Everyone Pays (22 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

MICHAEL

I found her on the street outside Glide—Emily—in almost the same position as the other.

This on one of my late-night walks before I found purpose, heard His word. I knew there was more to them than a simple diversion in the night, but I didn’t know what until I saw her. She was passed out, in trouble, left for trash, and unwanted beyond His own love. I saw my path. Heard His words.

She was the first time I heard Him.

He spoke to me then, and everything changed. For six years I had been compliant in the church—compliant to man’s ways. But then I began to follow His.

He told me to make her my own. To give her the love I had to offer, salvation beyond even what I’d had. He would accept her into heaven after I had cleansed her of her sins.

I went to her. Sleeping or passed out. Bloody. I covered her with my coat to keep her warm and carried her in my arms the five blocks back to my church. I snuck her down into the rectory. At that hour, it wasn’t hard to reach my room unnoticed. There I laid her on the bed and cleaned her wounds, inspected her mouth. I feared she might never stop bleeding. God told me she would.

I knew then that God would see to all.

He told me she was all right there in my room, that He would protect her as I nursed her back to health and then worked to save her soul.

“In time,” He told me. “In time, my son, you will avenge her sins. You will make her whole.”

Finding and cleaning her scars then, that was how I came to know her damage. The first of her sins. The others, the secrets came out in time.

In time, she gave me the first two names: Piper, Farrow.

That was when I started. This was His real work, my true calling, my path. To cleanse her for His salvation, I carried out His word.

Now I had one more name to claim, and it would be over.

But that night when I first found her, it was enough to clean her wounds and give her warmth, offer her God’s love. His love—and my own.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

DONNER

Coggins didn’t say anything when I came up to the car. He nodded at me from the driver’s seat but didn’t open the door or put down the window. I could make my own decisions about what he was thinking, whether he liked our night game. Bennett would handle the rest.

If I could trust him, I could trust his partner.

All part of the code.

Bennett opened the back door, and Meaders slid out fast under his arm. He was all energy, hopped up on coffee or something else: adrenaline and fanboy excitement about being out at night with cops.

“What’s our plan?” he said. “Fill me in, Donner.”

Like the others, he had taken to calling me by just my last name. He was getting comfortable, like he was one of us.

I said, “My partner is drawing out our chief suspect in these murders. We’re hoping you can make an ID at the scene.”

“Sweet. I’m in it. But I never met the guy. Just saw the girls. Will that help?”

“She’ll be with him. Hendricks drew our man out by posing as a john. If she’s your girl, then we have him.”

“So I’m not bait now?”

“No.” I hit him on the arm. “Isn’t that nice? Things really going your way.”

He laughed, loosened the collar of his shirt around his neck. “Yeah, good.” He got serious. “I still want to be in the middle of it.”

“Oh, don’t worry. You will be.”

I led him to my car and let him sit in the front. He was on our side now, annoying fanboy or not, and we were all in this together. I had no idea how the lieutenant would see this all when it was over, but that was a matter for tomorrow morning, maybe the next day. This was the moment, the night.

We drove back to Sixteenth Street slowly and passed the churches. I knew the layout from experience, an early SF boyfriend who liked to show me the sights. First was a small graveyard, one of two remaining burial grounds within the city borders, full of headstones marking deaths over two hundred years old. Then the small original chapel dating back to the seventeen hundreds, and finally the newer, larger church, rebuilt after the great quake of 1906.

I parked across the street, half blocking the driveway of a building that was sure not to need it at this time of night, and watched the big wooden doors of the old Mission chapel. The wind whipped through the trees along Dolores; outside it looked cold. Somewhere Coggins and Bennett were setting up. I had to trust in that. I trusted in Hendricks to be there, even if I couldn’t see him. The comfort I felt came from knowing that Father Michael did not want to hurt me, so far as I knew. I thought of my times on the basketball court, driving into the tall guys and finishing at the hoop. I would curl my limbs in between much bigger men to get my shot off. All it took was getting past my fear. Keeping my eyes open. This was the same. I thought about what I wanted, both for myself and for the city, and Meaders interrupted me by calling my attention to a guy on a bike.

