I Have Sinned

by Caimh McDonnell

Yet another hour later.

  Father Gabriel opened the door again.

  “Howerya, Father.”

  “OK. I will go back to see Sister Dorothy in the morning, and I will explain to her that I don’t want your help.”

  Bunny sat there, visibly shivering. He blew into his woollen gloves. “You can try, but she strikes me as the stubborn sort.”

  “Mãe de Deus! If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black. Look, I will talk to her tomorrow.”

  “Grand.”

  “So you’ll leave?”

  “Nope. I’m staying here to protect you whether you like it or not.”

  Gabriel stepped out and looked around. “And exactly how will you protect me when you’re dead?”

  “Well,” said Bunny, “that’s really more of a metaphysical quandary, Padre, so of the two of us, I’d imagine you’re best placed to answer it. Oh, and when I freeze to death, feel free to stick a red suit on me and pretend I’m a statue of Santa Claus – I’ve got some form in that area.”

  “I will not give in to emotional blackmail.”

  “Right,” said Bunny. “Well, speaking as the blackmailer and the hostage, that’s unfortunate. The poor bastard is going to freeze to death, but I admire your firm stance.”

  “You are unbelievable.”

  “And coming from a man who works for an invisible bloke in the sky, that’s really saying something.”

  “Do you think this is funny?”

  “’Tis hard to tell. I think whatever bit of my body is used to determine what is and isn’t funny has shut down because of the cold. ’Tis like one of them government shutdowns you’re always having over here. My unnecessary services are sending the staff home.”

  “You need to go.”

  “’Tis funny you should mention that. I don’t suppose you’d let me in to use the bog?”

  “The what?”

  “Sorry. The bathroom.”

  “No,” said Father Gabriel, rather more loudly than he had intended.

  Bunny waved at a woman who was walking by with her dog in tow. She looked embarrassed to be caught looking. “I’m not one to be judgey, but this could start to look a smidge unchristian pretty soon, Padre.”

  “For the love of God, I am pleading with you to leave.”

  Bunny shook his head. “And for the love of a woman, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  One hour and twelve minutes later.

  While there had been the tiniest glimmer of hope for it being otherwise, Father Gabriel was not in the least bit surprised to find Bunny lying down on the steps again.

  “Howerya, Padre.” His teeth were chattering as he spoke. “Don’t worry about the needing-the-bog situation. Let’s just say that resolved itself.”

  Father Gabriel looked up at the sky and then back down. It was then that he noticed the figure standing across the street in a puffer jacket with the hood up, watching them intently. “Who is that?”

  “What, across the street? Well,” said Bunny, jiggling his legs to try to keep the blood flowing, “I’m not on a first-name basis, but I’m pretty sure he’s a member of the whatchamacallems – Red Devils gang.”

  “And why is he watching you?”

  “He and his pal noticed me about fifteen minutes ago. I’d imagine his job is to make sure I don’t move while the other lad goes and gets his gun.”

  Father Gabriel gave the man at the far side of the street a long, hard look. “There is no violence around my church; the gangs know this.”

  “When they shoot me full of holes, you can send them a strongly worded memo.”

  Father Gabriel pursed his lips and breathed out through his nose. “Alright. Fine. Have you still got that gun?”

  “No.”

  “Do you really think now is a good time to lie to me?”

  “I think the bit that decides that is frozen too.”

  Gabriel said nothing, but he held his hand out.

  Bunny looked up at him. “I appreciate the gesture, Padre, but I am not willing to be put out of my misery just yet.”

  The men locked eyes again. After glancing around, Bunny slipped his hand into his coat pocket and handed him the gun, which Gabriel concealed within his robes.

  Bunny laughed in a way that sounded rather unhinged. “Jesus, Father, while I appreciate the sentiment, it feels like you’ve left me at a distinct disadvantage in the forthcoming gunfight.”

  “No guns in the church. Ever.”

