Altar of Bones (9 page)

Something suddenly seemed stuck in Dom’s throat; he had to swallow twice before he could get a word out. “Are you telling me you were some kind of gangster in a past life? I won’t believe it.”

“Hunh. So says the man who’s got no trouble wrapping his head around the idea of a virgin giving birth.”

The old man’s eyelids fluttered, but then he pulled himself back through sheer will. “You boys’ve got to find her,” he said, his voice faint, raspy. “Find Katya and get it back.”

“Get what back, Dad? I’m sorry, but this is just crazy talk—”

“The
film
. The film Katya made of my last kill. Them thinking I had the film is the only thing that’s kept us alive all these years.”

“What film? What last
kill
, for God’s sakes. I know you. You couldn’t—”

“Dammit, Dom, get your head around the idea that I’m not who you think I am. I never was….” He drew in a strangled breath and closed his eyes.

Dom shot a look at the monitors. His father’s blood pressure was up to 180 over 95, his breathing now so torturous he could barely speak. His hands opened and closed, as if he were trying to grab his strength back out of the air.

“Dad, maybe you should—”

“Shut up and listen to me, boy. I was ordered to do the kill, so I did it. It wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter, I was already in too deep. But I knew right from the get-go that once a hit that big went down, they were going to have to kill the killer, if you know what I mean.” He grimaced, baring his teeth. “So she got it all in living color, Katya did. It was supposed to be my insurance, the thing that would keep me alive. But a couple of days later, she disappeared on me. And she took the film with her.”

Dom looked into his father’s eyes and he saw fear, but he also saw sanity. And deep inside where darkness and truth burrowed deep, Dom knew: Mike O’Malley, who’d run a little charter fishing boat off the Gulf Coast, a man who wouldn’t even use a pellet gun to chase the jackrabbits out of his vegetable garden, had once been ordered to murder someone and he’d done it. And somewhere there was a film of the crime.

The old man grabbed Dom’s arm, but little strength was left in him anymore. “After Katya took off with the film, Dom, I let them go on thinking I still had it. But it was all one big, bad-assed bluff, and now—”

The word ended on another strangled cough. The oxygen hissed, his chest gurgled. “You better pray to that God of yours Katya Orlova isn’t long dead, because only she knows where the film really is. You and Ry, you’ve got to find her and get it back, and you’ve got to do it fast. Prove to them you have that film and it’ll be your life insurance, like it was mine.”

Who did you murder, Dad?
It was the obvious question, but for some crazy reason the words were all balled up in Dom’s mouth, he couldn’t get them out. If he said them aloud, they’d be real, and he couldn’t do that yet.

“You keep saying
them
,” he said instead. “Who are they, these guys who made you …?”

Kill
.

The old man shook his head, almost dislodging the oxygen tube again. “The details are for when Ry gets here, because it’s a long, ugly story and I’ve barely got enough life left in me to tell it once. And Ry will understand, he’ll know what to do. Call him again, Dom.”

“Why can’t you for once trust me, rely on me? I don’t live in a damn
bubble, I know how to do things—” Dom drew in a deep breath, let it out, made his voice calm, soothing. “I’ll call him again, Dad, I promise, only I don’t think he’s going to make it here in time.”

The old man gave Dom a smile that froze his soul and nodded slowly, accepting the truth. “All right then,” he whispered, phlegm thick in his throat. “It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones, but it ended with the kill.”

He laughed again, that hideous noise that shouldn’t come from a human mouth. “And not just any kill, but
the
kill. The big kill.”

Dom started to take his rosary out of his pocket, then left it there. He picked up his father’s hand instead, and this time the dying man let him keep it.

“What big kill?” he asked.

And his father told him.

S
OMETHING
CLATTERED
out in the hallway, and Father Dom whipped around. But it was only an orderly, pushing a cart stacked with lunch trays, broccoli and chicken by the smell. He fought down the urge to gag.

He turned back to the bed. His father slept now, so utterly still Dom wondered if he’d slipped into a coma.

He looked at his father’s hands, lying flaccid at his sides, at the age spots, the protruding veins, the knuckles only a little crooked and swollen from arthritis. He saw those hands raise the rifle, his father’s eyes line up the sights. He heard the shot and saw the bullet smash through flesh and bone, and the blood. So much blood—

“No, you couldn’t have done that,” he said out loud, but the old man didn’t answer. And if he had, Dom thought, it would only have been to sneer at him for not being man enough to accept the truth.

That his father was a monster.

He stared down at the lax face for a moment longer, then he put his priest’s sacramental stole around his neck, made the sign of the cross in holy oil on his father’s forehead and performed the rite of final absolution. Forgiving Michael O’Malley for his sins, even if he hadn’t wanted to be forgiven.

The act, the words, Dom knew, were really for himself.

When he was done, he hesitated a moment, then leaned over and kissed his father’s sunken cheek and asked that soulless face, “Who are you?”

