Extraordinary Retribution (22 page)

“These are fakes,” he said flatly.

“Yes, we assumed you would deny them. Deny what you have done. Just as you have denied the abuse we have too long hidden from the world.”

Lopez sat upright. “What are you talking about? Those charges are utterly false, and you know it!”

The bishop shook his head sadly. “You need help, Lopez. If you can come in here so incensed and deny before me and this Office the truth we are all familiar with, you have become completely delusional.” The bishop reached to the side, picked up a large folder, and dropped it in front of the priest. “Your file. One we have with great sadness been filling over the years with accusation after accusation. Ten years of sewage!”

Lopez flipped through several pages in a daze. “No, this is not possible.”

The bishop seemed to speak from a great distance. “We once held hope for you, Lopez, that you could find through the grace of God and the Church a cure for your perversions. But the demon of lust has you. After your criminal and sinful escapades with this whore from CIA, we woke up to the reality. No more little boys will be harmed, Lopez!”

The bishop stood up behind his desk, his ponderous mass lending an authority to his tone. “As of today, you are by degree of the Office of the Bishop, laicized—defrocked.” Lopez inhaled sharply. The bishop continued without pause. “You are forbidden to exercise ministerial functions of any kind, debarred from celebrating the Sacraments. Formal inquiry into these events, as an inquisition for excommunication, are underway, and I can say with some confidence that the result of this inquiry is not difficult to predict. Your vile actions, dishonoring the Bride of Christ, which is His Church, have rendered you anathema! Take yourself and your whore elsewhere!” He practically spat out the last words.

It was too much. Lopez felt the room spinning, his entire sense of reality becoming unglued.
Defrocked? Excommunicated? Accused of child molestation, with evidence over a decade?
He felt he was going mad.

There was a metallic click to his right. The sharp reality of that sound broke him out of his mental spiral, and he jerked his head toward the sound. Houston sat with a stern expression on her face, her eyes like glowing sapphires in her head. Her elbow rested on the arm of a chair, the forearm extended in front of her. In her hand was a large gun, the barrel pointed directly at the hulking form of the bishop.

“Bishop Ivy, do you know what this is?” she asked in a hard voice.

The bishop’s eyes were wide, but his tone was still authoritative. “A gun of some kind. Don’t think that you can threaten me! The police are already on their way, a phone call made the minute you arrived.”

Lopez felt his pulse quicken.
It was a trap!

“A
gun
?” she asked derisively. “You are so dismissive. Because of firearms like this, you and the rest of the people in this nation are still free to act like assholes. This
gun
is a Browning 1911, single-action, .45-caliber semiautomatic. This one was issued to my father in the Korean War. Powerful son of a bitch.”

There was an ear-rupturing explosion, and the bishop screamed. Behind him, to his left, a portion of the wall had been blasted away, dust and flakes falling from the air around them. Sweat began to bead on the bishop’s forehead, and his hands shook. He looked back at Houston and the Browning. Smoke trailed upward from the barrel. Screams, followed seconds later by doors slamming, could be heard from elsewhere in the building.

“See what I mean?” she said. “Halfway through your little monologue I figured you’d called the police. But this is Madison, Alabama. We’re at least thirty minutes from the nearest station or likely patrol car.
If
they aren’t engaged at the moment. Plenty of time to find out what you’re up to.”

“What I’m up to?” The bishop sat down slowly, his eyes terrified.

“The second time you called me a whore, I thought to shoot you then and there, you pig. But I realized that, as much as I would like to put a hole in you, I’d be losing out on some important information. So, let’s get to the point.” She leaned forward, pointing the gun right at the bishop’s face. “Who got to you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he sputtered, his words sounding false even to Lopez.

Houston sighed and pulled the trigger. The loud blast was followed by a howl of pain from the bishop, as blood splattered the wall behind his shoulder.

“You spawn of Satan!” he gasped angrily, his eyes then turning desperate. He grasped his injured arm, sobbing. “Please. Leave me be. Torment me not for my sins.”

