by Chuck Logan
Nothing happened. Some squirming from the other side; perhaps the penitent was having difficulty with the kneeling rest.
So Father Moros offered a prompt in his habitual avuncular tone. “May the Lord be in your heart and help you confess your sins with true sorrow.”
“It’s been years since my last confession, but I do feel sorrow,” said the penitent. A low voice, strained and hard to place.
“Yes, my child.”
“I’m not your child, and you sure as hell aren’t my father.”
Victor Armondo Moros sat up at the sharp tone. Here was something different to break up the hot afternoon. The intensity in the tightly controlled voice intrigued him. The passion of it.
“How can I help you?” he asked sincerely, in a less officious tone.
“I’m not real sure. See, I’m not what you’d call a good Catholic; I mean I’ve never done something like this before.”
“This?”
“You know, explain something like this.”
“I’m here to listen,” Moros said.
“First I need to go back over the rules. I mean if I tell you something, you keep it to yourself, right?”
“Of course.”
“Even if it could get somebody in trouble?” The tight voice rose, strained.
“I’m here as a minister of the church to hear your sins if you are sorry for what you’ve done,” Moros said.
“Yes, but you won’t tell anybody?” The voice rose again.
“I’m bound by the seal of confession to keep what we talk about in confidence. The seal of the confession is absolute.”
“Okay, the thing is, I feel real bad, but I don’t think I offended God. I think I pleased God. But there are parts to it that I don’t understand.”
“What parts?”
“Well, the basic part, like why does God permit evil? Why do children have to suffer? This stuff that’s been in the news—those priests and that cardinal in Boston—that really bothers me a lot.”
Moros took a deep contemplative breath as he scanned the agony of the Church. “It’s the mystery of evil.”
“You have to do better than that,” the voice parried sharply. “Like, I know this woman who has six kids, and she went to confessional and told the priest she’s gotta go on the birth control because her family was killing her, and the priest tells her birth control is a sin that will send her to hell. So you guys have quick answers for some stuff, don’t you?”
Moros hunched forward, closer to the grille. “One can assume that God created the best possible world, but he gave us free will. So evil comes into the world through the choices some individuals make . . .”
“But why?”
Moros inclined his head. “Perhaps because the human heart is vulnerable to the whole parade of venal and mortal sins. We must never forget that God has a rival who wants to collect our souls.”
Then the penitent’s words tumbled out in a rush. “There was this man. It was real big in the news. But this was before you came here, so you probably didn’t hear about it.”
“What?” Father Moros was taken aback by the personal reference, but before he could say another word the penitent raced on.
“He violated this child, and they let him get away with it. They said some of the people on the jury would not believe a kid over an adult, and that’s why they acquitted him. I mean, that’s not right. This guy was a teacher, and he got this six-year-old to play with his thing, you know, he told him it was a popsicle and got him to . . .”
“Please, calm down,” Father Moros said, not prepared for the lurch of velocity building in the language coming through the grille.
“I’m sorry, but I have to get this off my chest; it bothers me so much I can’t sleep. Okay?”
Father Moros nodded his head. Yes. Yes. This was the work he was called to do. The thing every priest knew could walk through the door at any time. And now here it was. “Go on.” Moros fingered the rosary in his hand for reassurance and found the black beads shiny with sweat.
“All right,” the penitent said. “I always thought God was, you know, like a real fierce micromanager, that he was involved in everything. But maybe it turns out he’s more laid back, and sometimes he uses ordinary people to make things come out right. Is that possible?”
Father Moros wondered if she was on medication. This was swerving on the line that separated the spiritual and civil spheres.
“Well, is it?” the voice said, quavering. When Father Moros didn’t answer, the penitent began to cry.
The anguish in her voice brought him back on task. “Are you ready to confess your sins?” he asked.
