“Some,” Molly said, “apparently more than others.”
“Manners,” Nill grated. “Manners, Missy! The Good Lord has a way of teaching them!” He glanced at the hulking shadow of Johnny Dinkfingers, who almost instantly stepped forward, his hand drawn back for a bitch-slap…
And my reflexes took over. Johnny Dinkfingers was no pussy. He was big, surprisingly fit and fast, and, perhaps more importantly, he was hard.. Prison teaches you that a straight line runs through every violent encounter. If you fail to find and to follow it, you will be maimed or dead. Ex-cons tend not to fuck around.
Mr. Dinkfingers was all these things and mean besides. But the sad truth was that he simply did not stand a chance.
Those of you with any long-standing involvement in sports know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you still fool yourself into thinking otherwise. I have heard no fewer than 3,687 fuckers claim, in this way or that, they were “ass-kickers.” Of those, only 16 or so were credible: real ass-kickers tend not to talk about kicking ass all that much (though with all this MMA crap I seem to hear it more and more).
See, if you play a sport, you have an inkling of just how vast the difference in skill and strength can be between players. Now take that inkling and apply it to combat, and you have a sense of just how unlike the movies real fights are. Trust me: you do not ever-ever-want to find yourself in the ring with someone like me.
There was simply no way I could ever gain the trust of these fuckers the way things stood, even if I had five years and wept at the mere mention of Herr Hitler. I was too clever, too arrogant, and just too damn good-looking to ever really be trusted by men like these. So I had to reach for the next best tool in my tool box: fear. Not that these guys were going to go all wobbly in the knees when they saw me in the street-not by a long shot. But they had done time, which meant that criminal paranoia was stamped as deep as a sex change into them. Cops, you see, have procedures, all kinds of rules that make them fluffy and cute so long as you don’t stumble into their sights-in which case they can bring the hammer down hard. But me? I was an unknown. And in a few moments I was about to become an unknown who could not be intimidated or otherwise bargained with-and who could kick some serious ass.
Atrained unknown.
I was about to become the big Who-the-fuck? in the marrow of their little world. The harbinger, baby.
And I had come bearing a gift-a simple feeling, one that said, I dunno but we gotta do something…
Something!
And something always leaves tracks. I caught the arm swinging toward Molly-before she had even registered it, I think. I stepped into its lumbering arc, twisted and turned, drawing the big man around and down. He didn’t really have much choice, given that he was simply following his own momentum-coaxed along arcs of my design, of course.
Afterward, I simply stood as relaxed as before, doing my best to appear as though I hadn’t even moved. A little Jet Li drama never hurts, I’ve found, when the violence is secondary to the message.
“Now where I come from,” I said in a toke-sharing voice, “you never- never-hit a white woman…”
Tim gaped in abject horror. The other sheeple just stood blinking-a critical incident processing lag of some kind. Stupid Nazi fuckers. Even stunned, Johnny Dinkfingers rolled forward on his rump, reaching for his boot-a knife of some kind, I imagine. The world becomes a Yard when you’re an ex-con. You always come armed.
Some woman screamed-a latecomer to the party.
Only Reverend Nill seemed unaffected. He held out a hand to stop Johnny mid-motion then turned to me with a mild expression of disappointment, placid while his Angry Bitch wife cackled in drunken laughter. It was pretty fucking hilarious, if you thought about it.
“I thank you for coming,” the Good Reverend Nill said.
“Sure thing,” I replied, drawing a shell-shocked Molly away from the crowd. “What time were Sunday services?”
He blinked those wild, freaky eyes.
“Ten,” he replied. “In the A.M.” Molly started crying on the drive back to the motel. I apologized-for real for a change. Told her some nonsense about provocation, the perfect balance of aggression and intelligence.
I sometimes forget what it’s like…
Being normal.
She should have been furious with me for putting her in a situation like that. Instead, she was embarrassed. She was young, eager to hammer pitons into the sheer cliffs of print fame and fortune. Her head was stuffed with almost as many ideals as romantic notions. Everyone knows that investigative journalists are fearless hard-asses, capable of staring down civil wars in illiterate nations, and here she was, getting all weepy about a little jiu-jitsu at a church picnic. She kept her face averted, pretended to stare at the setting sun through the passenger window. From time to time she wiped her eyes with fluttering fingers.
I could even hear her curse herself as she marched to her room.
“They were Nazis.!” I cried out in encouragement.
That was something, wasn’t it?
Once in my room, I called Albert, left a message on his machine or wherever the hell it is you leave messages nowadays-the nowhere of the Web probably. I needed to find out as much as I could about the Church of the Third Resurrection as soon as possible. There was piss all about them on the Web.
Say you were in a bind, a really, really tight bind, like the mob was out to hit you or something. Now, most men pretend they’ve stepped out of a movie, make believe they’re ready, willing, even eager to do what it takes, no matter what that involves. Most men pretend to be capable of calculated murder. But press them, and when the time comes I guarantee you they’ll find some bullshit way of backing out. Everyone postures in a vacuum, but when circumstances take hold, the sorting happens real quick.
Now, you can call this cowardice if you want. But let’s face it, murder is stupid, particularly if you have any personal connection to the dude you intend to murder. So I’m more inclined to call this intelligence rather than cowardice-the brave ones are the ones who shatter lives and go to prison.
Reverend Nill understood this all too well. He knew what it took to get people to kill for him.
The key is to get them young, when peer group pressures are well- nigh irresistible. Then you start smalclass="underline" graffiti, other kinds of petty vandalism. Then you do something for them, something low-risk but illegal all the same. Like so many things human, trust is the foundation of co-operative crime, and few things inspire trust like someone breaking the law for you-actually risking his neck. Then you ask them to commit some crime in return-to reciprocate. Once their cherry is popped, once they get away with something bad, it becomes oh so easy, even addictive for some types.
You don’t need to be a chromosomal mutant to enjoy hurting people. You just need to believe that your victims deserve their pain. And we’re wired to think that already.
No. Reverend Nill was no fool.
This was the realization I kept in mind as I lay on my bed, boots and alclass="underline" that I was dealing with a sociopath in the full manipulative sense of the term. If Reverend Nill was behind Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance, then he was “behind the scenes” in every sense of the word. Not only would he have a herd of complimentary character witnesses, he would have an ironclad alibi.
Which meant the place to start would be his tools.
The moment came to me as it always does, the one most pertinent to my questions and concerns. Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie cohorts, sitting at the crooked picnic table. They were both as skinny as marathon runners, but the one was older, sporting a grey mullet, while the other, the younger, had short-cropped hair dyed an artificial black. They were having a long conversation without jokes, eyes fixed then wandering. Looking down and bored, then matching gazes.
A single nod from Johnny, eyes closing as the mouth said, “Okay. I see.”
The older junkie sucked in his lips. “Sheesh. Too much. “