Sinner

by Ted Dekker

  “No.”

  “Never? Not even a little bit? Fail to report that tip money you receive at the tables now and then?”

  “Never.”

  Wrong answer, Billy thought. The man had just thrown out his credibility.

  “Good.” Billy looked at his client. “Tell the court how much money you reported on your return last year. Roughly.”

  Sacks looked at the judge.

  “Answer the question.”

  “A hundred ninety thousand.”

  “And that was all the income that passed through your hands from all sources? No more cash?”

  Now the numbers started to come, streaming into Billy’s mind as if fired from a machine gun.

  Seven million, cash, gambling only.

  Twenty-nine million if you count the trades.

  The gravy though, only two million five.

  What the heck is he doing?

  “Cash? Less cash actually. That was my total income.”

  “Have you ever had the opportunity to steal, Mr. Sacks?”

  He stared the man down and let the answers flow.

  I make my living stealing. If they only knew how much I skimmed . . .

  “Sure.”

  “And have you ever stolen from your employer?”

  Of course. Everyone steals.

  Billy pushed on before the man could answer. “Let me rephrase the question. How much did you steal from your employer?”

  Which time? Half a mil. What are you doing? The man’s right cheek twitched.

  Billy rescued him. “I realize this line of questioning seems strange. I mean, I’m your attorney, right? I have no business even bringing up the possibility that you might steal money from your employer. But I do because I know what you know, Mr. Sacks. That you wouldn’t dare steal from your employer. Isn’t that right?”

  “Objection, leading the witness.”

  None of what Billy was saying could mean anything, and that was part of the point. He had to get Sacks off his center quickly, before the judge stepped in.

  Billy held up his hand to accept the objection.“My point is, Mr. Sacks is a family man who has his daughters’well-being on his mind. Even if he did steal a dime here or a dime there, he wouldn’t dare confess it here, in court, any more than he would tell us where he put that dime. Or if he still had that dime.”He paused. “Or how to get to that dime. The account numbers . . .” Another pause. “The PIN numbers . . .”

  Billy let the numbers flow into his mind.

  “. . . all of it buried in his mind. It’ll go with him to his grave.”

  “Counselor! ”Now the judge was beyond herself. “Approach the bench.”

  “I’m coming in for a landing, Your Honor. I promise, I have a point. Please don’t stop this midstream.”

  Billy took the courtroom’s absolute silence as an invitation to proceed, and he did so quickly, spinning to the jury.

  “My point is this: every one of you on the jury has stolen at some point in your lives. Cheated your employer, misreported to the IRS, lied to your husband—”

  “Objection! The jury is not on trial here. Your Honor?” the DA squealed, face red.

  Billy continued. The jurists looked at him, and he threw their answers back at them without using names.

  “A hundred dollars from the teacher’s lunch fund, fifty thousand in charity donations you never made, your secretary, Barbara, Pete, Joe, Susan. Those tips are income, all twenty thousand of them. Those SAT scores that got you into Harvard . . .”

  Their eyes widened ever so slightly as he named their sins.

  “If you’ve done that and yet refuse to confess, can you really blame my client for doing the same as you?”

  “Counselor, this is enough!” The judge slammed her gavel down.

  Time for an exit. His argument was convoluted. Butchered. Meaningless.

  But he didn’t care. Nothing mattered except for the numbers that already ran circles in his head.

  Anthony Sacks’s numbers were his only means of salvation now.

  Billy raised his voice and made his final impassioned plea. “Just because a man is a liar and a cheat doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. You may not like Anthony Sacks any more than I do, but don’t hold his lying against him—you’re as guilty as he.”

  He faced the courtroom and spread his hands. “We all are. No more questions.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  THERE WAS a God after all,Darcy thought, pouring boiling water over a mint tea bag. Then she immediately pushed the thought from her mind.

  At the very least it was a good day to be alive. She dropped in two cubes of sugar, stirred the tea with a teaspoon, and stepped lightly across the tile floor toward the living room, warming her hands with the steaming porcelain cup.

  Eight p.m. She could either watch the latest episode of The Thirty, which she recorded weekly, or settle for a bit of Net surfing before curling up in bed with the latest Frakes novel, Birthright, which had to be the best of the vampire series so far.

  Thinking of the book, she stopped halfway to the love seat in the middle of her living room. Maybe she should just skip the Net and head to bed. Nothing was worse than reading too late and falling asleep two or three pages into a novel. It had taken her a month to read a novel in fits and starts last year—some vampire-romance book that wasn’t very interesting, but that was beside the point. She vowed never to read in such short spurts again.

  No, she would surf first and see if anyone had left her any messages while she was at it. She eased into the large leather seat and tapped the built-in controller on the right arm. A five-foot screen on the wall brightened.

  Loading . . .

  Her mind tripped back to the review at the plant. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. The world was running scared from lawsuits, and her employers had seen her aggressive reaction as a sure sign of her intent.

  Had they really doubled her salary? Or had she misunderstood that part? Either way, she hardly cared as long as they left her alone, which they were. For now.

  She had a near perfect job.

  She had her sweet mint tea.

