Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

by Lee Child

  When I got to the rectory, I locked myself in my room and prayed for her and her son’s health and salvation, and for the strength to keep my vows. As I prayed, it occurred to me that if Maria knew who was responsible for her husband’s death, she and her son might be in constant mortal danger.

  By 11:00 p.m., the lights were off in Maria’s and Manuel’s rooms. The prosthesis on my leg is a transfemoral one, commonly known as an AK, because the leg was replaced above the knee. It also uses a myoelectric, battery-powered device that works with a time lag. I have to put on additional socks intermittently because the fit fluctuates during the day. I was taking off the last pair in preparation for my nightly stretching routine when I heard a car door close.

  My bedroom sits atop the living room at the front of the rectory. I peeked through the curtain and saw a Lincoln Town Car parked across the street. I assumed it was a livery car — no one actually buys a Lincoln Town Car — and looked around to see if some well-heeled party animal was taking a leak along the fence after a night of drinking at Black-Eyed Holly’s up the street. I didn’t see any such person.

  Instead, a man got out of the driver’s side. He was short and squat and dressed in a suit. He was looking toward the church when a second man appeared in my line of sight, coming from beneath my window, presumably from the steps to the rectory. He was tall and lean and also dressed in a suit, with a fedora on his head. The tall man went to the car, where the short man whispered something to him. Beneath the light of the streetlamp in front of the house I could see their dark complexions. It occurred to me that while no one bought a Lincoln Town Car, people did rent them. At airports. When they were in town on business.

  The men reached inside their suit coats, pulled out guns, and headed down the walkway toward the door to the rectory.

  I scrambled to my feet, grabbed the phone, and dialed 911.

  I cupped my hand over the phone and kept my voice at a whisper. “This is Father Nathan, from St. Valentine’s Church on Huyshope Avenue.”

  “Yes, Father.” It was the same dispatcher as before. Muted voices barked in the background. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “Two men with guns. They’re here. They’ve come for Maria and Manuel. The woman and the boy who are staying with me.”

  A siren sounded on her end. “Please hold, Father.”

  An unbearable number of seconds followed. I held my breath to try to hear what was going on outside, but the sound of my heartbeat filled my eardrums.

  When the dispatcher finally picked up again, a combination of sirens, screaming, and static echoed from her end. “I’m sorry, Father. Are these the kids that have been bothering you all week?”

  “No. They’re not kids. They’re two men with guns. They came in a Lincoln Town Car. They’re assassins. The woman who’s staying here — her husband was a prosecutor who was murdered in Mexico. They’re here for her. For her and her son.”

  “Please calm down, Father. These men, are they in the house?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Officers will respond as soon as possible. Please keep the doors locked —” A knock on the front door.

  I hung up the phone and limped down the stairs, cursing the creaks in my prosthetic leg. When I got to the foyer, I faced the door and held my breath.

  Three more short knocks followed. It was a smart move, I thought. A church was a shelter for all. A priest’s first instinct was to open his door to anyone who needed assistance. Why break into a house when you can wangle an invitation?

  It took the cops ten minutes to arrive the first time, twenty minutes the second time. It seemed, based on the background noise during the call with the dispatcher, that the natives were restless this evening. The odds the cops would arrive faster than the previous two times were zero.

  I didn’t own a gun. The closest thing I had to a weapon was a butcher’s knife. But the idea of using it, the thought of sinking a blade into another human being’s flesh, was unimaginable under any circumstances.

  Sweat streamed down my back and created an itch beneath my cassock but I didn’t dare scratch it. A minute passed. Still, I didn’t dare move, for fear of making any kind of noise. Perhaps I’d misread the situation. Perhaps they weren’t killers. Perhaps I could will them away with my thoughts.

  Something clattered outside the living room.

  I forced my feet to move, crept around the corner into the living room, and hid behind a curtain. A night-light cast a semicircle of light beside a red-velvet couch. Above the sofa, the window rattled gently. They were checking to see if a window was open. Why break a window if you can slide it open?

