Steal Across the Sky (21 page)

FRANK EMERGED FROM
the confessional no better off than when he went in.

When he was a kid, it had been so easy. Confession every Saturday morning, say a penance of three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers, and emerge to stand on the church steps shining clean and completely safe. A sixteen-wheeler could hit you and you’d go straight to Heaven. It had been the best feeling in the world.

Frank helped an old lady in a flowered hat down the steps, holding her arm. “Is somebody picking you up, ma’am?” She didn’t look capable of even seeing the street, much less navigating it.

“Oh, yes! My grandson. Such a good boy, but never goes to church, let alone confession to . . . well. Thank you, dear. Do you see a 2011 blue Toyota Tundra?” The last words had obviously been carefully memorized.

“Coming along right now . . . Have a good day, ma’am.” He helped her into the car, keeping his head down so as not to be recognized by the driver.

“God bless you,” she quavered, and the Toyota squealed tires and lurched off.

Punk.

Frank pulled the brim of his baseball cap very low, wondered where to go now, and began to walk aimlessly. The inactivity was the worst; he hated it. No job, and no chance of getting one. The only thing he’d ever wanted was a job in law enforcement, and now that was closed to him. No girlfriend, no friends he wanted to see. His old buddies, except for Mike Renfrew, were too careful to not mention the Barton PD suspension. Or the bizarre trip off Earth (“Did you really go? Like, why, man?” Pat Donovan had asked after too many beers). Or the stares Frank got at
their old bars and ball fields. But it was the reporters that really alienated his friends, the jackals that followed Frank sniffing for scraps for their goddamn newscasts. . . .

Stop
. He’d just gone to confession, and here he was taking the name of the Lord in vain. That wasn’t the way out.

But what was? Confession hadn’t helped, not one bit. Father Pfender was too old, too out of it, too used to petty confessions of shoplifting and fornicating and fighting. But what had been the alternative—confess to the parish’s other priest, Frank’s Uncle Jack? No way.

“
Father, I told a serious lie, with serious consequences
.”

“
Consequences to who?
”

“
To the United States government. Under oath. I didn’t think about it that way at the time, but since then . . . things just snowballed. It wasn’t all my fault, and if . . . if others had done what they promised, I might have been justified. It wasn’t so much a sin of commission as of omission. Or maybe not, I’m no lawyer. But as it is . . . I think . . .
”

“
Yes?
”

“
I think I may have committed treason
.”

Did the old priest even know what treason was? He’d lived in that parish house for fifty years and he’d never been the deepest carrot in the garden, even if he was anointed by God.

“
If you’ve lied, my son, you must set it right. Go back and tell the truth
.”

“
To who?
”

“
To whoever you lied to, and to all those harmed by your lie. Lying comes from pride in oneself. Turn your pride over to Christ and you will see the way
.”

“
But
—”

“
Any more sins you need to confess?
”

“
No, I
—”

“
Then make a good Act of Contrition
.”

Easy to say,
Tell the truth to all those harmed by your lie
—but who was that? The whole world, maybe. Nobody, maybe. Frank didn’t know—that was the problem.

“Look—a Witness! It’s Frank Olenik!”

Oh Christ. Some old biddy with nothing better to do than stand in front of Parnell’s Grocery, and the next thing Frank knew there was a
crowd of punks who should have been in school and Wednesday-morning gawkers and somebody was sure to call the fucking media on a cell.

He walked in the opposite direction—walking, not running, he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction—turned the corner, and slipped into somebody’s backyard. A dog rushed at him, but it was small and it stopped when Frank turned and stared at it, boot upraised. He climbed a fence, and then another, and came out on Anderson Street, beside the Blue Junction.

Ten o’clock in the morning and the bar was open. Men in it, too, slouching over their drinks, pathetic misplaced losers. Frank joined them, ordered a lager, and took it to the darkest back booth.

This couldn’t go on.

He wanted his old life back, and he wasn’t going to get it, and it was the Atoners’ fault. Yeah, he’d gone along with the whole program, but he hadn’t been himself at the time and shouldn’t they have known that? They’d picked him out of millions of applicants; he cringed now to think how proud he’d been of that. Fucking idiot. But the aliens were supposed to be so super-smart, all that advanced star-faring technology, and they should have given some thought to the lives that the Witnesses were going to lead when they went home. There was that barracuda Cam O’Kane writing books and doing movie deals and yapping all around the country about the afterlife being real—like Catholics hadn’t known that since Jesus Christ made his promise:
I tell you today you will be with me in Paradise
. And there was Lucca Maduro sulking in some kind of rich man’s bunker in Canada and Sara Dziwalski trying to go on being a nurse and pretending nothing else ever happened. . . . Well, Sara was all right. She was pretty, too, in the modest and untrashy way that women should be. But they were letting her be a nurse and nobody was going to let Frank Olenik be a cop or an FBI agent or a U.S. Marshal or anything else he’d wanted to be since he was six years old. In the last six months, even the Border Patrol had turned him down. And he’d be damned if he’d go to the private security companies and end up a useless square badge.

So what was he going to do?

“
If you’ve lied, my son, you must set it right. Go back and tell the truth
.”

“
To who?
”

“
To whoever you lied to
.”

