Slow Heat (42 page)

“Don’t paint me out to be a saint. Because I’m not.”

“I have skills I have applied to this job and I think they would be put to good use being a bounty hunter,” Micah pressed, not letting King’s comment stop him now that his thoughts were rolling. He spoke from his heart, knowing everything he said was the truth. If that weren’t enough for King, Micah would do as he had just said. He would keep looking until someone would hire him. “I only know how to do one thing.”

Micah stopped talking. He hadn’t meant to say that. There was no way he could look up. His shirt clung to his torso, and the pendant hanging around his neck burned his flesh just below his collarbone. When he tried to think of something to add to his confession, there weren’t any more words.

“Will that be your fallback if being a bounty hunter doesn’t work out for you?”

Micah was shaking his head adamantly before he looked up at King. “No. There is no looking back. I’m only pushing forward and hoping to…” He’d almost done it again. Micah pressed his mouth shut before this telling-the-truth kick he was on got out of hand.

“And hoping to what?” King asked.

Micah searched for something that would make sense other than what he had almost let slip out. “Obviously I’m hoping to be good enough that you don’t regret hiring me back.”

“I might give you your job back,” King said.

“I’d appreciate it,” Micah managed, and kept control as he nodded once. It was all he could do not to grin like a damn fool and shake King’s hand vigorously.

“Tell me what you were about to say.”

Micah looked at him. Sirens sounded nearby. More than one emergency vehicle was approaching. He would not look over his shoulder and confirm how nervous that sound was making him.

“I’m going to have to talk to them. Better tell me now so no one else overhears.”

King didn’t need to say it out loud for Micah to understand getting his job back meant telling the full truth.

“I really hope never to go to prison.” His mouth was so dry when he spoke, he almost choked on the words.

King nodded, his expression not changing. “It’s a rare blessing when a man is given a second chance.

“Get on out of here.” King started toward the ambulance and police car that arrived simultaneously. He looked over his shoulder. “And Jones?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Haley’s call. You can show up in the morning and kiss her ass if you want your job back.”

Micah’s feelings were torn when he drove away from Old Shumba Creek. King told him he would possibly give him his job back, if his wife agreed. Micah would have to beg Haley to return as a bounty hunter. He didn’t like the thought of begging anyone for anything.

But it had come to this. In order to live his new life, to completely forget about Micah Mulligan, he would have to get down on his knees and humble himself. This life could have come at a much higher price.

Was having a new life worth it without Maggie? Every inch of him constricted in pain over the thought of not being with her again, never seeing her smile, or watching her moods change, or dealing with her fiery temper. Could he press forward without her? He didn’t know that answer but wouldn’t go back with his father and uncle.

Micah hoped he would see both of them again. He wanted them out of their family business, too. Right now he barely had the strength to pull himself through.

He’d left the interstate and realized he was in Maggie’s part of town. More than anything he wanted to drive to her house and demand she talk to him. Micah slowed, taking a scenic side street, and searched for inner strength to convince Maggie she belonged with him.

A large church was up on the left. Next to it was a school with children playing in a playground outside. Micah wondered how different his life would have been if he’d gone to regular schools with other children. He shifted his attention to the church, which looked as if it was being refurbished. A few men were on ladders outside each of the stained-glass windows.

Micah had been born Catholic. Possibly he’d been baptized. It wasn’t like he remembered. His father and uncle had made reference to the Bible occasionally, and had prayed to the saints whenever Micah had acted out as a kid.

He’d pulled into an empty stall outside the church before he’d realized he had done so. Micah climbed off the bike and walked up to the stairs. He stared into the vestibule on the other side of two large doors that were propped open. It was as if someone believed he should enter. The doors were already open.

Micah took it for a sign—although he didn’t know of what—and entered the large church. Immediately he smelled incense. When he paused at the entrance and stared down the long aisle to the altar at the other end of the many rows of pews, something shifted inside him. He’d never been in a church, but he knew what he needed to do.

“Excuse me,” he said, lowering his voice just above a whisper and staring at the back side of an older man wearing all black. “Are you the priest here?”

The man turned around, and the white collar around his neck answered Micah’s question for him.

“I’m Father Charles.” The older man smiled warmly at Micah, as if he’d been expecting him.

At least Micah felt a little better thinking about it that way. His clothes were suddenly not fitting him right, and it seemed he was itchy everywhere. He tugged at his T-shirt and cleared his throat.

“Um, Father, sir,” he began. God, he should turn around and leave. He didn’t belong here. “I thought I wanted…” His words broke off. “There are things I need for you…” Again he stopped talking. “Damn it, forget it.”

Micah hurried as fast as he could to the doors.

“Wait. Young man.” Father Charles didn’t yell. His voice was still calm and there was a smile in it that gave promise he wouldn’t condemn or be mortified by what anyone told him.

Micah turned around. He looked at the statues in the church, at the fancy altar at the other end, and at all the pews that were probably filled with people who would be sick if they thought a monster like him had entered their building.

“Come here.” Father Charles gestured. “We can talk over here,” he said as if Micah had already agreed to speak to him.

Micah found himself moving up the aisle toward pews at the front of the church. He continually looked from statue to statue and felt all the saints looking down at him, waiting to hear what he would say. Then judgment would be given.

He swallowed a lump of fear in his throat and stared at the pew where Father Charles was already sitting. The older man in black with the white collar patted the space next to him. Micah knew he’d never known fear as he did right now.

“I’m an assassin,” he began, deciding he’d dump it all in the priest’s lap at once.

Father Charles’s expression sobered, but then he nodded. “Sit down and tell me about it,” he said softly.

The church building didn’t crumble on top of him. All the statues of the saints didn’t explode and shred his skin with pieces of stone. There were no lightning bolts or furious rushes of water through the open doors facing the street. As Micah spoke, he realized it was still sunny outdoors. The sound of hammering continued. Everything went on just as it had before he entered the church.

