Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  9

  Galveston, Texas

  OFFICER BEADSLEY 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.”

  RY O’MALLEY 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.

  He staggered, reached out blindly, and his hand got caught in the yellow tape. He ripped it away with a snarl. A bloodred haze filled his eyes, rage and a terrible, tearing grief. The bastards who did this, the bastards.

  I’m gonna hunt you down and kill every last fucking one of you.

  He fell to his knees, wrapping his arms around his belly, hunching over. His eyes burned and his throat felt raw. He wanted to scream his guts out. He hated that he’d been too late, hated that he and Dom had seen so little of each during these last ten years because they’d taken such different paths.

  He hated that he was still here, and alone.

  He slammed his fist into the marble floor, so hard he nearly broke it. But the pain was good—it focused him, hardened him.

  Slowly, he straightened. He looked at the small altar shrouded in black shadows, at a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and the large bronze candelabra to the right of her that looked oddly out of place. As if there ought to be another, matching, candelabra on the other side.

  He stared at the Virgin’s too sweet face for a long time. Then he made himself look at the rest of it. A votive-candle rack tipped over, hardened drops of wax and scorch marks. Blood smears and splatter soaked into the porous marble floor. And something else he still couldn’t bear to look at, couldn’t bear even to think about: the outline in chalk that marked the place where Dom had died.

  It would be at the morgue now, Dom’s body. Inert flesh and bones, organs and trace evidence, but not his brother anymore.

  Not Dom.

  RY SLIPPED OUT the back way through the sacristy door, but he stopped while he was still within the thick shadows cast by Sacred Heart’s stone walls. He ripped the priest’s collar off his neck, drawing in deep breaths of wet, steamy air, trying to wash the smell of his brother’s blood out of his head.

  It helped a little, at least enough to get him thinking straight again. Except for the occasional car that rolled by on its way to somewhere else, the streets around the church looked deserted. But the killers, Ry thought—they could still be nearby. They would have been in contact with whoever planned the raid on his house in D.C., they’d know about his escape, and they would figure he’d have heard from his brother. So they’d also figure this would be the first place he’d run to.

  They were out there, all right—he could practically feel them. Watching the church, waiting for a chance to have another go at him.

  They, they, they … Who were they?

  They’d murdered Dom, and they were trying to kill him, and he still didn’t know why. But he knew where he might find some of the answers.

  Buried with Lafitte’s treasure.

  SO AS SOON as I hang up, Dom had said, I’m going to write down everything Dad said and put it with Lafitte’s treasure.

  He and Dom had grown up in a small Queen Anne–style cottage a block from the beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, an isolated strip of land that separated the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston and accessible only by ferryboat.

  One summer’s day, when he was eight, Dom ten, they were exploring the marshes and sand dunes and they came across an abandoned shack, weathered and rotting. Ry was sure the place had to be at least a hundred years old, but Dom said anything that old would long ago have been eaten up completely by the salt water, and they were arguing about that when Ry’s foot went through a floorboard and into a hole.

  In the hole was a wooden chest, banded with iron, and Ry said it had to be Laffite’s treasure chest. Jean Lafitte, the swashbuckling privateer and spy, was one of his heroes, and one story he especially liked had the pirate trying to help Napoléon escape exile only to end up getting his hands on the emperor’s treasure instead. Lafitte had buried the treasure, so the story went, near his camp on the Bolivar Peninsula, the secret of its location disappearing along with the pirate into the mists of time.

  Dom said a pirate as smart as Lafitte would never bury his treasure in a place where just any old body could stumble across it, and he and Dom argued about that until the moment they broke the padlock with a rock, opened the chest, and found, to Ry’s disgust, not jewels and gold doubloons, but a bunch of moldering old newspapers from the 1930s and a single Indian-head nickel.

  They got good use out of that old chest, though, using it to stash their own treasure, such as cigarettes and Playboys, and later booze and pot and that pack of jumbo-size condoms Dom had shoplifted from Walgreens the day after Lindsay Cramer said she’d go with him to the Ball High School homecoming dance.

  Ry started to smile at the memory, then his throat closed up and his belly clenched against a fresh wave of pain. Homecoming. Home.

  That little yellow house with its white gingerbread trim was gone now, destroyed by Hurricane Ike along with everything else on the peninsula. Mom, Dad, Dom—all of them gone now. The entire O’Malley family was dead, except for him.