Houston grunted. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Your
sins
. No doubt that was the key, no?” The flash of his eyes, even in the mask of pain on his face, answered her question. “I don’t care what sins you or your church think you’ve committed. For all I care, this entire place can burn down. Right now, we’ve got the CIA, likely now the FBI, and something even worse hunting us down like animals, cutting off all our paths. I need some answers.” The gun was pointed back at him.

“No, I can’t,” he moaned, his hand sticky and red.

Lopez winced seeing the quantity of blood.
Did she hit an artery?
He knew Houston was a trained agent and had seen her toughness before. But he was frightened by what he now saw. She was predatory. Cruel.
Or in a corner and fighting for her life.

“The next shot is going hurt more,” she said, her tone ominous.

The bishop wept openly now. It was a pathetic sight. His huge mass shook as he pleaded for mercy. “Please, I can’t! You don’t know, don’t understand. They are everywhere.
They know everything!
It’s not just me! Even if you kill me, they have cornered too many in the Church, in law enforcement.
Please!
I don’t know who they are. They come from nowhere, like shadows. They speak terrible things, reveal terrible knowledge!” His breaths came in gasps, his face pale. “Whatever you do, you cannot do worse than to reveal that knowledge. Some of us will die before we allow that to happen.”

Lopez saw the truth in the frightened man’s eyes. Whatever “they” had on him, it was bad. So bad he would accept death rather than the shame of revelation. It turned his stomach. Dark forces had reached the Church and turned the Church against him. His last hope! The one source of truth and trust he had left in the world.

They have taken everything from us.
Lopez felt a wild anger erupting from inside him, born of hurt and pain and betrayal. It rose like a solar flare. Before he realized what he was doing, he had stood up, grabbed the bishop’s collar, and was screaming at him.

“Why? How could you do this, you coward? How could you destroy my name, turn my family and friends against me? Bring down a false judgment on me for
your own sins
!”

“I’m sorry, I’m— “

Lopez struck him across the jaw with his fist. It hurt his hand, but that pain was a minor flash in the inferno of torment searing his mind. “Shut up! Tell me now, damn you! Where did you contact these people? How can we reach them?”

“Francisco.” It was Houston, but he ignored her.

“I told you, I don’t know,” said the bishop, blood dripping from his mouth, his eyes groggy.

“You liar!” Lopez swept his arm like a hatchet swinging and smashed his fist across the bishop’s face again. The large man crumpled downward, but Lopez miraculously held the three hundred pounds upright with one arm, again striking the man in the face, his rage completely consuming him. As he was to hit him again, he felt his arm restrained from behind and heard a shout from Houston.

“Francisco! Enough! He’s
out
!”

Her shout shook him out of his madness, and he dropped the form. The body of the bishop crashed onto his desk and then bounced and rolled to the side and out of the chair. The entire building shook from the impact as he hit the floor.

She sighed. “It doesn’t matter anyway. He doesn’t know any facts that will help us. He was a blind, manipulated without information. He wouldn’t clear your name anyway. He’d die before he risks the skeletons coming out of his closet.”

Lopez stared at her blankly. She grabbed his shoulders and looked into his eyes.

“Francisco, look at me! I didn’t shoot him for fun. I had to find out what he knew. We’re one step away from jail, or worse, and we don’t know who’s chasing us. This man’s lies are part of the noose tightening around our necks. I
had
to push him! But we need to back off now, cool down, use our heads. We don’t have much time. The police are coming.”

Lopez tried to slow his breathing. He felt a dull pain radiating from his knuckles.

“Better,” she said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

They ran. Houston led the way. Keeping her gun on display, she darted down the hallway, through the now-empty lobby of the building, and into the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone, and there were no signs of police. The workers had fled at the gunshot, Lopez assumed. Houston ran straight for their car, and he followed, the wind whipping his face helping to bring him back into the moment. But things were only going from bad to worse.

“The tires are slashed,” she said, squatting down near one of the rear wheels. Lopez crouched and looked with her. The tire was completely flat, a long, thin gash running along the rubber. “Someone didn’t want us going too far.”

“Indeed, we didn’t!” came a male voice directly behind them.

Houston spun around, but was too late. As Lopez turned to look, a blur rushed past his head, and a foot kicked the gun out of her hand, the body continuing a rotation that ended in the other leg striking Houston in the face. She flew backward, smashing into the car, her head striking the edge of the door. Knocked unconscious by the impact, she sank straight to the ground.

