Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

The girl sat on a wicker swing rocker with blue-flowered cushions, and as she spoke she pushed on the floor with the ball of one foot and the accompanying creak of the swing rocking in its joints was the only inflection in her voice.

  The crucifixion killing and the Fantastics murders were too sensational not to have made it into the Galveston press, but Mercedes Bloom seemed oblivious to their happening, and when he'd told her, she'd shown no horror. And as she described in their prurient and graphic detail all the things that had been done to her over the years, Rourke thought that she was indeed a marble angel, all her heart and feeling having been petrified by her father's perversion.

  Yet somehow Father Pat had managed to touch this stone child and then she'd tried to save her.

  “Father told me that it was all my daddy's sin,” Mercedes said, “and none of it was mine, and he made me see how I could stop it.”

  Rourke thought of Mercedes Bloom changing herself, bobbing away her finger waves, and getting on a streetcar that took her, not home, but to the train station. To a new name, a new town, a job and a fresh life—all provided for by Father Pat's special club.

  And she'd done it all just as Father Pat had told her she should, except for one thing.

  “Father said I wasn't to tell anyone where I'd be going, not even Nina or any of the other Fantastics, but I kept fretting about poor Mama, about how she'd worry so that something bad had happened to me. So one night, a couple of weeks after I got here, when I knew Daddy would be out driving his taxi, I called up Mama and I told her—I just said it really fast and hung right up, I didn't say anything about where I was—I just said, Father Pat had figured out how to get me away from Daddy and that I'm okay now.”

  And Ethel Bloom, out of some dark motive that Rourke didn't want to fathom, had turned around and shared that telephone call with her husband.

  Rourke thought of the priest as he'd first seen her that night, crucified on a crossbeam in an abandoned macaroni factory. The brass-knuckled beating to her face, the votive candles burning the soles of her feet, the nails through her wrists—they'd all been done to Father Pat to make her give up the whereabouts of Mercy Bloom.

  And now the girl Father Pat had died protecting looked at Rourke out of those marble angel eyes and said, “Do you think now that Father Pat's dead that I could go home? I don't like checking groceries, and the lady who runs this house, she's a niggardly old thing. She only lets us take a bath once a week and she counts everything, even down to the lumps of sugar you put in your coffee.”

  Rourke left her question unanswered because he couldn't have managed words for the life of him at this moment. The porch fell silent except for the creak of the swing and the rushing of the rising wind through the big elm tree in the yard, and then she said, “I think Father Pat was wrong about Daddy, anyway. Daddy never really meant to hurt me. He always told me it would feel good and sometimes it did.”

  Rourke borrowed the boardinghouse's telephone and put a call in to the squad room, pacing the tiny, cramped parlor impatiently while he waited for the operator to call back with the connection.

  It was Fio on the other end of the line.

  “It's her all right,” Rourke told him. “Miss Mercedes Bloom, alive and well, if you can call it that, and living in Galveston…Y'all pick him up yet?”

  Fio's voice seemed to be coming at him from outer space, breaking into hiccups as it crackled over the wire. “He wasn't at home, and he doesn't have a garage, just an old shed, but it was full of nothing but junk. The wife was passed out cold in bed. Nate Carroll got her sobered up enough for us to figure she doesn't know squat where Bloom is. Although…Nate says he thinks she knew what her old man had been doing to her daughter.”

  “She knew.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, we've got every man on the force out stopping taxis, but the captain doesn't think he's on the streets. He thinks he's probably with the Daly girl.”

  “Goddammit. Okay, I'm coming back now. It looks like some rough weather's brewing, but I'm going to try to outrun it.”

  The line popped and hissed and then Fio's voice faded in long enough for Rourke to hear, “…Miss Lelourie and your Katie had some…” before it broke apart completely.

  “What?” Rourke shouted, but the line crackled again and went dead.

  He rattled the cradle and dialed O, but he couldn't reach the operator. The wind must have taken the wires down somewhere. He paced once around the room, telling himself that if his guys were in any serious trouble, surely Fio wouldn't have waited until the end of the conversation to tell him so.

