by Declan Finn
I pulled out my own knife and was more like a fencer, my empty left hand against my chest. He came in with a teasing high strike. I slashed at it, but he pulled back before it could make contact, and arced down for my thigh. I dropped my arm, bringing it straight down, the edge of my knife only poised to meet his forearm. Ormeno’s forearm ran into the edge of my blade, but he pulled back before I could do real damage.
He burst forward, closing with me. His knife came in low, at waist height. My left arm came down in a chop against his wrist, and I brought my blade down, then slashed up, tagging him. My knife came up to my collarbone, the butt of the handle up against my shoulder, the point of the blade aimed right at Ormeno.
I drove my blade forward as Ormeno slammed against me deliberately. His pecs slammed against my arm, so I only drove my knife into his shoulder, not his eye.
—and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the Power of God, cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits, who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
So I bit his nose.
Ormeno roared, and I twisted my knife in his shoulder. Since I figured he was more like Baracus at this point than not, I brought my foot up and raked it down his leg, stomping on his kneecap, dislocating it. He fell to one knee, pulling my knife from his shoulder. I backhanded his face with my knife, cutting his face open. He swiped at my legs with the knife, biting into my calf.
I responded by kicking him in the shoulder, pinning him against the street. I kicked the knife away.
“What the hell are you doing, Rene?” I barked at him. “Working with the mayor? Are you stupid?”
Ormeno sneered at me. “Who do you think got me out of jail? Who do you think fixed my mind? I either work with the Mayor, or I go back to eternal damnation while I’m still alive.” His eyes lit with a new kind of fire, madness, and rage. “Where the only cure is your presence. I’d rather be under the control of the mayor than you, jefe.”
I ground my teeth. I was so pissed at being confused for the source of all this odd stuff. “It’s not me, Rene, it’s God. He’s with me. His presence healed you, you fool. Not mine, you moron. Your motto is rape, kill, control. The mayor now controls you, and after this brief reprieve, when you die, you really get to feel what eternity in Hell is like.”
Ormeno stopped struggling and paused. He looked at me, confused. This was a new idea that had never occurred to him.
Alex caught up to us, hurling yet another grenade back at the shooters. He slapped me on the chest. “Hey, Tommy, let’s go.”
From inside the house came a bellow so loud and fierce, it sounded like a kaiju roar. “Ormeno!”
With a jerk, Ormeno yanked his hand from under my foot, rolled to his feet, and ran for the house. He walked with a hint of a limp, but nowhere near a busted kneecap.
“Let’s get out of here,” Alex said.
I joined him as we ran back for our car. It took me a moment, but I realized that I heard him clearly. It was a surprise, but I realized that I had essentially channeled God’s grace to fight Ormeno. He healed my hearing while we were at it. Even my calf didn’t hurt as badly as it had a moment ago
God was on my side.
Chapter 16
License to Kill
We had stopped in a nearby parking lot as we collapsed the MP5s, reloaded them, and put them away in our backpacks. We sat down on the bumper of a car, and caught our breath as the sirens went by. As the adrenaline burned through us, it was … fun. I suppose.
As we waited for our heart rates to come down, and for the sirens to fade into the distance, Alex asked, “So, the warlock is the mayor?”
I nodded. “Apparently.”
We sat in silence for a long minute.
“Well, that’s going to be fun,” he snarked. “Why do you think he did it?”
I frowned, thinking back over the past few months. After the incident with the Women’s Health Corps/death cult of Moloch, Alex and I had played a trump card against the mayor: body camera footage of some of the Mayor’s more insulting comments about his constituents. His approval numbers had dropped like a rock. No surprise there. But since then, his policies still got through. It didn’t seem to hamper his ability to get things done. Recently, his poll numbers had even started to rise again.
The policies in question were also getting darker and darker. Hoynes was in talks with the DA – Carlton’s boss – to press charges against the Catholic church under RICO, the same laws used against the mafia. He argued that the Catholic church hid pedophiles. This would have been fine if all of the cases he cited weren’t decades old and prosecuting them would violate every statute of limitations on the books. It wouldn’t result in the prosecution of any child molester, but it would result in the confiscation of every church in the city and all of their bank accounts, property, etc.
Hoynes offered to keep the prosecutors away if the Catholic church in New York started marrying “nontraditional couples.” There was the similar talk of doing the same thing to Orthodox Jews once the Catholic priests were out of the way. Protestants weren’t being considered since they were trending towards gay marriage anyway. Islam wasn’t even discussed-- neither the politicians nor the activists mention them during these rants.
At the same time, Hoynes pushed the public school system to start sex education in the first grade. The special sex educators consisted entirely of transsexuals and transvestites. The special “education” hadn’t started yet, but every mutter of pulling children out of public schools and into homeschooling was met with threats of calling Child Protective Services and sending the police to people’s home to arrest the offending homeschoolers. No cop I know would do that, but there were some people in CPS I could see doing that – to their mind, it was easier than investigating abusive parents, and the law-abiding wouldn’t put up as much of a fight. Hoynes argued that “I’m a Libertarian! Children should be allowed to make their decisions about sex with all of the information at their disposal. How dare you take away their right to make an informed choice about what they do with their body!”
