Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  A car turned the corner. A black Lincoln whose headlamps suddenly went out, and Rourke felt a lick of fearful premonition in the back of his throat.

  The Lincoln shot forward with a roar and a squeal of its tires. At first Rourke thought the car was going to run him over, but at the last moment it swerved toward the house, peppering the crepe myrtle and the lamppost with gravel. Something came flying out of the car's side window—a black metal something the size of a baseball, but with the shape and look of a pineapple. It hit the gallery floor and rolled beneath the swing, just as Bridey burst out the front door, crying his name.

  Rourke was running now, running toward the house, and the grenade that lay smoking beneath her porch swing.

  The Lincoln swerved back into his path. The front grill hit him hard, and he thought he felt a rib go as a pain like liquid fire shot through his chest. The impact sent him flying backward through the air, into the middle of the road. His head smacked into the packed dirt and gravel, and a blinding white light flashed before his eyes.

  Bridey screamed.

  The light exploded into flames and flying shards of wood and glass and metal.

  He came back to a world of noise. The crackle of fire, the wail of sirens, shouts. His own breath rushing in and out of his throat.

  Someone knelt over him, touching his shoulder, saying something he couldn't hear because of the noise. Blood poured from his nose, down his shirt and throat. He couldn't seem to catch a deep enough breath.

  A body was sprawled at the bottom of what was left of Bridey's front steps. Someone had thrown a blanket over it, but one outflung arm lay exposed, bathed in the ambulance's pulsing red light. It made the blue tattoo on the inside of her left wrist look like a smear of blood.

  Rourke's head fell back. He looked up at the night sky, and the sickle moon wavered and blurred and broke into pieces.

  Chapter Eleven

  NOTHING BROKEN ON HIM. A BUMP ON THE HEAD, A couple of sprained ribs, but nothing broken. He was alive, nothing was even broken, and the sun had come up on another morning.

  A thunderstorm had built up during the last hour, though, and the sky now lay heavy and gray overhead, like a blanket of soggy stove ash. Yet heat still pulsed in cruel waves from the sun-baked stone steps of Charity Hospital where Daman Rourke stood, shivering.

  Fiorello Prankowski waited for him out in the street, leaning on the fender of a parked squad car. Rourke stayed where he was, unmoving, his gaze fastened on the crepe myrtle trees that lined the sidewalk. Thunder rumbled, and the clouds darkened and pressed down on him, heavy and hot, but inside he was cold and he could not stop shivering.

  “You okay?”

  Rourke blinked. He hadn't seen Fio walk up the steps to meet him. It was as if time had done a fugue on him and he'd lost track of the beat.

  Fio was looking him over, his eyes narrowed in his haggard face. He looked worried by what he found. “They said you got a concussion and some busted ribs or something. You sure you should be out of bed?”

  They hadn't actually released Rourke from the hospital; he'd simply got up, dressed in the clothes his mama had sent over, and walked out. Now here he was and here Fio was, and yet he didn't say anything, just kept on staring at those crepe myrtles. Bridey had had a crepe myrtle growing alongside her front gallery. The grenade had blown it into kindling.

  “Nothing's broken,” he finally said to Fio, because unlike Bridey he was theoretically at least still breathing and so he had no excuse for bad manners. “I'm just a little bruised and stiff, is all. Thank you for bringing a car around.”

  Fio shifted his weight, his shoulders hunching. His hands hung at his sides, big, limp, helpless. “Jesus, Day. You're lucky you weren't righteously fucked up….” Fio's face suddenly colored. He took off his hat and pushed his hand through his spiky hair. He cleared the roughness from his throat. “Man, I'm sorry about Bridey. What in hell is this all about?”

  Rourke breathed. He felt the pain of his battered ribs expanding, felt his mouth part open, but he couldn't seem to get enough air. There wasn't enough air left in all the world.

  “I don't know,” he said, or might have said. He didn't see how he could be talking when he couldn't breathe.

  “Jesus, I just don't know what to say. Bridey…. Man, I'm sorry.”

