The Priest's Graveyard Page 10

  The knob turned in his hand and he eased into the dark room. Immediately voices reached him.

  “I told you, I only wanted to talk to him.” The voice sounded timid. Female.

  The slap that followed surely wasn’t female. Amazingly the woman did not cry out.

  It took considerable control on Danny’s part to remain calm. He couldn’t barge in without jeopardizing both the woman’s health and his cover. He had to think. Feeling exposed, he stepped to the wall beside the lighted door.

  “Mr. Bourque’s a very powerful man. He has enemies.” Danny assumed the low voice belonged to Redding. “It’s my job to make sure he’s never in danger. You’re trying my patience. I need to know what you think you know that is so damaging to him.”

  “Let me talk to him,” she said. “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Hesitation. “I swore not to involve anyone but Jonathan Bourque. But I have it all written down in a safe-deposit box, and if anything happens to me, the truth will go to the press.”

  Danny doubted this. It was a television cliché that had little usefulness in the real world.

  Feet shuffled on the concrete floor. “I don’t think you understand your predicament,” Redding said. “I should turn you over to the police and press charges. They are good friends with us and would agree to uncovering your intentions. Or I could—”

  “I have a bloody lip,” the woman interrupted.

  “Heroin addicts found facedown on the street often have blood on them.”

  She didn’t fire back so quickly.

  “I’m not an addict. That’s not me.”

  “But it will be you if I choose to turn you over to the police. I’ll shoot you up, beat you down, and drop you off.” He paused. “My other choice is to ask you again, politely, who you are and what your interest in Mr. Bourque is.”

  Danny’s mind spun with the implications of the exchange. The woman wasn’t known by Redding but claimed to have information that threatened Bourque. The fact that Redding took the threat so seriously suggested Bourque indeed had much to hide, some knowledge that he would protect with force.

  “The thing about heroin addicts is that they can do some pretty strange things to themselves without really knowing what they’re doing,” the man continued. “I knew one who cut off his nose to stop the itching. The police would think nothing of a strung-out girl coming in with a few missing fingers.”

  “You’re going to cut off my fingers?”

  “Not all of them.”

  This territory was familiar to Danny, and he knew two things already. One, Redding—assuming the low voice belonged to Bourque’s man—would think nothing of carrying out his threat.

  Two, the woman either was truly naive or knew how to play naive most effectively. She sounded like a child, not someone who could pose a legitimate threat to anyone.

  “Only one of them?” the woman asked, still void of emotion.

  Evidently her abductor was also taken aback by her fearless question, because he hesitated for several seconds. “I’ll start with one, yes. Your thumb, up to the first knuckle.”

  Danny knew he meant it.

  11

  I COULD TELL you how I ended up in such a terrifying predicament, handcuffed to a chair in the basement of the Long Beach Hilton, but the journey had taken every second of three months, and dozens of missteps before this final, monstrous misstep, and all those details would fill a whole book.

  The very short version is this:

  I started my new life with one pair of pajama bottoms stuffed with roughly three hundred thousand dollars, the matching pajama top, a pair of pink-and-white underwear, an oversize pair of dirty blue overalls, and a spirit so crushed that I spent the first three days wondering if I had died and become a ghost trapped in the world.

  The money saved me.

  From that warehouse district, I walked for an hour on bare feet that started to bleed before I found any motels. You have to remember, I’d spent a year in slippers, protected from the elements in every way. My skin was lily white, my fingers were as soft as tissues, and my feet were like delicate creampuffs.

  With each step in those wee morning hours, my bitterness grew, and I used it to push away the pain. I arrived with puffy, cried-out eyes and raw feet at a dirty motel called the Rendezvous. Although the night manager had undoubtedly seen his share of strange people, the sight of me made him blink.

  I’d had the presence of mind to shove my stuffed pajama bottoms into a garbage bin outside the front door. When he said it would be twenty dollars an hour or fifty for the night, I handed over one of the bills I’d stuck in the pocket of the overalls.