If you think that there’s a disconnect between the public stances of “pedophiles bad” (but shouldn’t be prosecuted) and “teach seven-year-olds sex” you’re not the only one.
If you’re wondering that I should have seen this coming sooner, then you haven’t noted the similarities between Hoynes and the political stance of the average Democrat politician. The RICO idea had been suggested before. Using the law to force a homosexual agenda on Churches that didn’t want to perform said weddings? Homeschooling had been a target of the left in New York City since the concept began.
And yet, despite fascist methods and pissing off voters left right and center, Hoynes was gaining in the polls. I had always chalked that up to bad polling and the reliability of Manhattan elitists who would vote Democrat even if the candidate had personally threatened to kill them all after the election.
But magic and politics?
“I think you were correct back there,” I said. “He’s too much of an incompetent to really get elected. He’s using magic to get things done, manipulate the polls, and probably would use it to get elected again. You heard the bokor. The Mayor needs me dead to pay off his debts to his Friends on the Other Side. Election season more or less starts in a few months.”
“Really? He’s using black magic to win elections?” Alex asked. He paused a moment. “Okay. Yeah. That really does make too much sense. Any ideas on how to take him down?”
I shrugged. “Prayer and bullets?”
“Why not? It seems to have worked before. Now the real question becomes how do we get to him?”
It wasn’t an idle question. The mayor would have some serious security, in addition to whatever powers and abilities he already had. If he didn’t blast us with lightning from two miles out, his security detail would fill us with bullets.
Better and better.
“We should talk to ADA Carlton. He’s read into our situation.”<
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Assistant District Attorney William Carlton had tripped over the case of the demonic defendant back when this insanity first started. He later deduced my secret abilities by doing more legwork and analysis than I would have thought he’d have time for. We could go to him, and he wouldn’t immediately throw us in a mental hospital if we said the mayor was a spawn of Satan. He had a brain that worked better than any three people we knew. If anyone could come up with a way to legally corner the mayor, it would be him.
Except if we could come up with legal tactics, so could the mayor? If he were smart, he wouldn’t need magic, though, would he?
At that moment, my cell phone rang. I sighed and answered. “Nolan.”
“McNally. Where are you?”
I blinked. I hadn’t expected Statler or Waldorf to contact me. “We’re out of New York. I wanted my family to lie low while this whole thing blew over.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie. They were individually true statements. It wasn’t my fault if he tied them together.
“You’re not in New Jersey, are you?”
“Why do you ask?” Answering a question with a question is a tried and true method of avoiding the questions. Any question.
“There’s now an APB out on you. The Deputy Mayor insists that you just tried to murder him. Is that true?”
I hesitated. Not because I was thinking up a lie. I merely thought that they would have taken more time to think of a pretense to sic someone on us. “No. It is not true. Full stop. Do you want the truth?”
“Yes—no. We don’t want to know.”
I blinked. We? What we? …of course. McNally is probably on speaker with Horowitz in the room. “Say hello to Waldorf for me.”
“He prefers to be Statler,” he said in a casual, offhand manner. “Listen, keep your head down. You know, and I know that the mayor hates your guts. He’s probably using this threat on your life as an opportunity to get you killed. Putting an APB out on you gives any corrupt cop an excuse to shoot you while you’re trying to escape.”
“There any reaction from the beat cops?”
McNally gave a laugh. “Everyone within earshot gave some variation on ‘Go Fuck Yourself.’ But any cop who wants twenty million won’t hesitate.”
I blinked. “I think you remember wrong. It was ten million.”
“I’m old, not stupid. Your Dark Web bounty doubled in the last few hours.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. Given some of the things that had tried to kill me in the past few hours, “Dark Web” had taken on a whole new feeling for me. Bad enough that every crook with an onion router could look me up and hunt me down. But that also meant supernatural creatures who wanted my head. Those were probably listed on other sites that no one had seen just yet. Vampire message boards? Why not? They were all coming for me.
And they had to win only once. After that, my friends and family could start petitioning Rome for my canonization.
“Understood,” I finally told McNally. “I’ll pass the message on.’
“Keep out of the city, Detective,” McNally warned me. “Even if you’re arrested by a cop who’s just doing his job, you won’t last five minutes in holding.”
“Understood.” I hung up, turned off the phone, took out the battery, and stuffed them in different pockets.
The right corner of Alex’s mouth turned down in a half-frown. “Great. We’re trapped in New Jersey for the rest of our lives, aren’t we?”
I shook my head. “We need to get to Long Island, remember? Carlton lives in Great Neck.”
Alex arched his brows. “In case you didn’t notice, to get to Great Neck, you need a car. To get from here to there, you need to go through half of Jersey, then all of Staten Island or the Bronx, then the length of Brooklyn or Queens.”
I rolled my eyes. “We can get there by boat.”
Alex scoffed. “You mean the ferry from Connecticut? I’m not sure the car can make it that far.”
