The Priest's Graveyard Read online

  Danny bounded over, reached across the desk, and snatched the file from her hand.

  “I knew it!” She was frantic and yelling. “He killed him, I told you he killed him!”

  “Keep your voice down,” he snapped. “The whole neighborhood will hear you.”

  She gripped her head and paced, suddenly sobbing, beyond control. Danny scanned the page she’d found. It was a schedule of monthly fifty-thousand-dollar payments made to a bank account under the name Lamont Myers. Not unexpected. After all, Lamont had worked with Jonathan Bourque.

  A red marker had struck through the last three payments on the schedule, with the word TERMINATED printed at the top of the page. Not exactly definitive evidence.

  A crash jarred Danny from his thoughts. The green desk lamp lay shattered on the desk where she’d smashed it.

  “What are you doing? You can’t do that!”

  “Read the note!” she said, thrusting out a trembling finger.

  “What note?”

  “The Post-it note!”

  Then he saw the small yellow note on the desk. The Post-it had fallen from the page when he’d grabbed the file. He plucked it up and saw what had caused Renee to lose herself.

  Five words, written by hand: Take care of this problem. Just that, no more.

  His mind spun. True, taken with the larger body of evidence they had regarding Jonathan Bourque and Lamont’s disappearance, the note made a statement. But it wasn’t conclusive.

  “You see that?” she demanded. “That pig killed him!”

  Renee’s recklessness was so disconcerting that he wasn’t immediately sure how to respond. If Danny had replied, his voice might have masked the soft thump that came from the hallway.

  It was a soft sound, an elbow on a corner molding perhaps, or a foot bumping into a baseboard. And the moment Danny heard it, he knew they were not alone.

  He spun toward the door. Closed, as he’d left it.

  But then the door swung open. Simon Redding stood in the frame.

  He had a gun and it was trained on Danny.

  18

  MY WORLD CRASHED in on itself when I read those words on the yellow note. I don’t know what I expected to find after all our sneaking and breaking in; maybe nothing. After all, Bourque was the kind of man who hid in the darkest corners—surely we wouldn’t go in and find his sins printed on the walls. Besides, Danny had said it would be tough.

  Honestly, I was just so excited to finally be on the job, doing what I’d dreamed about doing for so long. After three months of imagining, I wasn’t only getting closer to my goal, I was reaching it with a master by my side. Danny might be a priest to his neighbors, but to me he was the fist of justice, and I was safely in his grip.

  Yet when the flashlight played over the Post-it note and I saw Lamont’s name, the sound of Danny picking at the box faded. I couldn’t hear anything, not even my breathing, not even my own voice.

  Something seemed to pop in my head. I stared at the file in my hand as a flood of realization crashed into me, washing away the doubt in the corners of my mind.

  Jonathan Bourque had killed Lamont.

  My next response was perfectly normal, I thought. Where I had hated Bourque before, I’d also feared him. More accurately, I’d feared what my hatred would bring to me—capture and torture and maybe even death.

  But with the last reservation washed away, I was left with only raw hatred. The fear was gone. I wanted to kill that man in whatever way made him dead, preferably by a method that put him through terrible agony and sorrow first.

  I cried out.

  Danny took the file from me.

  I smashed the lamp.

  Then the door swung open and the man who’d threatened to cut off my fingers at the knuckles stood there with a silenced gun pointed at Danny. He flipped the light switch on.

  For a moment no one moved.

  “Hello, Mr. Redding,” Danny said.

  The man’s eyes darted between us. A faint smile tugged at his mouth.

  Danny spoke in a soft, sincere voice. “It would be a terrible mistake to pull that trigger,” he said.

  Simon Redding tried to appear relaxed, but small beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead. There was something about Danny that could unnerve anyone, even when a gun was pointed at his head. Maybe it was his confidence, something I decided then and there that I would emulate. I think I fell in love with Danny in that moment.

  “The priest is more than he seems,” Redding said.

  “Aren’t we all?”

