Side Jobs (32 page)

 

 

I APPROACHED THE park with intense caution. It took me more than half an hour to be reasonably sure that Buzz wasn’t there, somewhere, lurking with another .50-caliber salutation for me. Of course, he could have been watching from the window of one of the nearby buildings—but none of them were hotels or apartments, and none of the pictures taken in the park had been shot from elevation. Besides, if I avoided every place where a maniac with a high-powered rifle might possibly shoot me, I’d live the rest of my life hiding under my bed.

Still, there was no harm in exercising caution. Rather than walking across the open ground of the park to the softball field, I took the circuitous route around the outside of the park—and heard quiet little sobs coming from the shade beneath the bleachers opposite the ones where I’d sat with Michael.

Slowing my steps as I approached, I peered under the bleachers.

A girl in shorts, sneakers, and a powder blue team jersey was huddled up with her arms wrapped around her knees, crying quietly. She had stringy red hair and was skinny, even for someone her age. It took me a minute to recognize her as Alicia’s teammate, the second basem—person.

“Hey, there,” I said quietly, trying to keep my voice gentle. “You all right?”

The girl looked up, her eyes wide, and immediately began wiping at her eyes and nose. “Oh. Oh, yes. I’m fine. I’m just fine, sir.”

“Right, right. Next you’ll tell me you’ve got allergies,” I said.

She looked up at me with a shaky little smile, huffed out a breath in the ghost of a laugh—and it transformed into another sob on her. Her face twisted up into an agonized grimace. She shuddered and wept harder, bowing her head.

I can be such a sucker. I ducked down under the bleachers and sat down beside her, a couple of feet away. The girl cried for a couple more minutes, until she began quieting down.

“I know you,” she said a minute later, between sniffles. “You were talking to Coach Carpenter yesterday. A-Alicia said you were a friend of the family.”

“I’d like to think so,” I agreed. “I’m Harry.”

“Kelly,” she said.

I nodded. “Shouldn’t you be practicing with the team, Kelly?”

She shrugged her skinny shoulders. “It doesn’t help.”

“Help?”

“I’m hopeless,” she said. “Whatever it is I’m doing, I just screw it up.”

“Well, that’s not true,” I said with assurance. “Nobody can be bad at
everything
. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.”

“I am,” she said. “We’ve only lost two games all year, and both of them were because I screwed up. We go to the finals next week, and everyone’s counting on me, but I’m just going to let them down.”

Hell’s bells, what a ridiculously tiny problem. But it was obvious that it was real to Kelly, and that it meant the world to her. She was just a kid. It probably looked like a much larger issue from where she was standing.

“Pressure,” I said. “Yeah, I get that.”

She peered at me. “Do you?”

“Sure,” I said. “You feel like people’s lives depend on you, and that if you do the wrong thing, they’re going to be horribly hurt—and it will be your fault.”

“Yes,” she said, sniffling. “And I’ve been trying so hard, but I just can’t.”

“Be perfect?” I asked. “No, of course not. But what choice do you have?”

She looked at me uncertainly.

“Anything you do, you risk screwing up. You could do a bad job of crossing the street one day and get hit by a car.”

“I probably could,” she said darkly.

I held up my hand. “My point,” I told her, “is that if you want to play it safe, you can stay at home and wrap yourself up in Bubble Wrap and never do anything.”

“Maybe I should.”

I snorted. “They still make you read Dickens in school?
Great Expectations
?”

“Yeah.”

“You can stay at home and hide if you want—and wind up like Miss Havisham,” I said. “Watching life through a window and obsessed with how things might have been.”

“Dear God,” she said. “You’ve just made Dickens relevant to my life.”

“Weird, right?” I asked her, nodding.

Kelly let out a choking little laugh.

I pushed myself up and nodded to her. “I never saw you hiding over here, okay? I’m just gonna go do what I gotta do, and leave you to make the choice.”

“Choice?”

“Sure. Do you want to put your cap back on and play? Or do you want to wind up an old maid wandering around your house in the rotting remains of a wedding dress and thirty yards of Bubble Wrap, plotting heartlessly against some kid named Pip?” I regarded her soberly. “There’s really no middle ground.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not right,” she said.

