25
Lucky said to me, “That gun is jammed, not dead. You
stay here until I tell you it’s safe.” He ran after
Buonarotti.
I crossed the room to
where Gabriel was bending down to retrieve his ax. I grabbed him
before he could seize the weapon.
“Let’s see how you do
with someone who isn’t tied up or lying on the floor half
unconscious!” I said.
Gripping his black
shirt, I bashed my forehead against his nose and stomped on his
foot.
He shrieked like a
girl, and his nose sprouted blood.
“Nelli!” Max called.
“Your assistance, please!”
I punched Gabriel as
hard as I could, really mad now. Somewhere else in the church, I
heard shots fired.
Nelli hobbled across
the room on three legs to join Max at the altar. He started
chanting.
“Noooo!” Gabriel
lunged toward them.
I tripped him,
knocked him down, and kicked him in the ribs. He cried out and
curled up in a fetal position.
“Get up!” I kicked
him again. “Get up you evil, murdering,
self-righteous lunatic!”
He rolled over and
crawled away from me. Somewhere else in the building, there was a
lengthy exchange of gunfire.
Nelli started
destroying the remaining objects on the altar, knocking down the
candles, tipping over the urns of dirt and pebbles, scattering the
animal bones. She took the dead chicken between her jaws and
started shaking it furiously as if it were a chew toy.
This was a little too
much for me. “Nelli, give me that,” I insisted. I took it away from
her.
Hobbling along with
her bad leg, she rose up to knock the human skulls off the altar,
then did her best to destroy them.
“No, no, no!” Father
Gabriel was practically weeping now.
I swung the dead,
mangled chicken and walloped the priest with it as hard as I could.
He cried out and backed away. Stomping toward him, I hit him with
the deceased bird again.
“Do you know how
terrified Charlie and Danny were when they died? Did you get a kick
out of that, you malicious bastard?” I hit him again. “You were
going to kill Elena? A woman? Because
she resisted being raped by your murdering, gloating, disgusting
partner in crime?” I tossed the chicken aside and kneed Gabriel in
the groin. He doubled over in pain.
Max’s chanting grew
louder. I was sweating. I thought it was because of my rage and
exertion. But it dawned on me that, actually, the room was suddenly
hot. Very hot. Unnaturally
so.
“And you were going
to have Buonarotti kill me?” I shouted.
“ME? What did I ever do to you?”
Gabriel moaned
pathetically. “You were going to find out. You were going to stop
me.”
“And you should be stopped, you warped, twisted, pathetic,
homicidal asshole!” I grabbed him by the shirt shook him really
hard. His head thudded against the wall. “You were killing people! You were going to get lots more
people killed! Even innocent people! People who aren’t wiseguys!
Like Lopez!”
I clamped my fingers
around his jaw and squeezed until he made a strangled sound of
pain. “And you nearly blew my audition for The
Dirty Thirty! You JERK!”
There was an
explosion so strong it shook the whole room. I staggered backward,
releasing my hold on the weeping, whining, disheveled priest. A
blaze of fiery heat washed over my back. Nelli howled. I heard more
gunshots somewhere in the belly of the church.
I turned around and
raised an arm to shield my eyes from the intense glow emanating
from the sacked altar. Squinting and looking through my fingers, I
could see that Nelli and Max were enveloped in a bright golden
light. Max was on his knees now, his arms raised overhead and
spread wide, as Gabriel’s had been when we first entered this room.
Nelli sat next to him, her muzzle turned skyward as she continued
howling. Max was bellowing words I didn’t understand, and the
intensity of light and heat increased until flames were rippling
all around him and his familiar.
“Max!” I cried,
afraid they wouldn’t survive. “Nelli!”
Shapes started
developing in the glowing flames, struggling to coalesce into
coherent forms within the undulating white fire that consumed the
whole altar. I thought I saw arms, legs, faces . . . Something huge
and rotund emerged from the tangled fray of writhing, twisting,
hideously suggestive shapes in the fire. It looked like . .