  That was how I spent the first hundred of Lamont’s dollars.

  If I hadn’t been so exhausted I would have taken one look at the room’s dirty orange carpet and smudged bedspread and fled. Lamont’s obsession with cleanliness had rubbed off on me. I tried halfheartedly to clean the bathroom, but the stains in the toilet and sink were stubborn, and the linoleum squares on the floor were starting to peel away from the crusted concrete.

  I finally gave up, turned the water as hot at it would go, and scrubbed every inch of my body under a steaming shower. But it didn’t really get me clean, not really, really clean. No amount of hot water could wash away what had happened to me.

  I sat down in the tub and wept while the water washed over me. Having lost Lamont, I was prone to crying those first few weeks.

  My most embarrassing moment might have been my first trip down the street to the Walmart. I needed clothes. I couldn’t very well go around in pajamas or dirty blue overalls the rest of my life. And I had to get some shoes. Even so, it took me two days to work up the courage to leave my room.

  I washed out my pink-and-white pajamas with hand soap and let them dry over the air conditioner. When they went stiff, I pulled them on. With some imagination, I reasoned, the pajamas might look like they were meant to be worn in public.

  I carefully hid the money under the mattress, put two of the bills in my waistband, and headed out into the bright day.

  How I got to the Walmart in such a state of terror I can’t say, but I was soon inside. I had rehearsed a list of items to buy, but when I stood beside the cash registers, my mind went blank and all I could think of was shoes, jeans, and soap.

  I don’t know if it was the pajamas, the stark terror on my face, or my frantic darting around the Walmart, but everyone was staring at me. I wasn’t blending in as well as I had dared hope.

  In my rush not to be noticed, I spent my second hundred dollars poorly. Upon racing back to my dirty motel room, I found that I had purchased one pair of green slippers size 11 for men, a pair of Wrangler jeans that swallowed me, two boxes of Clorox bleach, a quart-size bottle of shampoo, and a tin of Altoids that I’d picked up at the checkout stand because Lamont liked the smell of mint.

  Still, it was a start.

  Emboldened by my limited success, I returned to the Walmart late that same night dressed in my new oversize jeans, my pajama top, and the monstrous slippers. This time I arrived armed with a thousand dollars. I bought a large rolling duffel bag and enough clothes and supplies to fill it half full. I had to leave room for the money.

  I returned to the motel, stacked all of Lamont’s cash on the pillows, and laid my new clothes on the bed. This was now the sum of my earthly possessions: two pairs of Quiksilver slim-cut jeans that fit me well, three T-shirts, four tops, six pairs of underwear, three bras, five socks, a cute leather belt, a pair of black boots, tan slippers that fit me, a pair of Nikes, some lip gloss—Lamont hated makeup but thought gloss was okay—and a black purse.

  The supplies included duct tape, some string, and a screwdriver, none of which I had any immediate use for, though they had impressed me at the store. I also had one white plate, a set of flatware, and a glass so that I could eat and dri
nk properly.

  I began to hope. If I could buy stuff and rent a motel room on my own, I could surely track down and kill Bourque.

  What was I thinking? I’ll tell you: With every fiber of my being I was thinking that however naive I was or far I had to go, I would not stop until either he or I was dead.

  Staring at my new possessions and the pile of money on the pillows, it occurred to me that I did have some options. For example, there was no need for me to spend another night in that dirty motel room. I could afford a better place. And I could certainly afford a taxi to take me to a better place.

  The only question was where? The obvious answer came to me immediately: closer to the man who was responsible for destroying us.

  The law was in my hands, and according to the law of Lamont, any man as evil as Jonathan Bourque could only deserve one verdict and one sentence. Lamont had told me as much in his own words. I was sure that the only reason I’d found his money was to use it to hand down justice.