“See there? I’m not much good at offering wise counsel, but that didn’t stop me from trying.” I winked at her and walked on, around behind the backstop to where Michael sat on the bleachers on the far side of the field.

Molly sat on a blanket underneath a tree maybe ten yards away, with earbuds trailing wires down into her shirt’s front pocket, as if she were listening to a digital music player. It was an effort to blend into the background, I supposed, since she couldn’t have been listening to one of those gizmos any more than I could have. She was wearing sunglasses, too, so I couldn’t tell where her focus was, but I was sure she was being alert. She gave me the barest trace of a nod as I approached her father.

I sat down next to him and waited for it.

“Harry,” Michael said, “you look awful.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. I told him about the attempted assassination and about my discussion with Forthill.

Michael frowned at the children practicing, his expression quietly disturbed. “The Church wouldn’t do something like that, Harry. It isn’t how they operate.”

“People are people, Michael,” I said. “People do things. They make mistakes.”

“But it isn’t the Church,” he said. “If this person is part of the Church, he isn’t acting with their blessing or under their instructions.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think they were too happy with me when I was a couple of days late turning over the Shroud.”

“But you did return it, safe and sound,” Michael said.

“How many people know about the swords? How many knew that I had
Amoracchius
?”

He shook his head. “I’m not certain. Given the sorts of foes they contend with, the knowledgeable people within the Church are more than mildly secretive and security conscious.”

I gestured around us. “Ballpark it for me.”

He blew out a breath. “Honestly, I just don’t know. I’ve personally met perhaps two hundred priests who understood our mission, but it wouldn’t shock me if there were as many as six or seven hundred, worldwide. But among them, that kind of important information would be closely kept. Four or five, at most. Plus the Holy Father.”

“I’m going to assume that il Papa didn’t personally attempt to blow me away,” I said gravely. “How do I find out about the others?”

“You might talk to Father For—”

“Been there, done that. He isn’t a fountain of exposition.”

Michael grimaced. “I see.”

“So, other than him—”

He spread his hands. “I don’t know, Harry. Forthill was my primary temporal contact.”

I blinked. “He never talked to you about your support structure in the Church?”

“He was sworn to secrecy,” Michael said. “I just had to trust him. Excuse me.” He stood up and called to the softball team, “Thank you, ladies! Two laps of the park and we’ll call it a day!”

The team began discarding gloves and such, and fell into a line to begin jogging around the exterior of the park, in no great hurry, talking and laughing as they went. I noticed that Kelly was among them and felt a little less like a complete incompetent.

“I’d really like to keep my brains on the inside of my skull,” I told him when he sat down again. “And if one of the Church’s top guys is leaking information or has sprung a gear, they need to know it.”

“Yes.”

I stared out at the now-empty softball diamond for a minute. Then I said, “I don’t want to kill anybody. But Buzz is playing for keeps. I’m not going to pull any punches.”

Michael frowned down at his hands. “Harry, you’re talking about murder.”

“What a shock,” I said, “after taking one of those monster rounds in the back.”

“There must be some way to end this without bloodsh—”

Over his shoulder, I saw Molly abruptly spring to her feet and whip off her sunglasses, staring across the park with a puzzled frown on her face. Then the girls from the team appeared from the direction in which Molly had been staring. The girls were running as fast as they could, screaming as they came.

“Coach!” screamed Kelly. “Coach! The man took her!”

“Easy, easy,” Michael said, rising. He put his hands on Kelly’s shoulders as Molly came hurrying over. “Easy. What are you talking about?”

“He came out of the van with one of those electric stunner things,” Kelly babbled, through her panting. “He zapped her, and then he put her in the van and drove away.”

Molly drew in a sudden breath and almost seemed to turn green.

Michael stared at the girl for a second, and then glanced at me. His eyes widened in horror. “Alicia!” he called, stepping past Kelly and looking wildly around the park. “Alicia!”

“He took her!” sobbed Kelly, her tears making her face blotchy. “He took her!”

“Kelly,” I said, to get her attention. “What did he look like?”

