Sins of the Fathers Read online

FOURTEEN

  JOHN CALVIN STOOD at the window of his hotel room and stared through his reflection into the night. Las Vegas spread out below and around, the strip sliding past like a river of dirty electric light. Bright and busy, but silenced by the fat black worm of silicone sealing the glass all the way around. All those lights, those cruising sinners, semi-high on the possibilities of fortune or some other satisfaction. Some aware of their direction down, some still hopeful. All moving. Calvin sighed. Babylon, beautiful and empty. The man reflected in the window needed a shower and a shave.

  First the call. Calvin sat down on the side of the bed and began punching in the long code. He should have been calling from a pay phone on the street, but fuck it. Katey had been the last one, and he was headed home after this. No one was going to trace him back to the Holiday Inn in Vegas from a killing in the middle of Ute reservation hundreds of miles away. Certainly not the backwater tribal police. As far as Calvin knew, even the NSA couldn’t hack their special phones. Calvin listened to a shower of clicks and connections in a field of low phone hiss. Exactly three minutes passed, then a voice silked over the line.

  “Pronto?”

  “Why can’t Jesus eat M&Ms?” Calvin recited, waited a beat. “Because they’d fall through the holes in his hands.”

  “Has he been martyred?”

  Calvin thought about the question for a moment before answering. He thought about laughing. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

  The voice on the other end paused. “Natural causes?”

  Calvin imagined Katey’s corpse lying at the end of the tiny box canyon in the desert maze, blackened and swollen out of shape, punctured in at least ten places. “Snake bite.”

  “Interesting choice.” Another fat pause, then, “Well done.”

  “Can I come home now?” Calvin gripped the handset hard enough for the plastic to creek. “I have to come home now. We have to talk about some things.”

  “Not yet, Johnny.”

  Calvin held the phone away from his face as if it were alive, aggressive. “We’re suddenly on a first name basis over the phone?”

  “Special circumstances.”

  Calvin breathed slow and even. Hell, he’d called from his own hotel room, why not shoot the moon and break another rule? “Okay, Thom,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I received a call from one of our higher level errand boys.”

  Mafia. Fuck. Calvin didn’t like slumming. “They have their own cleaners. What—?”

  “This is a special job, no martyrs.”

  “What’s going on, Your Eminence? As long as we’re breaking all kinds of protocols, why not cut to the chase?”

  In a small house in an olive grove in the Italian countryside the head of an ancient religious order took a sip of brandy and stared into a crackling fire. Bishop Thom Neary sighed into the phone, the sound ran through copper wire and fiber optics before converting into waves and bouncing off a private satellite. The sigh found its way back into miles of glass threads, buried under the flowing streets of Las Vegas and up to the only other member of that secret order, Father John Calvin.

  Goose flesh broke out over Calvin’s skin. “Thom, what…” But he already knew.

  “You remember the trouble? How we met?”

  Calvin didn’t answer. It was all he could do to breathe.

  “It’s happening again, Johnny. I want you to go take care of it.”

  A drop of sweat stung Calvin’s left eye shut. “I think you’re a little confused, Your Grace.” Blood roared in his ears. “You were the one who got rid of that fucking thing. I was just an innocent bystander.”

  “You were hardly innocent, John.”

  “Why not someone else, Thom, huh? Why not some other priest.” Calvin whisper-shouted into the phone, “Why not a normal priest?”

  Neary chuckled. “Because another body would just complicate things.”

  Calvin put his free hand over his eyes and sighed. He didn’t like the way the air shuddered out of him. “How many?”

  “Just the one, a bodyguard. Garden variety tough-guy. Not your league, Johnny.”

  “Thom,” Calvin said. “It, the thing, came to me when I was in the canyon, before the last martyrdom. I think it’s been around for a while now, fucking with me.”

  “How long, Johnny?”

  “Since Ireland, maybe longer. I don’t know.”

  Silence from Neary. Calvin wondered if the encryption machines hooked to their com. network took the trouble to encrypt silence and what scrambled silence might sound like. “You there, Thom?”

  “I’m here.” An audible slurp of brandy. “What do you make of it?”

  “Hadn’t really thought about it much to tell you the truth. Kinda’ been trying not to, you get me?”

  “Well,” Neary’s voice took on an edge. “Start thinking about it, boyo. You’ve got some work to do, and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s going to be the hardest job of your young life.” Another slurp, a big one. “Damn near killed me getting it out of you, John.”

  Calvin felt the world spin beneath him, not in a physical sense, but as if his very understanding of the foundation of things was on a greasy pivot. He took his hand away from his eyes. The furniture looked contrived, cardboard set pieces. The room was bright, bleached out. He brought his lips close to the mouthpiece.

  “When I was on the serpent’s spine it told me you didn’t make it leave.”

  “Serpent’s spine? John, what’re you on about?”

  Calvin shook his head, clearing the memory of the mind-bending synesthesia, the pain, when the demon moved into him, to show him just how easy it was. “Sorry, Thom.” He took a deep breath. “Forget it. Listen, when it came to me on my little vacation it told me that you hadn’t done a damn thing to get rid of it. That it left of its own accord.” He closed his eyes again and sighed. “I think that’s what it was talking about, anyway.”

  Another encrypted chuckle from Neary.

  Calvin scowled and almost threw the phone across the room. “I’m happy this is so fucking amusing to you, Your Eminence.”

  “Relax, boyo. I only laughed because it pulled that garbage with me too. Scared the hell out of me, but I kept trying anyway. You were in there somewhere, just a kid who’d been tossed onto the streets and then tossed into the pit of hell itself.”

  Calvin wondered how long the Bishop had rehearsed this part. Neary didn’t know shit about what young Johnny had gone through, where he’d been. That endless, starless night. The immense gravity of nothing. Calvin kept his mouth shut, but it was difficult.

