I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (31 page)

“Seven is too many anyway.” Boone smelled the
inside of the cowboy hat. It smelled like the man. He threw it away
and looked to Kane. “You know what I mean.”

“No, son. I don’t.”

“I’m goin’ out. Get some fresh air.”

“Might be a good idea.”

Big Duke’s breath caught and rattled as he
expired on the floor.

Even with the driver’s seat pushed back as
far as it would go, Father Mark was a tight fit in the Monsignor’s
car. Three hundred pound priests didn’t make the best subjects for
stakeouts. Mark had his Fromm resting on the steering wheel and
read through it, occasionally casting an eye towards the house down
the street.

Jennifer lived in the suburbs with her
husband and two children. Mark had known Jennifer for as long as
he’d known Boone. He’d known Derrick since Jennifer’s husband came
into the picture. Mark had even been at their wedding, as Boone’s
“date,” a fact he never let his friend forget.
You
can
bring
one
of
those
skanks
occasionally
takes
pity
on
you
and
lets
you
bang
her
, the newly minted priest had explained it to Boone,
or
you
could
bring
along
a
humble
servant
of
the
Lord
,
make
mom
and
dad
proud
. Boone had opted for Mark. His choice had made his
family happy.

At the reception, when Jennifer had gone to
toss her garter into the crowd of single women, Mark had encouraged
his “date” to get in with the crowd.
Fuck
you
, Boone
had told him, the way a friend could say it to a friend, no hate.
The way they spoke to one another to this day, the way they’d
always spoken to one another, from their days in the group home to
their days as adults when one of them donned the collar.

Mark had spent most of yesterday afternoon
out here in the car with Erich Fromm. Nothing appeared suspicious.
Derrick and Jennifer came home from work; Jennifer went out
somewhere with the kids and came back. Mark stuck around until
after dark and then split. He was cool with the Monsignor, but he
didn’t want to keep the old man’s Lebaron out too long at any one
stretch. He also wasn’t so crazy about the new guy at work, Father
Tad. Kind of wanted to be around when he could, not leave the guy
with the altar boys.

He’d woken up early, served the 6:45 and 9:00
a.m. masses and come on back out. No idea what he was waiting or
looking for. Boone had asked him to protect his family. Mark knew
his friend well enough to know when the other man was messing
around with him, and Boone hadn’t been messing around with him.
Mark had no clue what was going on, what Boone had gotten himself
into, where the man had disappeared to for the last few weeks or
even the other day after he’d left the confessional. All Mark knew
was his friend asked him a favor and been dead earnest in the
request.

Mark would see it through as best he
could.

He knew Boone pretty much better than anyone
aside from maybe Jennifer, but Mark didn’t kid himself. There was
more he
didn’t
know about his friend than he did. There were
things about Boone he didn’t want to know about. Mark judged that
Boone’s heart was ultimately in the right place, or headed in the
right direction, and that was all that mattered.

Like Fromm. Fromm’s heart was in the right
place.

What Mark appreciated most about Erich Fromm
was the German-American’s work on character structure. Fromm
got
how the bourgeois revolution brought in capitalism but
also introduced a concept of freedom that continued to pervade
their lives down to this day. Fromm showed how, following
feudalism, the individual was freed from his lord and the land,
yes, freed from all the economic and social ties that went along
with a manor economy. And yeah, those ties might have bound the
individual in time and place, but they’d also provided a sense of
security and belonging. Under feudalism, you were going to work for
your lord, but he was going to watch out for you too: his stores
would feed you in case of crop failure; his knights would protect
your ass in case of attack.

With that feudal bond erased, a man was freer
than ever before, “more independent, self-reliant, and critical,”
as Erich Fromm put it, but also, as Fromm pointed out, “more
isolated, alone, and afraid.” Free to starve if he couldn’t provide
for himself and his family. He found himself “threatened by
powerful supra-personal forces, capital and the market,” forces
originating within human beings, but reified to stand above them
like gods. Suddenly the individual couldn’t count on counting on
others any longer, the market pitting him against everyone
else.

