Bennett 06 - Gone (8 page)

“A confession?” I said, sitting up. “That’s a switch. Wow, this almost sounds good enough for you to wake me in the middle of the night. Please, my son, confess away. Unload thy soul.”

“Well, you know how you told us all repeatedly to keep a low profile?” Seamus said, wincing.

I stared my grandfather solidly in his not-so-innocent blue eyes.

“Yes. I believe we were all there for the conversation with the witness protection folks.”

“Well, I haven’t been exactly following the rules. I was talking to Rosa, and she was telling me about the local priest in town. She kept telling me what a nice man he was, and I gave him a call. She was right. Father Walter is a very nice man. Actually, we’ve been talking back and forth for a couple of weeks now.”

What a thoroughly nutty situation this all is
, I thought. Seamus felt guilty about talking to another priest?

“OK,” I said. “You and the local guy are talking shop. Did you tell him who we were?”

“No, of course not,” Seamus said.

“Why do I have the feeling that there’s another shoe about to drop?” I said.

“Well, being the only priest in the parish, he’s swamped. I guess I let it be known that I might be available under extreme circumstances to help out. One of those situations just came up. His father had a heart attack, and he asked if I could fill in today for early-morning Mass.”

“Holy cannoli, Father,” I said. “Why would you say that?”

“Fine. I’ll admit it. I want to say Mass. Is that a sin? I haven’t said Mass in a while, and I want to.”

“But you say Mass for us here at the house every Sunday morning.”

“That’s not the same thing as saying Mass in a church, at an altar, Detective Bennett. I really miss it, Michael. I feel utterly, completely useless out here in the middle of nowhere.”

I looked at him. I knew how that felt.

“Listen, Father. I feel useless, too, but this guy who’s after us is not messing around. He’s spending a lot of money to find us. We can’t risk it.”

“I know. You’re right,” Seamus said. “I’ll tell him I can’t do it. What do people’s souls really matter anyway, right?”

I sighed.

“Where’s the church?”

“It’s Our Lady of Sorrows, in Westwood.”

“When is Mass?”

Seamus looked at his watch.

“Starts in an hour.”

“OK, Father Pain-in-My-Ankle,” I said as I finally stood. “Put on some coffee and let me hop in the shower. I wouldn’t want to be late for Mass.”

ABOUT TEN MILES TO
the northwest, Westwood was a quiet, tiny mountain town that didn’t stand on too much ceremony. There was a farmer’s market, a post office, a couple of streets of small, neat houses with pickups in the driveways and grills on the front porches.

“Hey, look, Dad,” my eldest daughter, Juliana, said from the backseat. “That’s a pizza place coming up.”

Juliana had overheard Seamus and me in the kitchen and insisted on coming along to be Seamus’s altar server. She claimed that she wasn’t just trying to get out of her homeschool classes, but I had my doubts.

“And oh, darn, there the pizza place goes,” I said, driving past it. “We’re in hiding, Juliana. No town pizza. If this weren’t a four-alarm Catholic emergency, we wouldn’t even be here.”

There were more pickups in the parking lot of Our Lady of Sorrows, beat-up work vans with ladders on top. Seamus had explained that the congregation included a lot of farmworkers, many of them unemployed after environmentalists in the state legislature had head-scratchingly cut down the rural area’s water allowance for the year. Without the water, farmers had been forced to let fields lie fallow, and now there were a lot of unemployed people hurting.

Thanks, government
, I thought, parking Aaron Cody’s seventies muscle wagon in the corner of the lot.
Take a bow. Another job well done.

“Our Lady of Sorrows, indeed,” I mumbled when I saw the food-bank notice on the bulletin board beside the door of the tiny white church.

The inside of the church was very plain. Definitely not St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but there was something nice about it, something serene. Instead of an organ, there was an old piano beside the altar, currently being played beautifully by a thin, red-haired middle-aged woman.

“That’s Abigail, the parish secretary,” Seamus said. “Juliana and I better get going. She’s supposed to show us where everything is.”

“I guess it’s OK,” I grumbled as I looked around at the blue-haired congregation. “Not too many gangbangers around.”

“Exactly, Dad,” Juliana said, rolling her eyes. “Everyone knows the gangbangers just go to Sunday Mass.”

