“Never touch it.”
“Now I have seen everything.” Trinity chuckled. “A tee-totaling mercenary. Amazing.”
Pat smiled. “If it helps my badass credentials, I do smoke a little reefer from time to time. Alcohol just doesn’t agree with me.” He stood and took his mug to the coffee maker. “Speaking of drugs, you want a cup? Or tea.”
“What the hell, I’ll take coffee, I’m not sleeping anyway,” said Trinity. “Black, one sugar.”
Pat filled a purple and gold LSU mug and handed it to Trinity as he sat.
Trinity sipped the coffee. It was strong and had chicory in it and tasted like home. “I’m guessing you don’t believe in all this,” he said. “I mean, that what’s happening to me is coming from God.”
“You’re assuming I even believe in God. I’ve been all around the world, and all I’ve seen are reasons not to believe. Still keeping an eye out for him, mind you. But...”
“I don’t know how you do it,” said Trinity. “I’m not judging, I just don’t understand. You kill people for a living. I can see how you could do that in service of a larger belief…but if you don’t believe in anything…”
“I’m not a nihilist,” said Pat. “I protect people for a living, and I kill anyone who makes an attempt on my clients. Sometimes the client is trying to change his government, other times the client is a government. Or there is no viable government, and I’m in the middle of a civil war. I don’t care which, so long as the client’s goal meets my criteria. Free and fair elections in a democracy limited by a constitution that caps the power of the state and protects dissent. That’s what I believe in.”
“That’s gotta limit your job opportunities.”
“It surely does,” said Pat with a smile. “But I’m very expensive, so I can be choosy.”
“And that’s it, that’s your criteria?”
“Hey, it’s the American ideal. I’ve been around enough to know we don’t live up to it, but it should always be our aim. See, I don’t need God to tell me about basic human rights. Reason does the job just fine.”
“Thin line between reason and rationalization,” said Trinity. “People step over it all the time.”
“True ’nuff,” said Pat. He sipped his coffee. “Look, man, I grew up in these swamps. Both my grandfathers were Cajun Catholics, one grandma was a Choctaw Indian, the other a half-black half-Indian who practiced a kind of swamp spiritualism somewhat akin to Hoodoo. They were all believers, and you know what belief did for them? It helped them accept their lot in life. Thing is, their lot in life was getting shit on by the ruling class. To me, that’s what religion is. A philosophy of coping. It may bring comfort to the dispossessed, but comfort isn’t good for the dispossessed. The dispossessed need to stay pissed off so things can change for the better.”
Trinity hadn’t intended to hit a nerve. He raised his hands in mock surrender and sent Pat a friendly smile. “Well, I haven’t been a believer very long myself. Preaching was always just a grift for me.”
Pat smiled back at him. “You and every other preacher on TV.”
“Can’t speak for all of them but, yeah, it’s an exceedingly profitable business,” said Trinity. “Anyway, Danny walked out on me barely in his teens…and I suppose I gave him every reason to.”
“You two seem to be gettin’ along OK.”
“It’s good to have him home,” Trinity said. “But I don’t want to rush things with him, you know?” He sipped some coffee.
“Ah, I get it. You want me to tell you about Honduras.”
Trinity nodded.
“Just remember,” said Pat, “there’s three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth. I can only give you mine.”
“I’d be much obliged.”
Pat sipped some coffee. As he spoke, his eyes became unfocused, looking back in time. “My client was an economics professor, running for the Honduran National Congress. An anti-corruption do-gooder campaigning on electoral reform.” He smiled. “My kind of guy. His popularity was growing fast, he was a threat to the status quo. He had supporters everywhere, and word leaked out to us that Battalion 3-16—that’s the CIA-trained Gestapo down there—was planning to cancel his ticket while he slept. I drove him up to a small mountain village where the local priest, Father Pedro, was a supporter. One of those political priests, you know, the liberation theology guys, but he wasn’t a Marxist like some of them. He just thought Jesus meant it when he instructed us to feed the hungry and care for the sick and visit the imprisoned. Anyway, Father Pedro was brave, he walked the walk, ya know? He hid us in the basement of his church as a couple jeeps pulled into town, six soldiers hopped out and started interrogating the locals. The padre told them we’d stopped to eat a meal, and then we’d left heading north. But somebody must’ve talked, ’cause they posted a few soldiers outside the church, front and back, round the clock.” He shook his head at the memory. “The longer we hid in that basement, the more frustrated the goon squad outside got, but there was no way to slip past them. The military in El Salvador had murdered a couple of political agitator priests, and it was easy to believe the practice might be spreading.”
