The un-slapped side of his face was white as bone. He hunched his shoulders, breaths coming in heaves. After a moment, he said, “Wh-what happened?”
I told him about Chloe and our conversation at lunch, about her mention of two partners—Keating and Boulay, I’d later find out.
He sat back down, clutched his stomach, looking like he was about to vomit.
“Get up,” I said. “We’ve got an errand to run.”
“An errand?” he said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I smoothed a wrinkle in my shirt. The skin on my face felt tight and hot. “We’re going to a little Cajun restaurant I know. Pirate Red’s.”
“A restaurant?” Frank lumbered to his feet. “Have you lost your mind? I need to see my wife. I need—”
I grabbed his arm, leaned close. “You need to shut the hell up and do what I say.”
He gulped but stopped talking.
“I’ve reached out to some people. Chloe and her partners are going to be there in the next hour.”
“That’s good, right? We know where they are.” He paused. “We should call the police.”
“They are the police, Frank.”
“Then what . . . how . . . I don’t understand.”
“Remember last week when we went to the gun range?”
He frowned. After a moment, he nodded.
“Your pistol is still in the lockbox in my truck.”
His eyes went wide, jaw dropping open.
“You’re gonna do what needs to be done, Frank. Or so help me God, you’ll wish you were dead, too.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stepped through the break in the barbed-wire fence and was on the Sky of Zion property.
The navy-blue van containing the bodies of Ian and his camera guy was a few feet behind me.
I figured it would take thirty minutes at a minimum before Throckmorton and the state troopers would be authorized to enter the compound. That meant I had a half hour to find Hannah before bullets started flying again.
I darted up the cattle trail, running at a crouch to avoid the branches from the trees growing on the creek bank.
The air was hot and still and smelled like stagnant water.
A couple hundred yards later, the trail ended at the base of a small hill, at the far side of a backyard area behind the three houses overlooking the old penitentiary. The lawn was freshly mowed, and there were several live oak trees that provided shade for the homes. An outbuilding contained the black Bentley, the only vehicle visible.
The houses were white clapboard, one story each, cheaply constructed sometime back in the fifties. The one farthest from me was the biggest, maybe three or four bedrooms. The one closest was little more than a shack. The middle structure was the nicest, the best maintained. The windows, covered from the inside, were clean, the paint fresh.
Between my location and the houses was a commercial-grade backup generator, like something you’d see at a hospital or an office building.
I stood on the edge of the tree line by the creek and surveyed the scene.
It was the hot part of the day, and there appeared to be no activity from any of the three houses.
I looked at my watch. Five minutes until my promised check-in with Throckmorton, twenty-five minutes at the soonest before the troops arrived.
Not very much time—or an eternity, depending on your point of view.
My weaponry—a Glock 9mm with one magazine and a pocketknife—was not up to the task of clearing three homes. On the plus side, I did have the element of surprise.
The rear door of the house closest to me, the smallest one, opened, and a man I’d never seen before came out. He wore a black suit and white shirt with no tie, the uniform of someone on the council.
He sauntered to a spot near the generator and plopped down on a lawn chair beneath one of the live oaks. His back was to me.
As soon as he sat down, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one.
I crept toward him, moving as silently and as quickly as possible.
When I was a few steps away, he jerked his head around, cigarette dangling from his lips.
I lunged and tackled the man as he tried to stand up.
We fell to the ground.
He butted the side of my head with his forehead, and stars cascaded across my field of view. His legs were tangled in the chair, so he tried to crawl away using his hands.
I grabbed his jacket, pulled myself on top of him, and slammed my elbow into the spot just above his ear.
He stopped crawling, moaned softly.
I yanked off his belt and bound his hands behind his back. My vision was double from his blow.
He wore heavy black shoes, brogues. I removed the laces from one and bound his feet. Then I dragged him behind the generator and slapped his face several times, bringing him back to coherence.
He stared at me, breathing heavily.
“What’s your name?” I blinked several times, trying to get my eyesight back to normal.
He didn’t answer. His lips pressed together tightly as if to emphasize his decision to not speak.
With one hand, I jammed his head against the grass, wedging it in place. With my other, I placed a thumb over one of his eyes and pressed down. Not hard, just enough to remind him that the situation wasn’t trending in his favor at the moment.
He yelped. “D-Daniel. My name is Daniel. P-please stop.”
I removed my thumb.
He took several deep breaths, blinking away tears from the eye where I’d been pressing.
My vision was more or less back to normal, so I glanced toward the houses.
No one was visible.
“Where’s the woman?” I described Hannah.
He glared at me but didn’t reply.
I held up my thumb, wiggled it in front of his eyes.
