Parishioner (35 page)

“Why?”

“Because if you’re telling the truth then you just might be expendable.”

Benol closed her eyes and opened them, trying hard to see something that was hidden.

“What did I do?”

“Kidnapping, accomplice to murder, conspiracy,” Ecks said. “There are all kinds of things that the law could throw at you.…”

Ecks trailed off midsentence because he was about to say that maybe all three boys were the target of murder. It was his turn to close his eyes. There were so many suspects and players.

“I was able to keep the guy I communicated with away from the Nut Hut.”

“Was he the third child?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

They sat quietly long enough for Yolanda to come take the dishes and leave a flimsy yellow bill.

“I found Brayton,” Ecks said at last.

“Where?”

“At his house.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“He didn’t know anything that I hadn’t already figured out.”

“I’d … I’d like to talk to him.”

“He was leaving town when we spoke. Sounded like he was planning a long trip.”

“Did he say anything about me?” the child in Benol asked.

“No. Not one word.”

This final rejection seemed to break Benol. She hung her head and exhaled, a solitary foot soldier ordered by a higher power to capitulate.

“Where should I go?” Benol asked. “Jerry was paying the rent at the hotel.”

Ecks reached into the pocket on his left hip and pulled out a roll of twenty twenty-dollar bills. This he handed to his minister’s client.

“Four hundred dollars,” he said. “Take it and get a bed at the downtown YWCA. I’ll call you the minute I know something.”

“What about the fifteen thousand?”

“Did you ever really think that that lawyer was gonna pay you, girl?”

Again Benol temporarily lost the power of speech. Xavier had put into words the question that she was unwilling to ask herself—there was nothing else to say.

“Will you call me tomorrow? Please,” she asked.

“Before the sun goes down.”

Frank was serious about the privacy and protection of his parishioners. There were two houses in Coldwater Canyon that belonged to the church, through unaffiliated individuals. The safe house was on Mill Valley Way. It was a pleasant little flattop bungalow with a deck that looked out over Los Angeles.

If any member of the congregation or other friend of Frank’s got in trouble, they were often brought to the safe house to wait for plane tickets or news.

Xavier was once asked to bring the church’s youngest member, Juan Margoles, there after the fifteen-year-old had killed his father. Even though the boy had shot the elder Margoles in the back of the head, Frank and his cabinet of six judges had deemed the act self-defense and agreed to get the young man to safety.

The Parishioner didn’t question the verdict. He’d never relied on the law for any kind of justice, and so he drove the boy to the house in the dead of night. No one had told him what had happened after that drop-off, and he never asked.

The safe house was on Mill Valley Way, but the guardhouse was where Ecks was headed that noon. The guardhouse was located on Pleasant Circle. The route there was different from Mill Valley Way, but the guardhouse’s small backyard was less than one hundred and fifty yards away from the safe house.

Ecks could see the safe house from the window in the kitchen. There were also sixteen hidden cameras that, when turned on, revealed every corner of the hideout.

Ecks turned on the four-by-four block of video monitors and sat back with a snifter of cognac. He rarely drank brandy, but that had been Swan’s favorite drink. He would toast his friend and see what might happen in the safe house on the hill.

At one thirty-three the thug in the ugly green suit approached the front door of the house on Mill Valley Way. The entrance was hidden from view by a hundred kinds of vegetation, but Ecks saw the man clearly on monitor five. Green Suit pushed the buzzer and Ecks heard it over the audio connection. Then came the knock. Buzzer again. Knock. There was a two-second delay between the action and sounds.

Then the man in green jiggled the doorknob. When he found that it was locked he turned and walked away.

Fourteen minutes passed and the man returned with three friends—one of whom Ecks recognized.

“Hm.”

A short, fancy little man in a well-cut buff-colored suit knelt in front of the door and had it open in under three minutes.

Ecks watched the crew from monitor to monitor as they went through the house. Green and Buff did a very professional search. This didn’t bother Ecks, because the safe house would be clean of any evidence or clues that might lead to the church.