“His relationship with his fellow men, with
everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged,”
was the way Fromm summed it up, “he is free—that is, he is alone,
isolated, threatened from all sides.”

Boone could count on Mark, which was why Mark
was out here in the Monsignor’s Chrysler. Fromm was a guy Father
Mark would have liked to have met, if the guy hadn’t died back in
1980.

Yesterday he’d considered briefly walking up
to the door, ringing the bell. But what would he say?
Oh
,
hey
there
Jen
,
Derrick
.
Hey
Mark
,
what
brings
you
out
to
Westchester
?
Well
your
brother
asked
me
…
your
brother
asked
you what? What would Mark have said? What could he
say? Boone hadn’t said much. Was Mark going to say,
don’t
worry
about
it
—
just
let
me
camp
out
here
on
your
couch
overnight
? No. So instead he’d waited around
and saw nothing, read his Fromm with a mind to his dissertation,
eventually gone back to the rectory in Brooklyn and returned
today.

He looked at the book in his hands. Cramped
in a borrowed car, sticking out like a sore thumb in a suburban
residential neighborhood. None of it conducive to studying. He’d
worn his black shirt and collar, just in case anyone came over to
talk, cops responding to a neighbor’s complaint. He knew his sheer
size made him a suspect in many people’s minds, suspect to
something. Same way darker skin would make you questionable in some
people’s neighborhoods.

Mark was done with his course work at the
City University Graduate Center. He’d passed his first and second
exams. His Ph.D. committee had accepted his proposal and Mark
needed to start writing his dissertation. The classes had taken him
three years to knock off and he’d mulled over dissertation topics.
Two or three had come and gone before he’d settled on his current
project, an exploration of character structure in pop culture
characters. Don Johnson’s Sonny Crocket on
Miami
Vice
. Pink in
Pink
Floyd
—
The
Wall
. The grue in the
Zork
trilogy, the game Mark had
first played on a Commodore 64 when he was a kid. There were a
dozen others he could have tackled, but he had his reasons for
these three. Maybe later, after he’d defended, he could look at
fleshing his dissertation out into a book, include the others.

Jennifer was a school psychologist, had her
PsyD. Mark didn’t know what her husband did but he knew Derrick
worked down on Wall Street. Made a good living at it too. Their
house was nice, a split-level with two-car garage, jungle gym in
the yard for the kids, picket fence surrounding the property. They
probably could have sprung for something bigger and more secluded,
in one of the tonier sections of Westchester, but neither Jennifer
nor her husband was like that.

The Monsignor’s car was parked down the
block, resting in the shadows cast by a neighbor’s wall of pines.
Its interior was littered with wax paper and tupper ware
containers. Mark would have to clean it all up before he returned
the car. What he
needed
to do was get to the gym, work
out.

Hard to focus like this.

Back to Fromm. The individual had achieved
bourgeois freedom, a freedom of abstract individuals. A bad kind of
freedom. Kind of freedom where you’re cut off from all others,
couldn’t trust no one. Mark imagined how exciting this new found
freedom must have been, exciting yet daunting-- even nerve
wracking—all at the same time. Some were in a position to accept
it, others, lacking the economic and political means, found it a
threat, a “freedom” they’d gladly abandon. Fromm spoke of the
“mechanisms of escape” people turned to, ready to submit, to trade
freedom for certainty and security.

It was 3 o’clock. Mark was hungry. He looked
up from his Fromm to the house. Nothing out of the ordinary. It
didn’t look any different than it had earlier. He doubted much
would change if he shot over to a deli or something, got a bite to
eat. What would that take? Ten-fifteen minutes? Mark couldn’t
imagine anything could happen in that time.

He cranked the Lebaron up and pulled away
from the street, Fromm on the dashboard. Mark took a left at
Jennifer’s house and meandered down the twisting blocks, passing a
couple of landscaping crews and their ride-on mowers. He set off
towards what he’d established the day before was a strip of shops,
wondering if there’d been a bagel shop.