From a dog bed on the floor, Edgar let out a melodramatic sigh.
“You said it, partner,” Pat said to the dog.
“I think I see how Daniel got involved,” nudged Trinity. “You couldn’t get out, so you figured to bring the world to you. Fastest way is to run a con. Some kind of fake miracle to get the world’s attention.”
“No flies on you,” said Pat. “Father Pedro put the word out, and one by one the village patriarchs came by, and he told them the plan. Next thing you know, old ladies and men are coming to church with various maladies.”
“Spontaneous healings! A classic,” said Trinity, “never gets old.”
Pat nodded. “They confess their sins to Father Pedro, tell him their ailments, and emerge from the confession booth babbling excitedly about how they felt electricity running through their bodies when Pedro forgave their sins. Their various maladies miraculously vanished. It got the Vatican’s attention all right. Within forty-eight hours, Daniel arrived to investigate.”
“Danny’d never fall for that scam,” Trinity said.
“He didn’t, he was on to us right away. But Father Pedro brought him down to the basement and explained the situation. Daniel wouldn’t certify a fake miracle, but he offered to conduct the investigation in slow motion, buy us some time. Once the news crews arrived, I’d be able to get the professor out. The goon squad would just have to pick another time to try and ice the guy.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“It was the best we had. But it didn’t work. The bad guys realized time was no longer on their side, and they made their assault late that night. Daniel was in the basement with me and the professor, and the basement was one large room with a staircase at either end. We heard the spray of automatic gunfire upstairs. I couldn’t cover both stairwells myself, and the professor’s brain was short-circuiting—he was rigid with fear, completely frozen. I shoved a pistol in Daniel’s hand, and we each killed three soldiers as they came blazing down the stairs.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” Pat smiled grimly. “And the capper to the story, the real kick in the head…the professor dropped dead of a massive heart attack while we were saving his life.”
“God does have a sense of humor,” said Trinity.
“God needs one,” said Pat. “Father Pedro was upstairs, dead at the altar. They’d cut him in half. We’d just killed six soldiers, and I was known as the professor’s bodyguard. Daniel gave me a priest’s uniform, and we drove cross-country to Guatemala, where he arranged a private plane to get us stateside.”
“That’s a hell of a story.”
“A day at the office. Like you said, I kill people for a living.” Pat drank some coffee. “Daniel had never killed anyone, so it was…it was an adjustment for him. But I tell you, he kept his shit together like a pro.”
Dani
el woke with a start, a rough hand clasped over his mouth.
“We gotta move, brother,” Pat whispered in his ear. “Visitors on the way.” Daniel sat up as Pat woke Tim Trinity. “You guys get dressed, meet me in the kitchen. Leave the lights off.” He disappeared into the darkened hallway.
Daniel and Trinity scrambled into their clothes and made their way to the kitchen by the dim blue light of dawn filtering through the windows. Pat stood at the kitchen table, shoving items into a backpack. He wore a pistol on his belt, an assault rifle slung over one shoulder. Edgar stood at attention by his side.
“I don’t hear anyone,” said Trinity.
“Motion detector at the end of the road,” said Pat. “They’ll be here in a minute.” He zipped up the backpack, tossed it to Daniel, and led them to the back door. “Wait for me in the boat, I gotta set the system.” He left them there and headed for the front entrance hall.
Trinity snapped his fingers. “Shit. Be right back.” He started back toward the bedrooms. “Gotta get my Bible.”
