I woke staring up at a light. I hurt all over. I tried to move my left arm. Pain leaped up and down my side. I tried my right arm. I could barely move it, but the pain wasn’t as great. Despite the agony I ordered my feet to move. I heard a groan, realized it was me. I managed to bend my legs at the knee and got my feet flat on the floor. I turned my head to the right and saw wall. I tried to the left. Stephanie sat there with a two-by-four in her massive paws. She lowered it to my knee caps and tapped gently against their apex.
“Lower, or I break them,” she said.
I eased my knees back down.
“He come around, Stephanie?” I lowered my chin and saw the top third of another woman.
Stephanie grunted a yes.
“If he moves, sit on him. Crush every bone in his fucking body.” This woman wore a black warm-up outfit. Lying on the ground, I had a distorted view of her height, but I thought she must be the short woman we followed three nights ago.
“Did they get the other two?” Stephanie asked.
“No. They’re gone. We’ve got to blow this dump in minutes. Priscilla insisted on one last look-through. Stupid. That kind of decision can cost a good unit valuable time and lives.”
Less than a minute later, all six women assembled in the little room. Three of them began rapid packing. Their swift work led me to believe they must have had practice drills. Now I knew how they had moved so fast out of their church hideout.
In all the chaos Prentice did not appear. The little shit had escaped again.
Priscilla had come in last. She and the woman in black stood in the doorway arguing. The others ignored them.
“Your goddam brother led them here,” the woman said.
Priscilla stabbed a finger at her. “Just like you did at the church, Sally.”
“I was protecting you,” the other snapped.
Stephanie stood up. Much to my surprise she walked up to the other two, grabbed them each by the back of the neck, and bonked their heads together.
Both women bellowed and tried to assume defensive postures. Stephanie kept her grip. “They can hear this bitch fit all the way from the Loop. You can fight later. Now get your goddam shit together. We’re leaving in half a minute.” She flung each woman away from her and turned to me. Her bulk looked even more enormous from where I lay. She lumbered over and peered down.
Almost involuntarily I tried to hunch away. I couldn’t completely stifle the moan of agony the pain caused.
“Do we bust him some more, kill him, leave him, or what?” Stephanie asked the room at large.
I surveyed the women, all of whom looked at Priscilla.
“Kill him,” Sally said.
“Not yet. Bring him along,” Priscilla ordered.
Her leadership prevailed. I passed out once during the drag and shuffle as they forced me up to the second floor exit. The shove out the window caused maddening pain, severe enough to keep me from passing out again. Fortunately, I landed on my right side on top of the dumpster. Wildly swirling snow lashed my face as I attempted to rise. The yank from the dumpster into a waiting van was more painful. They tossed me, their sleeping bags, and assorted belongings on the cold metal floor in the back of the van.
I lay gasping for breath, never imagining such pain could exist. I thought playing football in high school and for a year in college had inured me to pain, but this was incredible. Doors slammed. The interior of the van darkened. We began to move. “Back up the alley, not down,” a voice ordered.
“I’m trying,” Priscilla said.
I heard the whir of tires stuck in snow. Where were Scott and reinforcements? Maybe he and Jerry were still hidden in the building.
“Rock it back and forth,” Sally commanded.
“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?” Priscilla snarled.
Seconds of whirring passed. “Get out and push,” came the sharp command from in front. Stephanie and the others piled out. Moments later the van began to inch forward. With them preoccupied, I tried boosting myself to my knees. The upward movement and the rocking van caused me to slip. Grasping my left side with my right hand, I barely managed to keep from screaming in agony.
I heard shouts from outside. Doors flew open. They all piled back in. The van slewed left, straightened, and began to move. Stephanie saw me halfway up, gave me a friendly smile, and tapped two fingers against my left side. I cried out and collapsed in pain.
“What’s that?” I heard through the haze of pain.
“The macho hero wanted more.” Stephanie snickered, then took some rope from around a sleeping bag and tied my hands. From the floor I could make out occasional streetlights. The going seemed extremely slow.
