The snow was changing to sleet, freezing where it struck. He checked his watch. Fifteen more minutes, he figured, and they’d have to go in after her. He wondered how Danny Mao and the other bosses of Shadow Fist would feel about killing people in a church.
“Mr. Spector?” a distant voice shouted over the noise of traffic.
He looked up. A short, pear-shaped man with a clerical collar stood before the doors of the cathedral, waving over at him with a goofy grin. Demise tilted his head. “Now what the fuck is this?” he muttered.
“No call to be shy now, sir,” the pear-shaped priest shouted, a thick southern accent drawing out his words. “Come on over and let’s talk this here thing out.”
He hesitated for a minute, but then stepped out across the street, dodging cars, until he reached the opposite sidewalk. “Who the fuck are you?” he called.
“Father Henry Obst,” the priest said, beaming. “Lately of Selma. I’m taking over for Father Squid for a mite while he’s traveling the world. Come along inside now, sir. We’ve got a little matter of business to discuss, I think.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Rumor has you’re a hired killer for some sort of Asian mob,” the priest said pleasantly.
“Well. Yeah,” Demise said. “Where’s the whore?”
“Oh, she’s in here,” the priest said. “I think we can get this whole thing taken care of to everybody’s satisfaction. Come on along, now sir. No reason to do this out in the weather.”
The priest turned and trundled back into the cathedral. Demise stood looking at the open door, then, shaking his head walked up and entered the church. The space was bigger than he’d remembered, and almost empty. The twisted, two-headed Christ impaled upon a double-helix cross seemed to writhe as Demise walked down the aisle, his footsteps echoing. The scent of car exhaust and snow mixed with ghost-faint incense.
The whore was there, sitting in the first pew with her head bowed. The little priest was still smiling and leaning against the altar rail.
“Now then, sir,” the priest said. “I understand there was something you were looking for.”
“The bitch stole something,” Demise said. “I’ve come to collect it.”
“Well now, you see that’s the issue that we need to look at, you and me. The drugs and the money—I presume that’s what you had in mind? Yes, well, they are no longer in this fine young woman’s care. I’ve taken them myself in the name of the church.”
“Okay,” Demise said. “So I should kill you instead?”
“It’s one of life’s little ironies that you and I should be the ones having this conversation,” the priest said, sticking his hands in his pockets and looking out over the pews. His round, puffy face had taken on a philosophical cast that looked like he’d rehearsed it in the mirror. “The virus has given me the ability to recreate Our Lord’s first miracle from the marriage at Cana, and you his final one in rising from his tomb. We represent the alpha and the omega, you and I. Not that it’s done either of us much good. I have a sermon I’ll be delivering on the subject come Sunday. You should come hear it.”
“Whatever,” Demise said. “How about we get back to business. Give me the shit and I’ll walk out of here. Nobody gets killed.”
“You forget sir that you are in the house of the Lord. You have no power here.”
Demise laughed, a little disbelieving cough, and locked his eyes into the watery blue of the priest’s. Father Henry met his gaze placidly. Demise pressed the pain along where the channel should have been, but nothing happened. He could see the priest considering him, could look into the black of the little man’s eyes, but there was no connection, no lock.
“God is stronger than a virus, sir,” Father Henry intoned, and for almost half a second, Demise got nervous. Then he noticed the red marks on the bridge of Father Henry’s nose.
“You’re fucking nearsighted,” Demise said.
Father Henry’s expression froze and the whore gave out a little moan. “I knew this wouldn’t work,” she said.
“You thought you could fuck with my head by taking off your glasses?” Demise said, almost laughing. “Christ, what a fucking hick.”
“The power . . . the power of God protects me. You just stand your ground there.” The priest’s voice was wobbling like his neck fat.
Demise stepped forward, took the little man’s chin in his hand, and lifted. Father Henry, eyes pressed closed, took his hands out of his pockets. Demise didn’t see the little black cylinder until it hissed, a stream of pepper mace already scalding his eyes and nose. The pain was nothing compared to the constant pain of death he carried with him, but the stuff did make his eyes water. The little priest pulled away, falling loudly over the rail, while Demise wiped at the tears and roared.
He never saw the whore coming up behind him.
