The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  Laughing along with him, Haydn was glad, to her surprise, that Samuel had wandered into the room, for the temporary reprieve from worry, before the immediacy of her concerns pressed back in.

  “Samuel, we need to know why Garcia and Slade are working together,” she said, “why they would risk exposing us and themselves so publicly. Do you think you could help me with that?”

  “I could try.” He didn’t oversell his capabilities.

  “This particular job should require more finesse than brawn,” she explained. “I think you are just the right man for it.”

  “It would be my honor,” Samuel said, and Haydn nodded at his enthusiasm for the task.

  The sun had been up on the New Year for hours. Already starting its trajectory back down, Slade watched it glint off the metal on the equipment where it cut through the high windows of the warehouse.

  Somewhere behind him, Katlego and Amber were speaking in hushed voices, either traumatized by their exposure to first-hand violence or just back to work on the new tracking system that had already served them better than any of them could have hoped.

  Maybe too much better.

  Slade hadn’t told them to stay, but they were clearly reluctant to leave without express permission. Several times, Slade lifted his head, trying to find the energy to give it, but indifference pulled him back into moody silence before he could force the dismissal past his lips.

  Sean had no such qualms about making an escape. Barreling from the chopper before Amber could put it all the way on the ground, he took off with an announcement about bringing in the New Year right. Assuming that meant a bar or club, somewhere he could get drunk or get laid, preferably both, any other night Slade would have been right there with him, toasting his supreme skills and increasingly good record, and hoping some uninhibited bar girl would overhear him talking about his exploits and want a taste of the victory.

  They’d brought down another deraph. No small fucking feat.

  Not just any other night, Slade hadn’t moved since they got back. Grabbing a beer out of the cooler, he walked straight to his spot in the middle of the warehouse. Oriental rug marking its boundaries, furniture placed just so, it was a room without walls, a hint of civility amongst the crude metal of the machines. It was something he had learned from a career that required him to be in many stark, inhuman places for long periods of time. The smallest touch could make a big difference in a cold, desolate room.

  Gazing out from his favorite armchair at the levers and gears and switches at eye level, Slade still harbored some awe at the intricacy of his operation. It was the kind of cover they all dreamed about, but never, in a million years, did he imagine he would be this guy, the one with an actual front, supported by actual money. Running as a break-even business during the day, it would take a truly special agent to uncover the factory’s hidden agenda, or the built-in hideaways for weapon storage around the room. The person who funded their efforts was willing to go all in to make it look like a legitimate business, and it did. No one would ever guess what they were really doing behind these four walls.

  At the moment, Slade was having a hard time figuring out what they were really doing behind them.

  “Hey, hey.” Sean’s sudden, boisterous return intruded on his unusual, and unwelcome, state of contemplation. “Thought you might still be here. Damn. It’s a holiday for Chrissake. Go eat some pork and sauerkraut or somethin’.”

  Grinning ear to ear as he made it to Slade’s oasis, Sean flopped back on the sofa, kicking his shoes off to prop his feet on the coffee table between them, and tipped a bottle to his lips, releasing an “ahhh” of satisfaction Slade trusted went beyond the fresh beer.

  “Did you sit here all night?”

  Gaze locked on the filthy bottoms of Sean’s socks, Slade noticed the toenail on Sean’s big toe poking its way through the threadbare fabric. Trying to remember, he couldn’t, whether Sean had been wearing shoes that night, or, like now, was in his socked feet. Strange. He usually noticed those kinds of things, was trained not to miss them. Every so often, such seemingly trivial points made a difference that was hard to see early on. The fact that he couldn’t remember, had blanked on the detail, Slade couldn’t help but wonder what else he might have missed.

  Get the fuck off of me!

  He had definitely been in shock when he first heard Fiona’s voice and rushed to the makeshift living room to discover there was no threat in the warehouse, just Fiona and Sean, though not as Slade had left them.

  When Sean turned at the sound of his approach, Fiona clocked him good, sending Sean to his knees on the floor next to the table.

