Sins of the Fathers

by John Richmond

CALVIN TOOK VITALS. The demon lay pressed into the bed, a pool of sweat and urine mixing into the sheets, but no blood. Father Calvin was careful that there be no bleeding and no marks other than the stippling of tiny pink holes along strategic nerve clusters, in joints, genitals. The pulse was strong. He pulled his fingers from beside the boy’s throat. The demon had ceased its infernal wailing in response to Calvin’s administrations of the lancet and had fallen into a stupor. It had been a couple of hours since Tie had left and Calvin wanted this done before she got back. It was time to give the demon another chance to leave. Calvin snapped his fingers in front of its eyes.

  “C’mon, wake up.”

  It moaned, head thrashing weakly.

  Calvin slapped it hard across the face. The demon’s eyes, hate-lasers, focused on his own. “There we go,” Calvin said. “Enough?”

  “Stupid, limited, pig-fucking—”

  Calvin vaulted onto the bed, straddling the boy’s heaving chest. He sat down hard on the small body and crushed its head to the pillow with an open palm against the forehead. He brought the lancet—its business end now dark—to within an inch of one wide, staring eye and stopped.

  “Tearduct.”

  “No! No more! Templar, please!”

  “Get out.”

  The demon wailed, no longer menacing and putrid, but terrified and small, small as a child. “We want to leave. We do! We swear on your own God! But we cannot leave. There is nowhere to go.”

  Calvin waggled the lancet. “Then go nowhere.”

  “We would, we would, but we can’t. Nowhere will not have us back. The door is closed. The door is closed to us!”

  “I don’t believe you,” Calvin said. “I think you’re…” He trailed off, head cocked to one side. Calvin leapt off the bed. The demon whooshed a breath.

  “Shut up.”

  “Templar, you have won. We will leave if—.”

  Calvin pressed a hand down on the boy’s mouth, careful of teeth. “Stop making noise right now or you piss steel, understand?” He took his hand away. The demon nodded, eyes on the lancet. “Good.” Calvin hooked an arm through the straps of the medical bag and disappeared through the bedroom door.

  The priest shoved through the front door and leapt the porch steps, shifting his center of gravity in mid-flight. He landed to one side of the flagstones, his feet betraying no sound. He’d been talking, flapping his fucking gums, when the sound reached his ears. He wasn’t even sure what it had been because he’d been too busy playing Dirty Harry, but whatever had slipped into his mind below the sound of his own voice triggered an alarm. Father Calvin had learned to trust his senses. He may not know what it was, but something was wrong. He ran into the middle of the door-yard/clearing and froze, head cocked.

  Nothing.

  He waited. A breeze wafted above his head, shivering the trees. The air in the yard below was glass. He exhaled and closed his eyes, the lines in his face dissolved. Leaves rustled, late afternoon sighs exchanging breath with the oncoming evening. A crow called, scolding from its perch in the wood. Calvin’s eyes opened. The crow squawked again. It was pissed. Calvin turned toward the dark slash of path at the other end of the clearing. His feet hushed over the grass toward the woods. The gloom rolled over his shoulders.

  Calvin stuttered down the path: a few yards of silent sprint, a halt and listen, a few more yards. He stopped again and opened his other senses. Calvin flared his nostrils, hoping for a hint of Tie’s perfume. The breeze shifted and Calvin almost gagged on what it brought him. Decay, rot, death. The crow warned again from directly over Calvin’s head. He shot a glance into the boughs of the silvered maple overhead. Twenty-five seconds later, he was crouching on a thick branch two stories above the trail.

  It had been a long time since he’d shimmied up a tree. That had been almost ten years ago and he’d had the strap of a .223 over his shoulder instead of a medical bag. The skin on Calvin’s inner thighs and knees was abraded. He’d have preferred denim to the thin black fabric of his priest’s garb. He could feel spots of blood soaking through the fabric like sweat after a long run. The pain was manageable. All pain was manageable. All physical pain.

  Someone was coming up the trail below him. Calvin slowed his breathing and peered through a break in the fractal-edged canopy. Tie walked into his field of vision. She moved like a sleepwalker, her eyes blank and straight ahead. Tear tracks printed her cheeks, but her chest was calm, her shoulders didn’t heave and Seungk with sobs. Calvin squinted. She was furious. A moment later, Calvin knew why. Frank Mason emerged from the shadows behind her, a handgun pointed at the back of her head. He held the pistol like a marksman, left hand supporting the right, body turned to the side. Mason crab-walked—one forward step with his right, his left sliding quick to catch up—to maintain a perfect firing stance. One eye was squinted shut. He had her dead-bang.

