I Have Sinned
McGarry Stateside - Book 2
Caimh McDonnell
McFori Ink
Copyright © 2019 by McFori Ink
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Caimh McDonnell
Visit my website at www.WhiteHairedirishman.com
First edition: June 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912897-07-0
Created with Vellum
Contents
Author’s note on Geography
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
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Author’s note on Geography
Please note, this book, although set in America, is written by an Irishman and so the spellings used are those his mammy considers to be the correct ones. If it’s any consolation to you, she’s not wild about the swearing but we left that in.
Also, while the author is rightly renowned for the gritty realism of his work, the area Coopersville that appears in this book, while based on several areas in New York, is actually fictitious. He did this as he didn’t want to get slapped for inadvertently lowering the value of anyone’s house.
Prologue
“You may finish.”
Bishop Ramirez gasped. He was kneeling beside his bed, praying alone – or so he had thought. He looked up at the stucco wall, its faded yellow paint, and at the crucifix that hung there. He could feel the hint of a breeze through the window, carrying the scent of flowers from the garden below. He blessed himself and resisted the urge to turn around and look directly at the man he now knew to be standing behind him.
Previous bishops had had guards, but Bishop Ramirez had endeavoured to make himself as different as possible from his predecessors. The last one in particular had been overly enamoured with the trappings of the office. His excess and willingness to forgive the unforgivable for the sake of convenience had led to his downfall.
Ramirez had joked, throughout his career as a priest, that for him to ascend to the role he now held, something very bad would have to happen. Something had. A scandal that had rocked the church to its very foundations. He was “a clean pair of hands”, having spent all of his career outside the corridors of power, preferring the brutal honesty of the streets. He had only accepted the role on the understanding that he would be allowed to do it his way. His mission was to bring the church back to the people and restore it to the role it had always been intended to have: that of servant, not ruler. This approach had gradually started to win back public support, even as it angered those who had grown fat under the previous regime.
So no, this visit was not unexpected in the broader sense, although Ramirez would admit that he hadn’t expected a man to appear, out of nowhere, five floors up in a locked room. It was probably just as well that he didn’t have guards, as he would surely now be praying for the repose of their souls.
Ramirez nodded to himself. “And so it goes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind, my son. May I ask… I know I have angered many people in the last couple of years, but who in particular brought you to my door?”
“You did.”
“And how did I do that?”
The man moved so that he was standing at the far side of the bed, leaning on the wall with the crucifix to his right. He held a gun in his hand – but casually. He had sandy hair that reached to his shoulders and looked maybe fifty, but with a lean, hard edge to him. A capable man, capable of anything.
“May I say, you are taking this well.”
Bishop Ramirez shrugged. “We are alone in this room and, even on my best day, I don’t imagine I could fight my way out of this if I wanted to.”
It was the man’s turn to shrug. “That is true.”
“I knew when I took this job that there would be risks. It is the nature of these things.”
“And besides,” said the man, “this is not the first time in your life that you have had a gun pointed at your head.”
It was not a question. They looked at each other for a long moment, neither man speaking. Finally, the bishop nodded. “I see.”
“Yes.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Not to me.”
Ramirez blessed himself. “I am very sorry for the death.”
“What death?”
The two men locked eyes again.
“I don’t know what you…” started Ramirez.
The man laughed. “Please, you can stop the charade. I know the truth.”
“In some ways, the man you knew did die that night.”
“I raised him from a boy. He was my son.”
Ramirez ran the back of his hand across his forehead, where a thin film of sweat was forming. It was a warm night, although he couldn’t blame it on that. “Sadly, the world is full of bad fathers.”
“Yes, many of them wear the same robes you do.”
Ramirez nodded. “That is true.”
“I’m curious, though. How did you do it? It was an impressive trick.”
“There was no trick. I simply offered him the chance to confess his sins.”
“I see.”
“I would be happy to hear your confession too, if you so wish?”
“I’ll pass. God turned his back on me a long time ago.”
The bishop shook his head. “No, he did not.”
