“Actually, you don’t need to go to all that trouble, Mary Catherine,” Brian said, sitting up across the room.
“What do you mean?” Mary Catherine said. “Of course I do.”
“We’re not that kind of sick,” Brian told her.
Mary Catherine stared at him, confused.
“What kind of sick are you?” she asked.
Brian sat up against his headboard and folded his arms.
“We’re the sick-and-tired-of-doing-all-these-stupid-farm-chores kind of sick,” he said. “Nobody asked us if we wanted to become agricultural slave labor, OK? We’re hereby done with the milking. Hereby done with the whole cock-a-doodle-doo, crack-of-dawn hick routine.
This is a strike.”
CHAPTER 16
I WOKE UP TO a whole heap of commotion the next morning. It wasn’t even the rooster this time. There was yelling at first. Then it stopped, and then came something that shot me out of bed like a skyrocket.
A loud, cacophonous clanging was coming from downstairs. It was amazingly loud, like an old school fire alarm or the hammering of a boxing bell after the last round.
I tripped out of bed and found my robe and headed down the stairs two by two. It was coming from the boys’ room. What the hell now? I couldn’t believe it. It was Mary Catherine. She was yelling like a drill sergeant as she banged two pots together.
“That’s it! Out of your beds, you lazy so-and-sos! Everybody up now. I said up! And on your feet! You think you can sleep in, you’re wrong! Every last one of you, rise and shine!”
Mary Catherine fired the pots into the corner and stood there sweating, her fists balled. I was about to say something, but when Mary Catherine glared at me, I immediately shut my trap.
“What the heck did you do?” I mouthed to Brian.
He just swallowed as he stood there, as wide-eyed as the rest of us. I’d never seen Mary Catherine so fired up.
“Trent!” Mary Catherine barked.
“Yes, Mary Catherine?” Trent said, like a nervous miniature recruit about to start marine boot camp.
“Get the girls in here, pronto! They’re part of this. I know they are.”
“Yes, Mary Catherine.”
The girls came into the room sheepishly, followed by a groggy Seamus.
“Now, whose idea was this? Tell me now who organized this little work stoppage.”
Everybody glanced at each other.
“We all did,” Brian said after a moment.
“Oh, you all did? How creative of you. That’s just great. After all I do for the lot of you, you plot behind my back? That’s just a real fine how-do-you-do after the nice meal I cooked for everyone last night. Speaking of which, I have a question for you. Where did that food come from?”
“Mr. Cody,” Eddie said, raising his hand.
“Wrong,” Mary Catherine snapped at him. “Also, you all slept warm in your beds last night under this roof. Where did this house come from?”
“Um, Mr. Cody?” Eddie tried again.
“Wrong again, wise guy,” Mary Catherine said. “Food, houses, everything good that you use in this world, comes from one place: work. Men and women worked to put food on your plate. Men and women worked to put this house together. Now, let me ask you another question. Where would the lot of you be if all those men and women decided to claim that they were sick and sleep in?”
“Up a creek?” Eddie said with a shrug.
“Finally, Eddie, you got one exactly right. Without people working, we’d all be up a certain type of creek without a paddle.”
Mary Catherine circled the room, staring into each of the kids’ faces one by one.
“I think you guys know me pretty well by now. I try to help everyone. Sometimes I even let things slide.”
She stopped in the center of the room.
“But what I will not do, by God, is sit idly by and watch all of you become a lot of lazy, useless ragamuffins. While I live and breathe, you will do three things. You will work. You will help. And you will pitch in. Or I’m out of here. You’ll never see me again. Understand? No work, no food, no house, no nanny. Is that perfectly clear?”
“Yes, Mary Catherine,” a few of them said.
“What? I can’t hear you!” Mary Catherine yelled.
“Yes, Mary Catherine,” everyone said loudly, including me and Seamus.
I stepped back as my young, blond nanny hurried out of the room, her blue eyes sparking. I actually had goose bumps on my arms.
Whoa, Nelly. Talk about a wake-up call!