  But had there ever really been an O’Malley family, or was that name just another part of the lie that had been Michael O’Malley’s life? For all of Ry’s own life, his father had lived in that little house, making only a so-so living by renting out a small string of fishing boats to the few tourists who made it out to the peninsula. Sometimes, during the lean years, he’d even had to work a few shi
fts down at the shrimp-canning factory just to make ends meet. Bolivar was hardly a place you’d pick to live if you wanted to get either rich or noticed, it was too isolated, remote; the only way you could even get there was by ferryboat.

  No, what Bolivar was, was the perfect place for a killer on the run to go to ground.

  A killer such as his father.

  RY LEFT THE shadows, walking slowly, even stopping once directly beneath a streetlamp to go through his faux-cigarette-lighting routine, giving whoever might be watching a good look at his face. If the hunters were here at the church, he wanted to flush them out now.

  He walked to where he’d parked his ride, a twenty-year-old white Chevy pickup that he’d picked up in a used-car lot near the Houston airport. It was a clunker, but it had the virtue of having come cheap.

  This late on a wet Sunday night there wasn’t a lot of traffic. He needed to get over to Port Bolivar and see if Dom had a chance before he was killed to write down the old man’s confession and bury it as he’d said he would, in that old chest they’d used when they were kids. Lafitte’s treasure. But first he drove around Galveston Island, making random turns and flipping U-eys, running red lights and stop signs. A little ditty from when he was a kid kept running through his head: Come out, come out, wherever you are…. But he saw no sign of a tail.

  He idled at a stoplight on the Strand, a part of town that had once catered to sailors and whores, now lined with T-shirt shops, condos, and trendy cafés. Like that cybercafé on the corner, SIP ‘N SURF in blinking orange neon.

  Ry checked his watch. He still had over thirty minutes before the next ferry, the last one of the night, left for Port Bolivar.

  THE ONLY OTHER customer in the café was a pimply kid, wearing Harry Potter glasses and a T-shirt that said TALK NERDY TO ME. The barista, a guy with a scraggly goatee, acted put out by Ry’s request for a double espresso and a half hour’s worth of access to one of the computer stations.

  In his message, Dom had said a woman called Katya Orlova had made a film of this “big kill.” Ry logged on to the Internet and googled the name. More than eight hundred references popped up. He skimmed through them, but nothing looked even remotely helpful. A dog-grooming business in Des Moines, a Russian gymnast, a Facebook page belonging to a Berkeley coed. Michelle Pfeiffer had played a character of that name in a movie called The Russia House…

  And then he found her. Maybe found her.

  It wasn’t much, just a few lines in an article, for an academic journal, titled “Women Behind the Camera: The Feminist Struggle in Hollywood, Yesterday and Today.”

  Still, the following years saw little improvement in the dearth of opportunity for female cinematographers. Even the few kept on salary by the major studios were rarely assigned directive roles on any major projects. Katya Orlova, for instance, put in four years at Twentieth Century–Fox as second assistant cameraman before her name finally appears in the credits as a camera operator for The Misfits. Other women—

  Outside, a car door slammed. Ry looked up to see one of the island’s horse-drawn tourist carriages roll past the window, momentarily blocking his view. Then he saw a woman crossing the street from the direction of a big, black Hummer.

  He couldn’t see her face clearly through the rain-smeared glass, but he knew she was beautiful just from the way she carried herself—shoulders back, head held high, her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of a swinging, black leather trench coat. Her stiletto boots clicked on the pavement in long, purposeful strides.

  She passed beneath a streetlight, and he saw dark red hair that shone like wet blood. This woman came out of the ladies’ room and she had red hair, and after what Dad said, I thought …

  Ry dove for the floor just as the café’s front window exploded under a hail of gunfire.

  HE ROLLED BEHIND the counter as more bullets slammed into the espresso machine’s big boiler, spewing hot steam down onto his head.

  Ry had his gun out, but didn’t dare return fire. He heard the barista and the kid screaming, but couldn’t see them through the billowing steam. He couldn’t see the redhead either, but she suddenly made her presence known again by shooting up the computer he’d been using.

  He’d been stupid, almost fatally stupid. He hadn’t thought they would come at him in a public place like this, where innocents could get caught in the cross fire.

  She started firing again, pumping bullets into the wooden base of the counter. Ry pushed to his feet, put his arm across his face, and plunged into the scalding spray, through a swinging door, and into the kitchen. More bullets thudded into the door as it swung shut behind him—but from a different gun this time.

  Ry ran through the kitchen, past tables, a baking oven, pantry shelves, a big stainless steel refrigerator. Dammit, where’s the back door? There’s got to be a back door.

