The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (6 page)

But pardoning our offenses
.

The other grave she was looking for: The other one was there.

For a moment Amanda was dizzy, the world shifting on its axis. She stumbled and found herself on her knees in front of the headstone. She scrambled up again, but her thoughts were whirling in twelve directions at once. Her doggedly materialist faith began to slip from her grasp. Meditate long enough on the Improbable, Professor Gyver used to say, and you will come to accept the Impossible.

There had been two murders thirty years ago, not one; and the second, not the first, was the church's dirty secret.

IX

At ten the next morning, she sat in the Lady Chapel, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer open on her lap. She was trying to memorize the traditional liturgy so that the deacons would stop looking askance as she read past their fingers. She felt, more than saw, Christopher Taite slip in. He settled beside her, so lightly the loose wooden pew never budged.

“Are you staying?” he asked without preamble.

“Staying where?”

“Here. At Trinity and St. Michael.” He sat very still in his tie and shirtsleeves. “I would imagine you suspect a conspiracy to force you out.”

She shut the book, leaving one of the attached ribbons to hold her place. “If I leave,” she said, “you probably won't visit me anymore.”

He considered this. “Would you stay if I said I shall continue to visit?”

“Will you?”

He tapped a finger against his pale lips. “I doubt it. No. I've done my job, I think.”

“I know what happened thirty years ago,” she said.

“Please.”

“Wally wasn't the father of the baby, was he? It was his uncle. Another Christopher. The hereditary thurifer.” When he said nothing, Amanda continued. “That's why Wally took Terry away. He was protecting her from one of the most powerful men in the church. And that's why the church stopped using the incense, isn't it? Not because Joshua Bauer was killed with the thurible. Because the hereditary thurifer had impregnated a teenager.”

“She asked to be trained,” he said after a moment. “The church had never had a female thurifer.”

“But Terry was your first female acolyte.”

“Yes. And of course the national church was busily fighting about the same time over female priests. The earth was moving under our feet.” He stood up, walked over to the rack of thuribles, pulled out a modest-looking one. “Start small,” he advised. “A thurible of this size will hardly be noticed at first. Remember, the coals are the sin, and the incense is the balm. And the smoke—”

“The prayers of repentance, rising to Heaven. I remember.”

“It was a terrible temptation,” he said, still turning the golden vessel this way and that. “It was so terribly wrong, but, as St. Paul says, we are at every moment slaves to Christ or slaves to sin. And the thurifer was, for a time, slave to his sin. To desire. To the needs of the flesh. Theresa Bauer was very beautiful. She and the thurifer worked together closely. Still, he had no excuse for his behavior.”

“But he let them blame his nephew.” A pause. “Your nephew.”

“Yes. And then, when Wally killed himself—” He shook his head. “The families eventually learned the truth.” The thurifer's voice was fainter, as if he was drifting from her. “I have tried to tell each of the interim rectors the story. None would listen. None would believe. Father Bishop succeeded Father Dean. He laughed at me. Father Greely was here for four years after Father Bishop died. He listened now and then, but never took me seriously. Father Dean, however—well, he was a man of true belief. He confessed me, you see. Gave me penance in the orthodox manner.”

“But that didn't help.”

“It was too late. Scripture teaches the existence of the too-late repentance. Our Savior preached to the dead, but the orthodox teaching of the church is that they were not able through repentance to secure salvation. They learned the truth but could not act on it.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“You forget yourself, Mother Seaver. It is not our place to judge the will of God.” He put the thurible back in its place, straightened, and seized her with those grave gray eyes. “You, Mother Seaver, are the seventh rector of Trinity and St. Michael, or, counting back to the beginning of Trinity Church, the eighteenth. The decisions are yours. Will you reflect on all that I have told you?”

“I will,” she promised, and meant it.

“Thank you,” he said gravely, and, for the last time, left her.

X

She opened the Prayer Book and, for a while, sat alone in the Lady Chapel. She considered visiting whatever Taites were left to check her conclusions, but there was no point; and besides, none of them attended TSM any longer. The rest of the congregation would tell her nothing, and contacting the authorities was out of the question.