  He tried the phone again. Still dead, and he couldn't wait any longer. If he had any hope of getting back to New Orleans tonight, he had to leave now.

  The borrowed jalopy wasn't the fastest thing on wheels, and Rourke was in a lather of impatience by the time he got back out to the airfield, where big gusts of wind were rocking the SPAD, whistling through her bracing wires and pulling at the ropes that tethered her to the ground. It was full dusk now, only a film of gray light still clinging to the sky. Rourke looked to the west, where trumpet-shaped clouds with blackened bottoms obscured the horizon.

  “Weather comin',” the old barnstormer said as he watched Rourke go through the preflight check.

  “I got to get back,” Rourke said.

  “You in the war?”

  “Lafayette Corps.”

  “Flyin' and killin' and watchin' your friends get killed off one by one in their turn…Guess it gives some men a death wish.”

  Rourke smiled to himself at the old-timer's faddish psychology.

  He got aloft without any trouble, but it wasn't long before he was overtaken by rain and wind, and he had to fight with the stick to keep her steady. He was flying low, navigating by following the lights of the few small settlements nestled among the bayous and waterways of the wetlands and the bay indentations along the coast.

  He was just starting to think he'd gotten past the worst of it, when the front of a squall appeared like the sheer face of a cliff in front of him. He had but a few seconds to adjust the controls before he plunged into a maelstrom.

  It was as if a damp, black blanket had been flung over his head. The air dropped out from under him as he hit a downdraft, and then rain slammed into his face, icy and biting. He had to ride the elevator hard as the SPAD was buffeted by the wind. The plane pitched, yawed, and rolled under the violent gusts, as the squall did its best to tear the stick out of his hands. He was going to have to try to get above it.

  The rain froze on his goggles as he climbed, and the SPAD shuddered under the battering of the wind. Fearing carburetor icing, he kept his eye on the altimeter, his ear tuned to the sound of the engine, and even as he thought it he began to hear the rough, uneven pulse that indicated loss of power. His eyes flickered over to the airspeed indicator, and he saw that it wasn't registering. He rapped it hard with his knuckle, but it still read zero.

  He knew that he had been plunging around for too long in the dense blackness, that he'd probably lost his equilibrium. He had no physical feeling anymore of what was up or down, right or left, and without the airspeed indicator to tell him, he hadn't realized that he'd been flying slower and slower, too slow for his sharp rate of climb, approaching the speed at which the plane would no longer be able to remain aloft until—

  He stalled, and the SPAD shuddered and whipped into a highspeed, spiraling dive, plunging through the darkness.

  Katie Rourke sat in her daddy's chair and sneaked a peek through the top drawer in his desk, looking for some chewing gum. The last time she'd been here in the squad room, he'd had some Juicy Fruit, but this time she didn't find any.

  She found some rubber bands instead. She took one, stretched it out between two fingers, aimed for the nose of a man hanging on the Rogues' Gallery, and fired. She missed.

  “You must be Miss Katie Rourke.”

  After the scare they'd just had with the bad man getting in the house, the stranger's voice rasping in her ear mad
e Katie jump.

  She twisted around in the chair and looked way up at a man with a bald head so smooth and shiny it looked made out of wax and a mustache stiff as a bottle brush. She decided she didn't like him.

  She looked around the squad room to see if anybody else was taking any notice of the man, but the place was empty. All the policemen were out looking for the bad man, except for Captain Malone. He was in his office with Miss Remy and Mrs. O'Reilly. The blinds to his window were up, and Katie could see the three of them in there, talking and drinking coffee. Mrs. O'Reilly's heart had been having something called “palpitations” because of the bad man, but she seemed fine now.

  Katie looked back up at the man with the waxy head and gave him the smile she used on the nuns. “How do you know I'm Katie Rourke? I could be just about any-old-body.”

  The man laughed as he reached over her and plucked a photograph in a silver frame from off her daddy's desk. “I recognized you from your picture.”