  He found it and was through it, standing on a narrow stoop at the back end of a blind alley filled with trash cans, a rusted-out Dumpster, and a pile of rotting lumber.

  Across the alley was the solid brick wall of another building. No door, not even a single window, just a wrought-iron fire escape coming down from the roof, partly unfolded but still too high up for him to reach.

  He was about to make a dash for the street when the black Hummer screeched to a stop across the mouth of the alley. He heard the swinging door bang open back in the kitchen, and he launched himself off the stoop, out and up, and managed to catch the bottom rung of the fire escape with one hand. He jackknifed his legs hard and got enough momentum to pull himself up, just as a bullet slammed into the brick wall next to his head, so close he felt the heat of it.

  He ran up the metal steps, ducking and weaving, while the redhead and a guy in a black-hooded sweatshirt stood on the kitchen stoop. He felt a sting on his neck, a splash of blood. He pulled himself onto the roof, and, thank God, he had a bit of cover for the moment.

  He lay there, his chest heaving, listening. He couldn’t hear them coming up the fire escape after him, and he couldn’t hear any more gunfire from below.

  He ran at a crouch over the flat tar and gravel roof of what seemed to be a converted warehouse, wending through brick chimneys and hooded vents until he found a door. He reached up, twisted the knob—

  The fucker was locked.

  He’d learned a long time ago to always carry a set of lockpicks, but he didn’t have time to use them now, and just then, lo and behold, and about damn time, he heard sirens. But could the redhead have some kind of juice with the local cops, such as some kind of federal badge she could flash at them? Shit, if she did, he’d be screwed.

  Ry wasn’t going to stick around to find out. He ran toward the next building over. It looked like a set of condos, and it had a nice, terraced garden on its roof. It was also convenient that this roof was only a little bit lower than his roof, but shit, fuck, damn, there had to be a dozen feet between them, and it was a long, long way down to the alley below—six stories at least. He might be stupid, but not stupid enough to try jumping over a frigging abyss.

  He heard the pounding of feet on the fire escape behind him. He looked back, caught a flash of red hair.

  He turned and ran and jumped.

  For a moment he seemed to be literally running on air, his legs pumping madly. He’d almost made it across to the other roof when he stopped going forward and gravity won out.

  He just managed to snag a drainpipe with his fingertips. He hung there a second, dangling, and of course his fingers started to slip.

  He lost his grip, but grabbed at the drainpipe with his other hand, got a better hold of it this time. He hauled himself onto the roof and nearly impaled himself on a tomato stake. He looked up and there she was, her wrists braced on the ledge of the warehouse roof, her gun aimed at his head.

  He rolled behind a row of wooden tubs filled with palm trees and came up running.

  The condo owners apparently weren’t worried about anyone coming in through their roof door because it was, blessed Jesus, un
locked. He took the elevator all the way down to the parking garage, then walked down the rows of cars, banging on hoods, setting off alarms. By the time he climbed the steps onto the street, the cars were playing a loud mad opera.

  The Strand was a mess. A half dozen patrol cars ringed the café and one of the cops shouted into a bullhorn, scared that he had a hostage situation on his hands. But Ry would bet only the kid and the barista were still inside.

  Ry pushed through the crowd, trying not to stick out while he headed toward his truck. He’d had the sense to park it a few blocks away, over on Seawall, where he could shoot straight down to the ferry, leaving in …

  He checked his watch. Six minutes, dammit.

  He started to run. He heard someone shout, “Hey, you!” and he looked around. But the yell hadn’t been aimed at him. He spotted the guy in the black-hooded sweatshirt, though, walking in the street with the Hummer inching along beside him.

  He saw the redhead come up the steps from the condo’s garage, not even bothering to hide the gun in her hand. He made himself slow down again, tried to blend in—he knew now she didn’t give a shit if she killed every innocent in the street as long as she got him.

  Dammit, he needed to get to his truck.

  Then, music to his ears, he heard a horse’s whinny. He waited until the tourist carriage rolled up alongside him, then jumped inside, tossing a twenty into the startled driver’s lap.

  “How fast can that nag of yours go?”

  10

  RY STOOD at the end of the pier and watched the ferry’s lights disappear into the night. He listened to the diesel engines die away, then he heard nothing but the lap of water against the pilings beneath his feet.

  He’d missed the boat, the very last fucking boat. After getting shot at, scalded, and almost falling into the abyss, he’d gone and missed the damn boat—