  “OK, but…” Bunny looked up, his alarmingly red face filled with hope. “Does that mean…?”

  Gabriel nodded. “C’mon, get up.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m letting you inside.”

  “I know that, but I think my arse may’ve frozen in place.”

  Father Gabriel swore to himself and then reached down and grabbed Bunny’s arm.

  “Count of three,” said Bunny. “Actually, make it two, I think yer man’s friend might be back.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Zoya jumped in her chair and let out an involuntary yelp as the door behind her opened.

  Sister Dionne stuck her head in. Seeing as Zoya’s room doubled up as her workshop, it paid to be cautious when popping in. “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Zoya. “Cooler than a polar bear’s icebox. You just startled me.”

  “Really? I’m literally the only person who ever comes in here. How big a surprise could that have been?”

  Zoya felt herself blush. “Sorry, I was zoned out.”

  “Right. So, anything happening?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “So Father Gabriel hasn’t let him in yet?”

  “Oh, that? Yeah, yeah, he let him in about twenty minutes ago.”

  Dionne opened the door fully and stepped inside. “Why? What else are you watching?”

  Zoya hit a key and her screens shut off. “Nothing, nada, nyet. In my head, that was over – the priest sitch – and I’d moved on to other things. I’m like a shark, y’know…”

  “You never sleep?”

  “I was going for I gotta keep moving forward, but sure, your thing works too.”

  Dionne nodded and then put her hand on her hip in a sign that Zoya knew meant she was going into “talk” mode. “Are you OK? You’re acting a bit… weird?”

  Zoya would bet that Dionne had originally constructed that sentence with “even for you” tagged on the end but diplomatically omitted it. People often think weird people don’t know they’re being weird. They do. What makes weird people weird is they don’t care, as they find “normal” to be, in itself, weird.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Too much caffeine maybe, but other than that – cool, cool, cool, Daddyo.”

  “Right. I have warned you about those awful energy drinks.”

  Zoya rolled her eyes. “Ten-four, big momma. Roger Wilco.”

  It had recently dawned on Zoya that she had started saying a lot of stuff ironically in conversation and then it had crept in and just stuck. Now even she wasn’t sure where she stopped and the ironic techno-geek image she liked to project started.

  “Actually,” said Zoya, stilling Sister Dionne’s hand as she reached for the door handle, “can I ask… why are we keeping an eye on the priest and the Irish dude? I mean, everybody we have except us is out looking for Bernadette and Assumpta, so if anything happens, it ain’t like we could try to intervene.”

  “Yes, but at least we can keep an eye on them, and things might change. Bernadette might walk through the front door tomorrow.”

  Zoya tried to smile back encouragingly at this. She didn’t pretend to understand much that went on around her – at least not in the human world, which she found confusing at the best of times. Still, she knew some bits of the Bernadette-and-Dionne puzzle, although she couldn’t fit them together. The two women seemed to share a great deal of history and didn’t appear to like each other at all. In fact, their bickering had been an almost ever-present background noise in th
e hustle and bustle of the order. Then Bernadette had defied Sister Dorothy and gone off with Assumpta on some mission. That had been weeks ago, and since then there had been no word. It had only dawned on Zoya, in Bernadette’s absence, that to argue so much, she and Dionne must have sought out each other’s company. It was a big building, after all.

  Zoya, as well as monitoring all communication channels, had alerts set up should any of the aliases previously used by Bernadette or Assumpta pop up anywhere. Sister Dorothy had sent the entire order out to try to find them. So far, it was like they had disappeared off the face of the earth. It also appeared to be tearing Dionne apart that she had been forced to stay behind. Dorothy was sick and Dionne, despite her own protestations, had been voted in as their next leader. It surprised Zoya to realise she missed the bickering – the big old place seemed so quiet and empty now with just the three of them in it.

  Dionne seemed to want to talk. “So, did you use Birdie to keep an eye on them?”