“I didn’t come here for a sermon.”
“What did you come here for?”
The man raised the gun. “Apart from the obvious?”
“I could have been dead several minutes ago. You could have shot me in the street. They have repeatedly told me I am an easy target. I sense this is personal.”
The man’s face tightened. “You stole from me.”
“No. Respectfully, I did not. People are not possessions. A man has the right to turn from the path he is on.”
“Without me, the boy would have been dead a long time ago.”
“But with you, the man had become death itself.”
The man shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“Perhaps. But it is no life.”
The man took a step forward, and for the first time, anger showed in his face. “You want a reason? Fine. I wanted you to know that I know. I didn’t want you to die thinking you had beaten me.”
“I had never met you until tonight. Do you truly believe I view it in those terms?”
“I am going to take him back.”
Bishop Ramirez shook his head. “He is not the man you knew.”
“We shall see. Any last words?”
The bishop blessed himself one last time, closed his eyes and spoke a prayer, his lips moving from muscle memory as the words formed in his mind. Then he looked into the hard eyes that were staring at him down the barrel of the gun. “I forgive you.”
The man shot him once through the forehead. The bishop slumped onto the floor.
“The feeling isn’t mutual.”
Chapter One
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…”
Father Gabriel moved the rosary beads around between his fingers and did his best to stifle a yawn. It had already been a very long day and it wasn’t anywhere near over.
Last night had been great – a rare victory. He had seen one of his kids win a state championship in the ring. The victory was nice, but it was what it represented that meant so much. Coopersville, when mentioned at all, was used as a cautionary tale about what happened when political neglect met chronic poverty. It was the bogeyman of the Bronx, the place parents warned their children they’d end up if they weren’t good. And St Theresa’s sat in the middle of a three-way gang war without end. Children were sucked in only to be spat out as young people with dead eyes and bullet wounds. Watching Bianca as she stood in the ring, the referee holding her hand aloft, so different from the withdrawn and distrustful girl who had slouched into his gym two years ago, had meant so much. He had been forced to fight back the tears.
His elation hadn’t lasted long. He’d got the call at 2am, having just got into bed after dropping the kids back home. There’d been a drive-by over on Weston Avenue, in retaliation for one earlier in the week. He’d gone to the hospital to give Little T the last rites and sit with his mother. The woman’s grief was without bounds. Then he’d spoken to Razor, who’d been with him at the time and had taken two bullets. It was amazing: on the street they were hard men, brutal soldiers in a never-ending war, yet in a hospital bed they reverted to an almost childlike state. Gabriel had been here so many times over the last seven years. Each time, when the inevitable commitment to getting out had been made, he had to embrace it, to hope it would stick and the young men would stay the course. Invariably, they didn’t. On the last Tuesday of every month, without fail, Gabriel took the bus upstate to visit with as many of the boys from his parish as he could during prison visiting hours. On the first Wednesday of every month, he visited graves.
The inside of the confessional was silent, except for the slightly laboured breathing of the man on the other side of the latticed wood divider. It was also unpleasantly warm, the church’s heating system being blessed with only two settings – “sweltering sweatbox” or ‘off’. In a New York January where the temperature was struggling to get anywhere above freezing, sweltering sweatbox was the better option.
The man on the other side of the confessional was mumbling to himself. Father Gabriel waited patiently. As it was in his nature to notice such things, he observed that there was a musty smell to the man, as if his clothing had got wet and not been allowed to dry properly. Father Gabriel took laundry seriously, it was the closest thing he had to a hobby.
The man on the other side coughed and said, “Sorry, I’ll start again.”
“Take your time, my son.”
“Right. Thanks. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…”
The man went silent again.
Gabriel wasn’t great with people. It wasn’t that he disliked them; rather, it was that he was an introvert in a job that all but demanded an extrovert. Other people just had that thing – the ability to effortlessly command a room and win somebody over. He had got better at speaking, particularly in the last couple of years. Still, he was a lot better one-on-one than addressing groups. It also helped that, in contrast to his first few years in the job, he had finally established relationships. It was easier to talk to people you knew than to strangers. This was why he liked the confessional. If you had to converse with a stranger, a predefined set of rules and the cloak of anonymity made it easier. He could just listen to the words and not have to worry about much else.