“Leave it,” Daniel called after him, “I’ll buy you a new one.” Trinity didn’t stop, but he was back quickly, blue Bible in hand.
They ran down to the dock and Trinity scrambled into the airboat. Daniel tossed him the backpack, then unwound the line from the cleat and held the boat in place. He could now hear a vehicle crunching along the gravel road on the other side of the house.
Pat emerged from the house, Edgar at his side. He paused to lock the door, then jogged down to the boat, picking up a long aluminum pole beside the dock. “Hop in,” he said, and Edgar jumped into the boat, followed by Daniel and Pat.
Pat used the long pole like a Venetian gondolier, pushing them silently through the water, down to the end of the spit and around, staying close to cypress trees with roots that rose from the water like skinny legs with bulbous arthritic knees. Spanish moss hung down from the branches just above their heads.
“Eyes upward, Tim,” said Pat. “You’re on snake watch.”
“Got it,” said Trinity.
Daniel resisted the urge to look up as well. He shot a quick glance back from his position in the bow, just to satisfy himself that his uncle was scanning the branches, and then focused his attention forward.
A car’s engine shut off and its doors went: thunk…thunk-thunk, thunk. At least four men. Gliding silently around the other side of the house, they could now see it. A shiny black Chevy Suburban, parked just past the fallen tree that blocked the driveway. A white man stood next to the driver’s door. Mid-forties, built like a light heavyweight, wearing black chinos and a short-sleeved Cuban shirt that didn’t do much to hide his gun.
They crouched low as Pat moved the airboat forward slowly, careful to avoid bumping the aluminum hull against a tree. They were within earshot; such a mistake would be fatal.
The man standing by the Suburban lit a cigarette.
“He don’t look like a cop,” said Trinity in a stage whisper.
“And those aren’t government plates,” said Daniel.
From the stern, Pat said, “Can you see my front door?”
“Just a little further,” said Daniel. “OK, stop.”
Pat jammed the long pole deep in the muck, held the boat fast.
There was a man crouched below Pat’s living room window, gun in hand. Two more men stood by the front door. The white guy holding a pistol, the black guy a tactical shotgun.
The black guy was Samson Turner.
“Shit,” Trinity whispered to Pat, “that’s the guy who tried to kill us. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Pat shook his head. His face was unnaturally calm. “They’re already dead, they just don’t know it yet.”
Trinity’s eyes were wide with fear. He whispered, “No, no, we should just leave.”
“And they’ll just come after you again,” said Pat. He handed the pole to Trinity. “Now shut up, take this, hold us in place.” Then he gestured to Daniel. “Switch with me.”
As Daniel crept to the stern, Pat knelt in the bow and brought his assault rifle into position, clicked off the safety, and looked down the sight. He spoke under his breath, “Come on, look in the window, you know you want to…” The man crouching beneath the living room window started to raise his left arm. “That’s it, just pull yourself up for a little peek…”
The man started to rise, reached up to grab the security bars outside the window. He jerked against the bars, convulsing violently as a high-voltage crackle shattered the quiet. He convulsed again, his mouth open in a silent scream, and finally let go of the bars and collapsed to the ground, smoke rising from his dead hand.
The white guy on the porch said, “What the fuck?” and squared his body to the front door. He lifted his right leg and pivoted on his left foot and kicked the door handle. After a quarter-second of silence, there was a muffled pop and a thin metal blade two feet wide shot out from the door and embedded itself in the man’s abdomen. His guts came out in a shower of blood.
Pap! One shot from Pat’s rifle and Samson Turner’s head exploded. He shifted his aim to the man by the car before Turner’s body even hit the ground.
Pap! The man’s brains splattered against the black SUV.
Pat clicked the safety on, handed the gun to Daniel, and took the helm, cranking the airboat’s motor to life.
“Leave it,” he said to Trinity, and Trinity let go of the aluminum pole that was holding them in place. Pat gunned the throttle and they took off down the bayou, the flat hull of the airboat skimming over thick vegetation, Daniel and Trinity holding onto the gunwales with each turn, wind whipping their hair.