.
“Charlie?” I
said.
The figure resembling
Chubby Charlie Chiccante seemed to fold into itself, tumbling over
into more molten white heat and fire, and then another figure
emerged, then another.
I saw the graceful
curves of Elena Giacalona’s figure moving through the flames, as
well as Lopez’s clean profile and taut body, Danny Dapezzo’s tidy
form, and Johnny Be Good’s disturbingly Elvis-like image. Something
that looked like Lucky floated through the flames and then
dissolved, followed by a writhing entity that looked like my own
perfect double, glowing in the liquid heat of this mystical
cleansing. As the flames began receding and the glow faded, one
final shape passed through my vision. I frowned, thinking I must be
wrong about who it was.
And then the heat
faded, dissipating almost as quickly as it had gathered. The flames
vanished, leaving just one feeble candle on the altar to illuminate
this old, forgotten room.
Breathing hard, Max
slumped and started to keel over sideways.
“Max!” I rushed
toward him and caught him before he hit the floor.
He was damp with
sweat and panting with exhaustion. Nelli rose, staggering as she
discovered that her foot was too tender to hold any weight, and
hobbled a couple of steps closer to investigate Max’s condition,
her black nose wiggling as she sniffed his head. I saw that the
intense heat had melted the wax in the painted symbols on both
their faces, so that they were now covered with runny, rust-colored
streaks and splotches.
I petted Nelli with
one hand as I held Max in my arms. “Good work. Very good
work.”
Her tail wagged
wearily.
“Max? Are you
okay?”
“Fine. Just a little
. . . fatigued.”
We heard another
gunshot.
I stiffened.
“Lucky!”
“We must assist him,”
Max said faintly. “Help me up.”
“He said to stay here
until he told us it was safe to come out.”
“We can’t, Esther.
There’s one more doppelgangster.”
“I thought so.” I
looked over my shoulder to demand the priest tell us who it was,
even though I thought I knew.
But Gabriel had
escaped while Max was destroying the altar where the priest had
cursed his victims with certain death.
“He’s gone,” I said
in dismay. “I didn’t beat him up enough.”
“But you certainly
gave it your best effort.” Max stumbled toward the door. “We must
go to Lucky’s aid.” I followed him as he added, “He will be
outnumbered and taken by surprise.”
Nelli was limping
heavily behind me. Max turned in the dark doorway and said to me,
“Oh, bring the candle.”
Nelli suddenly
growled. I turned away from Max to look at her. I heard a dull thud
behind me and whirled around. Buonarotti was standing in the
doorway holding the gun with which he had just pistol-whipped Max.
Max fell to the floor, unconscious. Buonarotti seized my throat,
pulled me against him, and pressed the gun to my cheek. Holding me
between himself and Nelli, who was snarling and barking, he backed
out of the room, ordering me, “Shut the door.”
I couldn’t speak,
couldn’t breathe, couldn’t shake my head. I hung by my throat from
Buonarotti’s squeezing fingers. His fingernails dug into my skin.
The pain was mind-fogging. I thought I would pass out in another
second.
“Shut the door,” he
repeated, “or I’ll shoot the dog. Now.”
My hand fumbled for
the door handle. I found it and pulled. Max’s body was in the way.
Buonarotti kicked Max with his foot, rolling him over. My eyes
watering with pain and my vision blackening, I pulled the door
shut.
“Good.” Buonarotti
pressed up against me in the pitch dark hallway. “Now tell me where
he is.”
I made a strangling
sound.
“Huh? Oh.” He
loosened his grip enough to let me talk. “Where is he? Tell me,
bitch, or I’ll blow your head off.”
“Where’s who?” I
choked out.
“Gabriel.”
“I don’t
know.”
He slapped me so hard
I reeled away, then he yanked my hair to pull me close again. No
wonder Elena had called him an animal.
“He ran off,” I
gasped out.
“Why?”
