The Priest's Graveyard (15 page)

“Well, now you know. You saw my gun. I’m going to shoot Jonathan Bourque dead. Satisfied?”

He turned away. “I see that. And no, I’m not satisfied.”

“Why not?”

He swiveled to me, angry. “Because I like you!”

You see, I was right. God had brought Danny Hansen to save me, just like he’d brought Lamont to save me. Three months ago,
I might have thrown my arms around him again, but I was older and wiser now. I was someone to contend with.

“That’s nice, Danny. I like you, too. And you obviously know much more about this kind of thing than I do. So why won’t you
help me?”

“Because I’m not going to help you
kill
a man!”

“Then at least help me find out more about him. Help me expose him. Help me find the whole truth about him. That wouldn’t
be so bad, would it?”

He didn’t answer.

“You want to know what I think?” I said. “I think that you’re much more than just a priest. I think you’re here because you’re
more like me than you admit. I think you’ll do anything to stop a man from killing innocent people. You did it before, when
you went after the people who killed your mother, and maybe that wasn’t the last time.”

His eyes widened, just slightly, but I was sure that I had said something that took him off guard. He looked at me for a few
seconds, then ran his fingers through his hair and started pacing.

“This is crazy. You’re right, I have my reasons for wanting to help you, but it’s not what you think. I have a terrible weakness
when it comes to self-righteous dogs who destroy others for their own gain. Yes, I’m sure it has everything to do with my
own experience, but that doesn’t mean I could possibly stand by and support you in this crazy crusade of yours.”

“So why are you here? Why do you want to help me?”

He was prowling like a lion in a cage.

“I swear, you can trust me,” I said, suddenly hopeful.

“You don’t know how much danger you are putting yourself in.”

“I was facedown in an alley dying, just a year ago. Don’t tell me I don’t know about danger.”

“Going after someone like Bourque will get you killed.”

“My only reason for living is for justice, and if that gets me killed, oh well.”

Danny turned his face up to the ceiling. “Dear God, help us.”

“No.
You,
Danny.
You
help
me
.”

He lifted a trembling finger. “Not to kill. Not that! And you must also promise me you won’t try to kill him or do anything
so absurd.”

It was all I needed to hear. The mere thought of bonding with someone who would help me was overwhelming.

“Thank you.” Tears flooded my eyes. “Thank you, thank you so much. I swear I won’t let you down.”

“We’ll do a simple investigation, nothing more. Promise me.”

“I promise! I promise you with all my heart. I just need to know the truth, that’s all. I just…” My voice froze up with emotion.

“I thought you already knew,” he said.

“I do. I just want to really know, you know. So I know I’m not crazy.”

“You’ll have to do exactly what I say. Nothing more. And no one can know. Not a soul.”

I stepped up, wrapped my arms around him, and hugged him. “Thank you, Danny.” I could hear his heart pounding in his chest.
This time he put one hand on my shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“Okay.”

I felt like I had come home. Like I was lost and had been found again.

I finally pulled back and wiped my eyes.

“I should go now,” he said. “Come to my house tomorrow at noon. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Then he turned on his heels and left the room.

The next three
days were the happiest days of my life.

Looking back now, I can say that with complete confidence. A brilliant light had blazed into my dark world.

I’d had so many happy days with Lamont, of course, but my early days with him had been fogged by heroin and blurred by the
new drugs prescribed to deal with withdrawal symptoms. In their dulled state, my emotions couldn’t match the level of intensity
that I felt bonding with Danny after three months of isolation and uncertainty.

I remember the first time I got a real Christmas present. I was seven. My father hated the holidays because he said the whole
thing was just a lie made up by big corporations to sell junk that no one needed. He called it robbery. All of the neighborhood
kids got gifts, but I didn’t, so I hid out in my house over Christmas.

But for one Christmas, that changed—I still don’t know why. I think my father wanted to appease my mother, who’d caught him
cheating that December. Whatever the reason, when I woke up that Christmas Day there was a new red bicycle with a white bow
on it in the living room.

I could hardly stop jumping up and down. I rode the bike up and down the street all day to show the other kids that my parents
could be cool, too.

Two weeks later I ruined our neighbor’s rosebush by crashing into it by mistake. To punish me, my father broke all the spokes
on the bike. But for those first two weeks, I was in heaven.

That’s how I felt going over to Danny’s house that first day, like I’d gone from having nothing to having everything in just
one day.

I was so excited that my hands were shaking when I knocked on his door. I wanted to rush in and throw my arms around him when
he opened the door. I didn’t, of course. I just said, “Hello, Danny,” and walked in. But we were both smiling.

He had a pot of tea ready, and my first question had nothing to do with killing people. “Why do you like tea so much?” I asked
as he poured the steaming tea into two white porcelain cups.

“In Bosnia, my mother used to serve us tea twice every day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. She said tea had medicinal
value. I guess the habit stuck.”