A few minutes later, Pat cut the throttle and pulled up to another narrow spit of land, this one overgrown foliage and a rickety old cedar-shingle fishing cabin that listed to one side, braced from falling by three four-by-four beams that angled up from the ground.
Edgar jumped ashore first, followed by the men. Pat tied the boat to the exposed root of a cypress and led them to the cabin. “My safe house,” he said.
“Doesn’t look so safe,” said Trinity.
“That’s the whole point,” said Pat, digging a key ring out of his pocket. He put out a hand and stopped Trinity. “Wait.” He pressed a button on the key fob remote, and the entire front wall of the cabin began to rise like a garage door.
Behind the decrepit façade was a cinderblock structure with a metal garage door. Inside, another green Subaru Forester. Large metal cabinets lined one wall, and a Fort Knox gun safe stood in the corner.
Pat tossed the keys to Daniel. “You’ll find clothes and bottled water in the cabinets. I’ll go home and clean up the mess, meet you in New Orleans tomorrow.”
“There could be another guy or two waiting for you. We didn’t see if someone went around back.”
“Be dead by now. Once I set the defense system, nobody gets off my property alive.” Pat let out a grim smile. “Gotta go feed the gators.”
“OK. I’ll call your cell.”
Pat took the pistol off his belt, handed it to Daniel. “You’ve shot this one before, you know how it works.”
Daniel stared at the gun in his hand. The same gun he’d killed three men with in Honduras.
It felt better in his hand than it should have.
“Tim, there hasn’t been another car on the road for eight miles,” said Daniel. “Put it in the glove box.”
“Oh,” Trinity sounded distracted, “OK, good idea.” But he didn’t.
“Or keep fidgeting with it until you accidentally shoot one of us.”
“Right. OK.” This time he put the gun away. “Sorry. Guess I’m a little rattled, now it’s sinking in. That was…that was pretty close back there.”
“Yes it was.”
Trinity lit a cigarette. “Those men sure died ugly.”
“Yes they did.”
They rode in silence for a while. Trinity turned on the radio and found a talk station.
…and the Tim Trinity sightings just ke
ep on pouring into 9-1-1 centers and newsrooms across the nation. The latest one, believe it or not, from Anchorage, Alaska. Elvis Presley, watch your back, I’m tellin’ ya... The radio jock chuckled at his own joke. Speaking of the King, a blurry YouTube video that some jogger in Memphis claims to be of Reverend Trinity has gone absolutely viral on the Interwebs and is now drawing so-called “pilgrims” to Tennessee by the tens of thousands…
Trinity turned the radio off, shaking his head. “Memphis? What the hell would I be doing in Memphis?”
“Hey, it’s good news,” said Daniel. “The more people think you’re in Memphis, the better.”
They fell back into silence for a minute. Trinity shifted in his seat. “Danny, I, uh…” He gestured to the glove box. “I asked Pat about Honduras.”
“He tell you?” Daniel kept his eye on the road, but caught Trinity’s nod in his peripheral. “Good. Not my favorite story to tell. He tell you I freaked out?”
“He said you kept your shit together like a pro, and he wouldn’t have survived without your help.”
Daniel smiled. “Yeah, I did all that. And then I freaked out.”
“Probably a healthy reaction,” said Trinity, “certainly a normal one. You were almost killed.”
“Wasn’t that kind of freak-out.”
“Moral crisis?”
“Identity crisis,” said Daniel. “When it happened I was terrified of course, and the killing was horrible…”
“But?”
“But beyond the normal stress reaction, I was actually OK with it. I couldn’t convince myself that I’d done wrong.”
“You hadn’t,” said Trinity. “What, you’re supposed to turn the other cheek?
“Yes.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I was a priest. We’re supposed to emulate Jesus.”
“Even if it means dying.”
“Especially if it means dying.”
Trinity threw his hands up. “What can I say? You Catholics have some crazy ideas.”
“Everybody’s got crazy ideas, Tim.”
“True.” He gave Daniel an avuncular wink.
The Trinity Game Page 23
