The Priest's Graveyard (21 page)

Danny listened to
Renee tell her tale. She had tricked Darby Gordon into confessing his involvement in her husband’s murder and then escaped
after cleverly luring him into one end of a closet while she escaped out the other.

Her exuberance faded before they reached her hotel, replaced by a deep sorrow about the finality of Lamont’s death. She’d
always assumed him dead, but now she believed she had firsthand confirmation of that fact, and it robbed her of the thrill.

Her descent into sorrow was so quick, in fact, that Danny didn’t have the heart to tell her he didn’t consider the mission
successful. She’d done almost everything wrong and placed them both in far more danger than he was willing to accept.

Indeed, based on her terrifying tale—in which she’d surely avoided rape, torture, and death by the slimmest of margins—he
was tempted to reconsider his commitment to help her become a version of himself.

It’s her, Danny. You are falling for her. She means too much to you
.

He pulled his Chevy to a stop half a block from her hotel, thinking she should move again in a few days. Bourque would blanket
the city with inquiries the moment he heard from Darby Gordon. For all they knew, the call had already been made.

“I could kill him, Danny,” she said bitterly, staring past the hood. He studied the fine lines of her jaw, pale now under
the halogen streetlights. Her other cheek was red from Gordon’s blow. The thought of such a snake laying a hand on her was
nearly too much to stomach. Such a delicate creature, so violently abused.

Danny had made his decision the moment he’d seen Renee’s cheek: He would return—​perhaps tonight in the early hours, maybe
tomorrow night—​​and he would kill Darby Gordon after assuring himself that Renee had judged his guilt correctly.

He would do it in part because the man qualified to pay that price. He would also do it because the man had abused Renee.
You’ve fallen in love with her. You’re endangering her life and your mission.

He couldn’t quite admit these truths to himself. But he had to consider them, and he did, as he watched her in silence.

“You should have seen his wife.” Her jaw flexed. “How could anyone treat another human being like that? He’s an animal!”

“He is.” Danny turned his eyes to follow her blank stare. A slight drizzle had begun to fall. The forecast called for rain
by the early hours. “Stay away from him. This wasn’t a good night for us, you have to realize that.”

She faced him, eyes wide. “What do you mean? I thought I did pretty good.”

“You did. But you almost didn’t, and that’s not acceptable.”

Her jaw dropped. “Not acceptable? I pulled it off, and all you can say is
not acceptable
?”

“Please, Renee, that’s how this business works. If you want to stay alive and—”

“I know, you’ve told me. No mistakes. Zero tolerance for errors, all that Bosnia wartime mumbo jumbo. Sorry, I didn’t mean
it like that. I respect it, I do. But tonight I went in there and I came face-to-face with that scum and I got out alive.
Not to mention I learned what we needed to know.”

“And that’s good, although he didn’t directly confess.”

“Sure he did, just not with words. I know a guilty man when I see one.”

“Regardless, you came too close to failure for my comfort. I don’t know what I would—”

“For
your
comfort? I’ve been
dying
ever since Lamont was killed! Tonight was the first time in three months I’ve lived, really lived! This isn’t just about staying
alive to do it again, Danny. Not for me. It’s about doing what’s right. I’m going to kill the man who killed Lamont. I want
to, I have to, I will. Period. I don’t care what it costs me!”

“Then at least care what it costs me,” he said.

She faced the windshield speckled with tiny drops of moisture. “Don’t worry, I won’t get you caught. I didn’t say a word about
you.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what?”

He hesitated, then said it plainly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

She looked at him, silent. Her face softened. Danny felt a knot gather in his throat and looked away, uneasy with his own
emotions.

As much as he could no longer avoid his growing affection for Renee, he couldn’t displace a brooding sense that he was watching
himself in her.

“I know what it’s like, Renee,” he said. “Losing someone precious to you is a harrowing thing, and it storms the emotions
with a desperate need to set things right. What you’re feeling after losing Lamont, I’ve felt for years. I get it. It’s a
beautiful thing in some respects. But it’s also crippling. I see you and I see a precious person who’s crippled by her own
need to make things right. Like me.”

