Altar of Bones (10 page)

As he listened to the ringing on the other end, he rubbed his face, felt the wetness of tears.

Then Ry’s voice, tough and to the point: “Leave a message.”

Dom gripped the phone tighter. Over the pounding of his heart he heard the beep of the machine.

“Ry? It’s about Dad. He’s dead, and—” Dom choked back sobs, then
pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead, tried to pull himself together.
You’re a grown man, for mercy’s sake, and Michael O’Malley’s son, so you really should be tougher than this
.

He drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Yes, that was more like it. He heard a door open and close behind him, the rap of heels on the pegwood floor, and he jerked around. At first all he saw were black stilettos, then the flash of red hair.

He dropped the phone. It clattered and banged against the wall, but the noise it made wasn’t as loud as the banging of his heart. He watched the woman emerge from out of the shadows. It wasn’t the doctor from the hospital; this woman was older, not as pretty. He thought he’d puke with relief.

She walked past Dom without seeming to see him. He wiped his sweating hand on his pant leg and picked up the phone.

“Ry?”

Washington, D.C
.

T
HE
T
WO
men in their designer threads and custom-made shoes quickly crossed the street, jaywalking just so they wouldn’t have to meet him on the narrow sidewalk head on. Ry O’Malley gave them a little curled-fingers wave, then laughed to himself as he watched the two suits try to decide whether to wave back or run like hell.

He knew he looked scary as all get out, a real badass with his long hair and tattoos and biker’s black leather jacket. This part of Columbia Heights had been flirting with gentrification for years, but enough stubborn pockets of crime and poverty remained so that at cocktail parties the biggest topic of conversation was how to get a permit to carry.

As Ry turned the corner, he heard the stutter and hiccup of an engine badly in need of a tune-up come up behind him. Dusk was just falling, and he paused under a streetlamp to take a pack of cigarettes and disposable lighter out of his jacket pocket. He didn’t smoke, but the ritual of stopping to light up was a good way to do a little recon without being obvious about it.

The sick engine, he saw, was under the hood of a small red van with
GIOVANNI’S PIZZERIA
painted in white script on the side panels. The van chugged past him and pulled up next to a fire hydrant. A kid with spiked hair and a nose ring got out, carrying one of those insulated cases that were supposed to keep the pies hot but left them soggy instead.

Ry watched the kid climb the steps and ring the bell of a brownstone
town house, then he tossed the cigarette into the gutter and crossed the street. A lamp also shone in the bay window of his own Queen Anne– style shotgun, but it was set on a timer. No one was waiting inside to welcome him home.

He let himself in, stepping over the pile of junk mail and flyers that had accumulated beneath the slot in the front door. He shut off the alarm and went into the living room, took off his leather jacket and flung it at a leather sofa.

His Walther P99 was tucked gangbanger-style in the small of his back, and he took it out and laid it on the iron-banded Spanish chest he used for a coffee table. The chest was a gift from the prima-ballerina girlfriend he’d lived with for a while, until she’d grown tired of the long separations, of not knowing where he was or what he was doing, or whether the next time she saw him would be on a slab in a morgue.

He sat on the chest and unlaced his boots. They had steel in the toes and one kick with them could cave in a man’s ribs or his head, but that made them heavy as hell. It felt good to get them off his feet. He padded barefoot into the kitchen and made himself a very dry and very cold martini. He never drank while on a job and he shuddered now as the icy gin bit the back of his throat.

He had his feet up, Stan Getz on the stereo, and the martini was half-gone before he noticed the blinking red light on his telephone answering machine.

He waited until the last, piercing notes of
Body and Soul
died away before he got up and went to the antique Dickens desk that faced the room’s big bay window. Through the deepening dusk outside, he could see his next-door neighbor trying to defy the laws of physics by squeezing his SUV into a parking space three inches too small. And the border collie who lived on the corner was taking her owner out for a walk. He watched as they went from the lamppost, to the fire hydrant, to the tire of the pizza delivery van. His ballerina girlfriend had called it “leaving pee-mails,” and the memory almost made Ry smile.

He reached out and pressed the play button, and the machine’s hollow voice said,
You have one new message. Thursday, August twelve, four fifty-three p.m
. And then his brother, sounding raw and broken, “Ry?”

The only other word he could make out through Dom’s strangling sobs was “dead.”

Dad?

Ry’s throat closed up, but he shook his head. No way could it be Dad. Ry had gone home over the holidays and the old man had never seemed better. He was still grieving for Mom, sure, and for the loss of their home from the devastation of Hurricane Ike, but otherwise … Hell, that game of horse they’d played on Christmas morning—he’d almost kicked Ry’s ass.

Had there been some kind of accident? A car crash? The old man liked to take his boat out on the Gulf this time of year, maybe a squall had come up …

What had the machine said? August 12? That was two days ago.

Come on, out with it, Dom. What in God’s name happened?

He heard a banging noise, as if Dom had dropped the phone, then a burst of laughter, the clatter of billiard balls. His brother said, “Ry?” again, then a mechanical voice cut in demanding seventy-five cents for another three minutes.