He didn’t know any of the names of the government team that had debriefed him for two solid weeks. There’d been so many of them, and at first he was still dazed from the decon on the moon. Their ship— Frank’s and Amira’s and Rod Dostie’s—had landed at the ’Tonie base, guided by whatever computers the aliens had, without any help from Amira. The three of them had pulled on their EVA suits over their personal shields and walked the half mile to the Dome. The EVA suits were human designed; NASA had insisted on that, and the aliens had agreed. Not that it had done NASA any good; in decon the suits had been wiped as clean as the Witnesses.

As they waddled in the bulky suits toward the Atoner Dome, they’d been permitted to gather rocks to bring home as souvenirs. Amira had asked about that, in her prissy singsong English, and the ’Tonies had said yes, the rocks could be sold on Earth if they liked. So maybe the aliens
had
looked ahead and seen how hard it would be for the Witnesses to get regular jobs. Frank was holding on to his three good-sized rocks because he figured that the price could only go up with time, but the money wasn’t the point. Not even close. A man should work.

The screen over the bar came on, abruptly and loud. Frank actually jumped. He looked around to see if anybody’d noticed—God, he was twitchy—but nobody had.

Once they’d been inside the Atoner Dome, the aliens had knocked them all out for decon. The Voice—that was how Frank thought of it, a Voice but no body—explained that they would be scrubbed inside and out to make sure they carried no germs or anything back to Earth. All implants would be removed. Their souvenir rocks would be decontaminated, too. When he woke up from that, Frank had felt like he’d been beaten and scourged, inside and out, and so did everybody else. Then down to Earth and NASA did decon all over again, although this time he was awake and it wasn’t so weakening, just long and boring, almost as boring as two weeks of debriefing by people he couldn’t name and didn’t trust.

Not that you could really trust anybody in government. There were honest cops, like his father, and maybe some honest low-level civil service workers, too. Frank could believe that. But the bureaucracies that
ran the honest workers were corrupt, two-faced, like the Barton PD brass. You couldn’t trust anybody in politics.

Frank drank off his beer and considered his personal government contact, Jim Thompson, assigned to him right after the debriefing. Jim seemed all right, not too full of himself or anything, and he spoke Frank’s language. A regular guy. But that could just be to get Frank to trust him, and anyway, Jim was too small potatoes for what Frank had to confess.

So . . . call the president? This information was important enough! But a president had to be the ultimate two-faced politician. Also, Frank didn’t believe—and he didn’t care what anybody said, he wasn’t a sexist, but Saint Paul had been real clear on what men and women were each supposed to do—that a woman should be president. So shoot him. There it was.

But he had to tell somebody. Not only was that part of the penance that Father Pfender had given him, but the lie was eating him up. He knew why he’d told it, and it was still a legitimate reason—what the Police Academy called a permissible deception. But in the months back home he’d had time to think, really think, about the whole situation, and to pray about it, too. Prayer had clarified things for him. So now he needed help to make the whole situation right, and who—

The television blared something about Cam O’Kane at Madison Square Garden—“tonight, live, and for three nights only!” That exploitive nutcase, why would anyone go to see her yammer on about—

But all at once Frank knew whom he needed to tell about the lie that could change everything.

CAM DREAMED YET AGAIN
that she saw Aveo. The old man stood bare chested in his rough brown skirt, but the flesh drooped in gobbets from his bones and the bones gleamed like knives, glossy and sharp. Aveo smiled at her with blackened lips over rotted teeth, a smile like Satan himself. He held something out to her, and rasped, “You must play kulith better than that,
ostiu
, or else . . .” Cam woke, gasping.

She groped by her side but the young man, what’s-his-name, must have left after she fell asleep. The bedside clock said 4:30
P.M
. The hotel bedclothes smelled of afternoon sex. Cam groaned and turned on the light. She had a performance at Madison Square Garden in less than four hours.

It was the worst of all the nightmares. And why the fuck should she be having it? Aveo’s body was not rotting in a grave anywhere; Soledad had blasted it into clean oblivion on Kular A. Aveo’s spirit had long since started on the third road, and anyway, the old man had never looked at her with evil, had never been anything but kind in his own weird alien way. So why the terrible dream? And why hadn’t that guy—Cory, that was it, Cory—stayed after Cam had fallen asleep? That had been the whole point: to not wake up alone.

Cam’s government contact, Angie Bernelli, hated it when Cam picked up men: “bad security risks.” But Cam didn’t do it very often. And what Angie didn’t understand was that there were nights—and mornings and afternoons—that Cam simply could not get through alone. Tonight she would walk out on yet another stage and deliver the Atoners’ message, and no one in the audience would know that she had been in this frantic state four hours earlier. No one in the audience would know that Cam had killed several dozen men on Kular B and that those men did not let her sleep. No one understood.

She had thought, once, that Lucca might understand. He had witnessed violence on Kular A. But it turned out that those murders were voluntary, that Lucca had not killed anybody, and that he didn’t want to talk to Cam, anyway. Every time she phoned him, they argued. He just hadn’t been able to accept the truth about the Atoners’ message. Now he wouldn’t take Cam’s calls at all.

She heaved herself out of bed, padded into the hotel bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror.
God
. She looked like a crazy woman, with wild hair and wilder eyes. Like one of those bag ladies that she’d never seen back in Nebraska and that scared her in New York.

How many men, exactly, had she killed on Kular? And of them all, why was it Aveo who most terrorized her dreams?

Taking a deep breath and letting it out very slowly—one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand—she gripped the edge of the sink. She had a show to do. It was the most important show in the world. She could do this.