  They were killers. They were here for Maria and Manuel.

  These words should have motivated me. They should have summoned an adrenaline flow and spurred me to action. But they didn’t. Instead, I stood solemnly in place, resigned to my fate.

  It simply wasn’t in me. Twenty-three years ago, a stranger had groped my girlfriend’s breasts as we filed out of a rock concert at the Civic Center. When we got outside, I broke his jaw with a single punch. Unbeknownst to me, he followed us to a bar in his monster truck, and when we parked, he drove his vehicle through the passenger door. Matilda died and I lost two limbs, all because I raised my hand to another man. I couldn’t do it again. Two decades of meditation and three million, six hundred, and sixty-six repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer had absorbed all my rage.

  The glass broke inward with a muted crack. I remained behind the curtain, feet frozen in place, my vision wet and blurry. One of the men reached inside with a gloved hand, wiggled a shard of glass free, and removed it. After he repeated the process several times, a third of the window was gone. In sixty seconds, they would slip into the house.

  “Kill the cripple and the boy,” one of the men whispered, “but not the woman. She’s dessert.”

  Images of the killers raping Maria and then strangling her with their bare hands flashed before me. I slipped out from behind the curtain and headed straight for the kitchen closet. Swinging the door open just a smidge so the rusty hinges wouldn’t squeak, I thrust my good hand inside in search of my Hillerich & Bradsby bat. No luck. I felt the broom and mop handles but no stick.

  Another crack in the adjoining room told me the window was half gone. I had thirty seconds, if that. I lowered my reach and got the fire extinguisher. Better than nothing, but not what I wanted. I raised my hands six inches and grasped again. Pay dirt. The cold, hard wood felt good as soon as it hit my hand.

  I pulled the bat out of the closet. It was a vintage 1967 Roberto Clemente model, 36 inches long and weighing 36.4 ounces, a gift from my high school coach in Rockville after I hit thirty-four home runs in thirty games my junior year.

  I slipped into a nook between the living room and the staircase. The killers could not get upstairs without passing me, and they wouldn’t see me until it was too late. I’d drop the first man with a tomahawk swing and pulverize the second one’s skull with an uppercut blast. I hadn’t crushed a baseball in decades. There was nothing like the sensation of hitting the ball square on its sweet spot, the thud of the wood generating maximum force, the satisfaction of slamming one out of the park.

  Abraham waged war. Abraham was a warrior.

  Joshua laid siege to Jericho. Joshua was a warrior.

  A priest must be a warrior.

  I must be a warrior.

  I couldn’t see the window from my hiding place, so I had to rely on sound and shadow. I heard a scratching noise, followed by a gentle thud. One of them was inside. The short one, I suspected. The second man made almost no noise. He had the first one to help him. The living room was small, and there was only one way to go.

  The night-light cast ghoulish shadows on the wall. The ghouls moved.

  They were upon me faster than I expected. I raised the bat with both hands high in the air. As soon as I saw the first man — the short one — I swung downward with all my strength. My left hand led, but the right arm seemed
slow to react — of course it was; the prosthetic lagged — and then it just stopped. In midair. My left arm fought to bring the bat down but it wouldn’t move.

  My prosthetic arm was locked. It had malfunctioned.

  The killer saw me. He jumped back. The taller man with the fedora came into view. The three of us stood there for a couple of seconds, frozen in mutual disbelief. A priest, posing like an ax murderer for a wax museum, and two assassins, silencers attached to the barrels of their guns.

  The short one laughed. It was the deep, resonant laugh of a lifetime scoundrel and smoker, coarse enough to sand wood without touching it. The tall one chuckled like the calculating kind of person for whom genuine laughter was too frivolous. They raised their guns in tandem and pointed them at me, grins etched on their faces.

  Gunshots exploded. The floor shook. Pain racked my eardrums.

  I opened my eyes. I hadn’t even realized I’d closed them.