He found a Dunkin’ Donuts. It’d do. They sold
bagels, although Mark didn’t think much of the bagels they sold.
But he didn’t want to be away from the house for too long, so he
pulled into the parking lot and turned the car off. As he got out,
a sedan pulled in alongside the Monsignor’s Chrysler and
parked.

There was no line at this time of day and
Mark ordered his toasted bagel with cream cheese. Not good
bodybuilding food, true, but everyone was entitled to a cheat meal
here and there. He stopped with his coffee at the fixing area to
pour some out and add a healthy dose of milk. When Mark walked back
outside an Asian man was leaning against the car next to his,
between the two vehicles.

“A word with you, Father?”

Mark looked the man up and down. His hands
were empty. Medium height, thin, short dark hair. Might have been
Korean, Mark couldn’t tell. A tattoo on the inside of one forearm,
an elaborate cross. A bald white guy with mirrored shades sat
behind the wheel of their car.

“How can I help you?” Mark was suddenly very
cognizant of the fact that he was unarmed. He stayed on the
sidewalk, let the other man get up off his own car and join
him.

“Peace be with you” the man said, and Mark
found himself responding automatically: “And also with you.” He
frowned when he’d finished and the other man spoke to assure him,
“Have no fear, Father. I come to you in the name of the
Christ.”

“In the name of the Christ.” Aside from the
elaborate cross tattooed on the man’s forearm, Mark saw no evidence
of religious affiliation.
In
the
name
of
Christ
. Who talked like that? “Is that right?”

“You’re Father Mark Vachss. Parish priest at
St. Ann’s.”

“You’ve got me at a disadvantage.”

“I followed your college football career,
father. Thought you might go pro.”

“Me too, one time.” Mark grinned, his guard
still up. “Let’s just say I had a different calling.”

The other man smiled approvingly. “My name is
Ezekiel. Call me Easy.”

“Easy?”

“Yes. You know, Father,” Easy nodding towards
Mark’s car, towards the book there on the dashboard, “Liberation
Theology was officially condemned by your Vatican’s Congregation
for the Doctrine of Faith back in the mid-80s.”

“Yeah, I’m aware.”

“What’d I’d like to see,” Easy continued, “is
more scholarship linking Liberation Theology to the Frankfurt
School,” nodding towards Fromm on the dash again. “You know, Metz,”
Easy showing he knew about Johann Baptist Metz, “had some
interesting correspondence with Walter Benjamin,” pronouncing
Benjamin
Ben
-
ya
-
mean
, Easy showing he knew how
to pronounce the man’s name. “But what I’m wondering at the moment,
I’m wondering if I might have a moment of
your
time, to show
you something.”

“Actually,” Mark gestured with his bag and
coffee. “I’m kind of busy.” The fact that this guy knew
exactly
what game to talk with him only made Mark more
suspicious. “There’s some place I need to get back to.”

“Father, I promise, only a moment.” Easy
stepped from the sidewalk to the asphalt, making to move around to
the trunk of his car. “Please?”

“You want to show me something in your
trunk?”

“Yes.”

“No. I really have to be going.”

“I promise you, you have nothing to worry
about. Look at the size of you,” Easy gestured from Mark to
himself, “and look at me.”

“That don’t mean anything. What about him?”
Mark nodded towards the bald man in the car.

“Sam’s nothing for you to worry about.
Please.”

Against his better judgment, Mark stepped
around his own car and joined Easy.

“Your caution is well advised,” Easy
remarked, tapping on the side of the car. “It’ll suit you well in
what is to come.”

“What’s to come…?” Mark’s words trailed off
as the man inside the car hit the trunk release and the trunk
popped open. Daylight fell on a bound figure in the trunk, the
thing there writhing against its restraints. A cleave gag did
little more than muffle the figure’s growls and protestations, its
fanged incisors clearly visible on either side of the gag. The
sunlight brought from its exposed flesh.