Once Micah started talking, he couldn’t stop. Father Charles listened intently, nodding, patting Micah’s hand more than once, and asking very few questions, but never looking away. Micah started from the beginning. He admitted he couldn’t remember all the names, or places, but he listed off every name of each person he’d killed that he did remember. And as he did a weight he’d been carrying around with him for years began to lift.

*   *   *

Maggie didn’t know where she was going. After hearing her parents out she’d called her younger brother, Bernie. They had a good talk, and fortunately he didn’t ask for her to catch him up on her life since they’d last seen each other, which had been last Christmas. He was too excited telling her how he was buying Mom and Dad’s house. He didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that these life-changing decisions he and her parents had made rendered her homeless.

You’ve been wanting to move out forever. You’re the one who announced it. Got to love your family for giving you what you want.

Maggie knew her outlook on the whole thing was bitter. Her parents were happier than she’d seen them in years. Her brother had sounded very excited on the phone. She needed a change, too. Now just to figure out what to do with her life.

Her jaw dropped as she drove past Holy Name. “What the—?” she stammered.

A car honked at her when she slowed down, her attention focused on her rearview mirror. There was no way she’d just seen Micah’s motorcycle parked in front of the school she’d gone to and the church where she and her family had attended Mass all her life.

Maggie drove around the block at dangerous speeds and barely managed to stop at the stop sign. She stared down at the church and at the motorcycle. Was it just wishful thinking?

“It seriously has to be,” she informed herself. Like Micah would be parked in front of her family’s church.

Maggie searched up and down the street. There was an empty stall at the end of the playground close to the church. She cut out into traffic, endured being honked at again, and swung into the stall.

Old memories should have come flooding back to her. This was where she’d gone to grade school and high school. Any other time she might have taken a minute to watch the children play. She would have stared up at the beautiful old church and smiled when she saw them redoing the old stained-glass windows.

Maggie did notice the men working on the church and opted for the side door, the one she’d entered twice a week all her growing-up life to attend Mass with her class and the rest of the school.

Maggie opened the door on the side of the church just as she had when she was a child, carefully and quietly. As a young girl she’d always been afraid of interrupting God doing something important, like keeping people alive during a hurricane, or making sure children didn’t starve to death in Africa. Today she opened the door quietly because she was scared to death what she’d find inside.

She closed it just as carefully behind her, letting it hit her back before she stepped into the side vestibule and let the doorknob click back into place without making a sound.

There were voices. Maggie worried that she willed it to be Micah. But who would he be talking to? And why? As she tried convincing herself how insane this was and that she would probably end up trapped by one of the nuns, or Father Charles, who always seemed to know what was on her mind before she told him, she heard the man’s voice again.

“Five months ago I flew into DC for one of the largest assignments we’d ever accepted,” Micah was saying. “The men who contacted my father through the MulliganStew e-mail address had set up the necessary appointment just as all the rest did. Dad was extremely cautious about this meeting. My uncle was all over his computer and all of his techno devices making sure the meeting my dad had with these men was secure as hell. Oh, sorry, Father.”

“It’s okay, Micah.” That was Father Charles’s voice.

Maggie tiptoed forward, not sure why she wasn’t letting her presence be known. There was probably no number of Hail Marys that would get her out of the sin of hearing someone else’s confession. And that was what she was hearing. Micah was confessing his sins, and to her priest!

She wanted to jump with joy. She wanted to throw her hands up in the air and scream Hallelujah! She wanted to do a jig right there on the thick red carpet in the most sanctified place she’d known her entire life.

“I didn’t know about this meeting until it was over. That’s how it always was. I told you that already.”

“Yes, you did. Your dad and uncle didn’t tell you anything until it was time to go wherever you had to go to kill whoever it was you had to kill.”

“That’s right, Father.”

She wasn’t able to comprehend what she was hearing. Father Charles was the best man on the planet. She and her brothers and sisters all had stories they could share about their priest. Maggie had always thought him open-minded. Father had forgiven all her sins her entire life—or better yet, God had forgiven them. But Father Charles was the best stand-in on the planet. Now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense that Micah would rid himself of so many demons to the coolest priest there ever was.

“The kill went down just the same as the rest of them did. Just like every other person I had killed in the past, this CIA agent was crooked. He was doing terrible things. That’s why I was always brought in, to get rid of really bad people who had found a way to be above the law. I was the last-resort assassin. When I made my kill, families and communities lived better without some scumbag making their life hell.”

Micah cleared his voice and mumbled something, probably another apology for cursing, then he continued. “It wasn’t until after—about a week, maybe less after I had returned home—that my dad came home and was in a serious panic. I had assassinated a CIA agent. They were looking for me and we all knew they had the connections to find me.”

“So that is when you became Micah Jones?”

“At first I had no regrets. I was proud of who I was and convinced no one would find me. But when I met Maggie my past became more of an annoyance than anything else.”

“She’s a beautiful girl.”

“The best,” Micah agreed. “I love her, Father.”

Maggie’s jaw dropped. Father Charles knew about her and Micah. If she hadn’t just witnessed her parents in the Twilight Zone, Maggie might not have been able to accept hearing her priest talking with the man she loved, the assassin, in her church. But it was fitting, just another event in the most insane day of her life.

“After Maggie walked out on me, I cleared out the house I’d been staying in and left to join my father and uncle. I didn’t sleep but worked all night. I woke them up when I got to their hotel but they were happy to see me and ready to go. Listening to them talk, hearing the same routine I’d heard so many times before, helped me see the truth. I was a murderer. And I was preparing to murder again. I left the hotel and my father and uncle. I was going to quit for Maggie.