Parishioner (9 page)

The huge green metal door at the foot of the stairs seemed to be built for some kind of giant. To call the locks that held it shut padlocks would be like calling Fort Knox a safe. They were huge, ugly things made from metal, specially designed to be unbreakable.

“What the fuck you think they got in there, man?” Winter asked.

“The answers to all my questions. Probably something neither one of us wants to know.”

“I’ont think you got to worry about it, brother. ’Cause unless you got some kinda key to them locks we not gettin’ on the other side’a that mothahfuckah there.” There was more than a little relief in the driver’s tone.

The basement light was weak but good enough for Xavier to see.

“You need to go, Winter?”

“No. Why you ask me that?”

“Because I intend to break down this door and get on the other side. I sure do.”

“How? You friends with Batman or sumpin’?”

“Neighborhood I come from Batman stayed away.”

Xavier hefted his miniature tire iron and rubbed it thoroughly with a rag from the floor while studying the door closely.

“This ain’t no glass door, Ecks.”

“But you see, Win. The door got hinges.”

“Shit, man. Them things look like they frets on a battleship.”

“Sure do,” Xavier said with a nod. “But the outer edge is anchored in concrete, not steel. All I got to do is pull the outside of the hinges out the wall.”

“What about the locks?”

“They’re anchored in concrete too.”

It took a little under three hours, but Xavier, with some help from Winter Johnson, wrenched the hinges from their moorings and levered the five-hundred-pound door from its frame. It hit the floor with a mighty crash, but no toes were broken and the sound was swallowed by the earth.

The smells of fresh soil, with a hint of rotting flesh, wafted from the shadowy underground chamber.

The interior was dark, and Xavier hesitated to use his little flashlight.

“What’s that smell?” the professional chauffeur asked.

“Death.”

“What?”

“Listen, man,” Xavier said. “I let you come this far—to get your feet wet. I know you’re scared. You’d be a fool not to be. But maybe right now you should listen to that shiver in your heart. ’Cause you know, Win, this shit here is about to get bad.”

Winter’s eyes were light brown and small like their owner. He squinted at Xavier and his shoulders quivered.

“In for a penny,” the driver said, “in for a pound.”

This phrase was like the flip of a switch in the ex-gangster’s nervous system. The violence, as always, was most evident as a sensation in Xavier’s forearms. His jaw clenched, clamping down on the evil smile that wanted out. He turned abruptly, entering the tomblike vault, guided by the little plastic flash.

The chamber was largish, fifteen feet deep and twenty wide.

Toward the far end of the unfinished space, lying on a short mound of moist soil, was
Sedra Landcombe. There was a pale blue slip over her withered flesh and a bloody gash on the left side of her head. The force of the blow had caused the eyeball on that side to come out of its socket, falling down the side of her face and hanging next to her left ear.

“Oh, shit!” Winter cried.

Xavier knelt close to the body, looking for anything that might tell her story. But she was dead and bereft of any signature, jewelry, or sigil. Probably murdered in another room, Xavier mused, most likely the master bedroom. Xavier thought that Dodo had hit her aunt with the bludgeon, maybe more than once, dragged her down to the family tomb, and then gone back upstairs to wash up any blood.

“Oh, fuck, no,” Winter whined.

He was standing at the door holding a small dark and lightweight stone in his hand.

“No,” he moaned.

“What is it?”

“A baby’s skull, man. A baby’s little head.”

Winter dropped the stone and fell to his knees.

Xavier went to the area of the tomb that his friend had come from and saw various bones both jumbled and arranged. Most remnants belonged to children and babies, but there were at least three adult skulls in the mix. Xavier poked at the bones with his tire iron but he didn’t touch them, not even with gloves on.

The bruise on his side, from the car accident, suddenly flared. This was the only indication he had of some kind of feeling of vulnerability. His minister had sent him into slaughter and he, in turn, had brought along an innocent friend.

“What we gonna do, Ecks?”

“We get our ass outta here, Win.”

At the top of the stairs, still in the pantry that contained the door leading to the basement, Xavier had a premonition. There was something wrong—a feeling on the air.

“Ecks—” Winter began.

Rule put up a hand and moved in front of his friend. With a further gesture of the same
hand he imparted that the driver should stay where he was.

The pain in his side disappeared as Xavier Rule, aka Egbert Noland, moved quietly through the kitchen and into the living room.