  “I hadn’t even met the real you when I started on your case, but I knew you were in there somewhere.” Neary’s tone went dreamy as he receded into memory. “After about a week of pushing at that, that monster to just leave you be, it got very quiet and told me that nothing I did would ever make it leave. It laughed.” Silence from the line. “I damn near lost hope.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  Neary’s voice notched down an octave. “No, Johnny. I kept at it night and day with the old Roman Ritual and anything else I could think of to throw at it. I still wake up some nights reciting those ghost stories from Luke and all that ‘Save your servant’ stuff.”

  Calvin’s grip began to relax on the handset. “So that’s what worked, the bible?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised, kid. It is the word of the Lord, after all.”

  “Peddle that shit somewhere else, padre.”

  “Alright, alright.” Calvin could see Neary in his study, holding up his hands and smiling. “You want to know what I really think worked in the end? I think it’s because I grew to love you, Johnny. After fighting for your soul day after day, all that stuff about loving one’s fellow man started to mean something deeper for me than it ever had.”

  John Calvin looked up at his reflection in the glass. A man in stained j
eans and a wrinkled shirt stared back with deeply tired eyes. Thom Neary had loved him, had taken him from the mouth of the dragon and made him his son.

  “Do you know how many men I killed before I recruited you, Johnny? Seventy-seven. I murdered seventy-seven people for the glory of Holy Mother Church before I stopped so I could train you. Seventy-seven faces, seventy-seven pairs of eyes with that look—that one just before you do them, when they know.”

  Good God. Calvin had his share of notches on the proverbial hilt, but he wasn’t anywhere near seventy-seven. Not yet. “Why’re you telling me this, Thom?”

  “Because I knew what it meant not to feel anything at all for my fellow man. That’s why I could know love more deeply than a normal person. When you know what something isn’t, you sure as hell know when something is. That’s how I got it out of you, kid. Incidentally, that’s also how you got your name, John. As in 3:16?”

  “‘God is love.’”

  “‘God is love.’”

  “Thom,” Calvin took a breath. “I’m scared shitless. Why can’t you do this?”

  “Oh, kid. I’ll admit–and maybe this makes me a rotten priest, probably just makes me human–but I’ll admit that after going through this once, it’s better you than me.”

  Calvin laughed. It felt wonderful, like a thick needle being removed from the crook of his elbow. “Thanks for the honesty, Your Bright n’ Shininess.”

  “Seriously, though, Johnny. I would do it, but I’m just too damn old.” Slurp of brandy, stifled belch. “Uhf, and I drink too much.”

  Calvin remembered the pain as the demon ran around inside his body, forcing him to laugh until his bladder let go. What if he couldn’t keep it out of him? Calvin’s face darkened. “Thom, what if I can’t..,” he trailed off.

  “Umm?”

  “What if I can’t love the kid enough? What if I don’t understand about love the way you did?”

  Neary sighed. “How’d it feel to martyr the last one? The child molester? The baby killer? How’d it feel, Father Calvin.”

  Calvin thought for a moment. “Right. It felt right. Just, I suppose you could call it.”

  “Then you’ll be up to the task when it comes to this. I don’t need to tell you, the bastard’s putting that kid through worse nightmares than anything your martyr pulled.”

  “No, you don’t need to tell me.”

  “You’ll do it, then.”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said, studying his reflection. “I have to.”

  “Yeah.” Neary paused for a moment, switched gears. “There’s a package waiting for you at the front desk of your hotel.”

  “How’d you know where I’d be?”

  “Please.”

  “Right. Package at the front desk.”

  “It’s under the name Luke Johnson.”

  “Cute.”

  “Yeah, I’m inventive as hell, s’why I’m the Bishop and you’re just a knight.”

  Calvin smiled. “Oy.”

  “Critique my brilliant wit later, you heathen. Shut up and listen. Get some sleep tonight. Pick up the package in the morning. It’s a plane ticket and a laptop. The pertinent files are already loaded. Take the 8:15 to Detroit and read up on the way. They’ll have someone waiting for you at the airport.”

  “How will I know them?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. No neck, plus-size shoulders, expensive suits.”

  “Hooray, stereotypes.”

  “Don’t get snippy, double-oh-padre,” Neary said. “Johnny, when this is over, if you still want to come home and talk like you said, you can. It’s an open-ended ticket.”

  If he still wanted to talk. Neary obviously thought that this exorcism bit was going to cure Calvin of his existential blues. Like a good fight against a great evil would be just the shot in the arm he needed. Calvin wasn’t so sure, but Thom Neary had taken good care of him before. There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t now. “Hey, boss,” he said, head tipped to one side. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me for this one, kid.”

  “I’m not. Not for this one.”

  “Oh,” Neary said, softer. “Of course, Johnny. Sleep tight.”

  Calvin hung up the phone and moved over to the window again. Placing his palms and forehead against the humming glass, he stared down into the light flow. A lanky woman in a silver dress and wig of blue curls argued with a short black man in a red and white track suit. It appeared as if she were attempting to guide in an airplane with a storm of wild gestures. Her acrylic claws flickered around the man’s face, her mouth snapping open and closed rapid fire. The guy in the track suit just stood, half-slumped, hands in the pockets of his baggy nylon trousers. After what seemed like several minutes of this strange dance, the iconic woman closing the distance between them in tiny increments, the man in the tack suit slowly removed his right hand from his pants pocket. The woman’s palms flew up and froze, her head retracting into her shoulders like a turtle. Her gaze locked on the sidewalk and she took a step back. That’s all he had to do, take his hand out of his pocket. Calvin wondered how much she loved him.

  * * *