  Katie plucked it right back away from him and put it back where it belonged. She didn't like him touching her daddy's things. “That was taken before I bobbed my hair,” she said.

  The man laughed again and said, “So I see…Say, honey, is your daddy around? I need to talk with him.”

  “Why?”

  The man's smile was full of teeth. “I've been helping with a case he's working on.”

  Katie didn't know what to think now. She still didn't like the man, but Daddy was always telling her that it wasn't charitable to take against someone for no good reason except that you felt like it, and so she decided to be nice.

  She stretched her mouth out into a pretend smile. “Daddy went flying off in his airplane, but he's coming back soon. Miss Remy and Mrs. O'Reilly and I are going to wait for him here, because…just because.”

  She'd been about to tell him the exciting story of the bad man getting into the house, but then she changed her mind. She wasn't going to be that nice. “Are you helping my daddy look for the runaway girl?” she said instead. “'Cause if you are, he thinks he might've found her.”

  “Hey, that's great.” The man took a step away from the desk, then swung back around again. He was wearing a black duster, and it slapped against his legs like the flap of a magpie's wing. “This runaway girl, honey—what's her name?”

  “Mercedes.”

  “Mercedes? Why, that's a pretty name, isn't it? Do you know where your daddy went flying?”

  “No. I don't think he ever said,” she lied.

  “Are you sure? Think hard now.”

  She pretended to think hard and then lied again, “He just never said.”

  The door to Captain Malone's office opened just then, and the man's waxy head jerked in that direction. Then he turned back and leaned into Katie, so close she could see the ends of his mustache quiver as he talked. “When your daddy comes back, be sure to tell him I was here lookin' for him, y' hear?”

  Then he swung around and left her, walking fast. Miss Remy came up, and together they watched him leave the squad room through the short, swinging gate and disappear down the hall, his black duster flapping.

  “Look what Captain Malone found in his desk,” Miss Remy said, and Katie saw that she was holding a pack of Juicy Fruit in her hand. “Who was that man, honey?”

  “He said he was helping Daddy find the runaway girl,” Katie said, “but I know he was lying. Because he would've known her name then, wouldn't he have? Only he didn't.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Miss Remy said, using one of Daddy's favorite naughty words. She made a funny little half step forward, toward the swinging door, and then back, as if she wasn't sure which way she wanted to go. “I do believe that the man the whole of the Crescent City police department is out looking for has just walked right into this squad room, and then walked right back out again.”

  Gillian Daly hadn't given up.

  Three times she'd drifted away into the white nothingness, but she kept crawling back, and she'd pulled and twisted against the chain, strained and reached, and still the tips of her fingers fell just inches short from the wrench, and so she wept and screamed her silent screams, and listened all the while for the scrape of the bay doors and the footsteps on the oiled gravel floor, while she strained and stretched some more, and came up short.

  It was never going to happen, she was never going to reach the wrench without pulling the radiator from the wall. So she tried doing that, yanking on the chain until the links cut so deeply into her wrists that blood smeared in patches on the oily floor.

  She lay back, shaking from exhaustion, the pain in her arms so bad it felt like somebody was trying to twist them right off. Her chest bucked for air; tears and sweat blurred her eyes.

  I hate you, she screamed behind the gag at the man who was coming to kill her, screamed at God and fate and herself, and she gave one last mighty heave against the chain even though the radiator was never coming loose, never.

  One end of it popped out of the wall with such force that it swung around and hit her on the head, knocking her almost senseless. Pain blazed in white lightning flashes across her eyes, blanking out everything but the need to get at the wrench before he came back. She could feel him, like a hot breath on her neck, she could feel him coming.

  One clawed leg of the radiator was still bolted to the wall, but the other leg had busted free, and she was able to work loose one loop of the chain, giving her more slack. Enough slack that she could reach easily for the wrench with her right hand now.

  Her fingers closed around it—

  “Hey, Gilly girl.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Gillian Daly hadn't heard the scrape of the door and the crunch of gravel. He was suddenly just there, looming up in front of her, bending over her, coming to kill her.