“He’s a
coward.”
“What the hell is
going on here?”
“Huh?” And then the
truth dawned on me. This Buonarotti’s
face wasn’t bloodied. “Oh, my God. It was you.”
Another gunshot rang
out. Then two more. My captor stiffened. “Who is
that?”
“You don’t know?” I
rasped.
I was right about the
final figure I had seen in the dying flames of the
altar.
Buonarotti’s
doppelgangster grabbed my throat again. “You and I are getting out
of here.”
Well, Gabriel had
said his partner was proving to be more
trouble than he was worth. Apparently the priest had decided it was
time to help him shuffle off this mortal coil. Once Buonarotti came
face to face with his own perfect double, he’d be easy pickings.
Perhaps the priest intended to bring about the three-way war by
giving up Don Michael to the other two families now that he was
vulnerable.
Holding me by the
throat, his gun pressed to my head, the doppelgangster hauled me
down the pitch dark hallway. We paused at the doorway leading to
the choir gallery, and my captor leaned against it, listening. We
heard voices shouting on the other side of it.
“No, not that way,”
he muttered.
“There’s another
way?”
“Stairway to the
courtyard.” He dragged me to the end of the hall. “It’s how I came
up.”
“No, those stairs
aren’t safe,” I protested as he dragged me toward
them.
“That’s just what he
tells people to keep them out of here,” Buonarotti said
dismissively.
He took his hand off
my neck long enough to open a door. Despite his comment, I was
still anxious about descending a staircase in complete darkness
with a gun pressed to my head. I was equally anxious about going
anywhere with a murderous doppelgangster.
So it was a relief
when I heard a man’s voice coming from somewhere beyond the bottom
of the stairs.
Buonarotti went still
and covered my mouth with his hand, pressing the gun harder against
my head. Along with the voice, we heard a gurgling electrical
noise, like someone switching channels on a radio. This was
followed by a metallic sounding voice. I couldn’t make out the
words, but I gave a reflexive start when I realized what the sound
was: a walkie-talkie.
And then I realized
what the voices were talking about. I could make out a man saying,
“Shots fired,” and giving this address.
Someone was talking
on a police radio. There was a cop at the other end of these
stairs!
I tried to cry out.
Buonarotti squeezed my throat so hard I nearly blacked out. He shut
the door and then dragged me back to the other door, the one that
led to the choir gallery.
“One sound,” he
whispered, “and I’ll kill you.”
I was coughing
helplessly from the abuse to my throat, so this seemed like a
pretty stupid threat. He opened the door a crack and
listened.
We both heard Gabriel
whispering, “No, there’s a cop in the courtyard! We need to leave
this way.”
Buonarotti—the real
one—whispered back, “How do you think we’re gonna get past Lucky?
He’s between us and the door.”
The doppelgangster’s
body, which was pressed up against mine, stiffened. “Who the fuck
is that?” When I didn’t respond, he prodded, “Who’s with
Gabriel?”
“You are,” I
said.
“Huh?” He made an
irritated sound. “Dumb broad.” He opened the door and dragged me
through it.
The gallery was pitch
dark, too. Buonarotti and Gabriel weren’t giving Lucky a target by
illuminating themselves.
“You and your bright
ideas,” Buonarotti said to the priest. “I can’t see a fucking
thing.”
“Then neither can
Lucky,” Gabriel said. “We’ll slip past him.”
And then a familiar
voice at the far end of the church shouted, “Police! Weapons down! Police! Drop your weapons! I’m a cop!”
Lopez! Every cell in my body got a flood of renewed
energy as I recognized the voice.
“Hey, I’m not armed!”
Lucky shouted. “Don’t shoot! I am not armed!”
“That liar,” Buonarotti muttered.
“Lopez!” I
cried.
“Esther! Stay down!”
He didn’t even sound surprised to hear my voice. “Lucky, is that
you?” he called.
“Yeah. Watch out!