  Rourke felt the muscles of his face pull into a smile. He knew it was his bad smile by the way Fio was looking at him. The smile he used to wear when he flew his Spad right at the enemy, his fingers pressing hard and relentless on the triggers of his guns. Long silver barrels hacking bullets, death flying from out of a cold blue sky.

  “It takes about ten seconds for a grenade to explode,” Rourke said. “She had time to know she was going to die.”

  “You can't be sure—”

  “She screamed.”

  Rourke started down the steps. Fio stared after him for a beat and then followed.

  Rourke went around to the passenger side of the car and got in. Fio hesitated a moment, looking up and down the street as if he hoped the cavalry would come. Sighing, he opened the door and eased his bulk inside behind the wheel.

  He cranked up the engine and turned to Rourke. “So are we going somewhere in particular, or do you just want to take a ride?”

  Last night death had come in a fancy black Lincoln, one guy driving and another riding shotgun. The moon and the street lamps had only managed to cast the interior of the car in shadows, and both men had been wearing black fedoras, pulled down low to hide their faces. A professional hit, slick and thorough and impersonal, and most likely aimed at him. Bridey had only been in the way.

  If he shut his eyes he could still see her in that instant before the explosion of white light and bursting shards of metal and wood and glass. He was careful not to shut his eyes. There was nothing he could do, though, about the scream he kept hearing in his head.

  “I'm hungry,” Rourke said. “You hungry?”

  Fio gave him a slow, careful look. “Maybe.”

  Rourke felt his mouth twist into that terrible smile again. “I've a hankering for one of Tio Tony's oyster sandwiches.”

  “Aw, man.” Fio's breath came out in a big gust. Tio Tony's was a low-rent diner and bookie parlor down near the riverfront in the Irish Channel, and two blocks from Casey Maguire's slaughterhouse, where the bootlegger still kept his business offices. Maguire had eaten lunch at Tio Tony's every day for the past ten years.

  Fio gripped the steering wheel, then swore and let it go. “Guys like Maguire don't try to kill cops. It just ain't done. And it especially ain't done in New Orleans.”

  It hadn't been done in New Orleans since 1890, when the Sicilian Mafia had assassinated popular police superintendent David Hennessy for interfering with Mob business, and the city's outraged citizens had retaliated by lynching eleven of them in the courtyard of the old Parish Prison. Since then organized crime had not completely disappeared from New Orleans, but they had learned either to put the cops on the pad or leave them alone.

  “You going to drive?” Rourke said. “'Cause I'm getting hot, sitting here in this car.”

  “Could be that Chicago pineapple wasn't even meant for you. Could be her husband came back and—”

  “He's dead.” Sean was dead.

  “Maybe not, though. Or maybe, back when he was on the job, he sent somebody upriver who just now got out and doesn't know he's gone missing.”

  Sean O'Mara was dead, and Rourke was seriously wondering now if somehow, some way, he had gotten close to stumbling on to how Sean had died and why. Maybe the connection wasn't between Vinny McGinty and LeRoy Washington, but between Vinny and Sean. The hit on Bridey's house had been professional, the way Vinny's murder had been professional. Vinny, his bone. It had the stink of Casey Maguire all over it.

  Yet to believe that, you would have to believe…

  One summer's evening when they were thirteen, the four of them had sneaked into the St. Alphonsus rectory and stolen some of the wine meant for the
Mass and the sacrament of Holy Communion. They'd all been altar boys at St. Alphonsus in those days—all except for Bridey, of course—and so they knew where the sacramental wine was kept. Dark green bottles with hand-scrawled labels that were tucked away in the back of a closet in Monsignor McAuliffe's office. Afterward, drunk on the wine and the wicked sins of theft and blasphemy, they had taken the streetcar out to City Park, where a traveling carnival had come to town with a Ferris wheel advertised as the biggest portable one of its kind in the world.

  It seemed to soar a couple hundred feet or more into the heat-hazed, cobalt sky. Decked with strings of incandescent lights, it spun in the dusk like a giant pinwheel of stars. Brightly painted red and yellow gondolas hung from its thick iron spokes, beckoning. Oh, to fly.