I lifted my cup. “Then we will drink to your mother,” I said. He smiled. I think he liked that.

“To Mother,” he said. And he sipped his tea.

“So, when do we get started?” I asked.

“We have already,” he said. “If we’re going to work together, we need to know a little more about each other. I need to know
what you do and don’t know about Jonathan Bourque. Infiltrating the enemy’s a dangerous business, and if you’re not prepared
it will get you killed. I would like to avoid that.”

“Good thing I wasn’t an enemy yesterday,” I said. “I could have killed you in my closet.”

“Touché.” He smiled, but I think he was just being gracious.

We were soon sitting and talking very comfortably, as if this sort of thing was common for both of us. He wanted to know everything—where
I’d come from, why I’d gotten into drugs, how Lamont had rescued me, what life was like living by the sea. And I didn’t hold
anything back. After all, he was trusting me by taking me into his confidence, so I was eager to do the same.

We talked about so many things over so many hours those first three days. I can’t begin to explain it all. Although we first
met at his house, we spent the rest of our time at a park on the east side of town where our meetings would be less conspicuous.
His neighbor, an older widow named Ellen Bennett, would undoubtedly sit him down and interrogate him for long hours if she
saw him coming and going with a beautiful young blonde, he explained.

I was like an apprentice, and Danny was the wise, experienced master. He was thirty-two, not really much older than my twenty-four,
but he’d been to hell and back, whereas I had only been to hell (not counting my year with Lamont). He, the priest, would
help me find my way back. At least that’s the way I looked at it.

In some ways, he did seem like the perfect priest. He spoke with a sure voice and listened with those kind blue eyes. He oozed
such an unwavering confidence that it was impossible for me to imagine we could do anything but succeed, never mind his insistence
that exposing Bourque would be dangerous.

“Of course,” I always said to that. Of course, of course. But I was thinking that Danny had eaten danger for breakfast. I
felt like he and I could conquer the world.

During our walks in the park, he told me about growing up in Bosnia, about the war, about the brutal deaths of his loved ones,
about his path to justice. Hearing Danny tell the story, my heart broke for him.

The laws in Bosnia were a shambles, so he took the law into his own hands. After killing those who’d raped and murdered his
family he’d joined the militia and learned how to fight like a man. By the time he was seventeen, he was leading an entire
squad of scouts, assassins who killed enemies in their own homes.

Like I said, Danny ate danger for breakfast. He began to methodically teach me some of the fundamentals of hunting an enemy—surveillance,
planning, preparation, execution.

In a private corner of the park sheltered by oak trees and dense greasewood shrubs, Danny taught me about weapons. Though
I had learned a fair amount about the basics, Danny was the Zen master of personal weapons.

“Here, let me show you,” he said on the second day as I practiced wielding a large bowie knife.

“Sure.” I handed him the knife. He effortlessly flipped the blade over and spun it once. He wasn’t showing off. In fact, he
hadn’t even started to demonstrate what he wanted me to see. He was simply examining the blade by rote.

But he had me there, at the grip of his strong hand on the hilt of that blade, the flex of his forearm as he spun it, the
perfect balance and control he had over the weapon.

He caught my look of adoration. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”

I forget what he showed me. I was too enamored with his command of that blade.

Danny owned only seven guns, which he let me see and handle, but he knew every firearm currently in use, or so it seemed to
me. And he could palm a pistol like a gunslinger.

He demonstrated much more than I could possibly remember those first few days, but more than the weapons, he talked always
about love and true religion and his longing for justice. He only wanted what everyone wants, he said, and the reason everyone
wants justice is because God is just.

These were the truest words anyone had ever spoken to me, because I, too, only wanted God’s justice. They gave me hope. Danny’s
hatred of injustice began to flow in Bosnia and now spilled out on the streets of Los Angeles. He had many beautiful faces,
but his love of justice was his most attractive to me.

Danny would cross the street to help a woman pick up a dropped bag of groceries. Or stop traffic to give an old man time to
cross. He would sit with widows and pray for a husband and he would take time to bounce a ball with an orphan boy. I could
see it in his eyes, he loved them all.

And he hated anyone who stood against them.

Many other things Danny said drifted over my head, especially when my mind was focused on the way he was handling a gun. But
I tucked away the rest like a secret treasure.

He left Bosnia after the war and came to America to start over thirteen years ago. Changed his name to Danny Hansen to make
the break clean, entered seminary, and set out to be a true man of God, to atone for the many so-called Christians in Bosnia
and the rest of the world whose sins spit in God’s face.

At the same time, he seemed nothing like a priest. He never wore his collar when I was with him. He said that he wanted children
one day. Even more, he didn’t strike me as a very religious man, but more of a philosopher. His occupation seemed to be more
of a convenience than a calling.