“Exactly,” I said to the kids after Mary Catherine left. “Exactly what she said, and don’t you ever forget it!”
CHAPTER 17
THE NEXT MORNING, I awoke with a start as my bedroom door creaked open. It was early, I saw, as I glanced with one eye at the still dark-gray window, and someone was out in the hallway.
Something was up. Of course it was. Something was always up.
“Hark! Who goes there?” I said into my pillow. “If it’s you, Mary Catherine, please, no pots and pans this morning. I’ll be up in a second, I swear.”
“Good morning, Michael. Are ye awake?” Seamus whispered.
“I am now,” I said, sitting up in bed. “What is it? Let me guess. The kids are occupying the barn.”
“No, it’s not that,” Seamus said, stepping in and closing the door behind him.
“How are you this morning?” he said sheepishly. “Sleep well?”
I noticed that he was showered and wide awake and wearing his formal black priest suit with his Roman collar.
“I was, Father. I was sleeping as well as you please. I remember it quite fondly. What is it? Are you here to give me last rites? What in the Wild Wild West is going on?”
“Well, I —” he started. “What I mean to say is that … I guess you could say I have a confession to make.”
“A confession?” I said, sitting up. “That’s a switch. Wow, this almost sounds good enough for you to wake me in the middle of the night. Please, my son, confess away. Unload thy soul.”
“Well, you know how you told us all repeatedly to keep a low profile?” Seamus said, wincing.
I stared my grandfather solidly in his not-so-innocent blue eyes.
“Yes. I believe we were all there for the conversation with the witness protection folks.”
“Well, I haven’t been exactly following the rules. I was talking to Rosa, and she was telling me about the local priest in town. She kept telling me what a nice man he was, and I gave him a call. She was right. Father Walter is a very nice man. Actually, we’ve been talking back and forth for a couple of weeks now.”
What a thoroughly nutty situation this all is, I thought. Seamus felt guilty about talking to another priest?
“OK,” I said. “You and the local guy are talking shop. Did you tell him who we were?”
“No, of course not,” Seamus said.
“Why do I have the feeling that there’s another shoe about to drop?” I said.
“Well, being the only priest in the parish, he’s swamped. I guess I let it be known that I might be available under extreme circumstances to help out. One of those situations just came up. His father had a heart attack, and he asked if I could fill in today for early-morning Mass.”
“Holy cannoli, Father,” I said. “Why would you say that?”
“Fine. I’ll admit it. I want to say Mass. Is that a sin? I haven’t said Mass in a while, and I want to.”
“But you say Mass for us here at the house every Sunday morning.”
“That’s not the same thing as saying Mass in a church, at an altar, Detective Bennett. I really miss it, Michael. I feel utterly, completely useless out here in the middle of nowhere.”
I looked at him. I knew how that felt.
“Listen, Father. I feel useless, too, but this guy who’s after us is not messing around. He’s spending a lot of money to find us. We can’t risk it.”
“I know. You’re right,” Seamus said. “I’ll tell him I
can’t do it. What do people’s souls really matter anyway, right?”
I sighed.
“Where’s the church?”
“It’s Our Lady of Sorrows, in Westwood.”
“When is Mass?”
Seamus looked at his watch.
“Starts in an hour.”
“OK, Father Pain-in-My-Ankle,” I said as I finally stood. “Put on some coffee and let me hop in the shower. I wouldn’t want to be late for Mass.”
CHAPTER 18
ABOUT TEN MILES TO the northwest, Westwood was a quiet, tiny mountain town that didn’t stand on too much ceremony. There was a farmer’s market, a post office, a couple of streets of small, neat houses with pickups in the driveways and grills on the front porches.
“Hey, look, Dad,” my eldest daughter, Juliana, said from the backseat. “That’s a pizza place coming up.”
Juliana had overheard Seamus and me in the kitchen and insisted on coming along to be Seamus’s altar server. She claimed that she wasn’t just trying to get out of her homeschool classes, but I had my doubts.