  Cunt. Sean spat blood as he got back to his feet.

  Though he’d had a cleaning crew come in to lift the stain from the ornate rug, Slade could still see its splatter if he thought too hard about it.

  “Yo, Slade!” Sean slapped his hand down on the back of the sofa. “You just going to sit here or what, Man?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Slade declared, and, shifting on the couch, Sean nudged the table. A millimeter at most. Nothing at all like that night, when the legs of the coffee table were practically off the edge of the rug and onto the painted concrete floor. It was the kind of movement, Slade assumed, came from two people going at it hard on the tabletop. Or, he considered now, from one blindsiding the other and tackling her atop it.

  Hey Man, you forget something? Sean just picked his beer up from one of the end tables, swilling the blood left behind in his mouth from Fiona’s punch, and, eyes going to where Fiona sat facing away from them, hastily buttoning her jeans, Slade felt the white-hot stab of jealousy. Regardless of what he told Fiona later.

  Don’t worry, Sean tried to dissuade it. We were just fuckin’ around. You know I wouldn’t do you like that.

  When Slade looked to Fiona again, she threw a furious gaze over her shoulder, and he couldn’t read her. He thought he would always be able to. In that instant, though, he had no idea what he saw on her face. Maybe because Fiona hadn’t imagined or overstated anything. Maybe because it was fear, and Slade never would have recognized it on her, because, until that moment, he had never seen her afraid.

  “Need another?” Sean gestured to the empty bottle on the corner of the coffee table.

  “No.” Slade shook his head. “I don’t need a drink.”

  “Need someone to fuck?”

  Gaze rising at the question, Slade felt a curious sensation ooze down his spine.

  “Why?” he asked. “Are you volunteering?”

  “Fuck no.” Barking a laugh, Sean was too drunk to notice he wasn’t in on the joke. “But I was thinking Amber could use a little breaking in.”

  Pulse kicking up, Slade felt its rapid, hammering cadence behind his eyes. “I don’t want to fuck Amber,” he uttered, feeling the doubt he had managed to hold onto slip through his hands.

  “Well fuck, Man, what do you want?”

  I want him gone. Fiona had been perfectly clear in her request. Sean. I don’t trust him. I want him gone.

  Gone? What are you talking about? I brought him in on this, Slade reminded her. I can’t just ask him to leave.

  Either he goes or I go, Fiona said, and it sounded like an unfair ultimatum, because Fiona hadn’t actually told him what happened, hadn’t said it in so many words.

  He’s not a bad guy, Fiona. Clearly, she expected more of him, for Slade to take her side on instinct, to comprehend what he had seen. And maybe he had. Maybe that was why Fiona hated him so Goddamned much.

  Fuck you. Her parting words left little to the imagination.

  Then, she was gone. Without second thought. Without further explanation. And Slade just kept believing she would come back, that she would realize she was wrong about Sean, and give them both a second chance.

  Leaning forward, elbows perching on his knees, Slade released a small laugh at how ludicrous his thoughts had been. Any second chance Fiona gave Sean would give him another shot at her too, and, if he hit his t
arget, Fiona wouldn’t get any second chances.

  “What happened with Fiona?” There was a strange calm, Slade discovered, in his newfound clarity. His night spent in darkness had broken to the light of a new day. “It’s all right,” he prodded when Sean didn’t answer. “You can tell me. She’s with the altar boys now.”

  The customary insult putting Sean at ease, Slade knew he couldn’t resist the opportunity to brag for long.

  “She wanted it, Man.” Sitting more upright on the couch, Sean looked far more proud than apologetic. “Sorry. I know you two were like a thing, but I couldn’t exactly resist that pussy, right?”

  “Obviously not,” Slade uttered.

  “But when you walked in, Man.” Sean shook his head. “I mean, as soon as I saw you, I realized what I was doing. That was your girl, and you invited me into the crew. I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “I appreciate that.” Slade forced a smile as he watched Sean finish off the remainder of his beer. “So, just to make sure I have it straight…” Following his forward movement, he watched Sean’s empty bottle slide across the tabletop. “You’re saying you didn’t fuck Fiona because she was mine, and not because she was screaming, ‘Get the fuck off of me’?”