“Yes.” The penitent’s voice caught in a sob. “You see, they wouldn’t stop him. Somebody had to stop him, or he’d hurt more children. I mean, they were going to let him go back to work in the same school where he did that to the boy. So I went to his house when he was all alone. I took a gun and I shot him and he died, and nobody knows who did it except you, me, and God.”
It was silent in the confessional for ten seconds. Angel kneeled awkwardly on the prie-dieu. She could smell the Tic Tacs on the priest’s breath not more than a foot away through the grille. And Old Spice aftershave. With her left hand she picked up the printed form on the top of the kneeling rest. It was titled: “Summary of the Rite of Reconciliation of Individual Penitents.” Her right hand reached into the shopping bag.
“Wait a minute, I get it,” Angel said. She cleared her throat, composed herself, and recited from the form: “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God.”
There was more on the form, but Angel was now preoccupied with the Ruger Mark II .22-caliber pistol she had removed from the shopping bag. The plastic Mountain Dew bottle duct-taped over the barrel made it cumbersome.
On the other side of the screen Father Moros hung his head. What a horrible thing. Could it be true? But Angel’s act of contrition put him back on familiar ground. Automatically, he began to recite the prayer of absolution.
“God, Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Angel read along silently from the form as the priest droned the prayer, and then she said “Amen,” as it directed the penitent to respond. She raised the pistol slowly, bringing the bulbous makeshift silencer in line with the small rectangular screen over the kneeling rest.
“There’s one more thing,” Angel said.
“What?” Father Moros asked.
“This is your lucky day,” Angel said. “I think you’re going to see God.”
“I don’t quite understand . . . ,” Father Moros said.
The texture of light in the screen shifted slightly, and Angel placed the end of the green bottle dead center in the grille and extended her arm. “Tell me, Father Moros, why did you have to leave the parish in Albuquerque in such a hurry?”
“Wait a minute . . .” Moros tensed, combative.
“I thought you guys went in for little boys. But your thing is teenage girls, huh?” Angel said.
For a moment Moros was stunned. Where did this come from? How? Then he gritted his teeth to contain the welling anger, raised his fists, and shouted at the screen. “Lies, all lies. Not even lies; more like stupid gossip . . .”
Angel jerked the trigger twice in rapid succession, the sound of the hammer falling on the chamber louder than the muted clap-clap of the muzzle. Relax, stop shaking, see, it works—the bottle soaked up most of the blast. Furniture crashed on the other side of the partition followed by a meaty thump on the carpet. Then nothing.
Angel picked up the two ejected shell casings off the carpet, then exited t
he private confession door and entered the face-to-face confession door. The priest had pitched back off his chair, knocked over a lamp, and lay on his side on the floor. Angel was not even breathing heavily. She did notice that the priest had sleek black hair that was combed back with great care. Perhaps he was vain. Whatever. Hit in the right cheek and throat, he was still breathing. She was a little disappointed that his eyes were clamped shut. One of the things she relished in the memory of Ronald Dolman’s last seconds was the fear in his eyes. Angel quickly shot him again in the temple, and he shuddered and the breathing stopped. The small entry wounds leaked threads of blood. The small .22-caliber bullet did not exit the skull. Tidy. Self-contained.
Efficiently, Angel retrieved the tiny spent cartridge casing and stripped off the wig, shoes, gloves, jacket, sweatsuit, and the bulky body stocking.
Her disguise hid skimpy shorts, a sports top, lean runner’s legs, and a flat tummy. Angel set the awkward stage shoes aside and pulled a pair of Nikes from the shopping bag, pulled them on, and laced them tight.
The shopping bag contained a backpack. Promptly, she stuffed the pack with the sunglasses, the shopping bag, the clothes, padding, the wig, the paper bag containing the pistol and the plastic bottle silencer, which was now ragged with three holes. She removed a damp washcloth from a Ziploc bag and wiped off the cosmetics and lipstick, carefully replaced the cloth, closed the plastic bag, and dropped it in the pack.
Then, ritually, she left the signature.