  She swung the wrench at his head.

  He saw the blow coming and reared back, so that it missed, but the terror-fueled power of her swing popped the other end of the radiator loose from the wall.

  He laughed, and his laughter snapped the few threads of sanity left inside of her, made her more furious than scared, it made her want to beat him to a pulp. She swung the wrench at his legs, but he dodged it easily and kicked out at her with his heavy brogan, connecting with her forearm and her arm broke, because she heard it before she felt it. A sharp crack, like the snap of a wishbone.

  The wrench clattered to the floor and she scrambled after it, but he was on her, throwing her onto her back and pressing down on her with the full weight of his big body.

  “That wasn't being a good girl, Gilly,” he said, his breath blowing harsh on her face. “Not a good girl at all.”

  She bucked against him, tried to kick, but he was too heavy. She tried to beat at him with the chain, but he punched her hard in the face and then wrapped the loose end of the chain once more around the radiator. The radiator wasn't bolted to the wall anymore, but it still acted as a weight, effectively pinning her arms back in place above her head.

  He pushed up onto his knees, straddling her, and she looked up into his face. Tears of pain and terror blurred her eyes, but she could tell that he was smiling and his smile was the most horrible thing she'd ever seen in her young life, because it made him look kind. His smile made him look like he would never hurt her.

  “Don't cry, Gilly. Don't cry, baby,” he said, and his voice was so low and gentle. Like her own daddy's voice when she was a little girl and she'd wake up crying from a nightmare, and he would stroke the hair out of her face and kiss her wet cheek, and croon to her in a lullaby singsong.

  “I'm going to treat you really good, baby, you'll see. So good, so good, so good…”

  The SPAD dove in a wild, tight spin. Rourke watched the sinking altimeter and revolving compass, trying desperately and blindly to stabilize the controls. Burning pain from the rushing air pressed against his ears, and the blood left his hands and feet. Darkness began to creep around the edge of his vision.

  Suddenly the nose of the plane punched throu
gh the clouds, and Rourke saw a few scattered lights and the tidal path along the coastline, only the world had been turned upside down and the black water was rushing at him with dizzying speed.

  He had only seconds to live, but it was all he needed, because with the sight of the lights and the water, his equilibrium had returned. He shoved the throttle forward and snapped the plane out of its spin with a jerk that jarred his teeth. The propeller bit the air fifty feet from the water, so close it sent up a salt spray into his face, and Daman Rourke laughed because he'd beaten death once again and that victory was always so sweet, so sweet.

  The storm still raged around him, sharp and crooked bolts of lightning doing a dance above his head like marionettes jerking on a string, but he saw the denser lights of New Orleans now, and he laughed again and thought, Home free.

  Half an hour later Rourke was driving his Indian Chief motorcycle down the wet and dangerously slippery blacktop of the St. Bernard Highway as if he'd been shot out of the gates of hell. That brush with his own mortality had blown through his head like a snort of cocaine, cleaning it out.

  He knew where Bloom was keeping the girl.

  He cut the motorcycle's engine when he was three blocks away and cruised to a silent stop alongside the macaroni factory. He studied the hot car farm across the street, the one that had been shut down in a much publicized police raid only two weeks ago. The chicken wire fence rattled and the Victory Gasoline sign creaked loudly in the stiff wind. Trash twirled and danced around the pumps.

  He approached the place on silent feet. Shadows cloaked the garage, a gray clapboard building leprosied with rust. He saw no signs of life, but there was a brand-new padlock on the gate in the fence, and fresh graffiti had been chalked on the garage's bay doors, warning the hobos to stay away.

  He was about to be prudent for a change, about to jog the two blocks down to the call box, get the precinct house on the line and have them send in the cavalry, when he heard a little cry, like the mew of a weak kitten.

  He ran softly along the perimeter of the fence until he found a small gap that he could work into a larger one. He crawled through, snagging his leather jacket on the wire.