“Due to my upbringing, I never cottoned to the ministry,” he said. “By the way, my name is Delmer Pickins. I give you my name ’cause you won’t be passing it on.”
He lit a cigar and puffed it alight, then blew off the ash until the tip glowed like a hot coal. “Time to get on it, boy.”
* * *
JULIAN COULD NOT tell what the man named Pickins did to him. An eye mask had rendered him blind, and his wrists had been pulled behind him and cinched with ligatures. He knew he had passed out at least once. The greatest pain was in his fingers and feet and his genitals. He could control the nausea and his sphincter but not his fear, because he had no way of knowing where the next blow or mutilation would come from. He tried to call upon Joan of Arc for her strength, she who at nineteen was burned at the stake, a peasant girl who couldn’t read or write yet had accepted death by fire rather than renounce the voices she believed came from God.
Julian thought of the three Catholic nuns Maura Clarke and Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel and the lay missionary Jean Donovan, who were beaten and raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers at the orders of higher-ups and deserted by their own government. He thought of Saints Perpetua and Felicity and their agony as they awaited decapitation in the Carthaginian arena as part of a birthday celebration for the emperor Geta, brother of Caracalla. And he thought of Jesus, mocked and flagellated and left to slow suffocation on the cross. How did they get through it? How could anyone be so alone and so defenseless and so betrayed and yet be so brave?
Julian tried to think of green pastures and a hole in the sky through which he could escape the fate that had been imposed on him. But he knew no angel was about to descend through the roof and carry him into the coolness of a starry night; nor would there be a friend to bind his wounds, no maternal figure to hold his hand and dispel his fears.
Hell was n
ot a furnace in the afterlife. It was right here and, in this instance, controlled by a degenerate whose tools were fire and a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.
Then he heard the kitchen door open and felt the rain and wind crawl across the floor and press against the walls and windows.
“Who are you?” Pickins said.
“I’m Mr. Richetti. How do you do, sir?” said a voice that sounded like it rose from a stone well.
“You walked in on a private situation. This here is a child molester.”
“Liar.”
“How’d you like a bullet in the mouth? Who the fuck are you, anyway? Take that hood off your head.”
“Gladly. Get on your knees.”
“What happened to your nose? What are you?”
“You have approximately one minute to live.”
Julian rubbed the side of his face against the floor until the eye mask slipped partially onto his forehead. He could see a large figure silhouetted against the window. The figure’s shoulders were square, his chest flat, the thickness of his upper arms pushed out from his torso.
“Do you wish to say anything by way of apology?” the figure said.
Pickins squeezed the trigger four times on a snub-nosed, chrome-plated .357 Magnum, the sparks streaking into the darkness. Then he lowered the revolver and stared dumbfounded at the silhouette. He raised the revolver and fired the two remaining rounds. “What the fuck.”
“Now you will come with me,” the figure said. “Some of your old companions await you.”
“I ain’t going nowhere.”
The figure walked to Julian and leaned over and pulled the eye mask gently from his head, then melted the ligatures with one touch of his finger. “Stay here, Father. What is about to happen has nothing to do with you; hence, you should not be witness to it. I admire you, sir.”
Julian pushed himself against the wall on the heels of his hands. The figure lifted Pickins by his throat and carried him out to the two-lane as though he were as light as straw. Julian wished he had not limped into the living room and watched through the window the scene taking place on the two-lane while nests of electricity bloomed silently in the clouds and the wind ripped limbs from the trees.
Chapter Thirty-three
HELEN SOILEAU PICKED me up at my house in a cruiser, and the two of us rolled down Old Jeanerette Road in the rain. Julian had called in the 911. A fire truck and an ambulance and paramedics were already at the scene. A short, square-bodied fireman in a yellow slicker and a fire helmet who wore a handlebar mustache met us by the roadside. “Daigle” was painted in black letters on the back of his slicker. Emergency flares were burning along the edges of the road.
“Is that what I think it is?” Helen said.
“Watch where you step,” Daigle said. “One of the medics puked.”
“Where’s Father Julian?” I said.
“They’re packing him up,” Daigle said.