Okay. Take one last quick look around. Angel cocked her head. There was this narrow stained-glass window over the askew confessor’s chair. Except it wasn’t real stained glass. It was Contact paper, like from Menard’s.
“Fake,” Angel said as she slipped on the pack.
Then she ducked from the confession booth and paused in the hallway to make sure she was alone in the church. No one in sight. Not a sound. Just a faint blur of gunpowder smeared in the air.
Like incense.
She walked under the blind plaster eyes of Jesus and Mary, went down the hallway on the left side of the altar, and exited through the back door. The walls of the church and the rectory shielded her from the street. She crossed the backyard patio and disappeared down a brushy knob and came out on a gravel road. It only took a few minutes to trot through the dusty North End streets. Soon the Nikes thudded on city pavement.
Angel opened up her stride.
A jogger gliding in Patagonia shorts and top, she slipped anonymously past the whispering sprinklers on the chemically enhanced emerald lawns with their little signs: Warning—Unsafe for Children and Pets. She ran past the gleaming SUVs parked in the broad driveways and the meticulously painted gingerbread trim of the old North Hill homes.
Another one down. Four to go.
Chapter Two
Now who the hell was calling before five in the morning?
Groggy, Broker grabbed the ringing phone beside the bed, brought it to his ear, and mumbled, “What?”
“Broker.” The brusque male voice in the phone receiver sounded like a cop’s voice. A cop who’d been up all night. A cop Broker knew.
“John? That you?” Broker said.
“Yeah. C’mon, wake up.”
Broker blinked, looked around, and tried to focus his eyes. All he saw was black, as if he were suspended in warm ink. He shook himself and sat up. When you got a call in the dark at his age, it meant:
“Somebody’s dead,” he said as the careful knitting around his heart drew tight. Dad?
“Yeah, somebody’s dead,” John Eisenhower said. “Relax, it’s nobody we know.”
Broker sat up straighter. “So what . . . ?”
John talked over him. “Remember all those times I saved your life?”
“Bullshit, you never saved my life,” Broker protested.
“Okay, what about those times I saved your job when we were in St. Paul together?”
John had a point there; they’d come up together in the St. Paul department, and more than once he’d run interference when Broker had tangled with the bureaucrats. “Okay, okay. What’s up?” Broker yawned.
“Is your license current?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I need a big favor,” John said.
“When?”
“Starting at about daylight,” John said.
“Great.” Broker knuckled the sleep from his eyes. “You know where I’m at?”
“Guy like you comes into my county, I make it my business to know where you’re at. That’s why I’m the sheriff.”
Phil Broker was keeping to the back roads this summer. He had to figure a few things out. That said, Milton Dane’s river house was still a nice place to start the day, even after an early wake-up call from the Washington County sheriff.
Even when you’re estranged from your wife.
Even—count ’em and weep—on your forty-eighth birthday.
Broker sat up on Milt’s king-size bed, so his sweat dribbled down his bare chest and pooled in his belly button. Real smart. He had not turned on the air-conditioning, preferring to sleep with the windows open. He’d been hoping for a breeze off the river. There was no breeze. Just the ceiling fans stirring the humidity in slow circles.
Now it wasn’t even dawn yet, and the relative humidity had to be way over seventy. Yesterday the humidity had topped eighty, which was tropical.
Broker sat for a while and stared out banks of tall, east-facing windows as the darkness ebbed away, and, slowly, the St. Croix River came into focus, motionless as a painted floor. Gray mist draped the bluffs on the Wisconsin side. Still no breeze.
It would be another green furnace of a day.
It was mid-July, and Broker was in between relationships and houses. His own home was up in Devil’s Rock on Lake Superior, a twenty-minute drive from the Canadian border. But the house was haunted with too many memories of his marriage and especially of his five-year-old daughter, Kit. Her stuffed animals lay undisturbed where they’d dropped from her fingers when she’d visited him in May. At first he’d left the toys where they’d fallen because they were random reminders. Days passed and then weeks, and they started to look like tiny bodies at a crime scene. So he locked the house, traveled south to the Cities, and agreed to look after Milt’s place on the river north of Stillwater. He’d guided Milt on what had turned out to be an extreme canoe trip a year ago October. Now Milt, an attorney, had taken Jolene Sommer, a former client of his, to Italy to see Florence.