  She had the Net.

  It was indeed good to be alive.

  Truth be told, she couldn’t remember ever feeling so content as she did now. It had taken years of hard work and hundreds of hours of counseling, but she was finally coming to grips with her demons. So to speak.

  She’d repressed large chunks of her memory in an effort to survive a tortured past in a monastery, her therapist had concluded. Dissociative amnesia resulting from traumatic events. This was why she’d with-drawn from normal living in favor of the protected environment she’d built for herself.

  Billy.

  A smile tempted her lips. She did remember her first love. More of a crush, maybe.

  The screen waited, homepage loaded. Square windows into her customized on-demand world displayed slots for Entertainment,News, Friends, Services, and Other.

  She quickly checked to see if any messages had come from Susan, a Net friend whom she’d met only once in person but a thousand times on the screen. The only person other than her therapist who knew everything about Darcy. No messages.

  The only noteworthy news was a story about a lynching in Kansas City, the third such lynching in three states. Race related. You’d think the world would have learned by now that race had nothing to do with anything. She had no patience for such stories.

  No need to order groceries. She spun through the menus, running through a mental checklist of loose ends and options. This screen was her world in a box. A nice, easy world that accommodated her love of vampires and heroes and saber-toothed villains capped in black. Fictional bad guys, mythical monsters. Safe fantasy.

  Finding nothing that drew her attention, Darcy got stuck on a half-hour comedy show that she found only vaguely humorous, Three’s Company, a new show that made fun of one Hindu, one Muslim, and one Christi
an who shared an apartment in Manhattan.

  She found anything religious unsettling; anything to do with priests deeply disturbing. But the writers of this show leveled some of the most audacious religious slurs imaginable with a humorous boldness that she found at times irresistible, if a bit embarrassing. Particularly when it came to Christians, or, as the show sometimes characterized them using the most offensive of all religious slurs, blood—

  Darcy cut the thought short. However wounded she might be over her own run-in with the church, she wouldn’t stoop to such bigoted name-calling. Society at large had turned against Christianity with a vengeance over the past decade, and for good reason, Darcy thought. But poking fun at those who still embraced the faith was mean-spirited.

  She changed the feed and began to surf. News? No, not news. Reality game shows? She didn’t have enough patience to watch others make a spectacle of themselves tonight. She should just head to bed with the Frakes novel.

  She rotated into the Discovery feed. Tonight’s documentary examined events that led to the two assassination attempts on President Robert Stenton last year—the second of which succeeded. Numerous theories were still argued, but the one that dominated suggested that Stenton had been hit by Muslim extremists in retaliation for the Iranian prime minister’s death—while on U.S. soil.

  If there was a silver lining to the upheaval last year, it was the West’s final awaking to the volatility of religion, or more rightly, faith. The last twenty years were replete with examples of violence carried out in the name of God or Allah or whatever the fundamental extremists worshipped with their raging hearts and bloody swords.

  Tolerance had become the watchword of the day. A modest but important bit of progress in world history. Or at least American history. It was a step in the right direction, to be sure, but only a step. What the world needed was a thousand more steps in the same direction.

  Darcy sipped her tea and lingered on the feed. The commentator switched to an interview with an expert on the subject. The peace in Darcy’s small, protected bubble was shattered with a single image.

  A priest in a black robe.

  She set her cup down, felt it tip as she scrambled for the controls. Hot tea burned her thumb, but her mind was more interested in changing channels.

  Not until she’d successfully done so did she manage a curse. That was it; she was done with the screen tonight.

  She cleaned up the mess with a towel,went through what she called her retiring ritual—pink flannel pajamas, face wash, face cream, tall glass of iced water, covers back, book in hand—and slipped between her sheets with a sigh.

  That night Darcy read two chapters of Birthright before setting the book on the nightstand, turning the lights off, and snuggling three pillows tight against her body as her mind drifted into the land of flying black beasts seducing young maidens with promises of immortality and power.

  She was asleep before she had time to wonder if she would fall asleep quickly.

  The sounds began at one that morning. At first in her dreams, a steady thumping knocked about the edges of the tale she was constructing deep in REM sleep.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  An innocent construction of a healthy imagination.

  I’m a-knockin’, knockin’, knockin’ at your back door, baby.

  She felt herself smile at the sound of that voice. She knew it, of course. It was Billy.

  Wanna take a look, Darcy? Just one look, one taste, one tiny spike in their minds. Wanna trip, baby?

  I don’t know, should I, Billy?

  One look, baby. Only one.

  Thunk, thunk, thunk.

  Darcy’s eyes snapped open. The clock read 1:23 in bold red letters. She’d had a nightmare. They came and went every few months, not like they used to.

  She flipped her pillow over so the cool side would rest against her cheek. Wouldn’t really call them nightmares anymore. Just recurring dreams. They hardly bothered—

  Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  Darcy gasped and pushed herself up. Had she actually heard that?

  Rat-a-tat-tat. Thunk, thunk.

  Her heart slammed into her throat. Someone was beating on the house. The front door?

  Thunk, thunk . . . crash.

