Parishioner (30 page)

This led to an enclosed courtyard where men and women in various states of undress were sitting at tables eating or standing in line at a food counter where their meals were being prepared and served.

Ecks and Lenny got in line behind a deeply tanned, muscular man who was naked and maintaining an upstanding erection that was at least a foot long.

“Hey, Lenny,” the muscular white man said. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Not like you, Lark.”

“Got me doin’ double today. Had to take an extra dose.”

“Doc Henry’s shit?” Lenny was watching the erection with both fear and awe in his gaze.

“Yeah. Why?”

“That shit’ll fuck you up. That’s what Momo says.”

“You think I give a shit about that faggot bastard?” Lark roared, moving toward Lenny.

Ecks stood between the big man and the slender one. He figured he was fourteen inches from Lark.

“Pardon any insult,” Ecks said pleasantly. “My friend misspoke.”

If asked, Ecks felt, Lark would have called himself a lover and not a fighter. He turned his big dick around and pulled a tray from a shelf in the counter.

When he found out that Ecks was paying, Lenny ordered fried chicken, meat loaf, corn on the cob, snap peas, corn bread, apple pie, and peach pie too.

Ecks ordered a pastrami sandwich and followed Lenny to an empty round table.

Lenny started eating ravenously. As he ate he spoke.

“Thanks for standin’ up for me, brother. Thanks. You know, I try to talk to people; I try to talk to them but I always say the wrong thing, the wrong thing. I mean, I don’t mean nuthin’ but when I get talkin’ it’s like my brain stops workin’. You know what I mean? I mean, especially when somebody’s big and strong like that. And you know I couldn’t take my eyes off that big dick. I mean, girls like a dick like that. Shit. It was harder than mine ever gets even when I take Doc Henry’s—”

“I’m here to ask you about Loretta and Manly,” Ecks said, cutting off the stream-of-consciousness babbling.

Lenny’s face froze with his mouth open and filled with meat loaf. His head jerked to the side.

“If you try I’ll just run you down,” Ecks said.

Lenny looked back, his eyes quivering in his head like a child’s toy doll.

“What?” he said.

“I’m pretty sure that they aren’t your real parents.”

Lenny sniggered and wiped his nose with a violet sleeve. He gave Ecks a glancing look in the eye and put his plastic fork down.

“Prob’ly not,” he said after going through this obsessive routine. “Prob’ly not.”

“Definitely not,” Ecks said.

Lenny looked up again and then away. He shook his head as if he were a third person feeling sorry for the young man scarred with a necklace of bloody erections.

“You were kidnapped before your second birthday and sold to an underground child pornography film organization. They farmed you out to Manly and his wife.”

Lenny winced and slapped his hand down on the table.

“They made you do things for the camera, didn’t they?” Ecks asked.

Lenny made a yowling sound that he had inherited from a distant ancestor of humanity. People from other tables stared at the first true cry of passion heard in the sex warehouse that day.

Tears sprouted from Lenny’s eyes. His shoulders and arms began shaking. Ecks put a hand on the young man’s shoulder, not to calm him but to keep him from running off.

Lenny let his head loll to the right, gripping the killer’s hand between his cheek and shoulder.

“I met the people who stole you,” Ecks said. “It was a young woman and a man. The woman who did it wanted me find you. Maybe get you back in touch with your real parents.”

“And the man?” Lenny asked through the heaves of a sob-racked chest.

“He’s dead.”

This fact made Lenny cry harder. With both hands he grabbed Xavier’s forearm. He was stronger than he looked.

Ecks wanted to pull his arm away from the kid. Tyler’s description of him was accurate. He had been made into a sewer rat.

But Ecks allowed the tears to run their course. He had to—for Frank.

After a time the sobbing waned and Lenny let go of Ecks.

“I never went to school,” he said, and Ecks was forced to think about Dodo and her journey through Sedra’s business. The Parishioner thought, once again, that he might have
sought revenge against the octogenarian slave trader had she survived her own karma.

“They did all kindsa shit to me,” Lenny continued with hate in his voice. “Loretta held the camera while Manly fucked my ass. He tore me apart on the inside. They had a special doctor to sew me up when he was through.

“They’d lock me in a closet and leave a milk bottle for me to piss in. I’d have to shit—”

“I’m not interested in the story, Len,” Ecks said when he realized that pity was part of the young victim’s game. “That was before and this is now. I was asked to find three lost boys and you’re the last one.”

Lenny sat up and cocked his head back.

“Why?” he asked.

“The woman responsible was a teenager when she stole you. She wants to make amends.”

“Make what?”

“She wants to make up for what she did wrong.”

“Money?”

“I don’t think so, no,” Ecks said, but the word resonated in his mind.

“Then what good is it? What good is it? You know they kicked me outta the room I was in. I sleep in a steel box outside the kitchen next to the garbage cans.”

“I don’t care about any of that, Lenny. You know, where I come from there’s so much suffering that it doesn’t bother me anymore. Even with people like you—I just don’t care. What I was supposed to do is find you. Now that I have I need to ask you some questions and you need to answer me.”

Lenny O said that he didn’t know how to make normal conversation, and Ecks saw this to be true. The boy knew how to run and lie, how to be miserable and evoke pity, but he didn’t have the slightest notion of human communication.