“How deep do you think the snow is?” One of the women in back asked.
“Four inches, maybe more,” came an answer.
“It’s drifting badly,” Stephanie said. “We won’t get far. Where are we going?”
Silence as we all strained to hear from the front seats.
“How the fuck should I know?” Priscilla said.
“Good planning, sister.” Sally snickered.
A small woman in her fifties, who hadn’t spoken before, leaned forward from the third back seat nearest to me. “Where did that kid come from? How come only some of us knew about him? I joined this group for sisterhood, protest, and righteousness, not to cover up somebody’s stupid mistakes.”
“This whole thing has been one stupid mistake after another,” Sally said.
“Then why don’t you go back where you came from?” Priscilla said. “We’re sick of you and your terrorist-expertise shit. Go back to fucking boys and selling out your womanhood. The only kind of pro you are is the kind that walks the streets.”
In a voice that demanded attention Stephanie said, “Where are we going?”
Silence.
She spoke again. “We can worry about political correctness later. Where are we going?”
“The newspaper,” was Priscilla’s curt reply.
They fought about the advisability of that until the van sideswiped what I guessed was a series of cars. Then silence reigned for several minutes. Listening to the murmur of the tires over snow gave me an odd perspective. Priscilla, our driver, wasn’t used to winter weather. She alternately sped ahead, and rode the brakes, slipping and sliding in a variety of directions, often punctuating the more sudden jolts with shouts and curses at opposing drivers. If the snow was continuing to fall at anything like the rate I’d caught a glimpse of, roads that hadn’t already begun to close soon would.
Between bouts of pain, I worried about Monica, sleeping at the paper. Would they find her?
For ten minutes of badgering, Priscilla evaded the answer as to why she needed to stop at the newspaper. It took a near mutiny and a particularly violent jolt and swerve for her to say, “Money. We fucking well have to pay for food and gas, don’t we?”
This brought silence. My head rocked back and forth in a wide groove on the metal floor. Heat from the surrounding bodies, more than the feeble puffs of warmth coming from the van’s heating system, was melting the ice and snow underneath me. The dampness had reached the back of my head and soaked my right pant leg from calf to butt. The snow hadn’t filled in Chicago’s famed potholes. Each rumble over one caused pain to sear through my chest. As rigid as I tried to hold myself, I couldn’t prevent damp, pain, and misery. Any escape was far beyond my capability. I hoped Scott and Jerry had got away in time. Unfortunately, it seemed, so had we.
At the newspaper they engaged in an interminable debate as to who should go inside, who should stay with the van, and what to do with me.
Finally Stephanie said, “For Christ’s sake, let’s take a vote like we always do and be done with it.”
All of them going inside passed five to one. Carrying me along passed four to two. I wished it had lost. They tied a scarf around my entire face to muffle any noise I might try to make. Good thing because, unmuffled, my screams as they jostled me out of the van,
and then up the stairs, would have been enough to wake the ghost voters of Chicago. I only passed out once.
Inside, Stephanie propped me between herself and a wall. I didn’t have the strength to fight her. I concentrated on breathing easily to keep the pain under control.
A major squabble broke out upstairs. I accidentally began an exasperated breath, which came to a painful halt. There were several loud thumps, as of furniture being rudely tossed aside.
Moments later, two heavily bundled figures hurried toward us down the narrow interior stairs.
“What’s up?” Stephanie said.
One of them said, “We quit. They’re nuts. We’re going back to Boston.”
“Stop them!” came a harrowing shriek from the top of the stairs. The two women scuttled out the door.
