One to Go (32 page)

The prongs constricted tighter. Tom could feel his air cutting off and his face turning red. Couldn't the priest see he was being strangled?

The tongue snapped back to Chad's mouth. He extended it again and wrapped it around Brit's head, each prong caressing her hair.

Brit's breathing became heavier. “I need you, baby,” she said.

Chad glanced at Tom. “Here? Now? What about Tom? You know how embarrassed I get.”

“Tom's family,” she responded. “Aren't you, Tom? You wouldn't mind if we got it on, would you?”

Matthew, his eyes closed in prayer, continued the rite. “Therefore, I adjure you every unclean spirit, every spectre from hell, every satanic power—”

Chad took Brit's hand and gently led her to Tom. She reached around Tom and grasped the window sill on each side of him. Her face was inches from his. She raised her hips and rubbed them back and forth against Chad's crotch.

The priest made the sign of the cross on his own head, then traced the sign onto Tom's brow, his hand moving freely through Brit's image as it would through dust mites.

“Depart from me, you accursed, into the everlasting fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels—”

“Now comes the good part, Tom,” whispered Brit. She ran her black tongue across her lips.

Chad unzipped his fly, and pulled out a glass tube. He smiled, and tugged on it so Tom could see it was the neck of an empty Wild Turkey bottle. He winked at Tom, and lifted Brit's burgundy skirt.

“Oooo, baby.” Brit's eyes closed as Chad entered her. But Tom could still see the black orbs as if the lids were made of cellophane.

The priest's voice moved toward crescendo. “An unquenchable fire stands ready for you and for your minions, you prince of accursed murderers, father of lechery, instigator of sacrileges, model of vileness, promoter of heresies, inventor of every obscenity—!”

“Stop,” shouted Tom. “Everybody, just please stop!” Chad laughed and continued to pound into Brit.

Tom could feel her putrid breath exhaling onto his face. He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but black emptiness.

Behind her, Chad sang: “
Hail to the Redskins
—”

Brit joined in. “
Hail Victory
—”

The priest shouted, “Depart, then, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits, for God has willed that man should be His temple—!”

“
Braves on the war path
—”

The priest and the copulating demons moved to climax.

“Begone, now! Begone, seducer! Leave this soul and return to—”

Chad and Brit howled as they reached orgasm.

“
FIGHT FOR OLD DC! Aaeeeooohhhh!
”

“—the FIRE!” Matthew trembled and had to steady himself against a wall to keep from collapsing. Irene helped him to a chair, then quickly filled a glass with water and offered it to him.

Chad withdrew and they both rearranged their clothing. “That was amazing,” he said. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. Except Tom saw it wasn't a handkerchief.

“Where did you get that?”

Brit dangled it in front of Tom's eyes. It was white with pink and yellow elephants decorating the edges. Gayle had kept it in a small trunk in the bedroom closet along with other keep-sakes.

It was Janie's baby bib.

Tom bucked his body up and down, back and forth. “Don't you touch that! Leave her alone!”

From their surprised expressions, it was clear that Matthew and Irene had heard him. He was back on the air.

“Tom, are you okay?” asked the priest.

“Leave who alone?” asked the nun.

“Take these damn things off!”

An hour later, Tom and Matthew sat across from each other at Tom's kitchen table, Matthew on his second beer and Tom into his second Jack on the rocks. He'd thought briefly of his exchange with Eva about his drinking, but he assumed she would understand surviving an exorcism starring copulating demons qualified as special circumstances.

Sister Irene had appeared shaken by the experience. Tom supposed she hadn't witnessed the whole green vomit thing before. As soon as they'd untied him, after a quick blessing for Tom, she'd asked Matthew to be excused and he readily agreed.

When Tom described what had occurred, Matthew was nearly inconsolable.

“We should've located someone who'd done an exorcism before. I'm very sorry.”

“Forget it,” said Tom. “Something tells me the outcome would've been the same if the Pope himself had performed the
rite. So, I need to take another life in nine days or my daughter dies.”

“You know I can't—”

“What? Condone murder?” Tom struggled to keep his voice on an even keel. “So what would you do if you were me? You don't have any kids, but what about a sister or brother? A loving mother or father? Would you willingly let them not only die, but sentence their souls to burn in hell for eternity? Or would you attempt to find a bad guy and take his life?”

After a pause, the priest whispered, “I don't know.”

“And by the way, where's the frigging cavalry?” Tom took a deep breath. He knew he was close to losing it. “Sorry, Matt. I just feel abandoned. Where are God and Jesus and the angels, the whole merry band?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, I get it. We're on our own here. Look, I assume God wouldn't have a problem with self-defense. I know there's the whole ‘turn the other cheek' thing, but we're not talking about a slap in the face. Does God condemn a man who shoots an intruder about to kill his kids and rape his wife? Or is He okay with letting the good guys die to protect the sanctity of the bad guy's life?”

“We're not talking about self-defense here. Your targets to date did not threaten you.”

“But they'd killed before.”

“So now you've moved beyond self-defense to vigilante justice as your justification. Big leap.”

“Still haven't answered what you'd do.”

Matthew pushed himself away from the table and headed for the door. “I'm so sorry, Tom.” The priest paused, his eyes indecipherable, then left without another word.

The click of the door closing acted as a remote and the TV turned on.

The screen filled with a replay of the exorcism, including the copulating demons. Without breaking his rhythm, Chad's face turned to him.

“We had such a wonderful time and we know you did too, so we thought we'd give you a chance to enjoy the replay.”