Buonarotti’s the killer! He’s so off his rocker, he’ll whack a
cop!”
“Where is he?”
Lopez’s voice was coming from a new position. He was getting closer
to us.
“I think he’s up in
the gallery,” Lucky called.
The doppelgangster
drew in a sharp breath through its nostrils, thinking this meant
itself.
“What’s wrong with
the lights?” Lopez shouted.
“Not sure,” Lucky
replied.
“Shit! I don’t have a flashlight.”
“Listen, cop!” the
doppelgangster shouted, its mouth so close to my ear that I
flinched. “I’ve got your girlfriend!”
“Who the fuck is
that?” said Buonarotti in the
darkness.
In the dormitory
hallway behind us, on the other side of the door we had come
through, I heard a man shout, “Police!
Weapons down! NYPD! Drop your weapons! This is the
police!”
The doppelgangster
shouted down to Lopez, his voice carrying through the darkness,
“I’ve got her right here, and I’ll blow her head off!”
“He’s lying! His
gun’s empty!” Lucky said.
To clarify the
situation, the doppelgangster fired a shot.
“Holy shit!” said
Lucky.
“Who the fuck
is that?” said Buonarotti.
“Lucky,” I shouted,
“there’s a dopp—agh!” The hand on my
throat tightened.
“Esther?” Lopez
shouted. “Esther!”
At our backs, on the
other side of the door, the cop again called, “Police! Drop your
weapons now!”
“Esther!” Lopez
shouted, his voice coming closer. Something crashed to the floor.
“Goddamn it! Don’t any of these lights
work?”
The doppelgangster
ordered, “Throw down your gun and get on the floor facedown, cop!
I’m getting out of here! I’ve got your woman! You get in my way,
and I swear to God, I will kill
her!”
“Esther!” Lopez shouted.
“Answer him,” the
doppelgangster said. “Tell him to let us pass.”
I was coughing,
unable to speak. In the hallway behind me, I heard a scuffle, a
faint thud, and then a groan. The door behind us
opened.
“Esther! Goddamn it,
where are you? Esther!” And then Lopez
screamed, “I want LIGHTS!”
The lights came on,
blazing throughout the church. The sudden brightness made my captor
and me both flinch. I squeezed my eyes shut as they stung and
watered. The creature dragged me closer to the door behind us,
ensuring that we remained shielded from Lopez’s sight by the
dramatic velvet curtains that framed the broad
balcony.
“Freeze!” Lopez shouted, presumably at Buonarotti,
who now stood exposed on the balcony with light blazing gloriously
down upon him.
“What the
fuck . . .” Buonarotti
said.
As my eyes adjusted,
I saw the mobster staring at me with an expression of appalled
amazement. Then I realized he wasn’t staring at me.
The doppelgangster
sucked in its breath. “What the fuck . .
.”
Buonarotti’s gaze
flashed to the disheveled priest who stood blinking and shielding
his eyes, only an arm’s length away from him. The snarl of
murderous hatred on Buonarotti’s face revealed that he knew his
partner had betrayed him. He screamed—an inarticulate bellow of
rage—and started beating Gabriel.
“Freeze!” Lopez
shouted somewhere below the two men on the balcony. “Freeze!”
The gangster knocked
down Father Gabriel, then reached for the candelabra I had knocked
over earlier tonight.
“I’ll shoot!” Lopez warned.
“I’ll kill you, you
bastard!”
“Don’t do it!” Lopez
shouted.
Buonarotti picked up
the candelabra and screamed at the cowering priest. “I’ll kill you!”
A gunshot went
off.
Buonarotti cried out
and staggered back, and blood rolled down his arm. I didn’t
understand what was happening for a moment. Then I realized that
Lopez had shot him.
Undeterred by his
bullet wound, Buonarotti stumbled back toward the priest,
screaming, “I’ll kill you, you bastard! I’ll kill
you!”
“Stop!” Lopez warned. “Don’t make me shoot you
twice!”