Accompanying the gunsels was a tall, good-looking man in an elegantly cut cream-colored suit, and Jerry Jocelyn in dark blue business attire.

“Nobody here and nuthin’ else either,” said the man in green to the stylish boss.

“That’s right, Mr. Martindale,” the shorter lock-pick man added.

“Okay,” Martindale said. “Let’s just sit. Jesse?”

“Yes, boss?” the man in the buff suit said.

“Is there a window that looks down on the path up here?”

“Yep.”

“Keep a lookout.”

Ecks watched as Jesse moved from monitor seven to thirteen.

“Link,” Martindale said.

“Yes, Mr. Martindale?” Hideous Green answered.

“You find a place to keep a lookout for somebody coming from behind.”

“Why would they do that?” Link asked.

The images on the black-and-white screens were a little blurry, but Ecks could see clearly the hard look Martindale had for the minion Link.

“But I’ll go look,” Link said hastily. Then he walked into monitor eleven, pulled up a straight-backed chair, and gazed out a window that gave a view of the side and back of the house.

If Ecks looked out of his window he would have been able to stare Link in the face.

“Have a seat,” Martindale said to Jocelyn when the other men had gone to their posts.

The lawyer/pimp took a wood-frame chair with a bulging striped cushion.

Martindale approached the yellow couch, inspected it first with his eyes and then with his hands. Finally, when he was satisfied that there was no danger to his clothes, he sat down and sighed.

“So how’s it going, Jer?”

“The surfer’s dead and our guy’s got a day pass downtown on Thursday.”

“So it’s just Noland, this Lenny O kid, and that other business and we’re through.”

“I don’t know why we have to bother with Lenny,” Jocelyn said. “We know it’s not him.”

“If some bright-eyed cop catches wise then it won’t look like we picked and choosed. Keeps ’em off balance.”

“And what about the other thing?”

“No choice there either,” Martindale said. “Too bad.”

“Yeah.” Jerry Jocelyn seemed to have true lament.

“Not that.”

“No? Then what, Chick?”

“I used to really like Los Angeles. But you know, it’s got too crowded over the years. A man can’t make a living like he used to. And even when there’s money comin’ in, there’s no more pleasure. You know, I’ve done it all and now everything tastes like chicken.”

“So where you going after this?”

“If I told you then I’d have to kill you,” Martindale said, and Ecks didn’t think that it was a lie.

“I’m heading out to Maui,” Jocelyn said, unafraid.

“I guess that’s a good enough destination. But it’s a little gaudy for me. I want an old house in a white neighborhood where all the families can trace their roots back to Jefferson and Washington. Just give me that and I’ll live out the rest of my days in peace.”

Sipping his brandy, Ecks felt an odd kinship with the men on his screens. Each one of them had been born in the everyday world that provided the path that led from school to work to marriage to retirement and finally a sleepy death. At one point on this road they took a detour thinking that they’d get ahead of the herd somehow. And now they were outlaws with no way back. They still had family and friends, dreams and aspirations—but the pack that spawned them had moved on.

Ecks poured himself another brandy while the men settled into silence, waiting for victims that would never arrive.

“Jesse,” Chick Martindale called out at four fifty-seven. He was reading a newspaper while Jocelyn thumbed through a small tome he carried in his jacket pocket.

“Yes, boss?”

“You sure he said four o’clock?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Today?”

“I asked him twice. Had to pay five hundred for it.”

Toy had said three hundred. And Toy wouldn’t lie—not to a fellow Parishioner. Working thugs like Link and Jesse were always hungry for a few bucks. It was no surprise that they would lie to their boss. They’d lie to their own mothers if that helped pay the rent.

Ecks was on his fifth drink. He wasn’t worried, because the cameras were recording every word and movement. He had no intention of facing four men who were as untamed as he had been in the old days back east.

Criminal time, Ecks remembered, was often indolent and sluggish: sitting guard at a front door or waiting for a victim who might not ever show. Between the inherent danger and boredom it was not a job for everybody.

But there were moments, times when you were so free that the rest of the world seemed as if it were born and would die in chains.