  The man’s right brow lifted and my faith in Danny’s confidence fled. Sweat aside, Simon Redding looked too relaxed for my liking. And he had the gun.

  We were finished, Danny and I. There was no way out.

  Then again, the fact that Redding didn’t deny killing Lamont was as good as a confession to me. I stood rooted to the floor, torn between the realization that I hated this man as much as I hated Jonathan Bourque, and the fear that he might kill Danny.

  Redding swiveled his gun and pointed the barrel right between my eyes.

  “She’s just along for the ride,” he said. His eyes flitted to Danny. “You’re the professional here, she’s just a tagalong. What do you do, track down people you don’t like and turn them over to the authorities? You’re some kind of masked marauder who goes by the name of priest?”

  “Take your gun off her,” Danny said.

  The authority in his voice helped me regain some confidence, but the effect was only momentary. After all, there was a gun in my face.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Redding said. “I think you love this girl. I think you’ll tell me everything to save her life.”

  I finally found my voice. “That’s the most stupid thing I’ve heard in my life,” I said. “We just met the other night.”

  His eyes turned to me. “Really? How about we start with your fingers?”

  “Go ahead, just try!”

  I was blinded to everything but my own rage. I didn’t see how Danny got his gun out from under his belt at his back. I just heard the soft pop and saw a quarter-size red spot appear on Simon Redding’s forehead. Blood sprayed the wall behind him.

  My jaw dropped open.

  The sight of him standing tall, unblinking with surprised eyes, gun pointed at me, was completely surreal. It was also terrifying, because even though I was quite sure he was already dead, his hand was still shaking.

  I thought, That gun’s going to go off! I cried out and dropped to one knee behind the desk.

  Phftt! The bullet slapped into the bookcase behind me.

  Then Redding staggered back, crashed into the door, and toppled to the ground like a felled redwood tree. The whole house seemed to shake when he hit.

  I stood up, trembling from head to foot. But not from fear, I knew that even then. It was adrenaline. I didn’t feel a moment of fear once I saw that the brute was dead and bleeding on the stone tile, half in, half out of the office. If anything I felt elation, because, although Jonathan Bourque had given the order, it was probably this man who’d actually pulled the trigger and killed Lamont.

  I shouted out, a victory cry, something nondescript that sounded a little like a shriek, a little like “yes!” but was neither.

  Danny looked at me. I didn’t know what else to say. Here we stood in our black outfits, and there lay a dead man.

  So I said, “He’s dead.”

  Danny swore and hurried to the body, shoving his gun behind his belt as naturally as he’d withdrawn it. He leaped over the man, grabbed him by his shirt, and pulled him out into the hall.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Keeping him from bleeding on the carpet. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “What about him?”

  Danny flipped off the light. “Do me a favor, will you? Take the plastic off the window and get it under him. I have to get some things. Be right back.”

  He raced away, leaving me with Redding’s dead body bleeding
onto the tile just outside Bourque’s office. To my recollection, it was the first dead body I’d seen, and he hardly looked dead. If not for the pool of blood spreading by the head, I might think he was only sleeping.

  I whirled around and jerked the plastic off the drapes where Danny had clipped it. He wanted me to get it under the body to contain the bleeding, I thought. That way we could haul Redding out of the house without drizzling a trail of blood.

  I laid the black plastic beside Simon Redding’s body, grabbed his shoulder, and tried to roll him. He was a large man, heavier than I guessed, and it took a tremendous tug to get his torso to cooperate. Even then I didn’t manage to get the body all the way over before my foot slipped in his blood, dropping me to my seat.

  Now I had his blood all over my leg. His body rolled back to its original position. I swore. This was the dirty side of killing, I thought. Nothing was as easy as it seemed in books or movies. The little details always made the whole business messy. But if that’s what it took, so be it.

  Eager to get the job done before Danny returned, I pushed myself back up, stepped over the body, grabbed his shirt at his side, and pulled, this time shoving my heel against the wall for leverage.