“When did Princess Diana die?”
“Excuse me?”
“Princess Di,” said the man. “When did she pop her clogs? I’m trying to figure out when I was last at confession.”
“I don’t know that.”
“Could you google it?”
“I do not have a phone.”
“How do you not have a phone?”
“I own a cell phone, but I do not bring it into confessions, for obvious reasons.”
“Ah right, I get ye – fair play. Although it must be tempting to sneak it in, play a bit of Candy Crush in the boring bits?”
“No, that is not— so, your confession?”
“Right, yeah. Sorry, Padre, I’m a bit out of practice on the whole confessing front. It’s been… well, we don’t know that. Hang on…” There was a soft thump, as if the man had slapped the wall. “Dolly the sheep! What year was Dolly the sheep?”
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You must do. Dolly, the cloned sheep? They made a sheep out of the DNA of another sheep. It was supposed to be this amazing thing, and I remember thinking, if it was that clever, how come sheep have been doing it all this time?”
“An interesting point, but I am afraid that I don’t know anything about this sheep.”
“I suppose the Catholic Church probably isn’t hot on all that stuff. Playing God and all that. Is there somebody we can ask?”
Father Gabriel was trying to decide if the man was drunk. His accent was Irish, which, even in the melting pot that was Coopersville, was unusual, and he had a rather disconcerting stream-of-consciousness way of speaking. Normally in confession, Gabriel just let people talk, but he was aware that this conversation might need some directing, given the unusual path it was already taking. “How long it has been since your last confession is not important. What matters is that you’re here now.”
“Right. Spot on, Padre. Sorry, I’m rambling. Bit nervous.”
“That’s perfectly alright.”
“Let’s call it twenty-two years.”
“OK.”
“Give or take. Jesus, that’s a long old time, isn’t it?”
“As I said, you are here now.”
“Right enough. By the way, can I ask – why are there big floodlights sitting in the church?”
Father Gabriel sighed; these were one of the biggest headaches he was currently dealing with. “We – actually, the diocese – hired building contractors, because our roof keeps leaking.”
St Theresa’s was a large church, built in a time when not showing up on a Sunday was considered scandalous. These days, regular attendance was the exception and not the rule, but the building hadn’t got any smaller, only chronically in need of repair.
“So the big floodlights are here so they can find the leak?”
“Originally, yes. But the firm went bust, and despite extensive phone calls, nobody wants to come and take them away.”
“Oh, right. That’s a pain.”
“Yes,” agreed Gabriel. “These things are sent to test us.”
Every day, Father Gabriel looked at the unsightly floodlights and resisted the urge to move them outside and let nature, or at least the larcenous tendencies of s
ome of the locals, take its course.
“Anyway,” said Gabriel, “back to your confession.”
“Absolutely,” said the man. “So, how do we start this? I mean, twenty-two years – that’s a lot of sins.”
“Where would you like to start?”
“Well… we could knock out the Commandments? Use them as a guide, like.”
“If you feel that would be beneficial?”
“Well, ’twould be a good warm-up at least. I think I remember them. Christian Brothers properly battered them into me. First one – no false gods, right?”
“That is correct.”
“We’re grand on that one. One hundred per cent. Do you think he put that one first as it was the easiest one?”
“I think it was because it was important.”
“Ah, well yeah, I suppose. They’re all important though, aren’t they? I mean, not the one about coveting your neighbour’s ass. That feels like he had nine corkers and he wanted the even number.”
“It is not our place to second-guess the Lord.”
“No, you’re right. You’re dead right. Anyway – taking his name in vain? I’m scoring badly there, I’m afraid. I’ve always been shocking on that one. To be fair though, I’m Irish – that’s just how we talk. ’Tisn’t meant in a bad way. God is in the water over there.”
I Have Sinned Page 1