Out in the hall an intercom crackled, calling for a Dr. Elder to report to radiology. Dom sat down in the chair next to his father’s bed,
rested his elbows on his spread knees. He fingered his rosary, but no prayers were in him. He had a sudden, horrible fear he would never be able to pray again.

He didn’t know how long he sat there like that, but suddenly he was aware the room felt different. The machines still beeped, the oxygen hissed, but it was quieter somehow. Emptier.

His head snapped up. “Dad?” he said, and knew even before he looked that his father was gone. A split instant later the machines caught up to reality and the steady beeps turned into a screeching alarm.

For maybe five seconds more, Dom stared at the shell of what had once been Michael O’Malley. Then he pushed to his feet and ran from the room.

H
E STOOD IN
the middle of the hall while doctors and nurses rushed past and the intercom blared, “Code blue! Code blue!” His heart pounded, but already he was feeling foolish. Running from phantoms.

Within moments the hallway emptied, leaving him alone. He rubbed his hands over his face. His eyes burned, but he couldn’t cry.

The elevator opened and an orderly with an empty gurney came out, followed by a woman. She wore green scrubs with a stethoscope dangling half out of one pocket, and she had …

Red hair and that angels-weep kind of beautiful
.

They made eye contact for an instant, then she turned away and went to the nurses’ station. She picked up a chart, and although she seemed to be reading it, Dom felt an energy coming off her, like an electric charge, and that energy was focused on him.

The orderly had also stopped at the nurses’ station, but now he was pushing the gurney down the hall, disappearing around the corner. Dom’s gaze followed for an instant, and when he looked back around, he saw the woman in the green scrubs was coming toward him.

She slipped her hand into her pocket, the one without the stethoscope, and she smiled.

Dom whirled and ran in the direction the man with the gurney had taken, his father’s words blaring an alarm in his head …
loose threads … she’s got a killer’s smile … it’s just as likely to be a bullet to the head
.

But she wouldn’t dare shoot him here, in front of witnesses, would she?

He rounded the corner, the leather of his black priest’s shoes slipping on the waxed linoleum. He spotted a blue restroom sign and ducked inside. It was a single occupancy: one toilet, one sink.

He locked the door, then tested the handle to be sure it held. He leaned back against the wall, his hands flat at his sides. His chest heaved. He strained his ears for any sound out in the hall, but all he could hear was his own harsh panting.

He waited for what seemed an eternity, then went to the sink and splashed water on his face.

He stared at the same face he’d seen when he’d shaved this morning. Brown hair, brown eyes. A fairly ordinary face, really, except for those ridiculously deep dimples that he’d always hated because they belonged on a cheerleader’s cheeks, but not on a guy. Guys were supposed to be too tough for dimples, even guys who were priests.

The door handle rattled and Dom froze, not even breathing. The handle rattled again, but whoever was on the other side didn’t knock or call out. The silence dragged on and on, then Dom heard footsteps walking away.

He gripped the sink with both hands and leaned over it, squeezing his eyes shut. His father was dead. Michael O’Malley was dead, except there had never been a Michael O’Malley. That man was an illusion, a lie. Or his dying words had been a lie. One or the other, because those two realities couldn’t exist simultaneously in this universe.

The big kill
.

Dom jerked his phone from his pocket and punched in his brother’s cell number on speed dial, praying, praying he wouldn’t get shunted off to voice mail again. For long, agonizing seconds there was just dead air, and then Dom heard a ring.

Come on, Ry. Come on, man…
. Ry would know what to do. Maybe
their old man was right, maybe Dom didn’t have a gut understanding of evil, but his brother did. Ry O’Malley had been living with it, up close and personal, for years.

The phone rang on and on.
Merciful God in heaven, please—

The ringing ended abruptly, and Dom nearly sagged to the floor with relief. But when the computer voice clicked in, he cut the connection.

He’d almost done something really stupid. Ry had to be told, to be warned, but not like this. Weren’t cell phones like two-way radios? Anyone could be listening in.

So think, Dom. Think …

He couldn’t stay locked up in this bathroom forever. He heard deep voices, rough laughter, out in the hall. He went to the door, unlocked and cracked it open. A young man with his leg in a cast up to his hip bone was leaving the hospital, surrounded by a rowdy group of uniform cops. Big, tough-looking bruisers they were, with guns on their hips.

Father Dom joined them.

A
N
I
RISH PUB
was a block down from the hospital, a favorite haunt of the EMT crews coming off their shifts. The bartender’s eyebrows went up a notch at the sight of the white collar, but he gave Dom change for a twenty-dollar bill and pointed out the pay phone, in the hall leading to the kitchen, next to the toilets.

It was dark back there and stank of stale beer and grease, but Dom barely noticed. He punched in his brother’s home number. He didn’t expect Ry would be there to answer it, but it was a landline with an answering machine. Was that safer than a cell phone? It didn’t matter. Ry needed to be warned.