Sins of the Fathers Read online

TWENTY ONE

  HIDING IN THE shadows behind a brick gatepost at the end of Massa’s driveway, Tie wondered if this was the stupidest thing she had ever done. She shifted the straps of her backpack, crammed full of toiletries, some fresh shirts, and a few wadded-up pairs of panties. Calvin had said the woods and that was like camping she figured, so better to pack light. Not that she’d ever been camping or anything, but it seemed like good sense. Calvin. An image of his face rolled behind her eyes, hard and a bit bewildered, like he was always a little confused about something. The corners of her lips pursed into a smile.

  “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man,” she whispered to the crickets. Tie felt like she had to pee, but knew she didn’t really. She’d made sure to take care of that before leaving her apartment. She’d stood in the door and stared into her tiny home, wondering if she would ever see any of it again. The Matisse prints ripped from a calendar tacked to the drywall, the IKEA bookshelves, the broken TV—this was what a job as a waitress in a mob-owned steakhouse and the occasional fuck with the boss could buy. She’d left the light on and forgotten to lock the door.

  Now, she stood in the dark and thought about the only other time in her life she’d felt this mix of fear and exhilaration: the first time Mason had called her over to his table. He’d been laughing and smoking cigars with some of his boys—Sinclair had been there and maybe Finch. Mason had waved her over. He and his crew were not at a table in her section, but she knew who he was and got over to his table quick. All the girls knew him.

  One of Tie’s co-workers, a trashy little thing named Stephie, had been rumored to have dated Mr. Mason for a while. Stephie and Tie hadn’t been close, but Tie had liked Stephie’s voice, a high-end sandpaper, sexy-sweet-tough. And Stephie had been friendly, not open, but easy to be around. She didn’t show up for work one day and when Tie had asked the manager about it, he’d told her to shut the fuck up and get back to work. No one had talked about Stephie any more after that. So when Mason smiled and called Tie over to his table, she had just about tripped over her own feet. The following morning she’d found herself in his bed. She’d woken up with a sense of finality, like a sale had closed, but she wasn’t the one who’d done the buying or the selling. She’d been the product.

  No more. Not with Calvin. When she met the priest (A goddamn priest! She was never going to get over that.) it was the first time Tie felt that someone else had become a part of her life instead of her becoming a part of someone else’s. She felt added on to instead of subtracted from. And the way he looked at her… Tie smiled like the Cheshire Cat, her cheeks burned.

  Something was coming down the drive. She cocked her head, screened out the chirping of crickets and caught the sound of gravel popping under tires. Had to be, but there was no engine noise. Tie risked a look around the brick pillar just as the white cargo van rolled into view around a bend in the drive. “Oh man, oh man, oh man.” She clenched her fists. Now she really did have to pee. The van cleared the pillars and stopped.

  Calvin’s amplified whisper scratched through the air. “Tie? You here? Tie!”

  “Here,” she said and jumped into the van as Calvin reached over and pushed open the passenger door. He keyed the engine and hit the gas before both of Tie’s feet were even on the floor. The heavy door slammed shut. “Whoa!”

  “Sorry,” Calvin said, gunning the engine and roaring off onto a dark road. “I don’t know how much of a lead we have over them. Might be a few minutes, or…not sure.”

  Tie squinted through the windshield at the rushing night. “Don’t you need your lights?” She pushed the heels of her hands into the seat and dug in her nails as Calvin took a sharp corner.

  “Not yet,” he said. “He’ll be able to see our lights from the house. We need to go another quarter mile.”

  They sat in silence for a minute more then Calvin rounded another turn and braked as the road deadheaded into a perpendicular stretch that would lead them to the highway. He turned to Tie and allowed himself to see her for the first time that night. His chest warmed and his blood felt clean, light. He wasn’t sad, but his eyes were hot. She wore a red baseball cap turned around backward with Toledo Mudhens sewn in white thread. The cap did it. He was in love with her. They’d never even kissed.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.” It was all he had at the moment.

  “You, uh, gonna’ get us moving here, Father?”

  “Huh? Yeah, no, right. Of course.” He scowled, remembering what he’d meant to ask her. “How’d you get to the house?”

  “Cab.”

  “When was that?”

  Tie blushed in the dark. She’d gotten to Mason’s driveway a full hour earlier than she’d needed to. She’d just been so excited. “’Round eleven.”

  “You waited in the dark all that time?”