  Even though Lamont wasn’t around, I was still his. So was the money. I would use everything in my power to honor him, or to give my life trying. I had no other purpose.

  It wasn’t revenge; it was justice.

  The problem was, I had no idea how to go about finding much less killing a man like Bourque. I wasn’t even sure how to live on my own anymore. If not for the money I would have ended up back where Lamont had first found me, in some alley, a heartbeat away from death.

  That night I lay awake late and started to string together a semblance of a plan.

  The next morning I returned to the store, bought hair bleach, and spent an hour becoming a blonde. My hair was short, because that’s how Lamont liked it. With the blond I thought I looked quite different from the way I had a year ago. Not even Cyrus Kauffman would recognize me immediately.

  According to the phone book, the Rendezvous motel I had stumbled upon was in Cypress, east of Long Beach. The headquarters for the Bourque Foundation, I learned, were located in Long Beach. Problem was, Cyrus was also in Long Beach.

  I packed up all my belongings, called a cab, and asked the driver to recommend a cheap hotel with kitchens close to but not in downtown Long Beach.

  Half an hour later we rolled up to the Staybridge Suites at East Anaheim Street near Cherry Avenue, where I rented a suite for eight hundred dollars a week. I felt guilty spending so much—Lamont would probably object—but I didn’t want to be anywhere near Cyrus’s operation on the west side. Then again, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Lamont would approve of me renting a place with a kitchen so I could prepare my own food. Anything that could be ordered for delivery would undoubtedly poison me. Processed food was full of chemicals. Lamont had helped me learn how to eat only the finest whole foods—mostly raw, fresh, and local, without trans fats, preservatives, or sugars.

  It took me two days and both boxes of Clorox to clean my new home. Then I spent the better part of a week settling in, though I never grew comfortable with the brown couch or the carpet, both of which looked clean but were dirty to the touch. There was no way to clean them properly, and when I asked the manager if he would replace the carpet and exchange the couch for a leather one, my request was denied.

  I did exchange the flowered comforter that came with the room for a pink one I found at Walmart.

  I didn’t have a driver’s license and wasn’t eager to go out and get one, not yet anyway. I didn’t have my birth certificate, or any ID for that matter. The whole idea of legitimizing myself with papers and bank accounts and all the things required to function normally in society made me ill with nervousness. I didn’t have time to fill out forms and take tests that I would fail.

  Instead, I began to plot my journey to Jonathan Bourque’s doorstep with a boldness that surprised even me. It all started with a few simple questions that I began to obsess over.

  Basic questions, like: How do you kill someone?

  Even more basic: How do you find somebody? And, having found him, how do you reach him?

  I was surprised by how much thought these simple questions required. You would think anyone with a gun could just walk up to someone and shoot. While that may be true, other factors complicate even this simple action.

  Getting a gun, for example.

  Getting access to the individual without being tackled, for example.

  Getting away with it, for example.

  Each question led to other, more important questions. Did I want to get away with it? What did getting away with it mean? Did I want to simply survive or was it important to escape a prison sentence as well?

  On an even more fundamental level, I had to answer the question of guilt. Was Jonathan Bourque truly guilty of the evil Lamont had pinned on him? More to the point, had he killed my companion, my lover, my rock, my husband, as I assumed he had?

  These questions sickened me! How could I even doubt Lamont’s word? And yet they wouldn’t leave me alone.

  How much evidence did I need to remove my doubt? How would I go about finding that evidence?

  These were only a few of the questions that welled up in my mind as I gradually shifted my focus from functioning alone to the monumental task ahead of me.

  My two greatest assets were time and money. The Bourque Foundation was housed in a fifteen-story Wells Fargo bank building on Ocean Boulevard, across the street from the Long Beach Public Library.

  I purchased binoculars with the intent of watching the building to see when Bourque came and went, but the notion quickly proved absurd. For starters, I didn’t know what my target looked like. Also, within an hour of perching myself across the street with my glasses trained on the towering building, it occurred to me that the stares I was getting from passersby likely had everything to do with the fact that the building was a bank.