Ecks had known men and women like this all through his pimping and drug-dealing days. Many of the players had been the same. His immediate reaction was one of cold distance. If you worried about your clientele and employees you were bound for disaster.

Lenny’s lower lip began to quiver again.

“Start crying and I will slap your face just like Burt did,” Ecks said.

“What do you want?” Lenny said petulantly.

“I could take you home to your real parents,” Ecks offered.

This proposition transformed the fuck-film gofer. He was amazed. Ecks could tell that there was a time that he’d wished for home and love, mother and father. He went to sleep praying for deliverance. Then he was thrown under a bright light and raped for even daring to hope. After many long years of wanting and being punished he’d given up on his dream; then, after a time, he had forgotten his desires entirely.

But right then, at that sky blue concrete table, his memory had been ignited and true sorrow welled up in his eyes.

“What?” he pleaded.

“You heard me.”

“Look at me, man,” Lenny said, almost making himself an equal. “Look at me. How’s a piece’a shit like me gonna go back to a nice couple in a nice home on a quiet street? How can I go out on the lawn of their house and walk the dog?”

“I see you’ve given it a lot of thought.”

This observation stopped Lenny. He wondered whether maybe it was true. Maybe he still wished for deliverance.

“I don’t even know how to think about a real mother and father,” Lenny argued, maybe with himself. “I told you … I don’t even know how to talk to people. That’s why I get high. That’s why I do the things I do.”

“What things?” Ecks asked.

Lenny looked up with abject fear dawning in his visage.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Nuthin’ don’t sound like that,” Ecks said, quoting the long-ago words and even the tone of his dying friend, Swan.

“I can’t help it, man. I don’t even know what I’m doin’ half the time.”

Completely objectively, with no moral weight at all, Xavier considered killing the tattooed youngster. He might have done it if it hadn’t been for Frank’s sermons and the one hundred and fifty-nine Expressions meetings he’d attended.

“We’re all reprobate,” Ecks said, “from the presidents and popes and prime ministers on down. And if you’re going along the wrong path, that just means you have to turn it around.”

“Wha … what?”

“It’s my job to find you, Len,” Ecks said. “It’s your job to figure out what you want to do.”

The kidnap victim sat up straight and took in a deep breath. He coughed slightly and then cleared his throat.

“It’s too late,” he said.

Ecks took seriously the young man’s declaration. It was too late for Swan. It was too late for the copper-skinned man he shot dead in Sedra’s home. Time wasn’t a promise even if it was forever.

Not everyone can be saved
, Father Frank said at least once a month.
Some dogs are rabid. Some men are no better than rabid dogs—worse. But even then vengeance is not the reason for punishment, imprisonment, or execution. If there is vengeance in your heart you have no right to seek balance
.

“It might be,” Ecks agreed. “It might be that you can’t be saved. But that’s not up to you. You don’t know what your parents might think. And even if they hated you, that doesn’t mean that you did wrong.”

“Are you some kind of preacher?” Lenny asked.

“Parishioner,” Ecks corrected.

“What’s that?”

“Like you, Len, I’m part of a greater whole. A family, a history, and a future that is never set.”

Awe mixed with fear crept into Lenny’s face.

“What are you gonna do to me, man?”

“I’m going to take you out of here,” Ecks said. “I’m going to take you to a place where you will be judged.”

“Jail?”

“No.”

“Court? I got … I got a record.…”

“You will be your own judge, son. There is no power above you.”

Ecks had heard these words many times but had not uttered them himself. The nameless church was a safe harbor where a sinner was free to brand himself. Rich men and even royalty resided inside Father Frank’s walls. But there, on the hillside of Seabreeze City, all congregants
were equal under the sun and moon. They didn’t mention God because just the word was a weapon in the mouths of men.

“You want me to go with you?” Lenny asked.

“I do.”

“But what if you find out that I can’t be saved?”

“That’s not my call, boy. Not at all.”

“Can I have a bed to sleep in?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” Lenny asked.

“The woman who stole you says that she wants to make up for what she’s done. I don’t know if that’s true … I have my doubts. But there is no doubt that you are here and you were ripped from a family and a life. It’s my job, my mission to …” Ecks paused, gauging his words. “To try and help you recover from what happened to you twenty-three years ago.”

“I don’t understand half the words you’re sayin’,” Lenny whined. “And the ones I do understand don’t make any sense.”

Ecks smiled. “I will give you a bed to sleep in and food to eat. I will not judge you and I will help you to think about what you might want.”

“Do I have to fuck you?”

“No. There will be no sex involved.”

“What if I want to do it?”

“No.”

“How long do I have to make up my mind?”

“When you finish your lunches we’ll be leaving this place.”

“What about my final paycheck?”

“That life is done.”

Simmons and two of his friends were waiting for Ecks and Lenny in the parking lot. This was a possibility that Ecks hadn’t considered. It didn’t matter that they were there.

“Gentlemen,” the Parishioner said while still walking toward them.

“I’m gon—” Simmons managed to utter before Ecks hit him with a straight left. The sound was like a thick branch cracking under the weight of an ice storm. The big man lurched backward into one of his friends and slumped down. The friend, a blue-eyed redhead, didn’t know whether to hold up his fallen comrade, drop him and attack—or run.

Ecks put up his hands in a gesture of false surrender.

“I don’t want any trouble with you men,” he said. “Your friend has a broken jaw and a concussion. It could have been worse. It will be worse if you push this shit.”