Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

Priest McKenna had a home in my heart and I was aching to let him know it.

Priest

Rats like small, dark places. They like to hide, not run.

As any decent horror movie addict knows, you can always run, but you can’t hide.

Not from a monster.

Not from me.

I found Patrick Walsh a week after the car accident hiding out in Purgatory Motel, a rundown pitstop on the edge of Entrance painted varying shades of pink. I’d spent the past five days hunting down the lower elements in their fledgling organization before turning my sights on the patriarch. He was known for his cataclysmic rages, ruthless business dealings, and cheating on his wife. I’d had hopes he would be a worthy adversary.

Regrettably, it was so easy to find him, I took a moment to feel disappointed as I straddled my bike staring at Unit 9 where his outline was clearly defined behind the sheer curtains.

I yearned for a real challenge for a split second before I remembered how dangerous someone like that could be. Javier Ventura, for example, the notorious cartel boss, had terrorized the club for going on four years, and we still hadn’t been able to dismantle his organization or, at the very least, fucking kill the motherfucker.

So I’d take easy.

Besides, maybe he would end up being stronger than I thought, a wily fighter who would take more than a single punch to knock down.

The excitement I felt at being let loose to murder was a mental thing. It did not leech into my body, accelerating my heartbeat or coaxing a sheen of sweat to my skin. If I’d been hooked up to a heart monitor or a lie detector, I could have fooled experts without trying.

It was this dissociative behaviour that one of the nuns, a very, very long time ago, had told me made me such an easy sinner.

My body could perfectly execute what my mind allowed without trivial emotions ever sullying the waters.

So as I stalked toward the motel, I felt only calm, cold and controlled. My mind cycled idly through the weapons on my person. The gun in my waistband was for contingencies only. I preferred to work with knives, and those I had in abundance. The bagh nakh slotted over the fingers of my left hand like brass knuckles only tipped with blades, the machete I wore strapped to my back beneath my cut, the set of throwing knives I had strapped to my left calf, the curved hunting knife I had clipped to my belt, and the Bowie I wore on a chain around my neck.

I’d learned young it paid to be prepared for anything.

I’d learned early, too, I liked the intimacy of knives.

With a gun, you could kill a man at a hundred and fifty paces without ever seeing the details of his expression.

With a dagger, you could feel a victim die, his breath feeble on your face, blood pooling rich and wet over your hand, how their body went hard then soft as their pulse weakened.

I was looking forward to carving up Patrick Walsh.

It had been so long since I’d been able to let loose. A year since I’d sliced and diced up the motherfucker Staff Sergeant Harold Danner for trying to kill King.

My fingers itched to draw blood, and my mouth watered.

The door was flimsy enough, when I kicked it in, that it exploded into splinters, the heft of it flying back into the room with a force that knocked Patrick on his back.

He’d been praying.

There was an old, black leather-bound Bible on the pink bedspread flipped open, the nearly sheer pages torn by his hand as he fell.

“Fuck,” he cursed as he scrambled backwards on his hands and arse.

“Where are you goin’?” I asked with faux curiosity as I stalked him deeper into the room. “There’s no back exit. If it’s escape you want, you’ll have to go through me.”

“You’re one’a them arseholes who killed my son,” Patrick growled, recognizing the flaming winged skull on my cut.

This seemed to energize him into finding a shred of courage. He lurched to his feet, wildly searching for a weapon.

To move things along, I tossed him a knife.

It clattered to the hard, thinly carpeted magenta floor at his feet.

He stared down at it, chest heaving with fright, then up at me.

I jerked my chin. “Go ahead.”

“You’re giving me a dagger?”

I adjusted my leather gloves and rolled my head back on my neck until it cracked. “You don’t deserve to die quickly.”

Patrick’s fleshy, florid face, a typical Irish man if ever I saw one, crumpled like a sweat-stained napkin as he bent to pick up the weapon. He held it ham-fisted, completely incompetent.

He attacked straight on, hoping his weight would be enough to surprise me into fumbling. It was a method of brute force and idiocy.