In the middle of the recriminations, charges, and countercharges, they let slip the fact that they’d found someone in the building. I feared it was Monica. Moments later, the appearance of the bruised and battered newspaper owner confirmed this. They’d tied her hands. Her open mink coat revealed her evening gown draped in tatters on her body. She glared at her captors but gave me a rueful look and a half smile. They shoved her toward me, telling us both to sit. The push tipped her off balance. She stumbled and landed on top of me. I howled in agony. They ignored us and piled into the composing room, which was on this floor. Stephanie stood in the doorway and ignored us. From the occasional crashes it sounded as if they were breaking every piece of furniture in the place. From what they said, it turned out Priscilla was having trouble finding her hidden stash. She complained that in the cleanup after the last break-in someone had moved her stuff.
Our sarcastic terrorist, who talked in an incongruously high little-girl’s whine, voiced mounting contempt and sarcasm at Priscilla’s ineptitute.
Meanwhile Monica, realizing my pain, did as much as was possible with her hands tied to ease my discomfort. She asked what happened, but a snarl from Stephanie put a halt to that.
Stephanie did not move to stop what happened next. A deadly silence was broken briefly when Priscilla and Sally exchanged brutal accusations, and then the fight was on. The smashing and crashing of various objects were the only sounds that emanated from the ominously silent foes.
The brief battle ended in a triumphant screech. “Money!” someone yelled. I guessed the tumbling of a piece of furniture had revealed the hiding place.
Stephanie forestalled any renewal of hostilities by a simple suggestion: “Let’s go.” They almost left without a vote or a debate, but they had to decide what to do with us.
Eventually Monica and I lay together on the floor in back of the van. Priscilla sat in the seat nearest us. Sally took the wheel. In the brief trip from building to van, between bouts of pain, I thought the storm had picked up in intensity. They were in trouble if they thought they could make a daring escape by van. The slipping and sliding on the city streets was worse than before. Priscilla gave directions on getting from Lake Shore Drive to the Stevenson Expressway. I didn’t think we hit speeds higher than twenty miles an hour. My perspective only let me see occasional passing street lamps, lighting the wind-driven snow. It hurt too much to raise my arm to see my watch, but it had to be nearly dawn.
I found that if I relaxed my muscles as much as possible while avoiding any movement, the pain was manageable. This was a hell of a trick. I could do it up to seventy-five percent of the time.
“Priscilla, what the hell is going on?” Monica said.
“Tell them to shut the fuck up,” said the terrorist from the front.
So Priscilla talked, knowing her rival couldn’t leave the wheel to fight. She jerked a thumb at me and said, “Pretty boy here and his jerk lover broke up our last hiding place. I have friends in St. Louis who’ll keep us safe and be able to dispose of the prisoners without any trouble.”
“Can’t we work something out?” Monica asked.
Taking a shot in the dark and speaking between painful gasps, I said, “She and Prentice killed Sebastian. That’s why they kidnapped Jerry.”
“I don’t believe it. What possible reason could they have?” Monica said.
“That gets a little complicated, but I’ve got the time to explain,” Priscilla said. “And since you’ll be dead soon anyway, I don’t mind telling you.”
Monica stared in shock.
Priscilla rubbed her gloved hands together almost gleefully. “It all started when we planned our revolutionary activities,” she said. We got a tirade about the male establishment, patriarchal stupidity, and the evilness of the world in general. “Our problem came when we trusted another man.” She sighed. “Prentice, as you know, is my brother. He and I were close as children. I felt sorry for him. Plus, he agreed.”
“To what?” I asked.
Suddenly the van lurched, swayed, spun. Horns blared and I saw the top of a semi rumble past inches from the windows on the left side of the van. Infighting, recriminations, and finally a resumption of movement followed.
Priscilla said in a stage whisper, “Some people think they know how to lead this group.” She pulled her coat closer around herself.
“What did Prentice agree to?” I asked between clenched teeth. The spin had thrown off the rigidly comfortable position I’d managed to achieve.