  “Son of a bitch.” Sean realized the conversation he’d gotten himself into. “You’re not going to go all feminist bullshit about this, are you?”

  “No,” Slade assured him. “Nobody’s got that kind of time.”

  “Thank Christ.” Heaving himself to sitting, Sean’s glazed gaze alternated between Slade and his feet as he pulled his shoes back on. “You need a day off. Go get some sleep. Hey, Amber.” He lumbered up from the sofa. “Could you give me a ride home?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Slade heard Amber hop down off a stool, realizing, at some point, she and Katlego had made it to the drafting table.

  “Sean?” he said, stretching to his feet and feeling the tension melt away as his hands pressed behind his back to work the kinks out and close around a textured grip.

  “What?” Sean turned back with minor annoyance.

  “Nothin’,” Slade shrugged. “I just didn’t want to shoot you in the back.”

  Gun out, he couldn’t decide which was more vivid, the alarm on Sean’s face, or the red that flowed from the bullet hole in his forehead, but Slade was equally mesmerized by both, until gravity won out and Sean fell backward, landing with the kind of earth-shaking thud Slade suspected a tree made when it went down in a forest.

  At the scrape of metal on concrete, Slade looked over to watch Katlego scramble to the far side of the drafting table with Amber.

  “Don’t worry.” He made a deliberate display of putting his gun on the floor, showing them his empty hands. “I’m not mad at either of you. I was mad at him, and maybe a little at myself. You can go. If you get the chance, stop by a phone and call the police, will you? Just tell them you heard a gunshot. I’ll wait here.”

  Making no moves until Slade sank back into his armchair, Amber and Katlego at last hurried off, and Slade heard the door close behind them, taking them back into a world that couldn’t possibly be any more dangerous than the one they had gotten themselves involved in.

  A world in which everyone was sure they knew whom it was okay to destroy. For purpose or for pleasure.

  A world governed by personal, or sometimes collective, beliefs, where each person subscribed to his or her own dogma with such steadfast fervor that, when the weapons were lowered and corpses amassed, they truly believed they had done the world a great service.

  Like Garcia.

  Slade, for his part, had never known. He had just done the job. The money had always been more than sufficient compensation. He didn’t need a fuckin’ purpose.

  Glancing down at Sean’s hulking form as a scarlet pool formed on the floor around his head, for once Slade knew with absolute certainty what he had done. With a single bullet, he took out one bad man, and put another on the path to prison. It was a new year, and, apparently, he was in the mood for a rather permanent resolution.

  8

  Incense assaulting his nostrils, Armand felt like throwing up. Maybe that was the real power behind the perfume, to seep into all the alcoves where sin hid and spawn a deep purge that cleansed both body and soul.

  Pews dotted with only a few parishioners, they were a few more than he would have liked. The man in back, he could smell the booze coming off in waves, not the after-scent of recent celebration, but a habitual odor that clung like his stained and wrinkly clothes that didn’t quite fit. The old lady in the front, she was most likely a daily worshipper who lived close by and had nothing else to do with her long days. And the woman in black on the far side of the aisle, head bowed and covered, was clearly in mourning. It was only the fact they had taken the boy out of Galway, and not Glasgow, that kept Armand from linking her grief to his most recent transgression. Somewhere someone was missing the boy, but logic and distance assured him it shouldn’t be anyone in this church.

  Skin beginning to crawl beneath his shirt, it reminded Armand why he was there. Though it wouldn’t last beyond a few days, for the time being the raw itch was a form of penance. Not nearly penance enough, he cut across a row toward the confessionals, accepting that no one in the chapel cared about his sins, absorbed as they were in their own.

  Door pulled shut behind him a minute later, Armand situated onto the kneeling bench, too padded for real atonement. Not normally one to agree with corporeal punishments for spiritual offenses, today he felt as if he could kneel on knife points for a hundred years and still not be absolved.

