Saint (31 page)

“We don’t have much choice, Gabe. We can’t
just leave ’em here.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if Juarez finds out about Bethy,
they’ll both be in danger. He’ll use her to bring Maria in. Not to mention,
Angelface has some explaining to do.”

“Oh, there’s a big surprise.”

“Gabe, I’m starting to worry about you. You’re
on edge. Maybe you should get laid while we’re here. L.A.’s got it all, you
know.”

“When I need to get laid, I won’t have to
ask you for referrals, thank you very much.”

“Have it your way.” Francis shrugged,
moving to check out the kitchenette. “But don’t blame me when you wake up all
sticky.”

“Bite me, Father.” Gabe threw his bag down
in one of the armchairs. “And I mean that in the carnal sense.”

“You need counseling.”

“Huh, like you don’t? You smell like a
brewery.”

Francis knew the second Lolita left Bethy’s
room. Her perfume made it to the living room before she did.

Clad in tight spandex pants and a sequined
top, she bent to pull a pack of cigarettes from her purse and lit one. “Anybody
want a drink?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“None of us do,” Joan said in a tone that
made it clear they were to keep their voices down and their minds on the
mission.

“Suit yourselves.” She sashayed into the
kitchenette and opened the cabinet containing the liquor, splashing three
fingers into a tumbler before adding ice. Then she turned around and eyed the
three of them. “If you jokers think you’re spending the night here, you’re
sadly mistaken.”

“Loliiita,” Francis cajoled. “We’ve been
through this. It’s for your protection.”

“No,
you’ve
been through it.” She swirled the vodka then took a sip. “I told
you, I don’t know anything about any list. You’re wasting your time and mine.
Take a hike.”

“Listen, sister.” Gabe came out of his
chair. “I hate to burst your bubble but you don’t get a choice in the matter.”

“Okay how about this?” Francis stepped in
front of Gabe. “We’ll call Maria and you can talk to her yourself. Will that
make you happy?”

“You can call the president if you want.”
She smiled innocently. “They have all kinds of lists at the White House. Maybe
they’ll give you one of theirs.”

“Francis, dammit, this isn’t a parlay
session. We’re not calling Maria. Lolita will just have to take our word for it
that she needs the list.”

“There is no list! How many times do I have
to tell you guys that? Look, I believe you’re friends of Maria’s and you’re
only trying to help, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Are you trying to say she sent us halfway
across the country on a wild-goose chase, what with Joan not liking kids the
way he does?”

Lolita touched a scarlet manicured finger
to her nose. “Now you’re getting it, biker boy.”

“For what reason?” Gabe demanded, stepping
around him.

“Well, you guys are such a bag of laughs, I
can’t imagine why she’d want to get rid of you. Maybe to get you out of her
hair for a while?”

“She’s lying,” Francis said, folding his
arms across his chest.

“How do you know?” Gabe grumbled.

“Because I know, okay? But that’s all
right, sweetface, I don’t mind hanging around and looking at you for a couple
of more days. You’re easy on the eyes.”

Lolita’s full lips diminished into a thin
red line. “You’re not staying here and that’s final.”

“Oh yes we are. Joan was a nanny in his
former life. He’ll be glad to babysit Bethy while you go to work. But I wouldn’t
test his patience too far if I were you, Red. He doesn’t go in much for
innocent children being put in danger unnecessarily.”

“Francis,” Joan said in a warning tone.

“Don’t worry,” Francis assured him
casually. “I’m not gonna tell her you killed your wife.”

Lolita’s wide eyes flew to Joan as vodka
spewed from her mouth.

* * * * *

“I’m going to work.” Gabriel grabbed his
bag after breakfast the next morning and headed toward the door.

“Have a nice day,” Francis called out from
the kitchen. “Be home in time for supper.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Gabe couldn’t
remember Francis getting on his nerves so bad before. Maybe the preacher was
right, he just needed to get laid. And he had just the little filly in mind for
the job. It would be his reward for a hard day’s work.

Hard day’s work, hell. This would be a walk
in the park.

He had made up several small mercury-triggered
explosives, set to maim instead of kill. Spunky little things they were, with
the ability to go undetected for long periods of time in the most unlikely
places as long as the mercury was balanced. No ticking, just boom.

This was his forte. He could wire a cow to
give hot milk if he set his mind to it.

Gabe found a place outside the Juarez
estate to hole up ’til evening, when he could slip in and out quietly. He
settled back in the shade of the hillside brush and let his mind wander back in
time.

The Old Chinese man.

The four adolescent girls.

The ecstasy.

The opium.

His cock grew hard just thinking about the
things they’d done to him, the things he’d done to them, their sweet young
mouths and hairless pubic areas. The euphoric haze he had drifted in and out of
until he no longer cared who or what he was, only wanting more and more of
their soft hands caressing his hard body.

The old Chinese man directed them in sexual
escapades for his entertainment, took them himself while Gabe watched and had
them pleasure each other in groups. They bathed and massaged his body with
scented oils and herbs. Tongued every inch of him. Every orifice. Made him beg,
made him wild, let him tie them up in silk and leather. Made him talk.

He had no idea how long he was there. Hadn’t
cared. It was heaven and they were his angels, the opium his god.

So young.

So beautiful.

So deadly.

Half his regiment had given their lives for
his sick pleasure before the saint came and dragged him out of heaven and back
to hell. Back to life. Back to the dirty business of killing. Saint told him it
wasn’t his fault but Gabe knew better.

