The Acolyte (7 page)

“Filthy things.” He crushed it under his boot. “They’ll kill you, you know.”

“A lot of filthy things might kill me.”

Hollis smiled at that.

“You allowed Eve out into the crowd.”

I said, “She’s The Prophet’s daughter.”

“
Was
The Prophet’s daughter.”

“What Eve wants—
wanted
—Eve got.”

Hollis said, “Yet you realized how badly that would compromise her security.”

“I made her aware of that. She wanted to dance, and didn’t want me anywhere near while doing so. I refused to leave her side. She slapped me.”

Hollis sneered. “And that was enough to melt your mettle? A slap from a nineteen-year-old girl?”

“It wasn’t the power of the slap. It was the power of the slapper.”

Hollis nodded with a look of patently fake understanding. Friendly Uncle Hollis. I don’t know why he bothered. Did he want to elicit something approximating the truth before beating a false confession out of me? The honest truth before the official lie?

“Did you want her up on stage, alone, without protection? To save your own skin against the blast you knew was coming?”

I said, “Is that how we’re playing this?”

“This isn’t a game, son. Nobody’s playing.”

“I was nearly killed myself.”

“But you aren’t dead.”

“Not yet.”

“And your accomplice, Doe—she’s not dead, either.”

I said: “If you want to spin this that I dropped the ball and got Eve killed, okay—could be that’s true. You want to play it like I orchestrated it all and see that I get my head chopped off on National Republic TV, fine, I’ll read whatever script you hand me. But first I want it known and I want it witnessed: Doe is clean. So get Chief Exeter and let’s get on with it.”

Hollis grinned a death’s head grin.

“That’s altogether dashing of you—Jonah Murtag, the self-sacrificing hero of any dime store romance.” Then, speaking softly so the interrogation-room mics couldn’t it pick up: “You’ve lusted after Doe for years—I know you’ve always wanted to fuck her.” His voice was pure snake venom. “You craved her sweet
cunny
, isn’t that right?”

Before I could protest
,
he barrelled on.

“The bomber. The heretic jihadist. Catch a glimpse of his face?”

“No,” I said after a beat. “It happened too fast.”

“Too fast? He was on stage for fifteen minutes.”

“He wore a hood.”

“So you couldn’t see, or you purposefully ignored?”

“I had my attention on Eve. The most credible threats were coming—”

“From
you
, isn’t that a fact?”

“From the crowd. From—”

“No.
No
. From you.” Hollis shook a rosary-wrapped fist in my face. “You, Doe, and your accomplice set it up: allowing Eve up on stage, encouraging her even, saving your own hides when any true Follower would’ve sacrificed themselves on her behalf. Isn’t that right?”

“No!”

“Shshsh. Shshsh.” Switching gears: placating, honeyed. “Let’s go back to the bomber. When did you recognize the malice of his intent?”

“Too late.”

“Don’t get smart. When, precisely, did you appreciate his threat?”

“He came up behind Eve and Saint Kincaid. He spread his arms, this . . . crucifixion pose. I thought it was part of the act. Everyone did. Then I saw a DET cord sticking out of his sleeve. Half a second later . . .”

Hollis bent beside his tool bag. He pulled something out.

“A question for you, lad . . .”—stalking my blind side—“. . . if you acknowledged the threat, why-oh-why weren’t you blown to bits in your attempt, however fruitless, to throw yourself between the bomber and Eve? How come you found yourself in the only place in that club where anyone could have survived the blast?”

“Get Exeter,” I said. “I’m ready to confess.”

Hollis’s voice dripped cold rage. “You’re ready when I say so, you filthy bastard.”

The steel prongs of a cattle prod sent 10,000 volts flooding through my body. Next I was snorting blood and choking against the strap fastened round my throat. I saw an off-white chip stuck to my knee with bloodied saliva and realized, without much shock, it was one of my teeth.

Hollis was fulminating like an Old Testament Prophet:

“I am the Divine sword of justice, searching out villainy and excising it!” He broke into the Book of Revelations, spittle shining his lips: “
And in those days, evil men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them!
”

He socked the prod into my throat and sent another jolt hammering through my system. No pain, only this terrifying sense of confusion: my brain sucked out and the empty skull case stuffed with squirming black beetles.

“—
the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within
—”

A new voice joined Hollis’s. Choked and childlike. My own.

“The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .”

Zzaap!

“. . . maketh me lie down in green pastures; he leadeth . . . me in the paths of . . . of righteousness . . .”

Zzzzaaap!

“. . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no . . .”

Zzzzzzzzzzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!