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Heart pounding as, at last, the dark screen went up, the darkness seemed to sink even deeper beyond it. “It has been ten days since my last confession.”

  Inhaling deeply, the rich smell of the wood, the light scent of the polish, the conflict inside his head began to die down. In war, no moments of peace existed. On the streets, things most people would never know about existed. At home, he slept with his gun and two knives within reach. Inside the hallowed walls of this church was one of the few places in the world where Armand felt truly safe. It was illusory, of course, and the last place he should. For it was here the gravest danger was most pronounced, the danger of losing his very soul.

  “Name your sins.” It was in an effort to keep it that he came.

  “Where’s Father Andrew?” Armand asked. He knew the church schedule by heart, dozens of church schedules, all over the world. It was the kind of internal rolodex a man had to keep when he never knew where he might be when he needed to repent.

  “Last rites,” the priest responded.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Father Francis.”

  Armand couldn’t recall the name, not from the last Sunday he made it to church, or the clergy rosters. It happened, though. He lost track. Every now and then, there was a new face, a new voice.

  The man on the other side of the screen a virtual stranger, it occurred to Armand it would make things easier. He thought he would have to withhold, to try to make do with reparations for lesser sins, but, knowing this man didn’t know him, wouldn’t recognize his voice, and that he never had to see him again if he didn’t want to, it came as some relief to Armand that he could fully confess, to everything, exorcise all the demons within, though he’d made good and sure he could never get what he had done truly off his chest.

  “I have failed to keep the Sabbath for many months,” he eased in. It felt almost ridiculous, admitting to sins that didn’t look like sins at all in the face of what he’d done. It was like stepping on an anthill to reach the peak of a mountain. “I took the Lord’s name in vain. My mother wanted me to come home to visit, and I wouldn’t make the time.” Feeling his face grow warmer with each meager confession, Armand realized he was just burning fuel and he pressed his forehead to the cool wood next to the screen in an effort to keep himself from overheating. “I killed a young boy.” He could say it only in a whisper,
not sure Father Francis would hear, hoping he didn’t.

  “Why?” The softly voiced question lulled Armand into a sense of peace when he deserved none.

  “Father,” he breathed. “You must know there are things in this world that cannot be explained, dangers humanity knows nothing about, or knows only as superstition.”

  “Of course,” Father Francis returned.

  “I know those things too,” Armand said. “It’s a war with the devil we’re fighting, isn’t it? If we can tip the world in God’s favor, isn’t that always the right thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Father Francis replied. “Is it? You said you killed a boy.”

  “I did,” Armand confessed again.

  “And how exactly did that tip the world in God’s favor?”

  “He was a sacrifice,” Armand tried to explain it, tried to believe there was an explanation. “As was the woman I killed before him. When they died, they took evil out of the world with them.”

  “How?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” The wood creaked as Armand shook his head against it.

  “Try,” Father Francis said, and, though it was as mild as every other word, Armand got the sudden, sinking feeling he should have said nothing.

  Eyes rising to the profile he couldn’t entirely distinguish on the other side of the screen, he pressed back from the confessional wall and up off the bench, grimacing as the old wood gave a groan of relief. Reaching for the worn gold knob as quietly as he could, Armand glanced back at the screen as the latch on the door came free, jumping at the sight of the woman in black standing just outside the confessional when he eked it open.

  Catching a flash of blonde hair and familiar blue eyes as the woman tipped her head up, Armand started to scream, to warn the others to save themselves, but even his vocal cords couldn’t outpace a deraph. Hand wrapping around his throat, it stopped the sound before it started, and Auris thrust him back into the confessional, dragging the door shut at her back.

  Hand fumbling for his pocket, Armand lashed out with the other, knocking the black hat and veil from Auris’ head and gasping for air as her grip tightened around his throat. When his fingers at last closed around his knife, he sprung it open and struck blindly, slicing through fabric, his foot planting firmly in Auris’ abdomen and sending her back into the door.