  She smacked his thigh. “Shut up and drive, white boy.”

  Gravel rained up against the undercarriage as Calvin put his foot down. He hit the headlights and the world extended in twin fans for about a hundred feet. Tie watched Calvin’s eyes flick off points in the road. He blinked and squinted. She followed his gaze and startled at the pair of red eyes floating just off the shoulder. “Deer,” she gasped.

  “You’ll see a lot more of those in the next few days.”

  “Yeah? Where’re we goin’? You said the woods.” She smiled at her own voice. She was like a little girl on an adventure.

  “The Upper Peninsula,” Calvin said. “There’s a retreat up there the Society uses from time to time. It’s really just a cabin in the middle of nowhere, but it ought to be safe for a while.”

  “Society?”

  “Jesuits. Call themselves the Society of Jesus.”

  “Sounds kinda’ hippyish or something. Society of Jesus,” Tie said, tasting it. “You a Jesuit then?”

  “No. I’m Catholic like they are, but different. In fact, there’s only a couple of people in my order.”

  “Including you? Sounds more like a cult.”

  Calvin snorted a laugh. “That’s more apt than you know.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about you. Only thing I know is you’re a priest, but not really, and that you work for a mobster.” Tie remembered her seat belt and pulled it tight between her breasts. “Well, not anymore. You realize the kind of trouble you’re in, runnin’ off with me?”

  Calvin smirked and laid his wrist across the wheel, his hand dangling. “You’re not the only thing I stole from Frank Mason.”

  “I’m not a thing.”

  “No,” Calvin said, “No, you’re not, Tie. I’m sorry I put it like that.”

  “S’okay.” Tie looked out the window; the world flashed by in muted night colors through her reflection. “What else you take?”

  Calvin jerked his head over his shoulder. Tie turned in her seat so she could look into the back of the van. She whipped back forward and stared through the windshield. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh.”

  Tie forced herself to ask it. “He dead?”

  “Drugged.”

  She exhaled, faced Calvin. The light from the dashboard and the oncoming cars gave his skin a luminescence that made Tie think of horror movies. “What’s your first name?”

  Calvin laughed.

  “What’s so funny? You got a stupid name or somethin’?”

  “I’m Johnny.”

  Tie laughed.

  “What?” Calvin asked. “That a stupid name?”

  “No,” she said. “Doesn’t fit you is all. Father Johnny. Just don’t work.”

  “You can call me whatever you want,” Calvin said. “Only one other person ever calls me Johnny anyway.”

  “Who’s that? The other member of your little cult?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “You gonna’ tell me about that, ‘bout you?” Tie asked. “What’s the name of this
deal you’re in, Church of the Kidnapping Super-Freaks?”

  “Actually, it’s the New Church of the Kidnapping Super-Freaks.” Calvin glanced over in search of a smile. He got a jump from looking at her again, but Tie’s face, while still soft and open, was serious. Calvin faced front. He’d already gotten them both killed by taking her with him. Whatever else he told her now didn’t matter. Calvin took a breath and let it go. “You ever hear of the Knights Templar?”

  “Indiana Jones,” Tie said. “Third movie. The one with that old James Bond guy.”

  “Old James Bond guy? Roger Moore?”

  “Naw, the other one.”

  “Sean Connery?”

  “Him, yeah. Anyway, there was this really old guy in the end, like a thousand years old. Not Sean Connery, though. He was the protector for the Holy Grail. He was s’posed to be one of the temple guys you just said.”

  “Guarding the Holy Grail was only part of it.”

  Tie turned in her seat, the vinyl squeaking under her. “What? You mean like this shit is for real?”

  “Not all of it,” Calvin said. “There was a Cup of Christ that was used to catch his blood, but the real Grail was something else entirely. There’re a lot of theories about it, but no one really knows if it existed like in the movies. Some people think the Grail was a metaphor for a person, that holding the blood of Christ really means someone who was descended from Jesus.”

  “Descended? What, you mean like he had kids?”

  “Like I said, there were a lot of theories.” Calvin slewed up an entrance ramp to the highway and they merged with the light flow of late night traffic. “There was supposed to be a treasure trove of documents under the original Temple of Solomon that gave the bloodlines of Christ down through the centuries. One duty of the Knights Templar was to protect the Temple of Solomon. From that base, they evolved into a very powerful, very influential society.”

  “How come they’re not around today if they was such hot shit?”