Brit smiled at him. “Just one little matter we wanted to pass on. The fact you tried the exorcism, no matter how much we enjoyed it,”—she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“well, it caught the boss' attention, and for some reason he was in a cranky mood.”

“Very cranky,” added Chad.

“So, I'm afraid we have a rules modification. Not a big thing, really.”

Chad added, “Not big at all.”

“Your deadline's been moved up a week.”

Tom shouted at the screen. “No! You can't!”

Chad and Brit spoke in unison. “Two days.”

The screen went black.

After a long, mercifully dreamless sleep, Tom woke Friday morning and immediately grabbed his phone from the bedside table. He knew Janie had the day off for teacher in-service training, and called Gayle to see if he could take Janie and Angie to lunch. She readily agreed. Something about David also having the day off and the two of them going antiquing.

Tom remembered tagging along with her for antiquing excursions when they were married. They usually occurred on Sundays and every few minutes he'd check his watch, concerned he wouldn't be back home in time for the Redskins kickoff. He'd been an ass and wished he could rewind those years. He really wished he could rewind to that morning on Memorial Bridge, but no rewinds in life, unless you'd cut a deal with the devil.

He thought about asking Gayle to check the keepsake trunk to see if the baby bib was missing, but when she found it gone, as he knew she would, how would he explain himself? He arranged to pick up the girls at eleven thirty.

After dressing in jeans and a sweater, he found a poppy seed bagel in the fridge. As soon as he picked it up, almost all of the poppy seeds fell off, signaling the bagel was beyond stale. No problem. Anything to soak up the acid he felt in his stomach. The bottle of cheap vodka lurking behind the milk carton caught his eye. A step above Frank Custer's Akron gin, but a small step. A little sip to calm his nerves wouldn't hurt. He hesitated; Eva's image
filled his brain. He replaced the bottle and closed the fridge door, then exited the apartment before he changed his mind.

It was all he could do to keep from running full speed to the Shell station. As Tom approached, he spotted an old woman standing in front of the pay phone with a stack of quarters resting on the tiny, scuffed-metal shelf. Judging by her clothing and the supermarket cart parked nearby, stacked high with clothing and other paraphernalia, Tom assumed she was homeless.

“Hey—”

She turned, eyeing him suspiciously. “I'll give you twenty bucks to let me make my call first.” She didn't respond, and he quickly dug a twenty from his pocket and handed it to her. She snatched the twenty, grabbed her quarters, and stepped aside, standing guard next to her cart. She never took her eyes off him.

Tom ignored her and dialed Chewy's number. He could hear breathing as the connection was made.

“Chew, uh, I mean whoever's listening, I need a gun.”

He was surprised to hear Chewy's voice.

“Sorry, Teach. We're even. Stay free.”

“No, wait. I've got less than two days and—!”

The click terminating the call resonated inside Tom's head. He immediately called back, but this time no one answered.

“Phone broken?”

He turned around to see Percy Castro standing behind him.

Tom tried to conceal his shock. “What, you're following me? You have nothing better to do on a Friday morning?”

The detective didn't answer him directly. Instead, he looked up to a camera mounted under the eave of the roof overhanging the station's service bay.

“Nowadays, everything's on camera. Don't know about you, but kind've gives me the creeps. Somebody's always watching.”

Tom hadn't noticed the camera before, and he had a bad feeling.

“Of course, as an investigative tool, it's very helpful. Take your case, for example. We routinely check all the cameras in
the neighborhood to see if a target's engaged in any suspicious behavior. To tell you the truth, the Big Brother thing makes me uncomfortable as hell, but the greater good and all that.”

“I'm trying to think why I care, but nothing immediately springs to mind,” said Tom, with a bravado he certainly didn't feel.

Castro continued as if Tom hadn't spoken. “Then, when we do see our guy—you, in this case—using a public pay phone, we got to ask, why, in this age when every five-year-old has his own cell phone, would you be needing to make a call from a gas station pay phone? Could it be you didn't want the call to be traceable?”

“You know you're not allowed to talk to me without my attorney present.”

“So, we check the logs from the phone company—Ma Bell. Remember when we used to call the phone company Ma Bell? Good old days, right?—and trace your call to an unlisted cell phone, which switches the call to another unlisted phone in Poland.
Poland
. Then from there to some country I never heard of and can't pronounce. Very sophisticated, like you'd read in cold-war spy novels.”

“And?”

“And we don't know who you were talking to, but we suspect it might've been a local drug kingpin named Chewy Lewis.”

“First, that's ridiculous, and second, I said I can't talk to you, so unless there's something else, I'm going to go pick up my daughter.”

Castro stepped aside. “By all means. But there is one thing you may want to pass on to Ms. Stoddard. Something she'll be pleased to hear. The gun that killed Jessica Hawkins had a threaded barrel.”

“And ballistics?”

“Evidence of a wipe smudge. So it appears a noise suppressor, an older model silencer, was used.”

“I'll be sure to tell her.”

Tom hurried past him and jogged back to his apartment. They're monitoring him, maybe even following him. The likelihood
of obtaining a gun had evaporated. There was always a knife, but that meant he couldn't follow his plan of spraying a street corner full of drug dealers in a hail of bullets from a passing car. He'd have to get up close and personal.

But those were thoughts for a few hours later. Now, he had an aching need to see his daughter.

By its usual standards, the noise and chaos in the restaurant compared favorably to Tom's earlier visits with Janie—only three birthday parties filled with screaming kids. A quiet Friday afternoon at Chuck E. Cheese's. Janie and Angie sat across from Eva and him in the multicolored plastic booth, finishing up their burgers.