  Darcy threw the sheets off and slid her feet to the floor. Someone or something was beating on the front door. She lived in a small two-bedroom house surrounded by three acres just outside of Lewiston. She’d chosen the place because it was affordable and private. Animals were known to come in now and then, but this sounded too . . . regular . . .

  Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!

  The sound was now loud enough to wake the dead. Like a hammer.

  She jumped from the bed and whirled, looking for . . . unsure of what to look for. A weapon, but she had no gun. A knife.

  Slow down, Darcy. It’s a deer or a raccoon. Just go out and take a look.

  Thunk, thunk, thunk.

  The sound had shifted. Darcy reached a trembling hand for the bed-room doorknob, turned it slowly, and eased the door open.

  She crouched and hurried into the dark living room on the balls of her feet, eyes peeled and pointed toward the front door.

  Bang.

  Just one, but it was loud and it was most definitely the sound of some-thing hitting the front door. Right there, not ten feet from where Darcy stood in the dark. Then another one.

  Bang!

  Move, move, go, go. Go where? She stood fixed to the floor with fear. Should she call out? What? Hey you? What do you want? No.

  Should she call the police? Yes. Yes, the police. And tell them what? The thoughts crashing through her mind were chased off by another loud bang.

  There was a window that looked out onto the front door from the breakfast nook on her left. Without allowing herself any more delay, Darcy crept to the window, carefully spread two of the blinds, and peered out into the night.

  There was a large man at her door dressed in a black trench coat. He held a hammer the length of his arm and was sealing her in with planks and long nails through the door. Thunk, thunk.

  Had sealed her doorway.

  The man stood back, lowered the huge hammer. Slowly, as if it were controlled by small electric motors, his head turned and looked in her direction.

  Darcy’s blood turned to ice.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  NOT EVERYONE knew where in Atlantic City Ricardo Muness could be found, but Billy did. He knew because he’d been in the office at the back of the Lady Luck Hotel and Casino twice before. Once with Anthony Sacks, making a desperate and successful plea to double his credit from $150,000, and again three months later to be told that he would be defending that same scumbag, Anthony Sacks, who had vouched for his credit worthiness.

  Tonight he went alone, knowing that his chances of leaving the Lady Luck with all four limbs intact were smaller than a blind throw of the dice at the craps table.

  He hadn’t changed his shirt or the black slacks since leaving the court-room. Personal hygiene, dress, food—none of these rated high on his list of priorities today.

  Survival went straight to the top spot. Self-preservation was the only thing on his mind, gnawing the edges of his brain into frayed pasta.

  He walked down a dingy hall behind the casino, ducked into a stair-well, and descended to the underground level.

  After a series of motions and objections thrown about by his own client and the prosecution, the judge had dismissed the jury and demanded counsel meet her in her chambers immediately.

  She was curious as to Billy’s tactics in the courtroom, even wondered if he hadn’t pulled off a brilliant defense in what she thought had been a fore-gone trial. The jury would have seen through the last witness, she thought.

  You could go places, Counselor. Get a grip on your life. And put on a clean shirt the next time you stand before a judge.

  But she didn’t say any of it. She only expressed her dismay at his antics in he
r courtroom and demanded that prosecution and defense present closing arguments next. No more motions, no more surprise witnesses, this case was going to the jury room first thing Monday.

  So agreed.

  It no longer mattered. Billy wasn’t going to be around Monday morning or any morning, for that matter.

  “Can I help you?” A hand on his chest stopped him.

  “Yes, counselor of Anthony Sacks. I have to see Ricardo Muness immediately.”

  “He knows you’re coming?” The man was dressed in a blue pinstripe suit that looked completely out of place in the dingy hall.

  “If he’s as smart as I think he is, he does.”

  “Wait here.” He stepped back in the shadows, spoke softly into a cell phone, then emerged.

  “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “It means you have about ten seconds before I break your face. Leave.”

  “Tell Muness that I have $526,000 dollars for him. If he refuses it, I will assume he intends for me to have it. The choice is his.”

  “You don’t understand the word no, I take it.”

  “And I take it that you’re about as stupid as a sack of air. Have it your way.” Billy spun and headed back up the stairs.

  He made it all the way into the main casino before the suited muscle caught him by the arm from behind.

  “This way.”

  A single look in the man’s eyes told him that the guy’s head really was about as empty as a sack of air.

  Ricardo Muness sat behind the pale desk that had become synonymous with Billy’s image of the man. Bleached maple. Like bone. Otherwise everything about the man was dark. Boots, goatee, slicked hair, tanned skin. Even the dark glasses that covered his eyes.

  “Sit,” he said softly.

  Billy sat in one of two black leather chairs and stared at Atlantic City’s wealthiest underground financier.

  Nothing. Not a whisper of the man’s thoughts.

  Glasses.

  Okay, well, that was new. So he needed to actually see a person’s eye-balls to hear their thoughts. Billy crossed his legs and nonchalantly dried his palms on his thighs. Over the last six hours his focus had been split between the keys into cyberspace that Sacks had given him, and the phenomenon that was opening his mind to the world’s thoughts.