  The killers lay on the ground, the left sides of their chests riddled with multiple bullet holes.

  Manuel appeared in the stairwell, arms outstretched, clutching a gun with both hands. When he spoke for the first time, his voice had a youthful pitch, but his delivery was shockingly composed.

  “Leave my mother alone,” he said.

  When I saw Manuel’s arms stretched out, I realized how his appearance had changed and figured out what I’d failed to detect when we’d shared a glass of lemonade in the afternoon. His wrist was bare. His father’s gold watch was gone. He’d met the Aztecs to trade his father’s watch for a gun.

  By the time Maria arrived, hysterical, I’d removed my prosthetic arm from the socket and the gun from Manuel’s hands. I’d taken an EMT course and knew how to check for a pulse. I found none in either man. Manuel had shot each of them through the heart. They were dead.

  The rage I’d managed to build receded quickly. A sense of calm fell over me, as though I’d gone on a trip I’d detested and now I was back home.

  If the police saw that Manuel shot two men, he and his mother could be deported to Mexico. After all, he’d shot them with an illegal weapon, and he wasn’t an American citizen. In Mexico, they would die. In America, they would live.

  A priest I knew from seminary lived in upstate New York. He was a friend and kindred spirit. We would create new names and birth certificates. Manuel and Maria would start new lives. No one would know their past. Manuel’s father’s killers would never find them.

  I took the gun and wiped it down with the end of my cassock to make sure Manuel’s fingerprints weren’t on it. Then I fired two shots with my left hand into the wall behind the place where the killers had stood.

  Maria screamed at me, “What are you doing?”

  “Gunpowder and cordite leave burn marks,” I said. “Especially when fired at close range. If the burn marks are on my fingers, no one will bother checking Manuel’s hands. Why would they? It was my gun. I bought it from persons unknown.”

  A siren sounded in the distance. Its blare grew gradually louder.

  A Catholic priest must be a father. He is a spiritual provider and protector in the image of God, in the person of Christ: in persona Christi. The role of father is my favorite part of being a priest, the one that comes most naturally to me and gives me the most joy.

  I stepped closer and put my arm around Maria and Manuel. “Don’t worry,” I said, as though they were both my children. “There’s nothing to fear. I’ll take care of you.”

  THE HOLLYWOOD I REMEMBER

  BY LEE CHILD

  The Hollywood I remember was a cold, hard, desperate place. The sun shone and people got ahead. Who those people were, I have no idea. Real names had been abandoned long ago. Awkward syllables from the shtetls and guttural sounds from the bogs and every name that ended in a vowel had been traded for shiny replacements that could have come from an automobile catalog. I knew a guy who called himself LaSalle, like the Buick. I knew a Fairlane, like the Ford. I even knew a Coupe de Ville. In fact I knew two Coupe de Villes, but I think the second guy had his tongue in his cheek. In any case, you were always conscious that the guy you were talking to was a cipher. You had no idea what he had been and what he had done before.

  Everyone was new and reinvented.

  That worked both ways, of course.

  It was a place where a week’s work could get you what anyone else in the country made in a year. That was true all over town, under the lights or behind them, legitimate or not. But some got more than others. You were either a master or a servant. Like a distorted hourglass: Up above, a small glass bubble with a few grains of sand. Down below, a big glass bubble with lots of sand. The bottleneck between was tight. The folks on the top could buy anything they wanted, and the folks on the bottom would do whatever it took, no questions asked. Everyone was for sale. Everyone had a price. The city government, the cops, regular folks, all of them. It was a cold, hard, desperate place.

  Everyone knew nothing would last. Smart guys put their early paychecks into solid things, which is what I did. My first night’s work became the down payment on the house I’ve now owned for more than forty years. The rest of the money came with a mortgage from a week-old bank. And mortgages needed to be paid, so I had to keep on working. But work was not hard to find for a man with my skills and for a man happy to do the kind of things I was asked to do. Which involved girls, exclusively. Hollywood hookers were the best in the world, and there were plenty of them. Actresses trapped on the wrong side of the bottleneck still had to eat, and the buses and trains brought more every day. Competition was fierce.