According to Danny, it was the rules set down by religion that most often got in the way of truly loving people. Religious
authorities made it too easy to feel good about following those rules, regardless of love, and to frown on people who didn’t
follow the rules.

True religion, he said, should be about love. This is what he learned in Bosnia, and this is what he had set out to prove
to himself here in America. Justice was a supreme act of love.

He was very eager for me to understand this, and I assured him that I did, although I think he could tell that I was distracted.
I was itching to go after Bourque, an act that didn’t require quite so much philosophy.

I admit that I was a little distracted by Danny himself. After Lamont, I’d thought I could never look at another man with
even mild interest, but Danny was different. I can’t say my thoughts were necessarily romantic, but I’m not sure how else
I would characterize them.

I was in awe of him. He was a beautiful man with a strong jaw and soft eyes. He was very kind and smiled a lot and, even more
endearingly, he actually laughed at my antics. I could tell that he liked me, and I think he could tell that I liked him.

We were so different from each other, he being a priest and me a recovered junkie. He being a man who stood nearly six feet
and solid as a steel beam, me being a woman just over five feet, weighing in at about half his size. He growing up in Bosnia
in a loving family that had been killed, me growing up in Atlanta with two parents who didn’t love me enough to stick around.
He being a meat eater, me being a vegetarian.

But in other important ways we were similar, I thought. We both valued cleanliness. We both loved people. We both hated injustice.
We both listened to jazz and classical music as well as pop and rock.

We both had an interest in Jonathan Bourque.

I was surprised to learn that Danny was actually at the fund-raiser where we met
because
of Bourque. He’d started his own investigation into the man, having stumbled on information from an attorney named Cain Kellerman,
evidently one of Lamont’s co-workers.

My suspicions had been right—Danny had purposefully followed Redding into the basement that night.

I wondered why a priest would start his own investigation rather than turn the matter over to the police, but when I asked,
Danny just shrugged and said he had a thing for exposing injustice. At any rate, he hadn’t learned anything more than I already
knew.

“So when are we going to do this?” I asked while we walked in the park on the second day.

“We are doing this,” he said, hands clasped behind his back.

“Of course. But when are we going to…you know…go after Bourque?”

“We’re not going to go after Bourque. We’re going to let Bourque come to us.”

I never could quite understand the difference between the two but I let it slide.

“When are we going to start our surveillance?” I asked.

“When the time is right.”

Danny was as steady as a rock, but I wasn’t sure I had the patience to watch a rock. I was more interested in picking up that
rock and slinging it into Bourque’s head.

Most of our time was spent rehearsing what I knew, what I didn’t know, and what I should know in regard to how to conduct
myself in the field: choosing methods of surveillance, tracking subjects, breaking into secure locations, avoiding detection,
foiling security systems. It was a kind of hopscotch approach to fieldwork primarily because I kept changing the subject.

As he drove me home from the park after our third meeting, my mind was rattling with facts.

“Fieldwork,” I said, thinking of the Ann Rule books I’d read. “Seems more like FBI talk than war talk.”

“Like I said, I was with a militia. We were hunters with personal weapons who blew up bridges and infiltrated the enemy. My
primary duties involved finding key targets and neutralizing them. It was a different kind of war.”

I hesitated, wanting to get past the war to more personal kinds of killings. “How did you kill the men who killed your family?”
I asked. He glanced at me, and I wondered if I’d overstepped a boundary. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I shot them that same day. There were three of them.”

His confession surprised me, not just because he’d made it, but by the way he said it. So matter-of-fact. It seemed so real,
and yet so…I don’t know, maybe so
sur
real at the same time. It wasn’t as if he was gripping the wheel of the Chevy with both hands and sweating profusely as he
broke down and confessed. He just sat there with the wheel between three fingers and said it as if he were shrugging. I tried
to imagine his hands covered with blood.

“It was crude,” he said. “I was young. I wouldn’t do that again.”

“Would you ever kill outside of a war?”

He hesitated. “If I thought it was my moral obligation.”

I was leaning back in the passenger seat with one leg folded under the other, but in my mind I was on the edge of my chair.

“When is it morally right to kill someone?” I asked. “I mean, outside of war?”

“Now you want me to help you justify your desire to kill Bourque.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

Danny turned the corner and headed down Cherry Avenue toward the Staybridge. “Are you sure you want the answer to that?”

“Yes. A simple one. I’m not that smart.”

“You’re wrong about that. The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you
can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn’t learn it. If you learn the
world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it’s flat.”

“My world’s like an amoeba,” I said. “It changes shape every day.”

He laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“So,” I said, “when’s it right to kill?”

Danny took a breath. “Said very simply so that even a child can understand? Not that I’m suggesting you have the mind of a
child.”

“Yes, said very simply,” I said. “I want to be able to kill Jonathan Bourque without the slightest confusion about why I’m
doing it.”