The car filled with silence, as if it had been poured in through the retracting sunroof. He could smell the leather-scented
freshener. Renee’s deodorant, a musky antiperspirant she preferred to wear without any other perfume, hung softly in the air.

“You love me?” she said.

He didn’t know what to say.

“You love me, and the thought of losing me drives you crazy,” she said. Her hand rested on his knee. “I think that’s beautiful,
Danny. I think I love you, too.”

Dear God, what am I doing?
The knot in Danny’s throat had become a fist. The distress had come out of nowhere and swallowed him, and if not for her
presence in the car, he would have let himself go.

But here with her now, he could only share so much of his own pain. His role was to bear her pain, not burden her with his—to
give comfort, not take it, because it was more blessed to give than to receive.

“But you’re not going to lose me, Danny. I’m not going to let that happen. I just have to do this one thing. Okay?”

“There’s a fine line between the killers and us,” he said, finding his voice. “In the war I often wondered if I was as guilty
as the enemy I killed. I don’t want to turn you into a beast, Renee. And I don’t want to lose you.”

After stretched silence, she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on his cheek. “That’s the sweetest thing you could say.
When this is over, we should run away to a small house in the Swiss Alps and tell each other sweet things.”

He chuckled, in part because her spontaneity drew it out of him, in part because he was desperate to break the tension.

“Okay,” he said.

“Perfect, that’s our plan then. But you’ll have to give up being a priest first. I wouldn’t want to just sit around whispering
and sipping hot chocolate.”

“No, that wouldn’t do.”

“I would be cleansing myself all day if all I did was drink sugar like that.”

She was trying to be funny, but her mention of cleansing struck Danny as odd. Just how deep did her obsessions reach?

“In the meantime,” he said, “please, stay out of sight. We should move you again in the next few days just to be safe. Bourque
will—”

“Kiss me, Danny,” she whispered into his ear.

When he turned his head, she was right there, gazing at his eyes. He didn’t really intend to kiss her, but he did. He leaned
forward and kissed her warm lips gently.

When he pulled back, her eyes were closed. They fluttered open and her lips parted in a soft, teasing smile.

“That was nice,” she said. Then she leaned forward and kissed him again. She took his jaw in her right hand, pulled his face
into hers, and kissed him hungrily, deeply, with a passion that made his heart pound.

“I like you, Danny,” she said breathlessly. “I really do like you.” And then she flew out of the car and was gone.

I left Danny
in his car and I felt triumphant and I might have skipped back to the hotel if it didn’t strike me as a silly thing to do.
I had completed my first mission. I had entered the brood of vipers and come out without a bite, not counting the one slap.

And I had been kissed by Danny.

I really was falling in love, I was sure of it. We were finding meaning and love in each other. Becoming like one. See, that
word
triumphant
was a word that Danny would have used. I was sounding a bit like him now.

Triumphant.

The feeling started to fade before I entered my room on the third floor. The thoughts I’d lived with for three months started
to come back, only now they had a face.

Darby Gordon’s narrow features. Sharp chin. Beady eyes.

There was still Bourque, but I’d always known that he hadn’t pulled the trigger himself. Now in my mind’s eye I was sure:
Darby Gordon had. At the very least, he’d been involved and knew exactly who had pulled the trigger.

I got to my room sobered by this thought, fixed myself a glass of cranberry juice, changed into my pajamas, and sat down in
front of the television with my legs curled under me. I was wound up and needed to settle. There was no way I could sleep.

Danny loved me and I had done well, but only well enough to learn who had killed Lamont. Now what?

The late news was on, something about the Middle East. I didn’t really care about a war across the ocean; mine was here on
the streets of Southern California. I was about to change the channel when the picture changed and caught my attention.

A bomb had gone off somewhere, and a jerking camera showed people running as smoke boiled to the sky. The women and children
on the screen were from Beirut, but I was seeing the two children and the woman who’d fled upstairs in Darby Gordon’s house.