“See him? Is that our guy?”

“No.” A short Latino rode a rickety bike wearing a large backpack, likely coming back from a long shift of work. I couldn’t remember how many hours I’d been on the job. “Come on. Time to get out.”

I shut off the car and got out onto the street, pulled my jacket close. I went around to the trunk, watching Meaders’s head surface from within the car. He slammed the door from a crouch, peering over the roof across the street. I stepped around next to him, along his right side and took his arm in my left hand. With my right I reached inside my coat to touch the handle of my gun. It was there, hard and warm and ready. I didn’t need to check it, cock it, or chamber a round; I kept it ready at all times.

“Come on,” I said, pulling Meaders foward. A van passed along the street in our direction and then was gone.

No one stopped us, called out, or did anything as we crossed the wide, grassy median and found our way to Dolores’s west side. In front of the old chapel, the concrete sidewalk was broken by red bricks leading up to five brick stairs and two wooden doors that looked as if they had been there for centuries. And they had. They were mounted on great iron hinges, with patterns of squares and circles carved into the wood. No one did wood carving like this anymore. And they looked
thick
, these doors, like they could hold out a flood. They had been through an earthquake. Several.

We walked right up the stairs and turned our backs to the door, all the better to see the street.

“He’s coming?” Meaders said. “Your partner is meeting the guy out here.”

“On that corner.” I pointed my nose at the far side of Dolores, at Sixteenth, about five yards in front of our car.

That was when I heard something creaking behind us, the whine of a large metal hinge and a rattling like a strand of old, heavy chains.

“What the—?”

I turned, but already felt a strong hand on my arm, someone pulling me inside the chapel, into complete darkness. I stumbled, got my bearings in time to see Meaders pulled in and the door slam. He barked out something unintelligible, and then I felt him bump into me, knocking me farther inside. I pulled my gun and swung it around, surprisingly not hitting anyone or anything, and fumbled with my other hand to reach my phone for some light. Anything to see what was happening.

When the wooden door slammed shut, any light from the street outside had disappeared. Now
everything
was black. I found my phone, pushed its button, and then thumbed up from the bottom of the screen to get more functions. In the lower-left corner, I saw the flashlight icon, pushed it with my thumb. The light came on. For a moment I looked up, trying to see what was around me. I registered more red bricks, long wooden pews and white walls. Then a hand slapped the phone out of my hand, and I heard it clatter to the floor.

It was swiftly kicked away; I watched it slide under what I assumed were pews.

I swore.

The smell of old wood registered to my nose and then something metallic, what I knew was blood but hoped wasn’t.

“Meaders! Eric?”

I swung around with the gun again, not sure what direction to point or what, if anything, to shoot at. What dim light came in through the high stained-glass windows was minimal, murky, as if coming in filtered through muddy water. That Meaders was quiet couldn’t mean anything good.

I felt for the door, moving toward the thin cracks of light around its edges. Then I heard Hendricks’s voice and his fists pounding. My foot slipped on something slick underneath it. I caught myself. My next step bumped into something soft.

Meaders’s body. Had to be.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Hendricks pounded on the door outside. “Donner! Is everything all right?”

“No. Help me get out of here.”

I pushed forward to try the door, but my hands landed on heavy chains. I tried the release, and it wouldn’t budge; the lock was chained shut.

“I’m trapped,” I said in a normal volume. “And Meaders is hurt.”

Hendricks swore from the other side of the door again. “I’m coming around. I’ll find a way in.”

I turned back to the dark, crouching and feeling around on Meaders’s body. I felt wet and knew it was blood. What my fingers got to first was leather, his jacket, and then his shirt. This is where it was especially wet. I felt upward from there and came to a knife handle sticking out of his throat. Blood still spurted around it and onto my hand; I felt the hot pumps coming, tried to cover the hole. It was no use. Pulling out the knife would make things worse. Meaders was gone. The priest had killed him before he could even make a sound.