“And oh, darn, there the pizza place goes,” I said, driving past it. “We’re in hiding, Juliana. No town pizza. If this weren’t a four-alarm Catholic emergency, we wouldn’t even be here.”
There were more pickups in the parking lot of Our Lady of Sorrows, beat-up work vans with ladders on top. Seamus had explained that the congregation included a lot of farmworkers, many of them unemployed after environmentalists in the state legislature had head-scratchingly cut down the rural area’s water allowance for the year. Without the water, farmers had been forced to let fields lie fallow, and now there were a lot of unemployed people hurting.
Thanks, government, I thought, parking Aaron Cody’s seventies muscle wagon in the corner of the lot. Take a bow. Another job well done.
“Our Lady of Sorrows, indeed,” I mumbled when I saw the food-bank notice on the bulletin board beside the door of the tiny white church.
The inside of the church was very plain. Definitely not St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but there was something nice about it, something serene. Instead of an organ, there was an old piano beside the altar, currently being played beautifully by a thin, red-haired middle-aged woman.
“That’s Abigail, the parish secretary,” Seamus said. “Juliana and I better get going. She’s supposed to show us where everything is.”
“I guess it’s OK,” I grumbled as I looked around at the blue-haired congregation. “Not too many gangbangers around.”
“Exactly, Dad,” Juliana said, rolling her eyes. “Everyone knows the gangbangers just go to Sunday Mass.”
I knelt at a pew at the back of the church after they left. I hadn’t been to early-morning Mass during the week in ages.
I used to go all the time in the months after my wife, Maeve, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Before or after my shift at work, every chance I got, I would head to Holy Name Church, a couple of blocks from our building. The youngest person there by decades, I would sit in the front and pray with everything in me for my wife to somehow be OK, for God to grant me a miracle.
Because, while people talk about their wife being their better half, Maeve was more like my better three-quarters, my better seven-eighths. She was the saint who’d put our crazy, wonderful family together. Mike, we need to adopt another one, she’d say. And I’d look over at her, at the holy look in her eyes, and I was suddenly the farm boy from The Princess Bride, and it was “As you wish” time.
But, prayers or no prayers, God wasn’t having any of it. Maeve died almost six months to the day of her cancer diagnosis. It had been years now since she’d passed away, but her spirit was very much alive, and she was still such a source of strength for me.
“Hey, babe,” I whispered up at the rafters. “What do I do now?”
The church filled up more than I’d thought it would. In addition to the requisite white-haired old-timers, there were quite a few able-bodied young white and Hispanic men who looked like they worked outside. Praying for work, no doubt. For some hope, I thought, feeling bad for them. I checked my wallet and fished out a twenty to slip into the poor box on the way out.
It was just before the gospel when a strange guy with a gray ponytail and a scraggly white beard came into the church behind me.
“Well, what do you know? It’s actually true,” the guy whispered as he climbed into the pew beside me. “Open the door, and here’s the people.”
I looked him over. With his camouflage hunting anorak over his greasy jeans, and with suspiciously glassy eyes, the old hippie had a very strong resemblance to a homeless person. Or maybe to Nick Nolte about to get a mug shot taken.
“Welcome to the Hotel California,” I thought, rolling my eyes.
My cop radar thought Nick Gra-Nolte might pass out or cause some trouble, but as the Mass went on, he knelt when he was supposed to and knew all the prayers. He even knew all the annoying changes in the prayers that the church had just dropped on everyone out of the blue.
But as I stood to line up for Communion, I couldn’t help noticing what he was carrying at the back of his worn jeans.
It was a pistol, a Smith & Wesson semiauto, not in a holster, just tucked there, happy as you please.
Peace, love, and a nine millimeter? I thought, my cop radar clicking up to DEFCON 3.
CHAPTER 19
I WAS READY TO tackle the guy the whole way up the aisle. As it turned out, nothing happened. I breathed a sigh of relief as the old hippie left right after Communion.