I knelt at a pew at the back of the church after they left. I hadn’t been to early-morning Mass during the week in ages.

I used to go all the time in the months after my wife, Maeve, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Before or after my shift at work, every chance I got, I would head to Holy Name Church, a couple of blocks from our building. The youngest person there by decades, I would sit in the front and pray with everything in me for my wife to somehow be OK, for God to grant me a miracle.

Because, while people talk about their wife being their better half, Maeve was more like my better three-quarters, my better seven-eighths. She was the saint who’d put our crazy, wonderful family together.
Mike, we need to adopt another one
, she’d say. And I’d look over at her, at the holy look in her eyes, and I was suddenly the farm boy from
The Princess Bride
, and it was “As you wish” time.

But, prayers or no prayers, God wasn’t having any of it. Maeve died almost six months to the day of her cancer diagnosis. It had been years now since she’d passed away, but her spirit was very much alive, and she was still such a source of strength for me.

“Hey, babe,” I whispered up at the rafters. “What do I do now?”

The church filled up more than I’d thought it would. In addition to the requisite white-haired old-timers, there were quite a few able-bodied young white and Hispanic men who looked like they worked outside. Praying for work, no doubt. For some hope, I thought, feeling bad for them. I checked my wallet and fished out a twenty to slip into the poor box on the way out.

It was just before the gospel when a strange guy with a gray ponytail and a scraggly white beard came into the church behind me.

“Well, what do you know? It’s actually true,” the guy whispered as he climbed into the pew beside me. “Open the door, and here’s the people.”

I looked him over. With his camouflage hunting anorak over his greasy jeans, and with suspiciously glassy eyes, the old hippie had a very strong resemblance to a homeless person. Or maybe to Nick Nolte about to get a mug shot taken.

“Welcome to the Hotel California,”
I thought, rolling my eyes.

My cop radar thought Nick Gra-Nolte might pass out or cause some trouble, but as the Mass went on, he knelt when he was supposed to and knew all the prayers. He even knew all the annoying changes in the prayers that the church had just dropped on everyone out of the blue.

But as I stood to line up for Communion, I couldn’t help noticing what he was carrying at the back of his worn jeans.

It was a pistol, a Smith & Wesson semiauto, not in a holster, just tucked there, happy as you please.

Peace, love, and a nine millimeter?
I thought, my cop radar clicking up to DEFCON 3.

I WAS READY TO
tackle the guy the whole way up the aisle. As it turned out, nothing happened. I breathed a sigh of relief as the old hippie left right after Communion.

But, of course, it wasn’t over. Nick Nolte was pretending to read the bulletin board when I went out with Seamus and Juliana ten minutes after the end of Mass.

What will happen now?
I thought, my hand tracing the line of my back where my gun was located. A postservice Wild West gunfight? I mean, give me a break. My blood pressure really didn’t need this.

“Hi, strangers,” the hippie said, smiling.

I noticed for the first time that the guy was in pretty good shape—broad shouldered, with big hands. I instinctively put myself between him and Juliana.

“Nice service,” the guy said. “Are you guys new to the parish?”

“No,” I answered for Seamus. “We’re just passing through.”

“Passing through?” the hippie said. “In Aaron Cody’s station wagon?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” I said. “I got one for you. You always carry in church?”

“Carry?” the hippie said, his bleary eyes squinting. “Oh, you mean the ol’
pistola
here,” he said, giggling as he patted the small of his back after a beat. “Oh, sure. All us rootin’ tootin’ cowboys up here like our Second Amendment rights. That goes without saying. How about you? You always carry in church?”

“Get in the car, guys,” I said to Juliana and Seamus as I walked over to the still-giggling weirdo. Despite my initial paranoia and the guy’s roscoe, I could tell he was just a high California goofball.

“It’s been really fun talking to you, bro,” I said, smiling as I stared into his red eyes, “but don’t you think it’s time for you to grab a bag of Doritos and go watch
Jerry Springer
?”

He burst out laughing at that.

“I like you. You’re funny,” he said, going into his anorak pocket.

“Tight-lipped, too,” he said, removing a fat joint and lighting it with a Zippo as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He blew some rancid smoke in my direction.