She was the rector. The decisions were hers.

She decided to take a walk through the grounds of her church. In the bright morning sunlight, the birds sang noisily. Beyond the tumbledown wall, cars shuddered and honked and squealed. She heard playing children. The cemetery was utterly unthreatening. By trial and error she found the little bench, cracked in the middle and overgrown by weeds. The fountain was empty, clogged with years of vegetation. Too bad. She would have enjoyed this place of reflection.

She picked her way along the unkempt path until she stood in front of the Taite family plot, as she had last night. There was the grave, nearly hidden by brush. The Improbable lay before her, lighting the way to the Impossible. Christopher Standish Taite, aged forty-four, date of his passing a year after Wally's. No cause of death written in the ledger, no words of affection or praise carved into the tombstone.

Of course not.

But beside his name in the ledger Father Dean had inked a small St. Andrew's Cross.

Amanda wondered who had killed him. Terry's family? The other Taites? Some unknown member of the church, determined to equalize the balance? The one thing she knew for sure was that the last hereditary thurifer had not taken his own life, or he would not be buried here. Trinity and St. Michael was a stickler for excluding suicides.

Odd how one could grow so tangled in theology that justice became inverted. Wally rested in unhallowed ground. His uncle rested here.

Uneasily.

Repentant, but not seeking forgiveness; seeking instead to restore Trinity and St. Michael to what it had been before the wave of violence unleashed by his sin.

Amanda understood what the suffering Christopher Standish Taite did not, that you could move only forward in time. The church could never be what it had been in his lifetime. It could only be something new. But the traditions would help. Of that she was now sure.

She would have to find Wally's grave. It should not be that hard. She would find his resting place and pray to God to have mercy on his soul. But that would come later.

Amanda had carried the thurible from the Lady Chapel. She lit the coals, sprinkled incense from the boat, and murmured a blessing. She censed the graves before her. The cemetery was large, and the work would take her all year. No matter. She knelt in the grass, opened the book Christopher Taite had given her, and began chanting aloud the Litany for the Dead.

Me & Mr. Rafferty

LEE CHILD

I
CAN TELL
what kind of night it was by where I wake up. If I've been good, I'm in bed. If I've been bad, I'm on the sofa. Good or bad, you understand, only in the conventional sense of the words. The moral sense. The legal sense. I'm always good in terms of performance. Always careful, always meticulous, always unbeatable. Let's be clear about that. But let's just say that some specific nighttime activities stress me more than others, tire me, waste me, leave me vulnerable to sudden collapse as soon as I step back into the sanctuary behind my own front door.

This morning I wake up on the hallway floor.

My face is pressed down on the carpet. I can taste its fibers on my lips. I need a cigarette. I open one eye, slowly, and move my eyeball, slowly, left and right, up and down, looking for what I need. But before we go on, let's be clear: However haltingly you read these words, however generously you interpret the word
slowly
, however deep and 16-RPM and
s-l-o-w
your voice, however much you try to get into it, you are certain to be racing, to be galloping insanely fast, to be moving close to the fucking
speed of light
, compared to what is actually happening in terms of my ocular deployment. The part with the eyelid alone must have taken close to five minutes. The eyeball rotation, four points of the compass, at least five minutes each.

A bad night.

I am pretty sure I have a fresh pack of cigarettes on the low table in the living room. I concentrate hard in that direction. I see them. I am disappointed. Not a fresh pack. An almost-fresh pack. A pack, in fact, in the condition I like least: recently unwrapped, the crisp little cardboard lid raised up, and one cigarette missing from the front row. I hate that for two reasons: First, the pack looks violated. Like a dear, dear friend with a front tooth punched out. Ugly. And second, however hard I try to prevent it, the sight sends me spiraling back to grade-school arithmetic: There are twenty cigarettes in a new pack, arranged in three rows, and twenty is
not fucking divisible by three
. I see a pack like that and instantly I am full of rage and paranoia: The tobacco companies are lying to me. Which, of course, they would. They have an accomplished track record in that department. For forty years I have been paying for twenty, and all along they have been supplying me with eighteen. Eighteen is divisible by three. As is twenty-one, but are you seriously suggesting the tobacco companies would supply
more
than a person pays for?