  “What are you doing?”

  Danny had returned.

  “Get your foot off the wall, please,” he said. “You can’t leave boot prints on the wall like that.”

  “Oh, sorry. I slipped.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then he set down a black bag and hurried up to help me. Together we rolled Simon Redding’s dead body onto the black plastic sheet.

  Danny didn’t stop with that. He grabbed a box of black lawn bags and some gray duct tape from his bag and began to tape bags along the edges of the plastic sheeting. I couldn’t begin to guess what he was up to, and I was about to ask when he gave his next order.

  “Go to the kitchen. Find a mop and a bucket. Fill the bucket with water and soap. We’re going to need to get this blood off the floor.”

  “Okay. He deserved it, anyway,” I said. “And he hardly felt a thing, right?”

  Danny glanced up at me but said nothing.

  “Actually, it might have been better if he’d felt something. A little pain,” I said.

  “Please hurry,” he said.

  “Okay. What about my boot? It’s got blood on it.”

  He saw where I’d stepped in the blood. “Take them both off. And don’t step in any more blood.”

  “Okay.”

  I followed his directions eagerly, elated to be an integral part of such a noble thing. I couldn’t get my hands to stop shaking.

  Did I feel bad about Simon Redding? No. Maybe I should have, but we had just stopped a man from killing other innocent people. He’d given up his right to life a long time ago, as Danny would have said. We had done the world a great service.

  And when we did the same to Jonathan Bourque, which we would, we would do the world an even bigger service.

  The sound of a motor running made me think Danny was vacuuming up with a wet vac before I mopped up the last traces of blood. He was careful like that. The best. I could learn so much just by watching him.

  It took me ten minutes to find a bucket, a sponge mop, and some Ajax in the laundry, to fill the bucket half full with water, and to return to Danny. He was leaning over the body.

  “Got it!” I said over the whine of his machine.

  I saw what he was doing and I pulled up. Danny wasn’t using a wet vac. He had some kind of electric saw out, and he was cutting away at the brute’s right leg, six inches below his hip. He’d taped the plastic in such a way to catch any flying debris. Two arms and the left leg were already off and stacked up beside the torso.

  It was dark, thankfully, so I couldn’t see all the flesh and red blood, but the sight still hit me hard at first. Danny didn’t seem to know I was watching him. He was leaning and sawing and making quick work of that leg.

  But it was only a dead body, right? Simon Redding wouldn’t care if we sawed his leg off after he was dead. Danny obviously knew what he was doing. In the next minute I knew why he’d gone to all that trouble.

  He finished cutting off the leg, set it next to the other appendages, and looked at me. “Sorry, I should have warned you. But we have to get this body out of here, no traces. The only way to do that properly is to seal it in bags. The plastic won’t cover the whole body, and even if it did, trying to stuff a body this big into a trunk is too risky. Rip the plastic and spill blood and you leave evidence in the trunk; that could be a real problem down the road.”

  I was impressed. “Smart,” I said.

  “No evidence, right? That’s the first rule. Help me get these in their bags.”

  The legs and arms were easy enough. I held the bags while Danny placed the limbs inside. The torso was harder, but we managed with me holding it upright while he slipped a bag over the head and shoulders then down to the ground.

  Now we had one large bag and two smaller bags. Following his careful direction, I mopped up the mess on the floor and wiped down the walls while he cleaned up the office. This was something I was good at, and I made sure not a speck of blood or bone remained anywhere. Meanwhile, Danny hid the bullet hole in the bookcase and put everything back exactly as we’d found it, minus the desk lamp I’d foolishly broken. Live and learn, I suppose.

  After the scene was cleaned to Danny’s satisfaction, it took us ten minutes to get out of the house. He carried in both arms the large double bag containing Redding’s torso. I carried Danny’s tool bag. I tried to carry the two smaller bags as well but couldn’t hold them along with his tool case, so he set the arms and legs on the lawn for a second trip.