But where was he? I hadn’t heard any movement, hadn’t heard him leave.

“Father Michael? You there?”

No sound came back but the weak echoes of my own voice against the tiled floor and the thick adobe walls.

I said, “I can help you.”

Then I heard his voice, about ten or fifteen feet away toward the front. “Where is she?” he said. “I am ready for her. I’ll make her whole.”

I pointed my gun at the sound.

“As God’s will.” I don’t know why I said it; I was trying for anything I could offer that might engender his trust.

“Perhaps.” His voice came from a different location, off to my right now. My eyes were adjusting to the dim light of the church. I could just make out shapes though, the pews and a table to my left, nothing human.

“She needs you.”

“We want the same things, you know. To clean up this city, even a small part of it. I’ve done that. Now I can give her what she desires.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Absolution. God’s love.”

His voice kept moving, changing direction and location as well as height, as if he knew I might try to shoot if he stood still.

“Trust me,” I said.

Then a door at the far end of the chapel opened and a band of light shone in. I pointed and aimed the gun, but the priest moved through it too fast. He passed outside into the night and the door slipped closed.

I started at a run down the center of the chapel between the pews, knowing there was a small chance that Hendricks or maybe Bennett would have gotten over the high wall into the cemetery next door, that I might not be the only one in pursuit. I couldn’t risk waiting. I had to get to the door and outside after him. Luckily in the light of the priest’s exit, I had seen the stairs up to the altar and the metal gate that ran in front of it. I ran up the short stairs, found the gate with my hands, and jumped over it.

I reached the altar just as a door at the back of the chapel opened. Hendricks stepped through it with his flashlight blasting, having come in through the gift shop. The first thing his beam hit was Meaders, his body, confirming everything I had felt in the dark: the knife at his neck, the blood. He was gone. We had lost him, and Bowen or our code or the ways of the PD would not be able to save us, or save me from another terrible turn to my career. My status as a cop hung in the balance all of a sudden, good ideas or thoughts behind it regardless, and all I could do was barrel forward after our man.

“He ran out into the graveyard,” I called to Hendricks. “Get Meaders some help.”

“What are you—?”

He’d ask the obvious question, but I didn’t wait to hear. I hit the narrow wooden door off to the side of the altar and blew through it. What I came out to was the burial ground bathed in floodlights: shadows curled around centuries-old headstones and statues marking graves from long ago. In this light, the priest wouldn’t stay; neither would he run back toward Dolores Street. I turned to my right, toward the back of the church property, seeing ten yards of assorted graves and then a high metal fence. The fence shook with movement; the priest had to have gone over the top and was coming down the other side.

“No! Stop!” I sprinted after him. This was where a game plan and knowing Coggins’s and Bennett’s locations would have helped; maybe I could’ve chased the priest into them, but I didn’t have the chance to second-guess or do anything but give pursuit.

I dodged along the thin path through the cemetery to the back wall. He moved fast, this priest, and had to be a great climber or very blessed if he had already made it over the wall. But there was no place else for him to go. I hit the wall at a run and climbed it with my hands and feet, holding my gun in my right hand as I struggled to catch the chain links and stick my feet into the holes.

Up and up I went until my body was over my own height. I gave a quick look back and down, saw Bennett come out through the same door of the chapel that I just had. “Try that way,” I said, pointing toward the new church with my right foot.

“You got it, Donner.”

If there was another way around to the fence’s other side, maybe he’d find it.

I scrambled up the rest of the fence and got one leg up over the top. Levering it, I got my waist and both legs over, and then I saw over into a huge open schoolyard absent of any light. With the moon covered by clouds and high vines or shrubs lining its perimeter fence on two sides, shadows kept large parts of the terrain in pitch black.

I slipped over the top and found myself suddenly clinging to a side covered in ivy. Below me were the white-painted lines of a tennis court, then darkness beyond. I started climbing down, through the ivy, and kept getting caught in it. It was slow going.

Too slow.

So I decided to get down the fastest way I knew: I let go and dropped.