So I lie and pant, but again, let's be clear: The oldest, tiredest dog you ever saw sighs a hundred million times faster than I was panting. We're talking glacial inhalations and exhalations. Whole species could spark and evolve and go extinct between each of my morning breaths.

I had left cigarette butts at the scene. Two of them, Camels, close to but not actually mired in the spreading pool of blood. Deliberately, of course. I know exactly how the game is played. I'm not new to this. The police need the illusion of progress. Not
actual
progress, necessarily, but they need something to tell reporters, they need smug smiles and video of important things being carried away in small opaque evidence bags. So I play along. It's in my interests to give them what they need. I give Mr. Rafferty things to smile about, and I'm absolutely sure he knows they're gifts.

But they're useless. A cigarette smoked carefully in dry air retains almost no saliva. No DNA. No fingerprints, either. The paper is wrong, and most of it burns anyway, at a temperature close to two thousand degrees. So the gifts cost me nothing, and they give me the satisfaction of knowing I am playing my part in keeping the whole show on the road.

I move the fingers of my right hand and make a claw and start to scrabble microscopically against the resistance of the rug. I have future events to plan: getting to my knees, standing upright, stripping, showering, dressing again. A long agenda, and many hours of work. No breakfast, of course. Long ago I decided that respect for minimum standards of propriety forbade eating after killing. I am hungry, make no mistake, but the promised cigarette will help with that. Plus coffee. I will make a pot and drink it all, and compare its thin fluidity to blood. Blood is less viscous than people think, especially when generated in the kind of volume that my work produces. It splashes and spatters and runs and drains. It is spectacular, which is the point: Obviously Mr. Rafferty does not want to work cases that are mundane, or trivial, or merely sordid. Mr. Rafferty wants a large canvas, and a large canvas is what I give him.

I push with my left palm and ease my shoulders an inch off the floor. The pressure is relieved from my cheek. I am sure the flesh will be red and stippled there. I am not young. My face is doughy and white. Tone has gone. But I can pass it off as razor burn, or bourbon. I focus again on the almost-fresh pack ten feet from me. Tantalizing, and for now as distant as the moon. But I will get there. Trust me.

I have no clear recollection of last night's events. The details are for Mr. Rafferty to discover. I sow, he reaps. It is a partnership. But lest you misunderstand: My victims deserve to die. I am not a monster. I have many inflexible rules. I target only certain kinds of repulsive criminals; I never hurt women or children. I look for the people Mr. Rafferty can't reach. And not hapless, low-level street pimps or escort bookers, either: I set my sights a little higher. Not too high, though: for that way lies frustration. Neither Mr. Rafferty nor I can get to the real movers and shakers. But there is a wide layer of smug, culpable people between the two extremes. That is where I hunt. For two reasons: I can feel a glow of public service, and, more importantly, such careful selection puts Mr. Rafferty in a most delicious bind. He wins by losing. He loses by winning. The longer he fails to find me, the more the city is relieved of bad people. The reporters he deals with understand, although they don't say so out loud. Everyone—me, Mr. Rafferty, citizens, inhabitants—benefits from perfect equilibrium.

Long may it continue.