  I doubted that a bleached-blond ghost of a girl fit the typical bank robber’s profile, but I got far too much attention for my liking.

  The Long Beach Public Library—more specifically, the computers at the library—quickly replaced my binoculars as the better reconnaissance tool. I became a regular, although I couldn’t check anything out without a library card, which required identification.

  It occurred to me that the kinds of subjects I was looking up weren’t exactly the kind I wanted people seeing over my shoulder. Searches for kidnapping and poison and guns done on the same computer as searches for Jonathan Bourque might lead to an undesirable outcome if discovered.

  Two weeks after my return to Long Beach, I bought my own computer and hooked it up to the wireless Internet service at the Staybridge hotel. This saved me both time and cab fare.

  One of the first things I learned was that the manner of foul play I was contemplating was best done by people who were physically fit. I might need to run away, or hit someone, or quickly grab a gun from them.

  I had put on a couple of pounds since recovering from my addiction, but Lamont had been careful to make sure I was healthy, which meant I should stay thin. Although I was strong enough to clean the house and cook, I certainly didn’t have the muscle required to swing a bat around or break someone’s neck.

  I decided that I had to start exercising. Not that I expected to enter any karate competitions, but as I looked at myself naked in the mirror, I began to see that I was fragile as a feather. Bourque might blow me away with a heavy sigh.

  On the computer, I researched the kinds of exercises I could do without going to a gym or lifting weights, because I was far too shy to join a throng of half-naked, sweaty bodies, and I wasn’t interested in lugging dumbbells through the hotel lobby. So I installed a clamp-on pull-up bar in the bathroom door frame, downloaded a file on calisthenics, and started a basic regimen of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks.

  I’m sure I looked like an animated scarecrow doing the jumping jacks, but I could handle them well enough. The sit-ups were more of a challenge, but with some grunting I managed to string together ten. The push-ups were okay as
long as I stayed on my knees.

  But the pull-ups were evil. After tugging with all my strength and failing to lift myself more than an inch, I walked away from the bar and didn’t return to it for another month.

  Most of my emotional energy those first two months went into normalizing myself. Fitting in. Adopting the psyche of a woman bent on bringing justice to her corner of the world. Embracing righteous anger so I could extract justice no matter what the cost.

  You know, normalizing.

  By nature I wasn’t the vengeful type. I wasn’t easily angered or quick to judge. But I had nothing in my mind except the complete ruin Bourque had brought to us.

  I set my mind on his evil nature, and with each passing day and week my resolve grew. Time didn’t settle me but only made me more anxious. Maybe I held out hope that Lamont would one day knock on the front door and sweep me off my feet, and maybe the growing realization that he was gone forever played into my bitterness. I don’t know.

  My ideas of what I might do to the evil Bourque became wilder and more developed as the days became weeks and then turned into months. Coming off a year in which I’d spent most of my days alone in a house with little to do but clean and exist in my slightly drugged state, I was completely occupied with a burgeoning imagination fueled by hundreds of hours surfing the Internet.

  I decided early that I wanted to survive. And I did not want to spend the rest of my life in a prison, which meant I couldn’t get caught. Which in turn meant that I had to outwit the authorities. The police. The FBI.

  Those three letters terrified me. FBI. The FBI always won, as they should. They stood for the good guys, for the widows and the orphans and people like me.

  But like Lamont had said, sometimes the law got in the way of justice. I was actually on the same side as the FBI. I had to do their job because my hands weren’t tied like their hands were.

  This is what I thought about as I spent hours lying awake, staring at the ceiling in my suite at the Staybridge hotel. That and the fact that the FBI was smarter than me. Not that I was an idiot, but I wasn’t the sharpest tack in the tin, my mother used to say, and that was before the heroin.