  They each paid a nickel and stepped onto the wheel's landing as an empty red gondola swung down to meet them. Being southern gentlemen, they let Bridey climb into the wooden car first, and then Sean and Casey almost got into a fight jostling each other over who would sit next to her. Sean won and, grinning, he slipped his arm around Bridey's waist.

  As soon as their gondola lifted away from the earth, though, Sean let go of his prize and put a two-handed grip on the safety bar, and the rest of them started ribbing him bad about his fear of heights.

  They floated out over the park, above the dueling oaks, the colonnaded pavilion, the lights twinkling on the new iron-arched Pizatti Gate. Smells and noise rose up from the ground, popping bubbles of laughter and shouts and shrieks of joy, roasting peanuts and popcorn balls.

  Their gondola climbed halfway up the arc of the wheel's revolution and then stopped, swaying, and Rourke felt a little light-headed. The wine had been too sweet, and the sin of stealing it was such a wonderfully mortal one. If they died now they would go to hell, damned for eternity. It was a frightening thought, and the fear excited Rourke, making him dizzy, drunker than the wine had.

  He caught Bridey staring at him. Her eyes were stark in her face, and one corner of her mouth trembled. She looked scared, but then she could always sense when the hunger, the craving, for trouble was upon him. She'd know that tonight, for him, stealing from Holy Church wasn't going to be enough.

  Rourke smiled. Bridey jerked her gaze away from his, hugging herself.

  The Ferris wheel creaked into motion, they climbed and climbed, and the landmarks of their world spread before them. River and lake and swamp. Garden District mansions and waterfront dives—manna and corruption. The spires of St. Louis Cathedral and the whitewashed tombs of the city's many cemeteries—death and salvation.

  Their gondola swayed to a slow stop at the very peak of the wheel's revolution. They dangled in midair. It was a long, long way down. Certain death, surely, if you fell.

  Rourke stood up.

  The gondola teetered wildly, and Bridey stifled a little cry. Sean yelled at him to sit down.

  Rourke leaned over the back of the car and looked down, at a white oyster-shell walkway and the peaked top of a red and blue striped tent where hootchie-cootchie girls were doing the dance of the seven veils. The gondola below them was empty. It swung as if pushed by a breeze, although the air was hot and still.

  “I bet y'all each a dollar I can jump from this car down to the next one,” he said.

  Sean hooted a loud laugh. “You're blowin' smoke. And besides, who's got a dollar?”

  “Day, please don't,” said Bridey, who knew him better.

  “You might make it,” Casey Maguire said after a moment. “But if we start moving once you've jumped, you're dead.”

  Rourke climbed up onto the back of the seat, grabbing one of the wheel's thick, supporting spokes. The gondola teetered again, so violently this time it felt as though it would flip right over. Sean yelled, threatening to knock him into next week if he didn't get down.

  Rourke could feel the throb of the steam engine vibrating through the riveted metal. He could, with just the slightest shift of his weight, make the gondola rock like a cradle. The other car was at least fifteen feet away, but the angle wasn't impossible. As long as, like Case had said, the wheel didn't start to turn.

  Make it, you live. Miss and you die, and with the stain of mortal sin black on your soul.

  Die and you go to hell. To hell and everlasting punishment.

  Yes.

  He could taste fear at the back of his throat. The fear quickened his breath and made his blood burn, his skin shiver. He bent his knees and pressed his weight into the balls of his feet and jumped.

  Would have jumped if Casey Maguire hadn't snagged his strong fingers in Rourke's belt at the very instant that the wheel jerked into motion again.

  Rourke fell back into the seat. The car swayed and tipped and finally settled as it descended. In the breath-held silence that followed they could hear the creak and groan of the wheel's spokes as they flexed and the strains of Turkish music from the hootchie-cootchie tent. One of them laughed, and then they all four were laughing, wild with fear and relief, and they were all still a little drunk on stolen sacramental wine.

  And then, as their laughter wound down, Casey Maguire had said it. Right out loud he had said, “God, I love you guys.”

  They had looked at him in surprise, a little embarrassed at the freight of feeling they'd heard in his voice, then Sean laughed and leaned over, punching him lightly on the shoulder with his fist, and Bridey blew him a teasing kiss. Rourke had stared off to where the horizon of trees and rooftops was rising up to meet them, saying nothing, because for just a moment he had looked into Casey Maguire's face and had caught Case looking back at him with an undisguised and fearful love.