“My cup . . . my cup runneth . . . my cup . . . my cup . . . my . . .”

A spark. This fizzling blue pop in the darkness. And another. I willed myself toward the spark only to find I couldn’t: I was back in my body, arms and legs strapped. Then a voice:

“What do you mean, clemency? We’re talking about the man responsible for the death of The Prophet’s daughter. He’s all but admitted it.”

I was still seated in the Confessional. The voice belonged to Hollis, who spoke on the interrogation room telephone. The spark came from his cattle prod, which he kept firing off in agitation.

“No . . . now wait a bloody minute.”
Zzap.
“This man was part of my unit and we police our own. And if you even think about crossing swords, Exeter . . .”
Zzap.
“No, that was not a threat: that was a precise foretelling of future history.”

Was Chief Exeter intervening on my behalf?
I wondered,
Why?

“Gabriel wept!”—a snowball-sized spark—“Do you think I won’t request an audience with Him myself? And when I do, do you think your bollocks won’t be swinging from the nearest flagpole?”

Hollis hung up the phone in a rage.

“Are you a believer in miracles, Murtag?” he said. “Divine intervention?”

I said nothing. My lips were sealed with blood.

“You should,” he said. “You’ve been spared. Word has come down from on high.”

Edges of sharp metal closed round my right pinkie finger: tin snips or bolt cutters. The punishment was Standard Operating Procedure for gross negligence by an emissary of the Republic. It was the lightest discipline I could expect.

Hollis said: “Don’t flinch. I don’t want to have to cut twice.”

Steely pressure, a crunch of bone, the hiss of blood. When Hollis trained a blowtorch on the wound to cauterize it, I blacked out from the pain.

I regained my senses sometime later.

I had been strapped to a gurney in a well-lit room. The smell of antiseptic. Everything clean and polished and white. Nurses bustled here and there.

Angela was strapped to another gurney ten yards away.

Smiling wanly, she mouthed, “Okay?”

I mouthed, “Okay.”

She raised her hand, a clandestine wave. The sight heartened me.

Hollis had taken my entire pinkie finger.

He’d only taken the tip of hers.

Recovery

I opened my eyes. Ashy afternoon light streamed through the hospital windows. Garvey sat at the foot of the bed.

The fingers of my right hand were wrapped in gauze to the knuckles. A plug of yellow wax had been melted over the stump of my pinkie. The skin was purple and infected. I hoped it wasn’t gangrene.

“What’s happening?” I croaked. “What’s to become of me?”

Garvey chawed on a ball of tobacco. He worked it from one side of his mouth to the other and said, “That’s need-to-know info and I don’t need to know. But as I take it, you’ve been spared.”

“By who?”

His eyes rolled heavenward.

I said: “The Prophet?”

“You’re alive and within city limits.” Garvey shrugged. “Be thankful.”

Blisters on either side of my ribcage: electrical burns from Hollis’s cattle prod.

“Am I still an Acolyte?”

Garvey said, “So it seems. You and Doe both. But the two of you are under me now.”

He came round to the head of the bed. Bracing his hands on the mattress, he knelt so his face was level with mine.

“We’ve been through plenty together, yeah?”

“Yeah, Garvey.”

“Faced the heathens, fought side by each—you’ve saved my life more than once and I appreciate that. I love you as a brother under Christ. And I don’t know what happened in that club, with Eve.”

He paused, thinking maybe I’d divulge something. When I failed to do so, his hands clenched into fists and pulled the bedsheets taut.

“But if you ever give me reason to doubt your belief, I’ll kill you dead. You mustn’t ever test my loyalties; you’ll lose every time. Fair enough warning?”

“Fair enough.”

“I know you’re a man who appreciates straight dealing.”

Garvey reached for a squeeze bottle at the bedside. “Nurse said give you a squirt of this. Knockout sauce, put you back to sleep.”

I closed my lips around the plastic tube. Sweet fortified wine washed down my gullet. I caught the bitter taste of mandrake root and was gone again.

I awoke sometime at night. This time Hollis sat at the foot of the bed, smiling at me. In the withered light his teeth looked as if they’d been filed to points. He’d pulled the privacy curtain round the bed.

“What I did to you was my job. My duty.” He smiled again.

“Your duty,” I said in a way that indicated I could accept it. “Are we going to be able to continue forward on a . . . professional basis, you and I?”

“Depends on you, lad. I was simply doing as I was told, no malice intended. You left a crime scene. I am a god-fearing man, and god-fearing men do not carry unjust grudges. Do you carry a grudge?”