Lopez began to rise but felt metal against his temple.

“No, no, priest,” said another male voice. “Best that you don’t try anything. I’m not a fat and clumsy bishop.”

There was laughter as Lopez felt his stomach turn. He looked down at Houston, who lay sprawled on the asphalt of the parking lot. He tightened and instinctively wished to reach down and see if she was okay.

Instead, he felt a wet cloth placed over his mouth and inhaled a strange, burning smell. Everything went dark.

38

T
he room smelled like dust and mold.

As Lopez came to, the room spun around him, his sense of smell overpowering his mind. His head felt swollen, and he felt heavy, unable to move.
The hotel room?
No. That was before. But the same sickness in his stomach. The crushing headache. The spinning slowed, the dim browns and blacks of blurry shapes wobbled, and like a coin finishing a spin on a table, everything dropped suddenly into place.

It was a cabin. Some nineteenth-century log structure that had rotted nearly beyond usefulness. Bright light streamed in from a filthy window, and it appeared that they were in some forested area. Turning his head was painful, and the right side felt huge, like a massive tumor had grown out of his brain. His bleary vision began to clear.

Houston was on his right, tied to an old, rickety chair, her mouth covered with duct tape. Her eyes were open and they locked with his. Lopez tried to speak, but there were only muffled sounds, and he realized that his mouth was taped, as well. There was laughter to the left and behind them, its source out of sight.

“Missed talking to your squeeze, priest?” came the male voice. Lopez recognized it as speaking the last words he had heard before blacking out. “Too bad. You’re not ever going to get the chance to say anything else to her. But you’ll get to watch her scream. Oh, you’re gonna get to watch a lot.” The voice sounded demonic.

Lopez instinctively tried to raise his arms but was unable to move. He understood at last the heaviness he felt: he was also tied to a chair. He looked down, saw the rotten wood and moldy rope lashed around his arms and legs. The smell of mildew and decay reached his nostrils and turned his stomach. The knots were well formed, tight, painful to press against.

The voice laughed again, and a second male spoke through it. “Come on, Tom. Let’s get this over with.”

The one called Tom stepped from behind Lopez into his field of vision, his face a mask of hatred. “Like hell I will, Billy. Because of these two, Ryan and Marshall are fucking grilled meat.”

“They’re marked for immediate termination, Tom. No fucking around!”

“Shut up!” Tom shouted behind them as the figure of Billy came alongside.

Billy shook his head. “You’re goddamned crazy, Tom. I always said it.”

“I said, shut up!” But Tom grinned. He pulled out a large KA-BAR knife and twirled the blade around its long axis as he approached Lopez. “I’ll get to you in a minute,
altar boy
. But first!” he jumped and landed hard on Houston’s lap, the chair underneath nearly buckling, groaning horribly under the sudden impact. Her eyes widened, and Lopez could see her attempt to struggle out of her constraints. The wood groaned in anguish, but the ropes didn’t budge.

He placed the knife between her legs, the tip pressed against her groin. “See, Billy, I’m going to teach this traitor a lesson, what happens to you when you betray your country.” Lopez could hear Houston breathing quickly, a panicked look on her face. Tom seemed very happy to see it. “See, I
hate
betrayal. Hate it. When my wife betrayed me, when she started fucking that lawyer up the road every mission I was sent on, that made the bitch a whore. When you betray your country, whore, it’s worse!”

Keeping the knife where it was, he placed his hand up her shirt from below and felt up her breasts. Lopez saw Houston close her eyes and tighten her face. He felt a charged coldness run through him.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.
He pulled harder on the ropes but only managed to make the chair squeak more loudly.

“Oh, yeah, baby, you have a
nice
rack. I’m gonna have me all of this,” he said, suddenly pressing his left hand against her sternum and flicking the knife upward in a flash with his right. The duct tape muffled a scream from Houston, but she was uninjured. The knife work was highly skilled, her shirt and bra severed in a single stroke, her large breasts springing forward from the released tension. Lopez stared at them, pale like her skin, the nipples bright red and taut. He closed his eyes and felt ashamed.