The two men wore dark clothes. One was white and the other, an ecru-colored man, probably hailed from below the southern border; either he did or his ancestors had.

Xavier surprised them. They were carrying large duffel bags and weren’t expecting to come across anyone. But these men were professionals and so they dropped their bags and reached for things inside their clothes.

The violence in Xavier’s forearms went into action without volition. With his left hand he threw the crowbar like an underhand javelin, and before it had punctured the white man’s chest he was firing with the specially made Afghani pistol. The gun made little noise and no flash. Both men fell to the ground, decimated by the ambidextrous stone-cold killer.

“What happened?” Winter said. He ran into the room upon hearing the coughing of the whispering gun.

Xavier hurried to the men he’d defeated. The white man had managed to get a pistol in his hand, but Xavier slapped it away. The other man had four bullets in him, head and chest.

“Stay back!” Xavier said to Winter. “Don’t let him see you.”

Then the church deacon searched the bodies and bags of his sudden enemies. The duffel bags contained shovels and spades, kerosene and a black plastic body bag. The Hispanic man had two keys in his pocket, held together by a piece of string. Xavier would have bet that they were a fit for the front door and the underground tomb. The white man had a money clip in his pants pocket. There were a few bills and a slip of paper held fast by the silver clamp.

“Help me,” the white man wheezed.

Xavier might have considered killing him if Winter were not a witness.

“I’m dying,” the man with the crowbar protruding from the middle of his chest said.

Xavier searched the man’s pockets, found nothing but a cheap cell phone. He stood up, watched closely by the dying white man, turned his back, and went to the kitchen.

“We’re going to leave now,” he said to his shivering friend. “When we go through the living room keep your back to the one still alive. Don’t turn to look, and keep your hand up over your face so he don’t see you in any glass.”

On the way to the street Xavier told his friend to meet him at an all-night club on Pico west of Sepulveda.

“It’s behind the taco stand in the little minimall on the northwest side of the street. You don’t have to knock. Somebody’ll come out to meet you. Tell him you there for Ecks and he’ll let you in.”

Xavier drove in the opposite direction from his friend. A block away he entered a call on the phone he lifted from the dying man. The call was answered almost immediately by Clyde Pewtersworth.

“Church services.”

“Don’t you sleep, Clyde?”

“I try.”

“Connect me to Soto.”

There were three clicks, a spate of silence, and then a phone ringing. There were at least a dozen rings before a groggy voice answered, “
Que?
”

“That house? The one they saw me coming from? It’s a killing field, but one of the bodies is still breathing.”

Xavier disconnected the call and threw the phone from the car window. Then he did a U-turn in the middle of the street and drove his Edsel toward the no-name, after-hours nightclub.

On the way, following the speed limit like a teenager taking his first driving test, he remembered:

Swan was tall and hefty, not nearly as black as Ecks. He got in a fight over a woman outside the Chilean’s Bar on East 143rd and then got carried away. His opponent died when Swan twisted his neck after knocking him unconscious. The police had no choice but to put him under arrest. Swan got word to Betty Rynn that a young churchgoer, George Napier, had witnessed the slaughter and offered to bear witness in the trial. Everybody else at the Chilean’s knew better than to have seen anything. But George put his faith in God, and Betty told Ecks to
have a talk with the young man.

No one was supposed to know that George was a state witness. No one would have if it weren’t for one of Swan’s relatives who worked for the district attorney’s office.

Napier had a girlfriend named Lena. He was in the habit of spending time with her at her parents’ house off Flatbush in Brooklyn.

Ecks meant to talk to the young man, to scare him. He wanted to show him that he would never be safe or secret again. Maybe if Lena’s kisses weren’t so sweet and George had left at ten instead of twelve forty-five, maybe then Ecks wouldn’t have had time to think and the opportunity to kill rather than scare.

Those hours he spent waiting in the shadows he worried that the young zealot might get stupid and try to implicate him too. There was no one on the street or sidewalk when George came strolling out. He walked right past Xavier’s hidey-hole. His eye came out of its socket too. He died and Xavier went to fuck Betty Rynn, Swan’s girlfriend, as payment for getting her man out of a jam.

“You give me this right here,” Ecks told Betty, “and I promise your old man be outta jail by the end of the week.”

She gave it to him good. So much so that he suspected she liked him more than she ever let on.