But, of course, it wasn’t over. Nick Nolte was pretending to read the bulletin board when I went out with Seamus and Juliana ten minutes after the end of Mass.
What will happen now? I thought, my hand tracing the line of my back where my gun was located. A postservice Wild West gunfight? I mean, give me a break. My blood pressure really didn’t need this.
“Hi, strangers,” the hippie said, smiling.
I noticed for the first time that the guy was in pretty good shape—broad shouldered, with big hands. I instinctively put myself between him and Juliana.
“Nice service,” the guy said. “Are you guys new to the parish?”
“No,” I answered for Seamus. “We’re just passing through.”
“Passing through?” the hippie said. “In Aaron Cody’s station wagon?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” I said. “I got one for you. You always carry in church?”
“Carry?” the hippie said, his bleary eyes squinting. “Oh, you mean the ol’ pistola here,” he said, giggling as he patted the small of his back after a beat. “Oh, sure. All us rootin’ tootin’ cowboys up here like our Second Amendment rights. That goes without saying. How about you? You always carry in church?”
“Get in the car, guys,” I said to Juliana and Seamus as I walked over to the still-giggling weirdo. Despite my initial paranoia and the guy’s roscoe, I could tell he was just a high California goofball.
“It’s been really fun talking to you, bro,” I said, smiling as I stared into his red eyes, “but don’t you think it’s time for you to grab a bag of Doritos and go watch Jerry Springer?”
He burst out laughing at that.
“I like you. You’re funny,” he said, going into his anorak pocket.
“Tight-lipped, too,” he said, removing a fat joint and lighting it with a Zippo as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He blew some rancid smoke in my direction.
“Around here, tight-lipped works just fine,” he said. “Actually, I was just trying to be neighborly. The priest’s accent reminds me of my grandpap. I’m Irish, too. They call me McMurphy. There’s a little bar down the road a bit called Buffalo Gil’s. Why don’t we meet up? I’ll buy you a Guinness.”
I stared at the lit weirdo, wondering why this kind of crap always happened to me. I mean, talking to drugged crazy people was fun, but I had cows to milk.
“Sounds like a plan, McMurphy, but I actually have a better idea,” I said as I turned to
walk toward the car.
“Yeah, what’s that?” my new dope-smoking hippie friend wanted to know.
“How about we don’t meet up, but we just tell everyone we did?” I said as I climbed into the station wagon.
He stared at me blankly as I started the engine, but just as I pulled past him, he suddenly got it.
In my rearview mirror, I watched as the nut broke up, laughing in the empty parking lot, the joint in his hand falling to the gravel as he slapped at his greasy thigh.
CHAPTER 20
VIDA GOMEZ KEPT THE stolen Cadillac Escalade at a steady sixty as they rolled east on the San Bernardino Expressway in El Monte, east of downtown LA.
They were nearing their exit when a motorcycle gang roared past out of nowhere. Completely startled, she cursed violently as a dozen black-leather-clad motorcyclists on big Jap bikes screamed around both sides of her SUV like a fusillade of just-missing guided missiles.
Assholes, she thought, seething, as one of the devil-may-care speeding bikers popped a wheelie. She could have shot one of them. All of them, in fact. The thing she hated most on this earth was to be snuck up on.
Trying to roll the tension out of her neck, she glanced back at the six buzz-cut men seated behind her to see if any of them had witnessed her blow her cool. But they were calm, oblivious, half of them dozing as usual.
Though all of Perrine’s handpicked cartel soldiers had obeyed her so far, she never once forgot that they were killers of distinction from a place where killers were a dime a dozen. Any sign of weakness, even the slightest hint of fear, could be fatal in her line of work.
What was up with her today? she wondered. It definitely wasn’t like her to be so jumpy. This morning she’d woken up with a bad feeling. It was something in the air that wouldn’t quit, a brooding sensation that something unpleasant was about to occur.
Or was she just being paranoid? Having a bout of stage fright? She didn’t know. The only thing she knew was, this was definitely the part she hated the most, the space between the plan and the execution.
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