  “The priest and the Irish dude? A bit, but there’s a traffic camera that, after a little encouragement, now catches the church, so we got 24/7 eyes on the front. I’ll use Birdie to drop in some of my remote cams tomorrow to cover the back.”

  “Great. If nothing else, those two should make for an excellent reboot of The Odd Couple franchise.”

  “The what now?”

  Dionne sighed. “The Odd Couple,” she repeated. “It was a film? And a TV show, come to think of it.” She shook her head. “You really do make me feel old.”

  “Sorry,” said Zoya. “Hey, Dionne? What was it like in the good old days, when the internet ran off steam and the only way you could send an email was to print it out and staple it to a pigeon?”

  Sister Dionne laughed and pulled a face as she stepped out of the room. “Don’t forget to actually go to sleep at some point, missy.”

  Zoya saluted. “Aye aye, oh Captain, my captain!”

  “And don’t pretend to have never heard of The Odd Couple one minute and then quote from Dead Poets Society the next.”

  Zoya waved and then pressed the button she had installed under her desk that caused the door to slam. She knew that Sister Dionne would have a big smile on her face as she walked down the hall, laughing to herself. The reason she knew that was because there was a camera covering the hall. As she turned the corner, Dionne waved at it and pulled the face again.

  Now she was gone, Zoya could get back to what she had been doing before Dionne had interrupted her – due diligence. She was really just following orders. Three men had tried to break into the school, and the sisters had instructed her to keep an eye on them. Admittedly, she may have gone above and beyond on that score. Through a combination of traffic cameras, licence plate recognition on the cab and judicious use of Birdie, she had followed them home the previous night. She had watched as the Irishman was dropped off at a crummy-looking hotel in Queens before following the cab as it stopped at an all-night valet place, presumably to wash out the smell of the Irishman following his dumpster dive. Then she’d followed them to Hunts Point and watched as the little guy had dropped off Jackson Diller. He had moved quickly and quietly through the streets for a couple of blocks as Birdie flew silently overhead. There were no cameras here. He’d reached a row of houses with boarded-up windows, nipped down an alley and clambered up and into a second-floor window. Any thoughts that he might have been breaking in were dismissed as Birdie’s sensitive mic picked up the sound of him checking on someone called Mrs James.

  Zoya had spent today doing her job: checking for any communications from the sisters out in the field; running her sweep of media, message boards and law enforcement bulletins to see if anything had turned up that might be of interest to them; and finally, tweaking the school’s defences after last night’s “live test”. After all that, and only after all that, she had checked in on Jackson Diller. The night before, Birdie had laid an egg – which is what Zoya had nicknamed her remote monitoring cameras. There was no mission-critical reason for it; she just found him… interesting. It seemed he had left early in the morning and returned at about 6pm. If that surveillance was in any way justified, Zoya knew the next bit wasn’t – although, if pressed, she could pass it off as a ‘test’.

  Birdie already far exceeded the capabilities of any commercially available drone. Through a combination of clever battery design, solar panel recharging and improved aerodynamic performance, she could stay airborne for longer and travel further distances than anything that wasn’t owned by the US military. Zoya had also come up with the idea of using “nests”, which meant that Birdie had deposited a few of her own batteries in discreet locations dotted around the city. Her dual-battery design meant that she could swap out a dead one for a live one while maintaining operation. It was a design that would probably be worth a lot of money, but Birdie was Zoya’s favourite and she wasn’t giving it to anyone.

  Still, this test – which she had put into her notes as “Christmas 2.0” – was something different. She had waited for the cover of darkness, as delivering this large a payload would increase Birdie’s visibility. She flew in the 500-metre above-ground zone and took a route that avoided tall buildings to minimise the chances of being spotted. She also monitored police bands for any reports of an unexplained flying object.