“She’s with Silas in the main house.”
“Is that where the boss man is?”
“The Supreme Apostle resides there.” He nodded, a peaceful expression on his face. “But you cannot see him because you are not chosen. You cannot comprehend the divine.”
“Gotcha. So is that where you guys diddle little girls?”
Silence. Then: “You don’t understand the Apostle’s will. The bliss of a conjugal is from Elohim himself.”
Anger swelled in my chest. I reached for his eye but stopped. The mission was not retribution. The goal was to rescue Hannah Byrne and wait for Throckmorton’s troops. Then find Caleb and Mary and Hannah’s niece.
So I pulled the Spyderco from my belt, flipped open the blade, slid the point inside one of his nostrils. The knife was brand-new, as sharp as sharp can be.
“Well, we certainly don’t want to violate anything,” I said. “But you’re gonna look like a pumpkin carved up for Halloween if you don’t tell me what I need to know. How many people are in each house?”
His cheeks bellowed with each breath, but he didn’t speak. After a few seconds, I slid the blade in another quarter inch.
“Silas and a synod leader are in the main house with the woman you seek.” A trickle of blood oozed down his upper lip.
“What about the other buildings?” I removed the knife.
“Two men. In the control room.”
I looked at the structures. “Which one is the control room?”
He coughed. His face was pale. “The closest.”
“What about the other one?”
He shook his head. “You’re not allowed in there. That is holy ground.”
“I thought all three houses were holy.” I sighed. “I’m getting my doctrine confused.”
He d
idn’t say anything.
“The third house,” I said. “Is that where the conjugals go down?”
A moment passed.
“We have been persecuted for decades. Survival is paramount.” Tears filled his eyes. “We do what is necessary. You wouldn’t understand.”
I was about to ask what he meant, but I noticed the girl first.
She was standing on the other side of the generator, maybe ten feet away. I had no idea where she’d come from. I hadn’t heard a door open or any footsteps.
Her face was made up like the child’s back in the matrimonial chamber: heavy rouge, thick eye shadow, bright-red lipstick.
The air in my lungs felt hot and poisonous as I realized how much she looked like my daughter.
My skull felt like it was going to explode. My limbs shook, throat tightened.
It was my daughter.
I reached for her as sweat stung my eyes. I blinked, and she was gone.
A moment passed.
I looked at the man on the ground. “What the hell are people doing here?”
“The Apostle’s will,” he said. “I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
I sliced a strip of cloth from Daniel’s coat and gagged him with it.
The girl who looked like my dead daughter had disappeared. If she’d ever really been there at all.
The throbbing in my head was getting better.
There were three options.
The “control” room, whatever that meant—the smallest structure.
The Apostle’s home, where Silas was holding Hannah.
Or the third place, the one that Daniel had called “holy ground.”
I scrambled across the yard to the rear door of the middle house, the place where Silas had Hannah. I tried the knob. Locked. I dashed around the side of the structure.
The front of the home was plain and unadorned, a square concrete stoop, no landscaping, just lawn all the way up to the walls of the house.
Several four-wheelers sat nearby, the preferred backcountry mode of transportation.
I reached for the knob with my left hand, my right holding the Glock.
The door flung open, striking my wrist.
A lightning bolt of pain shot up my arm.
I stumbled backward and fell off the stoop as Silas McPherson dashed out of the house. His right arm was still in a cast, and a satchel was strapped across his back.
He didn’t stop. He ran and jumped on one of the four-wheelers.
I pushed myself up with my left hand, ignoring the pain.
Silas struggled to crank the ignition, his movements awkward because of the cast.
He was twenty feet away, an easy shot with the Glock.
I thought about the last time I’d fired a gun. But not for long.
I aimed for the rear of the four-wheeler, at the mass of metal where the transmission and exhaust system came together. A large target, much bigger than trying to hit the man astride the machine.
The engine caught, and a cloud of blue smoke spewed from the tailpipe. The four-wheeler lurched away as the Glock fired.
The whine of the engine swallowed the noise from the Glock. Barely audible above everything was a slight ping, the round striking metal.
I got to my feet.
Silas McPherson was already fifty yards from the top of the hill, speeding down a trail that led south away from the old prison. The trail followed the contours of the terrain, a low groove in the land that disappeared from view when it curved behind a bluff.
The whine of the engine grew quieter, and a few seconds later, he was gone. If the bullet had managed to hit anything vital, he wouldn’t get far. That was a big if, though.
I examined one of the other four-wheelers. The key was in the ignition.
My left arm hurt. I wiggled my wrist and fingers. Nothing appeared broken.