The first jolt of the stun gun hardly stopped him—the pain was negligible. He spun, reaching out for the bitch, but she danced back and then swung in low, catching him just under the ribs. By the fourth shock, his muscles were going weak, and it was getting hard to breathe. The fifth one—a lucky shot on the back of his neck—made his whole right side go numb.
Demise gave out before the batteries did.
Father Henry sat at the altar, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. With his glasses back on, the assassin turned from a muddy man-shaped blur into an actual man, hog-tied in the aisle before the altar. Gina, smart girl that she was, had gagged him with a sock and a strip of cloth and covered his head with a pastel pink pillowcase. She’d moved fast, and it was a good thing. The man had never quite lost consciousness.
“So what do we do now?” Gina asked softly.
“Well, we have this gentleman here, the other one back in the kitchen,” he whispered back. “Seems like hitmen are what you might call thick on the ground just now.”
“There’s still the other one out back. The other one from the car.”
“Well that’s all well and good,” Father Henry snapped, “but I don’t think I’m much up for doing this a third time today. A man has limits.”
“I wasn’t saying that,” Gina said. “But we’ve got to do something.”
“All right. Here, you keep an eye on this here miscreant and I’ll see whether I can’t work something out with our friend downstairs.”
Demise shifted, straining against his bonds, and tried to shout something, but Father Henry was damned if could tell what.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1987
“The whole thing was a setup,” Joey said. “I’m telling you, boss. I was lucky I got out of there at all.”
The restaurant was almost exactly the way he’d imagined it, except that he was empty-handed, Mazzucchelli was frowning, and Lapierre was over by the bar chatting up a waitress. Joey shook his head.
“And this priest got you out?”
“He woke me up after those four Fist guys jumped me and got me outta there.”
“Four guys?”
“Maybe five,” Joey said, trying not to wince with the lie. But it wasn’t like he could tell Mazzucchelli he’d passed out.
“The cops were coming, and he was thinking the Fist might try to kill me. They’d went in there and forced him to help them out. I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking hero going against them like he did.”
Mazzucchelli took a bite of his pasta and shook his head. Joey scratched at the scars on his left hand.
“Sounds like bullshit,” Mazzuchelli said.
“There was a Fist hanging just outside the back door,” Joey said. “And the cops—they picked up Demise there, didn’t they?”
Mazzucchelli took the starched white napkin off his knee and dabbed the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said with a long, slow, sigh. “Yeah, they did.”
“If I’d have jumped the gun and called in backup, they’d have ambushed us, boss. Demise was just the bait.”
“So how’d this hero priest get the drop on Demise?” Joey grinned.
“Yeah, he told about that too, when he was helping me get my feet. It went like this, see . . .”
Demise walked out of the detention center in the late afternoon, pissed off. He still had on the fucking Aerosmith t-shirt. The car waited for him at the curb, Phan Lo at the wheel. Demise climbed in and slammed the door.
“What the fuck took you people so long?” he demanded as Phan pulled out into traffic. “I was in there overnight. How hard is it to post a little bail?”
“Gambiones,” Phan said. “They hit back yesterday.”
“No shit?”
“They torched five of our places. We lost twenty, maybe thirty men. Word on the street is they were trying for Danny Mao.”
“Still doesn’t explain why I had to spend a night in the lockup.”
“You weren’t the top priority,” Phan said.
They drove in silence. The day was clearer, but cold. Phan turned toward Chinatown.
“Did you, ah, mention to anyone . . .” Demise began, but the sentence trailed off.
“They know you got your ass kicked by a deuce priest and a Jokertown whore,” Phan said. “They laughed about it a little and got back to business.”
“Shit.”
“The whole thing was a setup. I saw one of the Gambione guys coming out the back right before the cops showed up. So we got suckered. Let it go, man. No one’s going to remember how they did it. You want to get another shirt?”
“Yeah,” Demise said. “You know, that attitude is just like you. It’s just exactly like all of you. It’s not about who’s going to remember what. It’s about principle. If you let people fuck with you, pretty soon everyone’s going to think they can get away with shit.”
When Phan spoke, his voice was measured and careful. “I don’t think that someone who fucking kills people by looking at them is going to have a lot of trouble with people taking him lightly.”
“You don’t get it. The priest has to die. And I know where he’s going to be on Sunday morning. I’ll kill the little shit in the middle of Mass.”
“Hardcore,” Phan said, sounding unimpressed.