“Around here, tight-lipped works just fine,” he said. “Actually, I was just trying to be neighborly. The priest’s accent reminds me of my grandpap. I’m Irish, too. They call me McMurphy. There’s a little bar down the road a bit called Buffalo Gil’s. Why don’t we meet up? I’ll buy you a Guinness.”

I stared at the lit weirdo, wondering why this kind of crap always happened to me. I mean, talking to drugged crazy people was fun, but I had cows to milk.

“Sounds like a plan, McMurphy, but I actually have a better idea,” I said as I turned to walk toward the car.

“Yeah, what’s that?” my new dope-smoking hippie friend wanted to know.

“How about we don’t meet up, but we just tell everyone we did?” I said as I climbed into the station wagon.

He stared at me blankly as I started the engine, but just as I pulled past him, he suddenly got it.

In my rearview mirror, I watched as the nut broke up, laughing in the empty parking lot, the joint in his hand falling to the gravel as he slapped at his greasy thigh.

VIDA GOMEZ KEPT THE
stolen Cadillac Escalade at a steady sixty as they rolled east on the San Bernardino Expressway in El Monte, east of downtown LA.

They were nearing their exit when a motorcycle gang roared past out of nowhere. Completely startled, she cursed violently as a dozen black-leather-clad motorcyclists on big Jap bikes screamed around both sides of her SUV like a fusillade of just-missing guided missiles.

Assholes
, she thought, seething, as one of the devil-may-care speeding bikers popped a wheelie. She could have shot one of them. All of them, in fact. The thing she hated most on this earth was to be snuck up on.

Trying to roll the tension out of her neck, she glanced back at the six buzz-cut men seated behind her to see if any of them had witnessed her blow her cool. But they were calm, oblivious, half of them dozing as usual.

Though all of Perrine’s handpicked cartel soldiers had obeyed her so far, she never once forgot that they were killers of distinction from a place where killers were a dime a dozen. Any sign of weakness, even the slightest hint of fear, could be fatal in her line of work.

What was up with her today? she wondered. It definitely wasn’t like her to be so jumpy. This morning she’d woken up with a bad feeling. It was something in the air that wouldn’t quit, a brooding sensation that something unpleasant was about to occur.

Or was she just being paranoid? Having a bout of stage fright? She didn’t know. The only thing she knew was, this was definitely the part she hated the most, the space between the plan and the execution.

The latest task given to her elite squad was to deal with an Asian gang out of El Monte called the Triumph Dragons. The Vietnamese gang, though quite small, ran one of the busiest docks out at the Port of Los Angeles, down in Long Beach. Perrine had made a deal with them to let a large shipment through, but at the last second, the Dragons had reneged, causing the seizure by the US Coast Guard of an entire shipping container filled to the brim with premium Colombian heroin.

Manuel had not been pleased. Yesterday afternoon, the cartel boss had forwarded to Vida a very simple instruction by encrypted text message.

Slay the dragons, his text had said. Each and every one.

She weaved through the dense El Monte neighborhood until she found the location she was looking for, a deserted parking lot behind a shuttered supermarket on Cogswell Road.

The young man slouching in the passenger seat beside her loudly slurped at the last of his McDonald’s chocolate shake as they came to a stop.

“You’re going to do this now, right, Jorge? Not having any second thoughts on me, right?” she said in Spanish.

“Please,” Jorge said, looking at her, his brown eyes soft in his even softer face.

Youthful appearance aside, Jorge was an up-and-comer in the cartel’s newest ally, Mara Salvatrucha, the brutal Hispanic gang otherwise known as MS-13.

Jorge had dealt to the Dragons before, so his job had been to set up a dope deal. Five kilos of coke at the cut-rate price of $12K per. There weren’t any drugs, of course, and the only thing cut-rate was going to be the lives of the Vietnamese gangbangers, as soon as they showed up.

Vida looked out on the El Monte neighborhood as they waited. Low stucco houses, palm trees, chain-link fences. California shabby, minus the chic. Above it all, dark clouds rolled against the fast-fading gold of the sky.

More waiting
, she thought, feeling like a bubble about to pop. It was driving her mad.