Walter Mosley - Parishioner

They were standing on the back porch of the summer home. Arabella Marquette and her daughter, Fawn, lay naked and dead in the kitchen just behind them. The acned, twenty-one-year-old Robair gave Shirley a petulant frown as he simultaneously shot the little boy at his side.

Shirley raised her own pistol and shot her man in the center of his forehead. His lips formed a tight O . He didn’t lose his footing until he was already dead.

The weight of that condensed six-week lifetime settled on Shirley and she found in her heart that she could not deny one thing that she had done or that had been done to her.

“I sit in my home,” she said in an Expressions session that Xavier had attended, “and think about going back to Montreal and killing my stepfather. He’s old now and living in a retirement home. I’ve bought six tickets over the years. But every time I think about going I remember that look on Robair’s face when I shot him. He’d only talked big before he met me. He wanted to be evil but I was the one who allowed him to, who empowered him. And when I killed him there was no relief-not in me and not in the world we scarred.”

“Hey, Shirley,” Xavier said. “How you doin’, honey? Gettin’ any sleep?”

“I have a new barmaid,” Shirley said. “She’s not gay and neither am I.”

“Yeah? You don’t say.”

“But I told her about my sleep problems and she offered to lie in the bed with me, next to me. She’s a runaway and many times she goes out with her boyfriends. But on those nights she lies there by me I sleep like I did when I was child before my mother remarried.”

Xavier heard the words and the echoes they set off in the spree killer’s heart. He knew not to comment on her therapy and so said, “Thanks for lettin’ my friend in.”

“He looks scared.”

“He should.”

When Xavier pulled out the green straight-backed chair at Winter’s table the young man leaped to his feet.

“Just me,” Xavier said.

The words did not seem to have a calming effect on the youth, but he did sit down again.

“What we gonna do, Ecks?”

Xavier was a practiced killer but he rarely planned his crimes. He killed when he had to or when the opportunity arose and it seemed like the proper move.

At one time he would have probably killed Winter. It just made sense to tie up loose ends.

“That’s up to you, Win,” he said.

“Me?”

“Those men had guns, son. They would have killed us both and then burned the house down around our bodies. The way I see it, it was self-defense plain and simple. But the law could have different ideas. And I got a history, so they might not bring me down on this, but there are other warrants, in other places.”

“What about that man with the tire iron in his chest?”

“I used his phone to call the cops. They might get there in time to save him.”

Winter clasped his hands and then ripped them apart.

“What should I do?” he pleaded.

“If the guilt is too much for you, you can call the cops. Tell ’em that I made you come with me and that you waited to tell them because you were afraid I’d kill you. Give me a heads-up and I’ll be gone before they get to my door.”

“I can’t just turn you in like that, Ecks.”

“Maybe not, but if somebody saw your license plate or something, and the cops come up on you, then tell ’em that you drove me to my car, that I forced you. Don’t lie for me but for yourself, kid. Understand?”

“What was goin’ on in there?” Winter asked then.

“I’m on a job,” the Parishioner said. “I’m looking for three boys went missing twenty-three years ago.”

“You think that was them in the basement?”

“Maybe so. Maybe. I got a lead or two and so I’ll see. But right now you order a few shots of cognac and drink ’em down. After that I’ll give you a ride home and you sleep on what you should do.”

After dropping an inebriated and distraught Winter Johnson at his apartment on Crest Drive, Xavier drove down to the beach using surface streets.

On the way he took out his cell phone and entered a number.

“Yeah?” a gravelly voice answered midway through the second ring.

“I need you to take my route for the rest of the week, Bud,” Xavier said.

“Starting when?”

“In the morning.”

“Okay,” the voice said. “You all right?”

“Canned peaches and sour cream.”

At the ocean he veered right, heading up the Pacific Coast Highway. A twenty-four-hour jazz station was playing early Thelonius Monk for no particular reason. The complex rhythms reminded the killer of his late-night Harlem apartment home after the beatings and turmoil subsided, when peace reigned in the living room and the record player cooed with trumpets, saxophones, and piano. His mother had cried herself to sleep by then and the old man was passed out, or nearly so. Xavier would sit in the doorway to the bedroom he shared with his brother and cousin, listening to the music and the silence.

It was a quarter to three in the morning and the road was fairly empty. His forearms no longer ached for violence.

Ecks is an ambidextrous mothahfuckah. He can kill a man with either hand , mocha-colored Swan used to say about his friend. He’s the Sugar Ray Robinson of the street .

He’d never counted the number of lives he’d taken until Father Frank had him confess at Expressions: twenty-two if the white man died, twenty-nine if you held him accountable for the times he’d been an accomplice.

For a brief moment he considered driving off the cliff to his left.

“Even the criminal cannot pass judgment,” Frank whispered from somewhere in the car.

He reached the Seabreeze City limits at four forty-five in the morning. It was still shy of five a.m. when he rolled to a stop on the unpaved parking lot.

The iron-strapped ebony wood doors opened when he placed his thumb on the tiny crystal plate that operated the sophisticated locking system.

The overhead lights came on as he walked down the narrow aisle between the simple pews, through to the back door, and out into the yard. He strode up to Frank’s rectory, intending to walk right in, but before he got there the door swung inward and Frank was standing there fully dressed in his signature black.

“Come on in, Brother Ecks. I’ve been expecting you.”

And it was true. There were two chairs facing each other before an iron candelabra set with more than a dozen wax sticks burning intensely. Frank used candles that burned brighter than normal tapers. They were more like small torches.

“Have a seat,” the self-proclaimed minister offered.

“I don’t want to sit.”

“Do so anyway, Brother Rule.”

Xavier obeyed even though he promised himself that he would resist the man who had sent him out to break his oath.

“Soto called,” Frank said as he seated himself. “He told me about a subterranean killing field, one man sorely wounded, and another man dead.”

“The white man’s not dead?”

“Not yet.”

“I lashed out at them as if I had never spent one Sunday in this church,” Xavier said.

Frank allowed these words their own space. He did not dispute or deny the Parishioner’s claim.

Light began to break upon the ocean from the eastern sky.

For a moment Xavier shivered uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his face and he found it hard to maintain his balance on the chair. He leaned forward, putting his elbows upon his knees and his face in his palms. As the light grew so did his despair. This was one of those few emotional moments that surpassed the violence in his heart and mind. This anger, this hostility he knew was not an aspect of the war that surrounded his upbringing. His cousin had become a practical nurse and his brother, Warren, was an accountant in Montclair, New Jersey.