Walter Mosley - Parishioner

The violence in Xavier’s forearms went into action without volition. With his left hand he threw the crowbar like an underhand javelin, and before it had punctured the white man’s chest he was firing with the specially made Afghani pistol. The gun made little noise and no flash. Both men fell to the ground, decimated by the ambidextrous stone-cold killer.

“What happened?” Winter said. He ran into the room upon hearing the coughing of the whispering gun.

Xavier hurried to the men he’d defeated. The white man had managed to get a pistol in his hand, but Xavier slapped it away. The other man had four bullets in him, head and chest.

“Stay back!” Xavier said to Winter. “Don’t let him see you.”

Then the church deacon searched the bodies and bags of his sudden enemies. The duffel bags contained shovels and spades, kerosene and a black plastic body bag. The Hispanic man had two keys in his pocket, held together by a piece of string. Xavier would have bet that they were a fit for the front door and the underground tomb. The white man had a money clip in his pants pocket. There were a few bills and a slip of paper held fast by the silver clamp.

“Help me,” the white man wheezed.

Xavier might have considered killing him if Winter were not a witness.

“I’m dying,” the man with the crowbar protruding from the middle of his chest said.

Xavier searched the man’s pockets, found nothing but a cheap cell phone. He stood up, watched closely by the dying white man, turned his back, and went to the kitchen.

“We’re going to leave now,” he said to his shivering friend. “When we go through the living room keep your back to the one still alive. Don’t turn to look, and keep your hand up over your face so he don’t see you in any glass.”

On the way to the street Xavier told his friend to meet him at an all-night club on Pico west of Sepulveda.

“It’s behind the taco stand in the little minimall on the northwest side of the street. You don’t have to knock. Somebody’ll come out to meet you. Tell him you there for Ecks and he’ll let you in.”

Xavier drove in the opposite direction from his friend. A block away he entered a call on the phone he lifted from the dying man. The call was answered almost immediately by Clyde Pewtersworth.

“Church services.”

“Don’t you sleep, Clyde?”

“I try.”

“Connect me to Soto.”

There were three clicks, a spate of silence, and then a phone ringing. There were at least a dozen rings before a groggy voice answered, “ Que? ”

“That house? The one they saw me coming from? It’s a killing field, but one of the bodies is still breathing.”

Xavier disconnected the call and threw the phone from the car window. Then he did a U-turn in the middle of the street and drove his Edsel toward the no-name, after-hours nightclub.

On the way, following the speed limit like a teenager taking his first driving test, he remembered:

Swan was tall and hefty, not nearly as black as Ecks. He got in a fight over a woman outside the Chilean’s Bar on East 143rd and then got carried away. His opponent died when Swan twisted his neck after knocking him unconscious. The police had no choice but to put him under arrest. Swan got word to Betty Rynn that a young churchgoer, George Napier, had witnessed the slaughter and offered to bear witness in the trial. Everybody else at the Chilean’s knew better than to have seen anything. But George put his faith in God, and Betty told Ecks to have a talk with the young man.

No one was supposed to know that George was a state witness. No one would have if it weren’t for one of Swan’s relatives who worked for the district attorney’s office.

Napier had a girlfriend named Lena. He was in the habit of spending time with her at her parents’ house off Flatbush in Brooklyn.

Ecks meant to talk to the young man, to scare him. He wanted to show him that he would never be safe or secret again. Maybe if Lena’s kisses weren’t so sweet and George had left at ten instead of twelve forty-five, maybe then Ecks wouldn’t have had time to think and the opportunity to kill rather than scare.

Those hours he spent waiting in the shadows he worried that the young zealot might get stupid and try to implicate him too. There was no one on the street or sidewalk when George came strolling out. He walked right past Xavier’s hidey-hole. His eye came out of its socket too. He died and Xavier went to fuck Betty Rynn, Swan’s girlfriend, as payment for getting her man out of a jam.

“You give me this right here,” Ecks told Betty, “and I promise your old man be outta jail by the end of the week.”

She gave it to him good. So much so that he suspected she liked him more than she ever let on.

Ecks parked down the block from the nameless West Los Angeles minimall. The street was empty and his suit barely soiled. He had almost been murdered, struck down by a moving car, killed one man, and maybe another. There was a witness who knew his name, his address. He was three years out from the rat-infested harbor that had been his life but now he could see his past looming on the horizon-and there were sinister shadows moving along the shore.

Shirley’s Den was a pink stucco bunker hidden by buildings on all sides. It had a drab green door, no windows, and no external lights. Regulars knew to stand at the door and wait. Newcomers were met by a man whom Xavier knew only as Sentry. Sentry was a big brown man who asked strangers what they were doing on his property. He stayed in a side shack monitoring the door, opening it for regulars and their guests-shooing away the rest.

Sentry opened the door for Ecks and he walked through wondering what he should do next. He had money and a fake passport. He knew some Spanish and had connections in Cartagena, Colombia.

Shirley’s Den was a large room, bright and tinted green. There were fifteen triangular shiny red tables and a large gray-and-green marble bar. Jazz, always jazz-representing every decade and style-played on the lifelike-sounding speakers. That night it was Sidney Bechet barking out “Bechet’s Fantasy,” giving Louis Armstrong a run for his money, if not his genius.

There were maybe a dozen customers in twos and threes scattered about the emerald-and-scarlet room. Winter Johnson was sitting in a corner looking like a rich man’s dog left out in the cold for the first time in his pampered life.

“Hello, Ecks,” a woman said. She was half the way through her forty-first year, auburn haired, plain faced and yet somehow provocative.

Shirley Henn was from Montreal originally. At the age of seventeen she met a French Canadian named Robert, who spelled his name phonetically-Robair. Robair and Shirley spent six weeks touring the American South, robbing pawnshops, banks, convenience stores, and anyplace else that could stack two dollar bills together. They killed nine people. They did. Shirley had been initiated in weapons, liquor, and sex by her adoptive stepfather-Jacques “Jack” Henn. She fired as many shots as Robair did and was probably a bit more accurate.

Shirley loved Robair like moths loved flame. She clung to his skinny side and often shivered when he said her name. That six weeks felt as if it were an entire lifetime.

Shirley and Robair began to have differences when they invaded an upscale cabin in the Tennessee woods where a wealthy Houston family took their summer vacations. She didn’t mind when they shot the father or even when Robair forced the mother and teenage daughter to do a striptease before killing them. It was when Robair got into the family liquor cabinet and decided to take the four-year-old son in the backyard to use for target practice that Shirley spoke up.

“Don’t do that, Robert,” she’d said. Even then she realized, when calling him Robert, that the love affair had foundered.