  They were amazingly beautiful. Usually they were better-looking than the actual movie stars. They had to be. Sleeping with an actual movie star was about the only thing money couldn’t buy, so look-alikes and substitutes did good business. They were the biggest game in town. They lasted a year or two. If they couldn’t take it, they were allowed to quit early. There was no coercion. There didn’t need to be. Those buses and trains kept on rolling in.

  But there were rules.

  Blackmail was forbidden, obviously. So was loose talk. The cops and the gossip columnists could be bought off, but why spend money unnecessarily? Better to silence the source. Better to make an example and buy a month or two of peace and quiet. Which is where I came in. My first was a superhuman beauty from Idaho. She was dumb enough to believe a promise some guy made. She was dumb enough to make trouble when it wasn’t kept. We debated disfigurement for her. Cut off her lips and her ears, maybe her nose, maybe pull every other tooth. We figured that would send a message. But then we figured no LA cop would stand for that, no matter what we paid, so I offed her pure and simple, and that’s how I got the down payment for my house. It was quite an experience. She was tall, and she was literally stunning. I got short of breath and weak at the knees. The back part of my brain told me I should be dragging her to my cave, not slitting her throat. But I got through it.

  The next seven paid off my mortgage, and the two after that bought me a Cadillac. It was the eleventh that brought me trouble. Just one of those unlucky things. She was a fighter, and she had blood pressure issues, apparently. I had to stab her in the chest to quiet her down, and the blade hit bone and nicked something bad, and a geyser of blood came out and spattered all over my suit coat. Like a garden hose. A great gout of it, like a drowned man coughing up seawater on the sand, convulsive. Afterward I wrapped the knife in the stained coat and carried it home wearing only shirtsleeves, which must have attracted attention from someone.

  Because as a result, I had cops on me from dawn the next morning. But I played it cool. I did nothing for a day, and then I made a big show of helping my new neighbor finish the inside of his new garage. Which was a provocation, in a way, because my new neighbor was a dope peddler who drove up and down to Mexico regular as clockwork. The cops were watching him too. But they suffered an embarrassment when we moved his car to the curb so we could work on the garage unencumbered. The car was stolen right from under thei
r noses. That delayed the serious questions for a couple of days.

  Then some new hotshot LAPD detective figured that I had carried the knife and the bloody coat to my neighbor’s garage in my tool bag and that I had then buried it in the floor. But the guy failed to get a warrant, because judges like money and hookers too, and so the whole thing festered for a month and then went quiet, until a new hotshot came on the scene. This new guy figured I was too lazy to dig dirt. He figured I had nailed the coat into the walls. He wanted a warrant fast, because he figured the rats would be eating the coat. It was that kind of a neighborhood. But he didn’t get a warrant either, neither fast nor slow, and the case went cold, and it stayed cold for forty years.

  During which time two things happened. The LAPD built up a cold-case unit, and some cop came along who seemed to be that eleventh hooker’s son. Which was an unfortunate confluence of events for me. The alleged son was a dour terrier of a guy with plenty of ability, and he worked that dusty old file like crazy. He was on the fence, fifty-fifty as to whether the floor or the wall was the final resting place for my coat, and my coat was the holy grail for this guy, because laboratory techniques had advanced by then. He figured he could compare his own DNA to whatever could be recovered from the coat. My dope-peddling neighbor had been shot to death years before, and his house had changed hands many times. None of the new owners had ever permitted a search because they knew what was good for them, but then the sub-primes all went belly-up and the place was foreclosed, and the hotshot son figured he could bypass the whole warrant process by simply requesting permission from whatever bank now held the paper, but the bank itself was bust and no one knew who controlled its assets, so I got another reprieve, except right about then I got diagnosed with tumors in my lungs.