your feeding tube. Think harder, my man. Think higher. That’s right, both of them. Your tongue had become a point of discussion as well, and time permitting, it may still occur, but me, Baldwin, I’ve always been a firm believer in leaving them wanting more.