  Calvin’s breath hitched. Mason knew he was up against hard odds and he wasn’t taking any chances on someone getting the drop on him. Calvin couldn’t see it from his perch, but he was certain Mason’s index finger was wrapped around the trigger of that gun. He had set himself so that if someone even ripped a loud fart he would still get the shot off. Calvin imagined the single metallic bang from the pistol and Tie’s head exploding in a burst of pink. The droplets would hang in the sunlight, a fine glowing mist over her body as it slumped to the ground.

  Rawk!

  Calvin hunched his shoulders. He tracked the noise to the fat black crow, gripping the branch not three feet away from him.

  Rawk-rawk! Hell outta’ my tree!

  Calvin looked back down at the ground.

  Frank Mason was staring straight up at him, his gun still trained on Tie. She kept walking. Mason’s voice slicked out and flicked her ear. “Stop, cunt.” Tie stopped, her fingers clenched into fists. Mason stared up into the tree, something was in there. He squinted, trying to penetrate the dense screen of summer leaves and shadow. The cloud of flies buzzing around his head made it difficult to see. Something was watching.

  Calvin couldn’t move. If he took his hands off the branch he’d have to shift his footing as well or he would lose it and come crashing down at Mason’s feet. If he shifted his footing the branch would shake more than was strictly necessary for the movement of a bird, even one as big and fucking bothersome as this piece of shit crow. It hopped closer, now only a foot away. It cocked its head, flinty eyes flicking sparks of stupid malice. A mosquito, a half visible blur of legs and shadow, quivered over the crow’s back. Calvin’s own eyes widened. Could crows get rabies? Or maybe it was West Nile.

  Rawk!

  Mason retrained the gun into the canopy and fired a tight volley, the .44’s reports crashing off the trees like focused thunder claps. Tie tensed, her head attempting to disappear into her shoulder-blades. Mason jerked taut as something rustled and thudded down through the branches. A second later, the body of a large crow spread its broken wings over the roots of the maple. “Got you, fucker,” Mason croaked and put the gun back on Tie. “Move.”

  Three minutes later they were out of sight of the maple tree, walking toward the cabin. John Calvin rebalanced on the branch so he could use his left hand to wipe the gore and feathers off his mouth. A bloody smile floated up like a methane bubble from the depths of a peat bog. If there was a god, it had a sick sense of irony. Calvin spat and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Birds were filthy animals, the taste of pepper and iron, mold and dust coated his mouth. Could you get West Nile from getting crow blood in your mouth? Probably. Least of his worries, though.

  How the fuck had Mason found them? Calvin supposed it was possible that there was more than one On-Star locator in the van but that seemed unlikely. Mason would have caught up with them sooner than this if there had been. No, he’d had help and there was only one person who knew of the empty Jesuit retreat: Thom Neary. But Calvin could have taken
Tie and the boy anywhere. Had Neary just gone with his best guess? It was possible. Calvin shook his head. Bullshit. Thom Neary didn’t flail around. He was more patient than that, thorough. Thom Neary gathered information, collated data, then pounced. No, he had somehow known exactly where Calvin was.

  Calvin made his way down the tree, the medical bag swung over his shoulder. He gripped the trunk in a full body hug, the tenderized skin on his inner thighs burning as he pressed it against the rough bark. A minute later, he craned a look behind him, aimed, then hopped off the trunk a couple of feet above the roots, landing on the crow with a satisfying crunch. It was like treading on a bag of moist twigs. “Mouthy fucking bird,” he muttered.

  Calvin stepped off the path and moved off into the woods. He would circle around and make his way back to the cabin by way of the rutted tracks that lead from the road. He needed time to plan. Mason had him in a tight spot. While the implements in the medical bag provided several methods by which a man of Calvin’s education could dispatch another human being, he would have to get close to use them. Easy enough when the target wasn’t expecting a hit, but Mason would have his back to the wall and his gun either on Tie or the door. And if Mason decided to leave with Tie and Jeremy, he would have to drive out past Calvin.

  Calvin floated like a ghost over the forest floor, making no more sound than a breath of breeze or a busy squirrel. Years ago, Thom Neary had taught young Johnny how to move in these woods. It wasn’t possible to progress over twigs and leaves without making any sound at all, just like it was impossible to become invisible. But you could camouflage the sound of your feet to blend into the natural sounds of the environment, just as you could darken your face and alter your clothing to match the surrounding foliage and undergrowth.

  How could Neary have done it to him? He’d been more than mentor to Calvin, a father. They had bonded in the sea of blood spilled together over the years. It had been just the two of them against the evils of the world. Well, against the evils of the world as Holy Mother Church had perceived them. But even if their superiors at the Vatican dispatched the last Templar Knights on errands wholly political in nature, their work often produced positive results beyond the machiavellian scope of Rome. Calvin thought of a labyrinth of old stone in the desert, the footsteps of lost children and the Native American boy whose voice had not been engulfed by those gloomy canyons. Between the lines, the bones, Bishop Neary and Father Calvin had sometimes done good.