Now he had kicked the drug habit but not
the one thing that kept him and his wife from having a close relationship and a
real marriage. She was going to leave him, he could feel it in his bones. Maybe
that’s why he’d packed up and left when Saint sent for him. He was giving her
the chance, the choice to leave without any reservations, without saying
goodbye.

He wasn’t afraid of the drugs. He was
afraid of himself and the monster inside who waited for the opportunity to rear
its ugly head again.

Jesus! He was a fucking child molester no
matter how you looked at it. It didn’t matter that he’d never, since then,
acted on the impulse. But he was terrified it was only a matter of time. The
Asian woman he’d watched dancing the night before had affected him more than he
wanted to admit.

And if the ignorant son of a bitch who came
up behind him thought he couldn’t do two things at once, like listen to the
sounds around him and daydream at the same time, that was his problem.

* * * * *

Joan sat watching the small girl across the
table eat the jelly toast he’d fixed, her fingers purple and sticky as she
placed each bite daintily in her tiny mouth.

“Joan is a girl’s name,” Bethy stated
matter-of-factly.

“I know.”

She put another piece of toast in her mouth
and chewed. “How come your mommy gave you a girl’s name?”

“I’m named after Joan of Arc.”

“I don’t know her.”

“With God’s help, she saved her country
from the bad men who wanted to take it over. She was a general, kind of.”

She looked up at him curiously. “What’s a
general?”

“A general leads armies into battle. He, or
she, is kinda like the boss.”

“I wanna be a general when I grow up,” she
decided, mouth still half full.

“Generals don’t talk with food in their
mouths.”

“What else do generals do?”

“Don’t you want to know what happened to
Joan of Arc?”

She shrugged. “’kay.”

“She was burned at the stake as a traitor
to the church. But later they realized their mistake and made her a saint.”

“Eeewww.” Bethy’s face screwed up
distastefully at the thought. “I don’t wanna burn on the grill.”

“Nice story to tell a kid, Joan,” Francis
remarked as he passed them on his way to root through the liquor cabinet.

“You don’t need that,” Joan said woodenly.

“I don’t need lots of things. That doesn’t
mean I don’t want ’em. I’ll have to go on the wagon again when we get back. You
really have to work on putting a little more uummph into that gum.” Francis
found the bottle he was searching for and left to take a seat in the living
room, switching on the TV.

Lolita was still asleep, having stayed up
half the night and most of the pre-dawn hours trying to convince them she knew
nothing about the list they wanted. Finally she’d given up and gone to bed.

Joan glanced over at Bethy again. He would
have had a little girl if his bitch of a wife hadn’t murdered their innocent,
unborn babe. How did a person do that? How could people be so callous toward
life? Life was precious, every moment of it.

But they didn’t care, those Godless
heretics who used children for profit or as weapons against their enemies. They
had no compassion for a hungry child, an orphan, the small helpless infant left
to wail pitifully on a blood-soaked dirt floor.

They turned them into prostitutes, sold
them into slavery, used them as decoys.

Saint understood his pain. Understood that
kind of filth couldn’t be left to enjoy the wonders of life when they so callously
denied the innocent the same simple pleasures.

He wouldn’t have cared that his daughter
might be born deformed or mentally retarded. He would have loved her just the
same. But not that treacherous cunt who thought of nothing and no one but
herself and how she would be tied down to a less-than-perfect child.

He despised the miracles of modern
medicine, with ultrasounds and DNA testing and amniocentesis. They only served
to terrorize women who would otherwise bear these children and care for them.
It gave weak women an easy way out. Showed what they were really made of.

And she had done it purposely, the bitch,
while he was away on a mission. He’d been allowed no say. No one had bothered
to ask him if he wanted to be party to such a crime. She and her doctor had
decided for him.

At least his innocent daughter had gone to
heaven. His wife, he sent to hell upon his return to find out what she had
done. He hoped she rotted there with all the other scum he’d sent there over
the years to keep her company.

When he made it there himself, he was going
to kill her again, just for the sheer pleasure of it.

* * * * *

Francis took a swig from the bottle as he
flipped through the channels. Amazing, he thought. All the misery in the world
and people wanted nothing more than to hear about teenagers sleeping with their
stepfathers under their mother’s noses, women who self mutilate and why, and
men who want to be spanked.

If they wanted to see real misery, they
should take a tour of the hovels in South America, Asia and Mexico. Or visit
Tibet or Vietnam or Korea. They should spend half their adult life in a
steaming jungle with lice and leeches and God only knew what else crawling on
their skin. Then the clueless fools wouldn’t worry so much about mutilating
themselves or spanking some twisted jerk who couldn’t manage to get a hard-on.

He’d begun to think there weren’t any
decent people left in the world until he’d met Maria. And Saint, of course—that
went without saying. The man was decent. He understood weakness. And he never
took a man’s pride from him. When there had been no sane reason to go on, to
fight, to complete the mission, Saint had given them one.

When he had wanted nothing more than to
drink himself into oblivion in a crowded bar, Saint bent the rules.

There was only one rule with Saint. Do your
job. He recognized that his men were individuals, not just assembly line GIs.
He chose the men for his missions based on their talents not their military conduct
record. Saint chose the outcasts, the hardest of the hard—men who had nothing
to lose, nothing to live for—and gave them a sense of pride, his respect and
his trust. To date, as far as Francis knew, none of them had let him down. Any
one of them would die for him.

Francis wasn’t about to start a new trend.
He would get that list or die trying. Lolita was a hard case, but nothing they
couldn’t handle. She’d been around the block a few times, but not quite as many
times as the Saint’s posse. Between the three of them, they would wear her
down. That or she would tear every hair in her pretty red head out and beg them
to take the list with her blessing.