“Hurts, huh? Good. You managed to fuck everything up. But not as badly as dear naive Prentice.” She sighed. “He agreed to deliver a package to the chancery late at night. We told him it was a harmless smoke bomb. And it would have been, except Sally, our terrorist, isn’t as good at making bombs as she claims. Still, we didn’t want to kill anyone. If the damn security guard had let the package sit five more minutes, there would have been lots of broken glass, tons of smoke, and maybe a little fire. Unfortunately, he didn’t. More unfortunately, Bartholomew got suspicious of Prentice. The old son of a bitch had a date with Prentice that night. Once a month they had sex for half an hour. It’s all he could afford after scrimping from his pension each month, and at that Prentice gave him a discount.”
She gave a harsh laugh. “Bartholomew had told Prentice he loved him. What a joke. The old fool. Prentice decided to be late for their rendezvous that night. The old bastard went looking for him.”
“The old guy was shrewder than you thought,” I said. “He suspected something, and he knew where to go.”
Priscilla laughed. “Nah. He was lucky. He walked in the front door of Bruce’s as Prentice walked out the back. Bartholomew followed, saw the placing of the package—”
“Guessed the contents of the package or the purpose,” Monica broke in.
“—and ran for home,” Priscilla finished.
Monica said, “He saw the story about the chancery bombing in the paper the next day. I remember how excited he was. Now I know why.”
“Excited and a blabbermouth. He didn’t want to go to the police because he loved Prentice, but he told that goddam Sebastian. Such a fucking goody-two-shoes priest. A saint for our times!” She snorted. “Everybody loved him. Running around listening to people, doing good works.”
Another nasty lurch of the van, and pain shot through my side again. They’d crammed their belongings around me tightly, which kept me nearly immobile, an inadvertent kindness that helped keep me from constant agony. My feet were cold. Dampness had crept further into my clothes. As the trip progressed the inside of the windows had fogged up. I was mostly aware of shadows passing. I presumed the lighter shadows represented passing cars, trucks, or streetlights.
Priscilla talked on. Sebastian had gone to Prentice, told him what he knew, urged him to turn himself in. Prentice, not being the brightest, and Sebastian being one of the smartest, figured the prostitute hadn’t acted on his own. Prentice blurted out enough of the truth for the priest to guess the Lesbians for Freedom and Dignity were behind it.
Priscilla said, “Sebastian confronted me. I laughed at him. He didn’t get mad. He never did. He looked at me with those pitying, priestly, know-it-all eyes and tol
d me if Prentice and I didn’t go to the police, he would.” She drew a deep breath, rubbed her hand over the window glass, and glanced out the opening she made. “We decided to kill him. Poison in the altar wine. Prentice set up for mass every week so it was easy. That altar wine tastes like shit anyway. We get cases of that generic crap the archdiocese puts out. Sally had connections to some groups that gave us arsenic. We put some in the altar wine.”
I’d begun alternately to sweat and shiver. I could no longer distinguish between dampness from the melting snow and sweat from my pain-racked body. I forced my mind to listen to Priscilla’s continuing explanation.
On Sundays Prentice had administered the doses Priscilla gave him. She thought it would’ve acted slower. She shrugged. “I was surprised it took effect so soon. Anyway he died, and we thought we were safe. Then old Bartholomew started up again. The bastard got suspicious. He warned Prentice.”
“So he had to die,” Monica said.
“Not quite then,” Priscilla replied.
Their words came as if from a distance. The pain was all that kept me awake. Each lurch of the van brought me back to full consciousness.
“Of course it was this asshole and his pretty lover who screwed things up.” She aimed a kick at me. The sleeping bags and other paraphernalia piled around me spoiled her aim. She missed my ribs, but the jolt to my side was almost as bad. I gasped for air for several minutes.
She explained that our snooping around had worried them. Our relationship with Bartholomew, especially his trust in us, had caused them to take action. They had wanted to avoid killing him, thinking that another death in the group at this time would be too suspicious.
“Him and his buddy”—she jerked a thumb at me—“convinced the old son of a bitch they really cared for him. Bartholomew began to talk about telling them. He got brave enough to threaten Prentice and me together. He had to die.”
Prentice had lured him to the trap at Faith headquarters. They started the fire at the front and back downstairs exits.
The Only Good Priest Page 17