The priest turned to
run this way, apparently forgetting there was a doppelgangster in
his path. Not to mention a woman who had just beaten the shit out
of him.
He stopped suddenly
in his tracks, staring in sorrowful defeat. But he wasn’t looking
at us. He was looking past us.
“I was good, wasn’t
I?” he said, his voice flat.
I stared at him
blankly.
Then from behind me,
Max answered, “You were very talented.”
The priest turned and
dove over the balcony railing.
I choked on a
startled scream and lunged forward reflexively as the body crashed
into the wooden pews below the balcony. The doppelgangster was
startled enough to release its grip on me.
I got to the railing
and looked down. It was a long drop, but survivable. The priest,
however, had thrown himself head first into a bank of pews. He lay
at a horrid angle, his neck evidently broken and blood pouring from
his shattered skull.
Lopez ran to the body
and then leaned over to press his fingers against the neck,
checking for a pulse.
“Is he dead?” Lucky
called from the other side of the church.
“Yes,” Lopez said
after a moment. “Dead.” His voice was grim.
I made a choked
sound. Lopez looked up and saw me.
“Esther! Get out of
there!” He quickly raised his gun to aim it at something on my
left.
I realized that the
wounded Buonarotti, standing to my left, was also looking over the
railing and that I was much closer to him than was wise. I turned
to flee, then stumbled and halted. The doppelgangster was in my
path. But only for a moment. Max swung the bloody hand ax—the one
that Gabriel had used this evening to kill a chicken—and
decapitated it.
Buonarotti starting
laughing as if the funniest thing in the world had just occurred to
him. Within moments, he fell clumsily to the floor and just sat
there, rocking back and forth, laughing, and saying over and over,
“I’m a dead man! I’m a dead man!” His bleeding arm didn’t seem to
bother him.
Behind Max, I saw an
unconscious cop in uniform.
Max followed my gaze,
then said, “I was afraid the doppelgangster would harm him. It
seemed best to remove him from the equation.”
Nelli stood over the
cop, holding her injured foot gingerly in the air. She snuffled the
fallen man with concern. When the policeman groaned, her tail
wagged with relief.
Lopez’s running
footsteps carried him up to the choir gallery via the long spiral
staircase we had climbed in the dark earlier tonight. When he
reached us, instead of covering the hysterically laughing
Buonarotti with his gun, he pointed it at Max.
“Put the ax
down, Max,” he said.
“Pardon? Oh!”
Realizing that his holding a bloody ax had been misinterpreted as a
hostile gesture, Max set it down. “I hope I didn’t alarm
you.”
“What the hell
happened to McDevitt?” Lopez snapped.
“Who?” I
said.
“The cop lying on the
floor behind Max!”
“Oh! That’s my fault
entirely, I’m afraid,” Max said. “I hit him with the ax
handle.”
“Why, Max?”
“I believed him to be
Don Michael. Who was threatening to kill Esther.” Max added
helpfully, “It was very dark, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Lopez
said. “And the blood on the ax would be
from what, exactly?”
“A chicken,” I
blurted.
“A
what?”
“A chicken. Um, I
guess that’s where all these feathers came from.” I kicked a pile
of doppelgangster detritus with my foot. “The
chicken.”
“Father Gabriel
killed it with the ax.” Max shook his head sadly. “He also
threatened us with the ax. I’m afraid
he was involved in some most unsavory activities. The Church
wouldn’t approve at all.”
“He was in league
with Buonarotti!” I said.
“I know.” Lopez
glanced at the wounded mobster. The arm had only been nicked; it
was bleeding, but didn’t look serious.
I said, “Buonarotti’s
been committing these murders!”
“I know,” Lopez
said.
“You do?”
“Are you all right?”
Lopez asked me.
“Yes.”
“Are you
sure?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing
here?” he asked me.
“Don’t you
know?”
“How would I know?”
he said in exasperation.
“Well, what are
you doing here then?”
