The Priest's Fire (Heinous Crimes Unit Book 2), page 12
Christian ignores the preacher and watches the girl. She walks up to an older man, perhaps in his forties. Christian sees the disapproving look the man gives her. He says nothing, and the girl keeps her eyes on the ground. She clutches the Bible to her chest as if it were a shield.
The preacher finishes speaking and the older man looks down at the girl. “Go on. Give it to your mother.”
The girl moves to the grave and kneels. Christian has to walk closer to see as she reaches in and lays the Bible down.
There is no coffin inside. Only the body of a woman wearing a purple dress. The face is bruised and battered. Purple skin and split cheeks, showing the bone beneath. The throat is still swollen with large blue veins trying to burst from it.
The girl stares for a moment longer and then scurries back.
Christian keeps on looking until everyone leaves and the world around him goes black.
Christian blinked as the video ended.
“What is this?” the voice asked. “A new room? One hastily created, clearly.”
Christian looked above him and saw a vent that hadn’t been there when he first started watching the film.
“My question is, Christian: Why do you want to catch her? You do realize what you could be right? A god, right here on Earth. That girl would die for you. She would, and has, killed for you. She’ll continue to. Why don’t you want that?”
Christian sighed but said nothing. He looked at the television in front of him, wishing it would go on. Wishing he could know what happened to the woman in the dirt, and why.
“I’ll leave you be. You can keep watching. Just think about it. Why catch her? Why not train her instead?”
The television turned back on and Christian went forth.
“What I’m about to do…it’s essential.”
The man stands on his porch, his daughter next to him. They are the same people from the funeral. Christian is four feet to the man’s right.
“And you’re going to have to watch it.”
The girl’s eyes are wide and fat tears stream down her face. They seem to come from an endless supply. The wooden porch beneath her is wet with them, yet they continue falling.
“Duh-duh-Daddy,” the girl says, but she doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Hush,” the father says. “I don’t want to hear nothin’ from you about this. God already spoke to me.”
Christian takes a step behind the father and looks at his back. The man is wearing a white t-shirt, but it does little to hide his wounds. Large stripes of blood cross the shirt like rivers. Christian doesn’t know what the rest of his body looks like beneath his clothing, but there appears to be long gashes all over him.
“If she won’t believe, then God ain’t never gonna talk to us,” the man says. He’s not looking at his daughter.
He is still staring out across the front yard when the girl falls down, collapsing right on the porch. The tears still flee her eyes and she begins to whine, a sound that threatens to make Christian’s ears bleed.
The father finally breaks his concentration and looks at his daughter. “Stop it.”
The girl doesn’t stop. The whine continues until the man reaches down and picks her up, slinging her over his shoulder. Christian can’t imagine the pain that must accost the man with the added weight on his back, but the father only gives a slight grimace.
He walks into the house and Christian follows. He doesn’t look at the area around him as he tries to keep up. The man is walking quickly.
They move straight through the house and into the backyard. There’s a shed in the back and Christian has no doubt that’s where the man is heading.
The three of them cross the yard. Christian looks around and sees there are no other houses anywhere. They are alone, with only tall grass fields and the insects they hold for company.
The man reaches the shed and opens it. There is no lock. No need for security in a place this remote.
Christian follows the two inside. A dingy overhead light bulb is the only light in this place. It casts a yellow glow across everything, making the room look diseased.
A woman lies on the ground, and that’s exactly what it is, just dirt ground. Her arms and legs are tied with tight knots. She is the same woman from the funeral. Her face is already beat to shit, and her eyes are so swollen that there’s no way she can see.
She breathes into the dirt and particles fly up around her face, landing and sticking to her bloodied skin. She says nothing.
Is it because she knows it won’t matter?
The man drops the girl to the ground. She’s still making that awful noise. Her thumb is in her mouth and her legs are curled up to her chest as if she’s regressed to an infantile state.
“Sit up,” the father says.
The girl doesn’t move.
“Sit up!”
His voice slaps through the room like a whip, and the girl does move. She sits up and quickly pushes herself all the way to the wall, leaning her back against it and staring at her mother.
“I tried to make her believe. You’ve got to understand that. If you don’t understand anything else, understand I tried.” The man’s southern drawl is thick, almost a caricature.
The woman breathes heavily on the dirt floor.
“She ain’t never believed, though, and God ain’t going to send us what we’re waiting on if someone like this is in our midst. The Bible says not to suffer a witch, and a whore is pretty similar to a witch in my eyes. In God’s, too. Your mother is a whore, and if it ain’t with other men, then it’s with other ideas from this sick planet. I won’t suffer her in my house any longer.”
The girl says nothing, only sucks her thumb and continues crying. The horrible whine has stopped. She’s completely silent.
The man kneels down next to his wife and rubs his hand through her hair like a caring lover.
“You should have believed,” he says.
Christian sees no tears in his eyes. His voice carries the concern of a man doing a duty, but not one he finds joy in.