She shook her head. “I don’t—I can’t . . . White, not really tall. His hair was cut really short. Like army haircuts.”

Buzz.

He’d threatened Michael to get me to bring a sword out in the open, where it was vulnerable. Then he’d tried to kill me before I locked it away again. And when that failed, he tried something else.

“Molly,” Michael said quietly. “Take the truck. Drive Sandra and Donna home. Call your mother on the way and tell her what’s happened. Stay at the house.”

“But—” Molly began.

Michael turned hard eyes to her and said, “Now.”

“Yes, sir,” Molly said instantly.

Michael tossed her the keys to the truck. Then he turned to a nearby equipment bag and smoothly withdrew an aluminum bat. He whipped it around in a flowing
rondello
motion, nodded as if satisfied, and turned to me. “Let’s go. You’re driving.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where?”

“St. Mary’s,” Michael said, his tone positively grim. “I’m going to talk to Forthill.”

 

 

FORTHILL HAD JUST finished saying evening Mass when we showed up. Father Paulo greeted Michael like a long-lost son, and how was he doing, and of course we could wait for Forthill in his chambers. I suspected Paulo held deep reservations in regard to me. But that was okay. I wasn’t feeling particularly trusting toward him, either.

We’d been waiting in Forthill’s quarters for maybe five minutes when the old priest came in. He took one look at Michael and got pale.

“Talk to me about the order,” Michael said quietly.

“My son,” Forthill said. He shook his head. “You know that I—”

“He’s taken Alicia, Tony.”

Forthill’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“He’s taken my daughter,” Michael roared, his voice shaking the walls. “I don’t care what oaths you’ve sworn. I don’t care what the Church thinks needs to be kept secret. We have to find this man and find him now.”

I blinked at Michael and found myself leaning a little away from him. The heat of his anger was palpable, a living thing that brought its own presence, its own gravity, into the room.

Forthill faced that anger like an old rock thrusting up stubbornly through a turbulent sea—worn and unmoving. “I will not break my oaths, Michael. Not even for you.”

“I’m not asking you to do it for me,” Michael said. “I’m asking you to do it for Alicia.”

Forthill flinched. “Michael,” he said quietly. “The order maintains security for a reason. Its enemies have sought to destroy it for two thousand years, and in that time the order has helped hundreds of thousands, even millions. You know that. A breach could put the entire order at risk—and that means more than my life, or yours.”

“Or an innocent child’s, apparently,” I said. “I guess you’re going to take that ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me’ thing kind of literally, eh, Padre?”

Forthill looked from Michael to me, and then to the floor. He took a slow breath, and then smoothed his hands over his vestments. “It never gets any easier, does it? Trying to work out the right thing to do.” He answered his own question. “No. I suppose it’s often simpler to determine the proper path than it is to actually walk it.”

Forthill rose and walked over to a section of the wood-paneled wall. He put his hands at the top-right and lower-left sections of the panel and, with a grunt, pushed it in. It slid aside, revealing a space the size of a closet, filled with file cabinets and a small bookshelf.

I traded a glance with Michael, who raised his eyebrows in surprise. He hadn’t known about the hidey-hole.

Forthill opened a drawer and started thumbing through files. “The Ordo Malleus has existed, in one form or another, since the founding of the Church. Originally, we were tasked with the casting out of demons from the possessed, but as the Church grew, it became clear that we needed to be able to counter the threats from other enemies as well.”

“Other enemies?” I asked.

“Various beings who were masquerading as gods,” Forthill said. “Vampires and other supernatural predators. Wicked faeries who resented the Church’s influence.” He glanced at me. “Practitioners of witchcraft who turned their hand against the followers of Christ.”

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “The Inquisition.”

Forthill grimaced. “The Inquisition has become the primary reason Malleus maintains itself in secrecy—and why we very seldom engage in direct action ourselves. It’s all too easy to let power go to your head when you’re certain God is on your side. The Inquisition, in many ways, attempted to bring our struggle into the light—and because of the situation it helped create, more innocent men and women died than throughout centuries of the most savage, supernatural depredation.