Broker had never been to Tuscany, but his estranged wife had received her mail there. Major Nina Pryce and their daughter had taken up residence in Lucca, a walled medieval town on the road less traveled between Pisa and Florence.
He didn’t know why Nina was there. She didn’t wear a uniform anymore. The nature of her work was classified. And then she and Kit had just disappeared.
Broker got up from the king-size bed and passed beneath a throng of African masks and Asian dragons that peered down from the walls and the post-and-beam ceiling. Milt had transformed the upper level of the river house into a bachelor heaven; the walls were decorated with his vacation booty. The master bedroom opened on the kitchen. The kitchen patio doors led to the broad deck.
So now, as on every recent morning, he padded into the kitchen and confronted the rectangular cyclops eye of the laptop on the table. The screen saver fluttered gently in the thin light; a winter scene to mock the current heat wave, snowflakes trickling down against a hillside of snow-frosted pine trees. He clicked onto the Internet icon, went into the message center, and selected GET MESSAGES.
He typed in his password: LUDDITEONE.
And got the prompt at the bottom of the screen: NO NEW MESSAGES ON SERVER.
Broker exhaled and disconnected from the Net. No communication from Nina since Kit returned to Italy in May. Not one call, e-mail, or letter. She and Kit had vanished down into a secure government rabbit hole. Broker suspected it was the culmination of a process that had started right after 9/11.
>
Initially, after the attack, and despite their personal issues, Nina had called regularly explaining that her duties might, and then would, make it impossible to keep Kit with her in Europe.
Fine. Broker was more than ready to take over his end of their shared child care. Then, right after Kit’s visit in May, the messages became ambiguous. Kit’s transfer to her father’s care was put off. Then communication had abruptly stopped.
Broker didn’t exactly have a lot of recourse to penetrate the silence. There was no one he could talk to about his wife’s situation. The unit that Nina had triumphantly gender-crashed herself into did not officially exist.
“Fucking Delta.” Broker swore softly.
So he drew the only conclusion he could from the silence: whatever Nina was doing at the moment, his daughter was somehow included in it.
Not knowing was worse than knowing. It has been bad enough when he admitted to Nina he had strayed with Jolene Sommer. Nina was quick to thrust back with a confession of her own weak moment with a Ranger officer.
Make that a young Ranger officer. Squeaky young. Smooth young. The kind of young that didn’t have to compensate for the torn rotator cuff, the stressed knees, the back injury, and various shrapnel deposits. Carefully, Broker lined up forty-eight years of knotted scar tissue, stood up, and walked to the bathroom. Some things still worked. A kidneyful of pee crashed into the bowl. He flushed, washed his hands, and threw some water on his face. Then he turned and studied himself in the mirror on the door.
So this was forty-eight.
One hundred eighty pounds shrunk tight on a six-foot frame looked back at him. He was still holding his own against the sags of gravity; still hollow-cheeked, tucked in here, a dangle there. He had his love handles down to an inch of pinch. No second helpings. No dessert. His usually thick dark hair was cut high and tight, more than summer short; a monk’s vow of discipline. His eyebrows remained his defining feature, joining in a bushy line over his gray eyes. A pale white, raised centipede of stitched scar tissue crawled out of his hairline, angled down his forehead, and curled around his left temple. Two more puncture scars were less obvious on his left arm: one high on the biceps, the other just above the elbow. He wiggled his fingers and his toes to test the numbness. He’d been stabbed in the arm and had almost frozen to death, and he carried frostbitten nerve endings as a reminder. That was last year’s adventure; that’s when he met Milt and Jolene. Her husband, Hank, had saved his life, and Broker had not been able to return the favor.