He turns the woman on her back and straddles her stomach. Christian can finally see the woman’s full face, the yellow light from above painting everything with a jaundiced tint. Her eyes are wide and full of fear, different from her daughter’s, which appear almost dead. They don’t contain tears, though.
Husband and wife look at each other dry-eyed. and then the man wraps his hands around the woman’s throat.
Christian sees the strong cords of muscle bulging beneath his skin and his face twists in a wicked snarl. The woman begins gurgling, her feet kicking up and down behind her husband, doing everything in their power to grant her lungs air. She can’t move her arms because the man is sitting on them.
Her head twists left and right and clods of dirt grab onto her hair. She can’t escape. Spit flies from her mouth, landing on her lips. The bright white foam reveals the woman’s dehydration. Her skin is turning blue.
With Bradley Brown, Christian had wanted to turn away, but now he doesn’t. He wants to watch this man kill.
“Yes,” a voice says to him.
Christian doesn’t turn to his left, where the voice comes from. He can see a shadow standing in his peripheral vision.
“Watch her die. Brutality is necessary in this life, Christian. Necessary, and even right sometimes.”
Veins bulge across the woman’s forehead, and the strangling continues for five minutes or so. Christian doesn’t turn away. He wasn’t aware it took so long to strangle someone.
Finally, the life inside the woman is gone, and the man falls over to the side. He lies on his back, his chest heaving.
Minutes pass in silence. The girl still sits against the wall, not moving. She stares straight ahead as if nothing happened.
Finally, her father speaks, although it’s difficult for him to catch his breath. “Father Martin says the church will take care of it. All of this is okayed by everyone. It was the only thing we could do.”
“It’s not a pretty life, is it?” the voice said. “The father quoting scripture and discussing why the mother must die. I wonder, will the daughter quote scripture when Luke dies? Did she quote it for Goleen?”
There was more here and Christian knew it, but he didn’t want to stay any longer.
The voice that spoke from the vent was starting to sound sweeter. Not something that he wanted to run from, but maybe something he’d like to hear more of.
“Go on, then, Christian. I’ll be here when you’re ready to learn about our girl.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
While Christian was watching Lucy Speckle’s history, Lucy watched Veronica Lopez in reality. Or, rather, she watched the world around Veronica Lopez.
The night was late and the road dark. Streetlights were spaced every thirty feet or so, but Lucy had no problem remaining in the shadows.
She looked at the car sitting across the street from Lopez’s house. Two heads were sticking up just above the seats. Lucy had been staring at the car for the past hour, at a distance of fifty feet. Her body did its dance and twitch as usual, and as usual, Lucy didn’t notice.
Lucy’s thoughts were on the two cops.
The Lord had spoken to her, just as Daddy said He would. The Lord had told her what her daddy had about Momma.
Don’t suffer a witch, and a whore is pretty much the same thing.
This woman was a whore, and while the demon may have suggested Lucy take her, the Lord was the one who gave the final direction. The demon didn’t know it, but he was playing right into God’s plan, which made sense to Lucy. Everything served God.
A pistol sat lodged in between her stomach and her pants. She’d taken it from Luke Titan’s house. She had shot guns when she was younger, with her daddy, so she wasn’t concerned about using them. After throwing Titan in the trunk, she had found a suppressor in Titan’s house and had attached it to reduce the noise factor.
Daddy and the church showed her a lot about guns, so while the designs had changed over the years, the basics remained the same. Really, the demon had supplied her with everything she needed to do this job, including the getaway car.
Lucy moved around the back of the house where she was hiding. She crept across the unfenced yard, moving diagonally to the very edge of the property. She crossed two yards like that and had to scale a fence on the second, but that was easy.
Now she stood about a hundred feet in front of the cop car, behind another house. The night was silent. No dogs sensed her presence, and there was no movement from any of the houses.
Lucy pulled her hoodie off her head and started walking. She moved across the lawn and entered the street in front of the two police officers. She wanted to be seen. Her hoodie covered the gun’s bulge.
The two police officers simultaneously opened their doors, breaking the night’s silence. The cop in the driver’s seat shined a flashlight, blinding Lucy a bit. That was okay. She knew where they were standing.
“Ma’am, please stop right there.”
Lucy did.
For all the twitches and shakes her body gave, her father had trained her well with a gun. She whipped it from her pants and fired two bullets into the cop on the passenger side, while the other dropped the flashlight and scrambled for his own weapon.
She shot him as he raised it. He collapsed to the ground.
Lucy stood in the silence, the flashlight still shining across the ground. It showed the cop’s leg twitching and that made Lucy smile. She didn’t know why.
Lucy walked forward and turned the flashlight off, leaving the two bodies in darkness. She didn’t bother picking them up. She didn’t plan on being inside the house long. She did close the doors on each side before walking off. She didn’t want the interior lights shining.
She felt confident as she walked across the street. She knew God was with her, and while He may have abandoned her for a bit to teach her a lesson, she was on the right path once more.
Veronica woke at a noise that could have been a car backfiring and froze. Completely. She couldn’t breathe, her lungs seizing up like an engine without oil. The lights inside her bedroom were off, and she lay in darkness with the covers pulled to her neck.