I sighed. “Just give me your phone. I need to get a ride.”
Alex dug out his phone and handed it to me. “Why? Are you going to call an Uber? Maybe they’ll take all of the guns in our trunk.”
I simply sighed and dialed. “After this, we need to stop by the local church. I think I need to stock up on holy water.”
Monmouth Beach had very nice piers and docks.
Thankfully, we knew someone with a boat.
During the battle with the death cult calling itself the Women’s Health Corps, D had brought reinforcements with a boat. In this case, we didn’t need a small army to come to our rescue, just someone to drive.
The boat pulled up, and much to my surprise, Nate Brindle stepped out onto the dock. “Hey, Nolan, how are you?”
I blinked. “Good to see you. How’s life treating you, post-Rikers?”
He shrugged. “Not bad. I still like your little Jedi trick.”
Alex arched a brow. “Jedi trick?”
Brindle smiled. “You didn’t realize that your partner was a Jedi?”
Alex shook his head. He went back to the car and popped the trunk. “Come on, let’s unload the trunk.”
Between the three of us, we had filled a flatbed handcart from the trunk in a few minutes. Thankfully, we had burned through a lot of ammunition, which was usually the heaviest part of guns and ammo.
“So, what’s the occasion?” Brindle asked once we were underway.
Alex: “Long story.”
“We have a few hours.”
“Depends,” I started. “Do you want to make a few million? You just have to shoot me.”
“Say again?”
We explained on the way to King’s Point. He rolled his eyes. “Wow. You got on somebody’s bad side. I had heard you were pissing people off while I was in jail, but boy, have you got it bad.”
I shrugged. “I’m Catholic. My people have been annoying the general population for two thousand years. It’s part of the job description. Do deny the Devil and all of his works, especially if his works are current fads.”
Brindle laughed. “Only you, Nolan. Only you.”
Alex yawned. “Pardon me, but I need a nap. I’m getting too old for this crap.”
Brindle waited a moment, then asked, “So, how are you doing?”
I flinched. “I’m sorry, what?”
“How are you doing?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I hadn’t given any thought to how this was affecting me, one way or another. It was hard to believe that this was only very late on Monday night (or very Early Tuesday morning, depending), and that one of my parish priests had been murdered right in front of me only 36 hours ago. While hadn’t really known him personally, he seemed like a stand-up guy; Mariel had worked with him at the soup kitchen. I had barely slept. When I had slept, I hadn’t slept very well. I had only gotten a few hours when the SWAT team kicked in my door, and a few more hours that afternoon. But I’ve been shot at on five separate occasions by human beings, twice by Balrog drone, killed two hellhounds and ran a parkour foot chase through Spanish Harlem, not to mention both zombies and toasty vampires.
Sure, I was sleepy and mostly running on adrenaline. Aside from that, I was mostly numb. I should have been scared out of my mind. All the forces of Hell seemed to have a target on my back. But I didn’t feel scared. Fear wouldn’t help. I could only handle what was ahead of me. For everything else, I could pray.
But now, the mayor was out to get me. Dozens if not hundreds of corrupt cops were probably out to kill me. The forces of darkness knew my name and where I lived. They probably also knew what my family looked like and who they were.
Ever since the demon spotted me, I had been a target in one way or another. The demon wanted to destroy me because he could. It had murdered a friend of mine and a friend of my son’s, then tried to slaughter my family in our own home. The death cult wanted me because of revenge. The Mayor, a warlock fueled by the powers of Hell, wanted me so he could pay off his debts to his friends on the other side. Friends
were dead. Cops were dead. Brothers in arms were dead.
And for what? For nothing. Because I did halfway decent things for total strangers. I gave to charities. I served with charities. I occasionally put people up in a spare room when they needed it. Far as I could tell, they were minor good deeds on a good day. These little charities had cost me nothing … until the demon. Maybe a little time that I could afford. Maybe a little money that I could afford. Maybe some patience, which I could afford.
For that, Hell wanted me dead. For that.
“You know what, Nate? I feel pissed off.”
Nate nodded. “Good. Because you don’t deserve this shit, man. You really don’t.”
I chuckled wryly. I started to feel like Alex. “There’s a reason one prayer to God is that we don’t get everything we deserve. Because who, then, would be left standing.”
He spared me a look as he drove the boat. “You, probably.”
I rolled my eyes. Not him, too. “How do you figure? I figure I’m fairly humble, but not that good.”
“You’re Catholic, ain’t you? Don’t you know your Bible?”
I didn’t laugh. Honest. “I’ve heard a few lines. Here and there. I even remember a few.”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. The merciful will be shown mercy. The pure of heart shall see God. The peacemakers are children of God. And those who are persecuted because of righteousness, theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Jesus.
“Tell me, which of these are not you?”
I was about to protest. But humility was to be honest about yourself. Modesty was to conceal, almost lie about yourself.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice … I was a cop. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be doing my job.
Blessed are the merciful … More than a few of my fan club who I arrested thought I was merciful. I didn’t argue with them that I didn’t have to be a prick about arresting them.