“I asked the local
patrolman to keep an eye on the church and let me know if anything
unusual happened. So when he saw a woman, two men, and a huge dog
entering furtively around midnight tonight, he called me. And since
I had a feeling I knew who he was describing, I told him to stand
by, and I came here. By the time I arrived, he thought he’d heard
shots fired.”
“Oh.” I frowned.
“Wait a minute. It’s just the two of you?”
“At the moment,
thanks to Max assaulting a police officer,” Lopez said, “it’s just
the one of me.”
“Who turned on the
lights?”
“What?”
“Who got the lights
working again?” I asked.
Lopez shrugged and
looked at me and Max. We looked at each other.
“Well, whatever
brought the power back on,” Lopez said to me, “I’m just glad it
happened. I thought you’d be dead in two more
seconds.”
Max was staring at
him.
Lopez noticed.
“What?”
I stared, too,
remembering the fierceness in his voice at that moment:
I want LIGHTS! And suddenly there had
been light, in answer to his command . . .
I blinked. Oh, good
grief, what was I thinking?
Don’t be ridiculous. It was just . . .
coincidence.
Max kept staring hard
at Lopez, his posture erect, his gaze intent and speculative. Lopez
stared back, probably thinking again about having Max’s place
searched for drugs.
“Max?” I prodded,
feeling uneasy.
“Pardon? Oh!” Max
smiled. “Er, you were saying, detective?”
“I’m all done saying. Now it’s your turn.” Lopez said to me,
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“We, uh . . .” I
looked at Max.
Max looked at Nelli,
who had by now limped to his side. Nelli looked at Lucky, who came
up the staircase at a slow, painful pace, grimacing as he reached
the top step. She wagged her tail.
Lucky said, “I’m
gettin’ too old for my work.”
“What ‘work’ was
going on here tonight?” Lopez said, keeping an eye on Buonarotti,
who was still sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth as he
laughed hysterically and occasionally shouted, “I’m a dead
man!”
“Ah, forget it,”
Lucky said genially. “You can take all the credit. We was never
even here.”
Lopez look at all
three of us for a long, tense moment.
Then he sighed.
“Well, my backup will be here in about two minutes. So if you were
never here, then you need to be gone before then.”
“Really?” I said.
“You’ll let us leave? We don’t have to talk to Napoli or
anyone?”
“Esther,” Lopez said
wearily, “the very last thing in the world that I want right now is
to spend the rest of the night . . . No, the rest of the week . . .
No, the rest of my career trying to explain to Napoli and my
captain what you were doing here tonight with them.” His glance
encompassed Max, Lucky, and Buonarotti.
“Oh.”
“We’ve got tainted
physical evidence and conflicting witness statements. The, er,
chicken-slaughtering priest who’s just committed suicide may be an
accessory to murder. We recorded a phone conversation today in
which Buonarotti brags about whacking Chubby Charlie, Johnny Be
Good, and Danny the Doctor—”
“He talked about it
on the phone?” Lucky looked
appalled.
“—but he sounded so
crazy in that conversation that I thought he seemed well on his way
to making a credible insanity plea . . .” Lopez took another look
at Buonarotti, who was now shrieking with laughter. “Even before
now.” He shook his head. “Overall, I don’t think either side is
going to want to take this case to trial.”
Lucky said, “So
Buonarotti will go to a prison for head cases. The priest will get
buried. This mess will go away quietly. Sounds good to
me.”
I looked at Max, who
looked much the worse for wear. “Yes,” I said slowly. “I guess that
is for the best.”
We heard sirens
approaching.
“Go,” Lopez said. “I
won’t cover for you if you’re still hanging around when they get
here.”
“Thank you,” I
said.
“But someday, Esther
. . .”
“Yes?”
“Someday you’re going
to explain to me what the hell that crap is that’s all over your
face and hands. You look like you’ve had the worst tattoo accident
in history.” His gaze swept our group. “All three of you, actually.
And your little dog, too.”