She strained to hear, and though she had been asleep moments before, the night’s sluggishness had been cast off like a groom’s pants on his wedding night.
A brittle sound cut through the silence.
That was glass. That was glass breaking, her mind said, oddly calm despite her inability to move or breathe.
The kitchen door swung open.
Veronica wanted to say something, to ask who was there. Maybe it was the police, or maybe…maybe it was Christian. That’s what her mind tried telling her, but deep down where Veronica’s dark thoughts lived, she knew the truth.
She shouldn’t have made it out of Bradley Brown’s house alive, and every moment since had been time stolen from death. Now death had come to collect what was owed.
The alarm. The alarm is going off.
That was true, regardless of anything else happening right now. She had set the alarm before going to bed. The cops were being alerted. Someone would come.
“Get up.”
The voice spoke from the bedroom door. It wasn’t a man. No way. That was a woman.
“I said get up!”
Veronica jumped, moving for the first time since waking. She scooted back against her headboard, keeping the covers pulled up to her neck. She could make out a figure in the darkness. The intruder looked thin. Skinny, even.
“Okay. Have it your way,” the woman said.
Veronica watched her move, frozen once more, and a single thought went through her head.
She’s so fast.
Pain erupted on the side of Veronica’s face, followed by a dark explosion with rings of light outlining it. The rings spread the pain across her head, and darkness followed until it owned everything.
Luke watched the woman waking. He’d been staring at her for the past two hours, having decided that when he left this building, he’d paint a picture of Mrs. Windsor lying bound on the floor. He memorized each detail, from the way the light above cast tiny shadows across the thousands of ridges on the concrete floor, to how her hair hung behind her ear as she slept.
Luke closed his eyes and let his head slump down to his chest just before the woman opened her own eyes.
He heard her move and pretended to slowly wake, blinking and looking around the room as if he hadn’t seen it for hours.
Luke’s eyes found Mrs. Windsor’s. She was pulling herself up and trying to push her body back against the wall so she could sit.
“Have you been awake long?” he said. “I don’t know when I dozed off.”
“No. I just woke up. She hasn’t been back, I take it?” Mrs. Windsor said.
“I don’t think so.”
The woman sighed and Luke turned his gaze to the metal door.
“No sense in screaming, is there?” she said.
“I don’t think so. I tried earlier, but I don’t think a lot of sound escapes.”
A pause followed, and then Mrs. Windsor asked, “Do you know why she’s doing this?”
“The obvious answer is she’s insane, but I don’t think that’s what you’re wanting,” Luke said.
“Yeah, I’d like a little more substance.”
Luke looked back to her, his face showing a warmth that had been absent the past two hours. A look that portrayed one message: they were in this together.
“I’m not totally sure, but I believe she thinks your son is either Christ, or a harbinger of him, and through sacrificing people, Christian will realize this—ooof.” Luke stopped, grimacing. It was, of course, faked, but he needed to humanize himself for this woman. “Sorry. She really did a number on my head. She believes that by sacrificing people, Christian will realize his fate. She honestly believes she’s saving the world.”
“So she’s going to sacrifice us?”
“No. She’s going to kill me, and probably the next person she brings here. I think you’re just going to be made to watch us die.”
“Oh, that sounds pleasant,” Mrs. Windsor said, laughing without humor and shaking her head. “Do you have any kind of plan to get out of this?”
Luke blinked and looked forward at the door. “No,” he said, not lying to the woman. “I’ve got no idea how to free us.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got no plans either.”
Luke liked her humor. “At least you can laugh in a situation like this.”
“It’s either that or cry.” Mrs. Windsor paused. “Do you think Christian will find us? Or Tommy?”
“I know that they’re both doing everything they can. I think if we could convince her to bring Christian here, that would easily solve this.”
“Bring him here? Into this? He won’t be able to handle it. I mean, I know how awful this will sound, but she could kill him, too.”
Luke nodded. “I think he can handle it. He’s a remarkable person, Mrs. Windsor, and if he comes here, I’m betting Tommy and a host of other agents will, too.”
A few minutes passed in silence, and then Mrs. Windsor said, “I appreciate you saving my son. It feels weird to say that, but I do.”
Luke smiled. “Let’s hope he returns the favor.”
A car door shut outside, hard. He hated that the bitch was driving his Tesla around. Out of everything she’d done, perhaps that was the most unforgivable. Luke had, indeed, provoked his brief beating. But her to be driving his vehicle around with bodies in the trunk nearly made him vomit.
“She’s here,” Mrs. Windsor said, pulling her knees to her chest, though she couldn’t wrap her arms around them due to her constraints.
“It’s okay. Just stay calm. Listen to me, now,” Luke said, still looking at the door. “It’s important you pretend to buy into what she believes. You know your son is what she says, and you’ve just been basically babysitting for the past three decades. Whatever I say during this time is in hopes of getting us out of here, so you’ll need to go along with it. Okay?”