  Neary and his little house in the olive grove had been the only safe place. Calvin remembered mornings spent in the little kitchen, the window open to vent the heat from cooking breakfast. Thom always asked Johnny to make pancakes. They’d work in the garden together sometimes. Calvin would laugh at Neary’s pathetic attempts to yank tomatoes from the chalky soil, the older man’s ample rear pointed toward heaven, his hands scrabbling in the dirt. Those tomatoes popped up every summer: tiny green pods, tough and sour. No matter what new type of method or fertilizer Neary might try, they were always bloody awful. You couldn’t even make sauce out of them. There had been the evening arguments over politics, theology, ethics. Two assassin priests, sipping smoky whiskey in a tiny study. Calvin with his constant demands of logic and explanation for a god he couldn’t understand or accept. Neary’s easy smile and far away eyes, his head nodding to Calvin’s sometimes volcanic blasphemy, his faith in his God and himself a granite wall. Neary’s peace had cooled the fires in Calvin’s chest for years. Where god and church had failed him time and again, his teacher, his friend, Thom Neary had borne Calvin’s faith.

  About a quarter-mile away from the cabin, the setting sun winked through the undergrowth. Calvin peered through a tangle of scrub brush. Whatever he could say about Mason and his people, he had to give them their taste in cars. A Lotus Espirit hovered like a slice of midnight on the double wheel ruts leading to the cabin. Calvin winced, they must have torn the shit out of the low-slung undercarriage to get it this far into the woods. A royal blue BMW cozied up behind the Lotus, its driver-side door flung wide as if the driver had leapt from the car without giving it a second thought. A female voice, high-priced receptionist or escort, wafted from the BMW’s interior. “The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is—.”

  The keys dangled from the ignition. Calvin yanked them and closed the door but not before getting a whiff of the flyblown interior. Mason’s car. Had to be. Calvin didn’t know what the hell the man had been rolling in, but he smelled like the killing floor of a Missouri slaughterhouse in high summer. He’d come alone. No one could have possibly endured his company without a biohazard suit and an oxygen supply. Calvin turned his attention to the Lotus and was about to look through the window when it spoke to him.

  “Please move away from the vehicle.”

  Calvin dropped the medical bag, blood pounding through his veins hard enough to hurt. Fucking talking car. Whatever happened to just plain beeping? He took a step back to appease the car’s anti-theft proximity sensor and assessed the situation. The Lotus could only carry two. Probably Mr. Horton in the driver’s seat and who else? Neary?

  Calvin crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. He could have been a customer in a high-end automobile showroom, wracked with indecision over which toy to chose. The Bimmer would go great with my new Armani. But that Lotus is a fuck machine. Decisions. Decisions. Instead, he mulled the tactical implications of the situation: a sociopathic mobster, an armed bodyguard, an expert assassin, the love of his life, a demon and the boy it rode. Calvin’s head reeled with the variables. Had this been an assignment he would have aborted a long time ago.

  Calvin thought about it. He could just go. He had the keys to the BMW and the expertise to disappear, become anyone he wanted, anywhere he wanted. His eye roved up the grassy wheel ruts toward the cabin. What was keeping him here, Tie? Some woman he’d just met and convinced himself he was in love with? A gangster’s fuck-bunny? Besides, she didn’t love him, not really. It was the trauma inherent in the situation. He’d studied psychology just as he’d studied martial arts and weapons use. People—predictable little monkeys—pair-bonded during crisis situations. It happened all the time, but after the flames died down and the bullets stopped flying, it never lasted. If he didn’t walk out on her, she would just take off on him. It was inevitable. Besides, why would a woman like her want anything to do with him? A priest, a killer.

  Calvin let his head fall back. The sky ran a blue ribbon between the trees where they parted over the road. A single evening star glowed. He named it, “Venus,” and laughed, not caring how the sound carried or who might hear it. It had been Mars overhead when he and Tie had first met in the garden behind Mason’s house. Calvin dropped his head, shaking it side to side. “All’s fair, right?” He gritted his teeth and hissed, “Fuck.”

  Calvin began jogging up the path. He tossed the BMW’s key into the undergrowth at the base of a triple-pronged beech tree. The Bimmer would have a security system too, the kind that wouldn’t allow the car to start unless it sensed the computer chip in the key. And if the BMW wouldn’t start there was no way to drive the ultra-low Lotus through the brush to get around it. No one would get out of here in a car unless Calvin came out on top. No one would get away.