  And that, Rourke thought now, had taken more raw courage than he would ever have or hope to find.

  Tio Tony's waterfront diner was on Tchoupitoulas Street, tucked between a gray-clapboard colored movie theater and a long brick warehouse. It looked out over the wharf, where banana boats awaited unloading and trucks filled with hogsheads of sugar stood ready for shipping upriver. The smell of roasting coffee beans and boiling molasses hung thick in the air.

  Fio was taking his sweet time prying his bulk out of the squad car. “You're going to get our asses fired,” he was saying. “Uh-huh. 'Cept you won't be fired 'cause your daughter's granddaddy is the superintendent of police in this fair city that care forgot. So they'll give you one of them nice offices upstairs in City Hall where you can shuffle papers all day and pick the lint out from between your toes. Me, I'll be fired, and then I won't be able to make the forty easy little payments on my new parlor organ.”

  Rourke stared at him across the car's scuffed and sun-faded black hood. “You done?”

  “Yeah, I'm done. Are you going to kill somebody?”

  “Not today.”

  Fio rolled his eyes, beseeching the thunderclouded heavens to give him a break. “Oh, blessed are the meek of spirit and the pure of heart.”

  Tio Tony's wasn't big on the amenities. You could sit on a stool at the stained tile counter or in one of the cracked red leather booths. Photographs of prizefighters intermingled with holy cards of the Virgin and her saints on the diner's tired yellow walls. A fan creaked in the pressed-tin ceiling, stirring the floating layers of cigarette smoke. The place smelled of fried oysters and burned coffee, with a faint odor of booze underneath. If you knew how to ask for it, Tio Tony served a first-rate scotch and rye, and some of the best Ramos fizzes in the city.

  At the back of the diner, a swinging door with a porthole for a window opened into the kitchen. A door in the kitchen led to a bookie parlor and a room with plank benches, sawdust on the floor, and a rope-ring where boxing exhibition matches were held on Friday nights. In Tio Tony's back room, up-and-comers could make their reputations by taking on all challengers.

  For being so close to the lunch hour, the diner was quiet, nearly empty. A man with a bald head the size and shape of a watermelon sat at the counter, paring his nails with an open pearl-handled barber's razor. He was talking to the man behind the counter, who wore
only a sleeveless undershirt beneath his grease-splattered apron. The cook—if he was the cook—didn't look armed, but Rourke had no doubt that a Thompson submachine gun was within reach beneath the counter.

  As they entered the diner, the door knocked a cow bell into jangling, and the man with the razor turned to look, the stool squeaking beneath his weight. Eyes the size of dimes blinked rapidly as his oversized head processed what he was seeing. Then he shrugged and turned back around, probably figuring Rourke and Fio were just two more cops on the pad who had dropped by to collect. He said something low to the cook, and the cook laughed, his gaze sliding to the booths in back.

  It was hot and muggy in the diner like it was everywhere else. Dark, wet loops stained the armpits of the cook's undershirt, and droplets of moisture clung to the bald-headed man's forehead like rain. As they passed by them, Rourke could smell their sweat.

  Only one of the booths was occupied. Two men sat while another stood in front of them with his hat in one hand and a taped brown envelope in the other.

  The man with the envelope set it on the table between Casey Maguire's hand and the remains of an oyster sandwich. He ducked his head and turned to leave, paling as he saw Rourke and Fio. He put on his hat, holding on to the brim to hide his face as he brushed past them.

  Casey Maguire lifted his hand, but he did not pick up the envelope. He sipped from what looked like a glass of iced tea garnished with mint leaves, and probably was. During the last few years, the city's official bootlegger had become a teetotaler.

  Sitting across from him and working on a plate of red beans and rice and fried sac-à-lait was Maguire's right-hand goon. Paddy Boyle's head came up as they approached, and his washed-out blue eyes looked them over slowly. His thin lips pulled into a smirk, and he scratched at his neck where the hair curled out of the open collar of his shirt like bronze wire.