  “I’m assuming you can drive?”

  “Me? No, I don’t have a license.”

  “But you can drive?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. You’re taking the BMW.”

  “You’re staying behind? I can’t drive!”

  “I’m taking Redding’s car. Leaving it out front will only raise an alarm. The streets are empty, you can follow close.”

  Smart.

  Redding’s car was a Suburban, and I wondered if we’d wasted energy carving up the body. We could have just shoved the body into his mammoth vehicle without tearing the bag. Danny said no. It would be easier to dispose of the body in pieces. The larger the body, the more buoyant it would be. Smaller pieces sink easier. I would see, he said, as he placed the bags into the Chevy.

  We left Jonathan Bourque’s mansion in Palos Verdes after Danny repaired the phone lines, checked the house for any sign we’d been there (other than the missing lamp), and locked the front door.

  In the Suburban, Danny led me west; I hugged his taillights in the rented BMW. It had been a long time since I’d been behind a wheel, but it came back to me after a few corners.

  I was ecstatic. We had broken in, found the evidence we needed, eliminated a problem, and escaped without any additional complications.

  But as I followed Redding’s body parts, I began to think about the fact that we hadn’t touched Bourque yet. Until the man who had killed Lamont was dead, I could not, would not, did not want to rest.

  I wondered if I could do this for a living. Danny did, didn’t he? Simon Redding had accused him of taking the law into his hands, and Danny hadn’t offered any denial.

  He hadn’t come right out and said he killed people, naturally. Who would? People would put him behind bars if they knew what he did. I understood his need to lie.

  Danny was a very special kind of priest who had done this sort of thing before. And I thought I might be quite good at doing the same kind of thing.

  Maybe that’s why I’d been saved from the streets. Maybe all my suffering would produce some good after all. Maybe Lamont’s death wouldn’t be wasted.

  At the very least, I was now more confident than ever that I would learn whatever I needed to know to kill Lamont’s killer. The idea of it made my head tingle with a strange mix of ner
vousness and anticipation. Maybe it’s the kind of feeling that comes right before jumping out of a plane for the first time.

  I followed Danny to a dirt road that ran half a mile toward the ocean before ending at the top of a sheer rock cliff. Climbing out of the BMW, I hurried to the edge, where he was studying the breaking waves a hundred yards below.

  “You’re going to throw the bags over the cliff? Won’t they just float?”

  “Not the bags. The body parts. Give me a hand.”

  He headed to the back of the Suburban, opened the rear door, and pulled out the three bags.

  “Won’t the waves just wash the body parts up onto the shore?” I asked.

  “There is no shore in this section, only cliff. The tide’s heading out. We’ll give each piece some added weight and let the ocean do its thing. Within a day, the fish will have Redding stripped to the bone. Even if he does wash in, it’s highly unlikely anyone will spot his smashed bones way down there. Here, help me out.”

  We pulled the body parts out and strapped large boulders to each using rope. We shoved each bundle over the cliff and watched them splash into the waves, then disappear beneath the surface.

  Shark food, Danny said. He retrieved his power saw and dropped that over as well.

  He explained how he would burn the bags and clean his other tools to rid the world of the last evidence linking Redding’s disappearance to us. We’d both worn gloves and left no prints; we’d vacuumed and washed away all stray hairs and fibers from the house; we’d been careful not to leave any forensic evidence in the cars. There was evidence of a break-in at the house, perhaps, but not a killing. The missing flash drive would create some havoc, but Danny could live with that.

  Now all we had to do was drive Redding’s Suburban to a warehouse that specialized in stripping cars for resale on the black market, and we would be done.

  On the cliff with Danny, facing a gentle sea breeze, I felt a numbing sense of appreciation and accomplishment. We’d done it. Together. Danny and I.

  The long arm of Danny’s law had rescued me in the same way Lamont’s had. I was saved by the law, our own law. The full, just, unbending law. A law that called to task all those who acted nice on the outside but trampled innocent victims without a second thought.