“I can’t watch it anymore.” Preston pulled a gun and pointed it. “I’ll kill him right here. I swear to God I will. I’ll shoot him in the head. I’ll fucking kill him.”
He cocked the hammer, and it was as if the lawyer heard. The legs stilled. The hands stopped twitching. The old man gasped three times, and a final shudder rolled the length of his spine. Adrian saw it happen, and the silence behind that final breath slammed the door on thirteen years of fear and submission. His legs were still numb, but he didn’t give a shit. Life. Death. All that mattered was Preston’s face and the weight of his own gathered fists. The guards turned when he stood, and for a moment showed an utter lack of fear. They thought him the broken man, and why not? After years in the pipes and on the metal bed, it’s all they’d ever known of him, the screams and withdrawals, the dark holes of the prison and the faint scratchings of a forgotten man. He was the inmate who maybe knew a secret, and that’s how they saw him still—a final mistake—for there was no prisoner left in Adrian’s soul and nothing where he stood but the fighter.
“Preston?” Olivet understood first, looking once at Adrian, then stepping back. “Preston?”
But Preston was slow to understand and slow with the gun. He didn’t see the rage or hate, so Adrian opened his throat and let it out. He howled as he charged, and though Preston managed two shots, they both flew wide. Then Adrian was on him, driving hard enough to lift him from his feet and move him through six feet of empty air. The gun spun away when he hit dirt, then there was only the fight and the fighter, the spray of blood and teeth as Adrian gave and gave, then went after Olivet and gave some more.
22
Beckett slid through the small door, and it felt wrong somehow, the underside of a church. He felt the weight of it above him. A hundred and seventy years. That’s how long the building had stood.
“Okay.” He reached back. “Give me the light.”
Someone handed in the big flashlight, and he shone it around. The pillars were fieldstone, the timbers as thick as his waist. He saw spiders and termite mounds and bits of old debris. The space was immense and low and dark as pitch.
“Someone’s been here.”
The drag marks were obvious, as if a man had pulled himself through the dust, not once but many times. The track bent past the first stone pillar, then angled for the front of the nave. Beckett shifted his bulk in the tight space.
James Randolph was hunched in the open square, the sky beyond him dark purple. “You sure about this?”
“Why? You want to do it?”
“No, thanks. After fifty-four years I’m close enough to damnation as it is. Looking for bodies under a church might just push me over the edge.”
Beckett shone the light on the tracks. “Drag marks point that way.”
“The altar’s that way.”
“The thought occurred to me.” Beckett shone the light around some more. Clearance between the dirt and timbers was two feet or less. “I’m a little big for this. If I get stuck or call you, you come running.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
Beckett didn’t know if Randolph was serious or not. He twisted around again, got on his belly. “Just find Dyer,” he said. “Get him out here.”
After that, it was just Beckett and the dark space under the church. He stayed clear of the drag marks and after the first pillar, angled to the right, earth and stone gouging his elbows, ruining his shoes. None of that registered because fifty feet in he was feeling the same kind of religious dread as Randolph. How many people had been married or christened or mourned in the church above his head? Thousands over the years, and all the while this raw, rough place was beneath them, this musty, crude, dirt-strewn slit of an oven.
Beckett squeezed beneath another beam.
How far was he, now? Seventy feet? Eighty?
He stopped where a pillar had collapsed and the floor joist sagged. The clearance was barely a foot, so he worked his way around. Even then, wood scraped his shoulders, the top of his head. He choked on sifting dust, and when he cleared the other side, he saw the graves.
“Holy … God.”
He crossed himself again and felt the kind of chill that only comes once or twice in a lifetime. The graves were little more than mounded earth, but bones protruded from five of them. Finger bones, he thought. A dome of skull. The graves made a narrow arc around a depression large enough to hold a grown man curled on his side.
Yet, it wasn’t the bones alone that bothered him Beckett closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to fight the sense of earth pressing up and church bearing down.
“Breathe, Charlie.”
Claustrophobia had never been a problem, but he was under the altar—directly beneath it. So were the graves.
Nine of them.
“Come on, come on.”
He rolled on his side and imagined all the people who’d moved through the church in the last 170 years. He felt them like ghosts above his head, the infants and the prayerful, the newlyweds and the newly dead. Lives had turned on the altar above him, and bodies here, in this place …