Yes, sir.
Outside, he found Puck. None of his crew had been injured. Everybody was gone for the day. Good.
Shea spent the next twenty minutes circling the Chapel, scanning the masonry for cracks or bulges. Nothing major. Some bricks shaken loose from the concussion, but no serious structural damage.
Except to the stone walls that lined the parking lot. The blast had cracked the mortar on the end near the building, knocking several of the stacked stones loose. Picking up one of the pieces to replace it, Shea noticed a number engraved on its surface. Nine, zero, three. There’d been letters above it at one time but they’d been obliterated by time or the blast.
He stared down at the stone, trying to understand its message. Then wheeled and pushed through the crowd lining the sidewalk, and headed across the street to Paddy Ryan’s.
“Dan! Wait for me!” Lydia called, hurrying after him, catching him in the middle of the street. “What’s wrong? Where are you going?”
“Wait here. There could be trouble.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she said, falling in step beside him. “And to quote one of my heroes, when you start signing my paycheck, you can tell me what to do.”
“Mr. Shea?” Sam said as Dan pushed through the door with Lydia right behind him. “We heard one helluva bang. What happened?”
“Kid stuff,” Shea said. “Somebody set off a couple of blasts in the Chapel. Rough neighborhood you’ve got here.”
“Told you that the first day.”
“So you did. Funny how the Chapel’s gone to wrack and ruin, local shacks are falling down, yet your place still looks great. A bit rich for this neighborhood, isn’t it?”
“The ’hood wasn’t always like this,” Sam said cautiously. “Years ago, it was different.”
“Yeah, like Dodge City, you said. Must have been wild.”
“We were pretty wild ourselves, those days.”
“I believe you. When you backed me against Razor, he seemed to respect you. Not a lot, but some. I think maybe you still scare him a little.”
Sam shrugged. “We’re a couple of tough old Micks. You live in the Chapel district, you pick up a few tricks.”
“Tricks might explain how you survived here all these years, Sam, but not why. You’re the last white faces around, the neighborhood’s falling apart. So why are you still here?”
Without a word, Morrie got up from his stool, limped to the door, and locked it. When he turned around, he had the Army .45 in his fist. He waved it toward the counter.
“My brother wants you to sit down, Mr. Shea. Do it. And put your hands flat on the counter. And then you’d better tell me what you think you know.”
“I don’t know anything for sure,” Shea said, doing as he was ordered, with Lydia beside him. “But I’ve got some questions. Know what this is?” He tossed the shard of stone on the counter. Numbers-side up.
“It’s your rock, you tell me.”
“The blast knocked it loose from the wall across the parking lot. Looks like a piece of a gravestone to me. And there are a lot more pieces just like it cemented into that wall. How do you suppose broken gravestones ended up there?”
“Maybe when the Dazers moved the old cemetery—”
“The End Days Brethren never moved that cemetery, Sam, and you damn well know it. It was still there when Black Luke was killed. Maybe it’s why he was killed, I don’t know. That’s something the law can sort out. What I do know is that after the murder, somebody smashed up the stones and paved over that cemetery. Maybe the same two Micks who bombed the place tonight.”
“You’ve got that all wrong,” Sam snapped.
“Then you’ve got thirty seconds to set me straight. I owe you that much for backing me against Razor, but no more. And tell Morrie to put that gun away. He’s not gonna shoot anybody with an army of cops across the street.”
“All right, all right! Hell, even when we were ganged up we never killed anybody and we’re not about to start.”
“You were gangsters?” Lydia asked.
“Not exactly, but we worked for ’em. Everybody did in the old days. The Five Families owned this side of the river. You had to join up to survive. We were strictly small-time but the Families were the real thing. People that crossed them disappeared. And that’s where we came in.”
“How do you mean?”
“Know what the tough part of a murder is, miss? The body. Without a corpse it’s difficult to make a case. And we came up with a perfect place to lose bodies, the last place anyone would look. A ghetto cemetery that nobody used anymore.”
“And Reverend Black found out about it?”
“Found out, hell. Luke was on our payroll for years. A nice little scam, kind of a midnight mortuary service. Until Luke got too deep into the booze and started believing all that crap he was preaching.”
“What did he preach, exactly?” Lydia asked.
“About the End Days coming and him being the new messiah. All of a sudden he got these big plans, started talking about expanding the Black Chapel. Told us to get the stiffs off his holy ground or he’d blow the whistle. Took himself way too seriously. And didn’t take the people we worked for seriously enough.”
“They killed him, didn’t they? His death wasn’t a murder/suicide.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Sam said carefully. “A coroner’s inquest returned that verdict all legal and proper and it doesn’t matter anyway. It was a long time ago.”
“Yes, it was. So why are you still here?”
“Black Luke’s curse,” the old man spat. “We’re stuck. Luke’s death solved one problem but dropped a bigger one in our laps. The banks foreclosed on the Chapel and put it on the market. We were afraid new owners might want to move the cemetery so we brought in a crew one night, busted up the stones, made a wall out of them, and paved the whole thing over. Put up the basketball nets for camouflage. Locals figured the banks did it, but those people never came down here, never even noticed. To them the Chapel was just another rundown property in a rough part of town. We figured we’d wait for things to settle down, then move on.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Progress, Mr. Shea. They kept inventin’ new ways to identify bodies. Blood types, dental records, DNA. If they turn them stiffs up now, they’ll be able to identify some of them, maybe all of them. Won’t take ’em long to figure out how they got here. So we’re stuck guarding the place, like old junkyard dogs. Not much of a life, but better than life in prison.”
“You didn’t set off those blasts, did you?” Shea said slowly.
“Hell no! Your project is our last hope. With the church open again and the cemetery forgotten, we can walk away. But now, if the walls are damaged and they find the stones... well. You found us, didn’t you?”
“What are you going to do with us?” Lydia asked.
“Nothin’, miss. We’re amateur undertakers, not killers. I’ve always known this day would come. The penalty for livin’ too long. But if you figure you owe us anything, Shea, we could use a few days to get clear. We’ve served our time here. I don’t want Morrie to die in jail. Please. Just a few days.”
“What are we going to do?” Lydia asked as they walked back to the turmoil around the Chapel.
“Go to the police,” Shea said. “What else can we do?”
“After all these years? Would it be so wrong to just... let them go?”
“What about the people they helped bury? Do we forget them, too?”
As they approached the police lines, Reverend Arroyo pushed through the crowd, his creamy suit smudged, tie askew. “We need to talk, over here,” he said nervously, leading them to the lee of his Cadillac.