I stared at the key to the four-wheeler for a few seconds and then pulled the walkie-talkie from my back pocket, turned it on, and hailed Throckmorton. He answered immediately, swearing at me because I hadn’t responded to his last message to not enter the compound.
When he’d gotten that off his chest, I related what had happened and that the suspect was fleeing south, headed toward the road we’d seen on the map. He told me air support was at least an hour away. He said to find Hannah Byrne and then get out. I didn’t reply, turning off the radio instead, again ignoring his orders to leave the compound.
The back door to the middle house was open.
I approached warily, Glock in hand.
Hannah Byrne was in the living room, the front portion of the house.
She was bound and gagged in a chair that had been placed in front of a large mirror on the back wall.
A man in his fifties stood beside her, one hand on her shoulder. He was barely five feet tall and wore a black suit and no tie. He looked at me as I entered, mouth agape. One of his eyes was milky white over the entire surface.
“Wh-who are you?” he asked.
“Think of me as the devil.” I eased inside. “It will be easier that way.”
The room looked like the Salvation Army had decorated it. Mismatched, worn sofas; rickety chairs; a tattered hook rug.
His limbs shook, breath coming in rapid gasps like a panting dog. He stared at the gun in my hand for a moment. Then he ran out the front door.
I looked at Hannah. “Are you OK?”
She nodded and shot her eyes toward the mirror.
I pressed my back against the wall and eased toward a door next to the mirror.
She watched me go, a terrified expression on her face.
The door was unlocked.
I flung it open and stepped inside what had once been a bedroom.
The Apostle was waiting for me.
He was alone, sitting in a wheelchair, hands folded in his lap.
I aimed at his chest, my finger tight on the trigger.
He wore a black suit, a white shirt with no tie, and dark sunglasses. His hair was gray and slicked back.
“Put your hands up,” I said.
He didn’t move. He appeared to be in his late seventies or older, and I wondered if he could hear me.
I stepped closer, and that’s when I noticed the smell.
A chemical tang overlaid with cologne and the faint stench of decay.
I lowered the gun, felt my jaw drop.
Dust freckled the man’s shoulders like a thin coating of snow.
I stepped in front of him and removed the sunglasses.
His eyes were closed.
I grasped the significance of the loose skin on his cheeks and the stillness of his body at the same time that I realized his chest wasn’t moving.
The Apostle was dead.
He’d been that way for a long time.
They’d embalmed him and placed his corpse in a wheelchair, an easy way to move him into view for the masses.
Their actions were understandable.
Personality cults were hard to maintain if the personality went offline.
Lenin’s body stayed on display at the Kremlin for decades, until the embalming started to wear off. More than a few popes and saints were preserved under glass, moldering in their vestments. The Church of Scientology managed to convince their membership that L. Ron Hubbard hadn’t died but had merely transitioned to another plane of consciousness.
This was a descendant of the original Apostle, according to Hannah. I imagined there had been a power struggle upon his death, and preserving the body seemed like a way to buy time.
I ran back into the living room and cut off H
annah’s gag.
“Silas got away.”
She nodded, taking several deep breaths.
I cut the cords on her wrists and ankles.
“He said the Apostle wanted to watch me die.” She looked at the glass. “That little guy was supposed to do it. Some kind of specialist. I was a sinner. I deserved the fires of hell.”
“The Apostle’s not watching much of anything these days.” I put away my knife. “It’s more a Weekend at Bernie’s situation.”
“What do you mean?” Hannah stood, wobbly. “Is he in there?”
I took her arm and led her to the door. She gasped, staring at the corpse for a long moment.
“Ian and his camera guy,” I said. “They’re dead, too.”
Her face turned pale. She told me what had happened after I’d darted into the old prison.
They’d made a frantic dash to the van and then left the way we’d come in, easing their way through the people to the front gate. The troopers let them leave, and they had headed west to get away from the riot that was brewing at the entrance to the compound.
They’d stopped at the wide spot on the shoulder, debating their next move, when a gray pickup full of guards, obviously alerted to their escape, had appeared and taken Hannah. They’d transported her to the houses using the same trail along the creek.
“Why did they kill them but not me?” she asked.
“Women have value. They’re a commodity.” I told her about the matrimonial chamber.
“What the hell are they doing up here?” she asked.
I didn’t say the obvious, what we both knew intuitively but were afraid to speak aloud.
Instead I stepped outside the house and looked across the compound below to check the situation at the gate. Hannah followed.
From the front stoop, we had a good view.
Squad cars clogged the highway, too many to count. Officers had massed by the entrance.
On the compound side, more guards had taken up positions. Sandbags had appeared, forming spots for snipers to shoot from.
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