  Acquiring the package itself had been tricky. Normally, she would have had it delivered to one of their dummy addresses and had one of the other sisters pick it up for her, but the only person who could do that was Dionne and she hadn’t wanted to bother her. She also hadn’t wanted to explain what she was doing. Instead, she bought it herself and then contacted an independent courier to deliver it. The great thing about New York bicycle couriers was that they were all far too busy to care about your weird request – a big enough tip and they’d deliver a baby to a pack of wolves. She’d watched from a distance via Birdie as the Lycra-clad woman dropped the parcel in a remote spot in Pelham Bay Park and then sent the text message confirming receipt. The courier had shaken her head and pedalled off to the next job. Then Birdie had swooped down and retrieved it. Zoya was very pleased with how effectively Birdie’s clamps had worked on a non-standard-sized package.

  Given her precautions, the only difficulty in the flight had been the unexpected, in the form of a seagull who tried to take an interest. A blast of AC/DC from the internal speakers had warned it off. She had delivered the package forty-five minutes ago and now she was just waiting. The test was already a success, and she had logged it as such in her records. That was the important thing. That was all that mattered. Everything else was scientifically insignificant.

  She watched as Jackson Diller climbed up to the second-floor window and then stopped as he noticed the package sitting there. He looked at it warily and then glanced around. He touched it and moved quickly backwards, as if expecting it to blow up. But curiosity triumphed over caution, and he untied the string that held it together. Then he ripped through the packaging. Zoya zoomed in on his face as he opened it. She watched as the wide smile spread across his lips. Her heart pounded in her chest.

  She pulled back as he stood up and put the coat on. It was a puffer coat in classic black with a feather down interior, featuring a double-layer design with a funnel neck, a classic collar, buttons over the front zip fastening, long sleeves, side slit pockets and a quilted exterior. She didn’t really know what most of that meant but it had sounded impressive on the website. Jackson Diller seemed to like it. He put it on and hugged it to himself and beamed a smile into the cold winter’s night. Unseen, several miles away, Zoya beamed back.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Father Gabriel handed Bunny the cup of hot cocoa.

  “Thanks very much, Father.”

  Gabriel couldn’t quite bring himself to say the words “you’re welcome”. Bunny wasn’t. For better or worse, it appeared that he was stuck with the Irishman, which, given his current situation, was the last thing he needed. He would try to make time to go talk to the sisters
tomorrow and see if he could resolve the matter. Given that Sister Dorothy had been furious with him for breaching protocol and bringing McGarry to see them in the first place, he was not optimistic. And there was no dissuading the man himself from following what he considered to be his orders.

  They were in the storeroom that formed the main part of the basement. Broken furniture, boxes of old hymn books and trash bags full of donated clothing filled most of the space. Bunny sat on a battered armchair which had been there since before Gabriel’s time. Normally the place had a damp, musty smell, but the Irishman’s coat was dominating in that area – even from across the room.

  “I see you found dry clothes that fit you?”

  Bunny nodded. “Yes. Thanks, Padre. There’s a load of stuff over there in those orange bags that seems to be my exact size.”

  “I see. Mrs Washington donated those. They belonged to her former husband.”

  “Bitter divorce?”

  “Terminal heart attack,” said Gabriel, blessing himself.

  Bunny looked down at the hooded Yankees sweatshirt he was now wearing. “Jesus, if that isn’t a wake-up call to lose a bit of weight, I don’t know what is.”

  “Indeed. Very sobering.” A thought struck Gabriel and he held his hand out. “Speaking of which, no alcohol of any kind is allowed in the church.”

  “What! It’s been a while, but is the blood of Christ not represented by wine anymore?”

  “That may be the case,” said Gabriel, “but we do not have a policy of bring your own.”

  Bunny looked up at him, his eyes filled with outrage. “Technically, this room isn’t in the church, is it? ’Tis more below the church when you think about it.”

  Gabriel said nothing, he just looked pointedly at his extended hand.

  Bunny pulled a flask from the back pocket of a dead man’s jeans and handed it over with a petulant look on his face. “A nip against the cold never hurt anybody.”

  Gabriel opened the flask and took a smell before pulling his head back in revulsion.