People would think nothing of blowing the responsible terrorists to kingdom come. Wasn’t that what Danny was doing? Going
in and dispatching the guilty to hell if they deserved it? Defending the innocent?

Wasn’t that the whole point of what I was doing? And it wasn’t costing the taxpayers a million dollars a bomb. People like
Danny should be national heroes. They should hold parades for priests like him. We were like God’s angels.

I realized then that what I needed to do wasn’t just about my vow to defend Lamont’s honor. It was also about those two innocent
children crushed by a useless man who called himself a father. It was about Darby Gordon’s wife, Emily.

The thoughts made my face hot. It was hard to see the television. My mind was clouded by images of Darby glaring at me, twisting
my arm behind my back, breathing obscenities into my ear. The sound of his hand smacking into his wife’s face shot through
my memory like the crack of a small-caliber pistol.

My breathing was heavy. I took my glass of cranberry juice into the bedroom, set it on the nightstand, and walked into the
bathroom. It had taken me three days to clean the place, and a sanitized smell still hung in the air, not quite cut by the
lemon-fresh deodorizer I’d used.

I took my time brushing my teeth, washing my face, combing my hair. But the whole time my mind was on Darby Gordon, and I
was imagining what he would have done to me if I hadn’t outfoxed him.

What was he doing to his wife right now? I imagined that his children were crying themselves to sleep, begging God to take
away their daddy.

I decided I needed a hot shower to clean the stink of Darby’s place off my skin, and I emerged fifteen minutes later, red
as a lobster but squeaky fresh.

Thoughts of Darby Gordon’s wickedness ran circles around my brain like rats on a wheel. I had to relax and turn my mind to
other matters, like Bourque. Yet I was having difficulty thinking of anything but Darby Gordon.

Spotless as a baby lamb on the outside and dressed in newly laundered pink pajamas with yellow butterflies, I climbed under
my covers and tried to lose my mind in a book by Ann Rule. Perhaps if I focused on other people’s problems I could put my
own out of mind.

This might have been a mistake, because the book launched right into a scene of a woman’s carefully plotted revenge against
her husband, who’d run off with all their money.

I immediately began to think up ways to deal with Darby Gordon.

I imagined his death and the freedom that his death would bring his wife and children in at least a dozen different ways.

Did he have life insurance? Probably not. He didn’t care about those he left behind. But I had some money I could give them.
I wouldn’t miss fifty thousand dollars.

I had the book in my hands, reading by a single lamp’s light, and I got four pages into the chapter before realizing that
I had no clue whatsoever what I’d just read. My eyes were following the words dutifully, but my mind had switched to more
important matters.

I started the chapter over, and this time the thoughts that crept into my mind were of a slightly different nature. This time
I began to imagine more than Darby Gordon’s death. I began to detail clever ways that I, Renee Gilmore, could, would, or at
least
should
kill Darby Gordon.

Not all of them were particularly inspired, and some were outright absurd. Like renting a wood chipper and feeding his bound
and gagged snake-self into the part used to shred trees and such. I’d seen this in a movie called
Fargo,
a detective story set in (no surprise) Fargo, North Dakota.

But as my mind spun through various scenarios, discarding those that were either stupid or beneath me, I began to wonder what
it would be like to actually go over there to that devil’s house and kill him. Just slit his throat, for example.

Assuming I could break in.

Did he have an alarm? It was an old house, and he didn’t strike me as the electronically savvy kind of person. Could I burrow
under his foundation with a shovel and come up in the closet?

No, I could easily go through the window in the kitchen. The kids were upstairs and used to crashing sounds, and the viper
was on the other end of the house. I could break in, I was sure of it. We’d broken into Jonathan Bourque’s house, a fortress
by comparison.

I finished the whole chapter and closed the book with very little memory of what I’d read beyond the first two paragraphs.
Turned the lamp off. Hugged my pillow and willed myself to go to sleep.