  “Well, what it comes down to is that they got a little too powerful for the Vatican to stay comfortable with it.”

  “Wait,” Tie said, “weren’t they part of the Vatican?”

  “Yeah, a very special part.”

  “You keep saying that. What’s the deal?”

  “Know what tithing is?”

  “In church, when they pass the plate for collections?”

  “That’s right, and religious doctrine as well as state law—remember, back then they were one and the same—stated that a person could only tithe within the walls of the church. Except, for the Templars, and that’s what gave them all their power.”

  “So they could like fundraise anywhere they wanted?” Tie said. “So? So what? I don’t get why that would make them such a big deal.”

  Calvin sighed and screwed up his forehead. “Okay,” he said. “Imagine it like this: a group of armed men on horseback, in the finest armor and clothing money could buy, come riding into your town, demanding money in the name of God. In exchange, they offer divine salvation and the favor of the church.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, imagine what that would look like today.”

  “What like guys on horses rollin’ up main street?”

  Calvin shook his head. “No, future ‘em up. Not suits of armor, but Armani suits. And not swords, but—“

  “Guns,” Tie finished, her eyes widening. “You’re talkin’ ‘bout protection money like with the Mafia!”

  “Dead on.” Calvin said. “But imagine a Mafia that had the backing of the cops and government. Not the under-wraps backing they’ve got today, but out-in-public backing. Imagine how rich they’d get, how powerful.”

  “Make Al Capone look small-time,” Tie said. “So the big boys at the Vatican felt all threatened and all, right? So, they broke up the Knights?”

  “After they got a little too big for their britches, one of the Popes declared the Templars heretics. They were hunted down and nearly wiped out. There was a lot more getting burned at the stake than witches in those days.”

  “Damn,” Tie whispered. “Talk about a corporate fuckover.”

  “That’s great,” Calvin said, nodding and laughing. “I like that.”

  “So, but wait—you said that you and this other dude were Templars, right?”

  “The last two.”

  “Does the Vatican know about you?”

  “Oh, they fund us. We work for them.”

  “Doin’ what? I know it ain’t fundraising.”

  Calvin glanced over at her. “Try contract killing.”

  She was quiet a moment. “You’re serious. You kill people for the Vatican.”

  “I used to. I’m done now, Tie. I’m retired.”

  Her eyebrow rose. “They let you retire from something like that? You, uh, get a pension, Father?”

  Calvin stuck out his lower jaw and exhaled. “No and no.”

  “Mason’s the least of your worries, ain’t he?’

  “Probably.”

  “How’d you get in with him, anyway?”

  “He knows my boss, that other dude.”

  “One who calls you Johnny?”

  “Him.”

  “Why’d they send you to take care of the kid?” Tie asked. “I know you a priest and all, but aren’t there ones that are a little more,” she searched for the right word, “specialized for that kind of deal?”

  Calvin gripped the wheel. “I’m the only one who can do it. At least my boss thinks so.”

  “Why?”

  Calvin thought about the child in the back and the demon he’d highjacked into riding him like a cowboy tied to the saddle. Once again, he tried to remember his own time in the belly of the beast, and came away with a sense of darkness and falling but no concrete memory. “Something happened to me when I was a kid, just a little older than Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy,” Tie repeated. “I keep forgetting his name.”

  “Mason wasn’t big on making you part of the family unit, huh?”

  “You could say that.” She waved away the tangent. “What happened? When you were a kid, I mean.”

  “I was possessed.” He tried to sound easy about it. They were already electrified, running from Mason, he didn’t want to juice her anymore.

  “Jesus, Johnny. What was that like?”

  Tie’s use of his name set Calvin’s bones buzzing for a second. “I don’t remember any of it, really,” he said. “But my boss thinks that because I’m a priest and it also happened to me, that I’m the right guy.”

  Tie yawned, her words stretching and rounded. “Are you?”

  Calvin had taken the two prize possessions of one of the world’s most dangerous men and in a few hours they would pull into a rundown cabin in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Once settled, Calvin would put them both through a torture neither would ever forget if they survived. All to save a boy. And she wanted to know if he was the right guy for the job.

  “Hell if I know,” Calvin said with a flash of teeth.

  Tie couldn’t tell if it was a smile. She looked out the window and watched the distance increase between her old life and the unknown ahead. One thing was for certain in all this calamity and rough change: she was free. Tie closed her eyes and let the rush of the tires pull her under.