Now I have to decide whether to roll right or left. It has to be one or the other. It's the only way I can get up off the floor. I am not young. I am no longer agile. I decide to roll left. I stretch my left arm high so that my shoulder goes small and I push with my right. I roll onto my back. A significant victory. Now I am well on the way to rising. I know that Mr. Rafferty is getting up, too, ready to start his day. Soon he will get the call: another one! Hung upside down, as I recall, zip-tied to a chain-link fence that surrounds a long-abandoned construction zone, gagged, abused, eventually nicked in a hundred places, veins, arteries, throat. I don't recall specifically, but I imagine I finished with the femoral artery, where it runs close to the surface in the groin. It's a wide vessel, and, given adequate pressure from a thumping heart, it spurts high in a wonderful ruby arc. I imagine the man jerked his chin to his chest to look up in horror; I imagine I asked him how he was enjoying his BMW
now, asshole
, and his big house and his Caribbean vacations and his freebies with the poor Romanian girls he imports with all kinds of false promises about jobs with Saks Fifth Avenue before turning them loose to perform disgusting acts for six hundred dollars an hour, most of which he keeps, until the girls grow too addicted and haggard to earn anything anymore.

Not that I care about either Romania or the girls. I have no enthusiasm for any part of Eastern Europe, and prostitution has always been with us. Although I know the man I tied to the fence also runs Brazilian girls, and I care for them to some slight extent. Sweet, dark, shy creatures. I partake regularly, in fact, in that arena, which is what led me to the man himself. A girl I rented, less than half my age, recited on request the menu of services she offered, some of which were truly exotic, and I asked her if she really liked doing those things. Like all good whores she faked great enthusiasm at first, but I was relentlessly skeptical: You
enjoy
sticking your tongue deep into a stranger's anus? Eventually she confessed she was obliged to, at risk of getting beaten. At that moment the man's fate was sealed, and I imagine I used a stick before I used the knife. I care about justice, you see, and the whole what-goes-around-comes-around thing.

But mostly I care about the equilibrium, and the partnership, and keeping Mr. Rafferty in work. He is a veteran homicide cop, my age exactly, and I like to think we understand each other, and that he needs me.

It is time to sit up. And because written narrative has its conventions, let me again be clear: A long time has passed. My thoughts, however presented on the page, have been halting and disconnected and have taken a long time to form. We are not talking about a burst of decisive energy here. This process is slow. I walk my hands back above my waist, I raise my head, I twist and lever, I sit up.

Then I rest.

And I confess: It is about more than just equilibrium and partnership. It is about the contest. Me and Mr. Rafferty. Him against me. Who will win? Perhaps neither of us, ever. We seem to be perfectly matched. Perhaps equilibrium is a result, not a goal. Perhaps we both enjoy the journey, and perhaps we both fear the destination.

Perhaps we can make this last forever.

I scan ahead through my morning tasks. The ultimate objective, as for so many, is to get to work on time. My day job, I suppose I should call it. Punctuality is expected. So less than an hour after sitting up I gather my feet under me and rise, hands out to steady myself against the walls, two staggering steps to establish balance, a lurch in the general direction of the living room, and the prize is mine: my morning smoke. I pull a second cigarette from the pack and close the lid so as not to see two busted teeth; I gaze around, trusting in the eternal truth that wherever cigarettes may be, there will be a lighter close by. I find a yellow Bic a yard away and thumb its tiny wheel; I light the smoke and inhale deeply, gratefully, and then I cough and blink, and the day finally accelerates.

The shower is soothing: I use disinfectant soap, a carbolic product similar to medical issue. Not that I carry trace evidence; I am not new to this game. But I like cleanliness. I check myself in the mirror very carefully. The carpet burn on my cheek is noticeable, but generalized, like a normal Irish flush; it is entirely appropriate. I part my hair and comb it flat. I unwrap a shirt and put it on. I select a suit: It is not new and not clean, made from a heavy gabardine that smells faintly of sweat and smoke and the thousand other odors a city dweller absorbs. I tie my tie, I slip on my shoes, I collect the items a man in my position carries.

I head outside. My employer provides a car; I start it up and drive. It is still early. Traffic is light. There is nothing untoward on the radio. The abandoned construction zone is as yet unvisited by dog walkers.

I arrive. I park. I head inside. Like everywhere, my place of employment has a receptionist. Not a model-pretty young woman like some places I have seen; instead, a burly man in a sergeant's uniform.

He says, “Good morning, Mr. Rafferty.”

I return his greeting and head onward, to the squad room.