He heard coins being fed into a slot, followed by his brother’s voice, sounding scared now, “Oh, God, Ry. This woman came out of the ladies’ room and she had red hair, and after what Dad said, I thought …”

There was a pause as Dom took a couple of deep breaths, then his next words came out clear and relatively calm.

And strange as hell.

“Dad’s had a heart attack, Ry. Dad’s gone, and now they’re going to come after us, because of what he did. The big kill.”

“The big
what
?” Ry said, but his gaze was already sweeping the street outside, every molecule of his being alert.

He heard his brother draw in another ragged breath, go on, “I know I’m not making any sense, but I can’t … not over the phone. You need to get down here fast, Ry, and I’ll explain everything—” Dom made a noise, as if he’d started to laugh, then almost gagged. “I mean, I’ll tell you what Dad told me, which isn’t enough, not nearly enough. But for now just know there may be people out there who are going to try to ki—”

Ry pressed the stop button, cutting off his brother’s disembodied voice.

The pizza van
.

The red pizza-delivery van that had followed him around the corner, that had pulled up next to the fire hydrant over thirty minutes ago now.

Ry dove for the floor just as the van’s side door slapped open and the bay window exploded.
Uzi
, he thought as he rolled, snatched the Walther off the chest, and came back onto his feet. He pressed his back against the room’s inner wall, out of the line of fire from the street.

In the kitchen, the door to the backyard crashed open under the force of what had to be either the world’s biggest foot or an honest-to-God battering ram. Ry reached around the doorjamb with the Walther and emptied half a clip down the hall. More Uzis returned fire, tearing up walls and furniture. Wood splintered, glass shattered, plaster dust billowed in the air.

Whoever these guys were, they weren’t being subtle. And they were professional, taking their time to coordinate their attack, surrounding the house, cutting off any escape route, hitting it hard and fast, and getting out before the cops arrived. Which meant he had a minute, maybe two, before they came at him with everything they had. Ry had another couple of clips in the inside pocket of his leather jacket, but he needed more ammo, and another gun.

The floor plan to his small house was simple. The front door opened into a tiny foyer with a staircase going up and a long, narrow hallway leading back to the kitchen. To the left were the living and dining rooms, separated by pocket doors. Above, was one large bedroom and bath. He had a basement, but the only entrance to it was off the kitchen where the bad guys were, and it was a dead end anyway.

There was no place for him to escape to, no place to hide, and he was fast running out of time.

Ry kept his ammo and extra guns, including a pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun, in a wall safe behind a panel of wainscoting next to the fireplace in the living room. He fired most of the rest of the clip down the hall, then dropped and rolled past the open doorway. He commando-crawled across the floor, picking up his jacket on the way. He slapped
one of the fresh clips into his gun and lay down another spray of fire. He got return fire, but it was still coming from the kitchen. He’d slowed them down, but he hadn’t stopped them.

He popped the wall panel and spun the dial to the safe. Barely two minutes had passed since they’d blown in the window and battered down the back door, still he strained to hear the distant wail of sirens. The emergency response system had to be flooded with calls by now, so where were the goddamn cops?

The safe clicked open. He jerked up on the handle, swung open the door—

Shit
.

Ry’s belly clenched into a fist of fear. The guns, the ammo, were gone. In their place were two brick-size packages of white powder wrapped in clear plastic. It could be powdered sugar or flour, but Ry didn’t think so. He had to be looking at six kilos of pure-grade heroin.

Jesus. Who
were
these guys?
They’d bypassed his state-of-the-art security system, stolen his guns, and planted the smack in his locked safe, then staged what would look like a drug deal gone bad. He knew the D.C. cops weren’t coming now. Whoever these guys were, they had gold-plated connections. Federal, probably, and this operation would be completely off the books.

He heard movement out in the kitchen, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, the metallic snap of weapons being readied. There’d be three guys, he thought, maybe four. And figure another couple guys waiting in the street, by the pizza van, in case by some miracle he made it through the front door alive.

A bookcase flanked the other side of the fireplace. Ry jumped to his feet, spun around, and flattened himself against the wall. Now he had the bookcase between himself and whatever came at him from the kitchen, not that a few inches of walnut and bound paper were going to stop the 950 rounds per minute that came from an Uzi submachine gun.

He was also vulnerable to the street here. At least the first shots through the window had blown out the lamp so the room was in darkness. Except for the red light on his answering machine. He desperately needed to listen to the rest of Dom’s message.

Dad’s gone, and now they’re going to come after us, because of what he did
.

Going to come, shit—they were already here. He’d been fucked before, but not this fucked.

He reloaded, pointed the Walther in a two-fisted grip at the open door, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes.

Galveston, Texas

A
T THE SAME
time, in Sacred Heart’s peaceful quiet, Father Dom was hearing confessions. He sat behind the thick purple velvet curtain, in the closetlike darkness of the confessional box. He was adrift, empty of all feeling. He’d even stopped being afraid, but then he supposed that was because the human psyche could only live on an emotional knife-edge for so long.

He’d thought about running, disappearing, but he had no idea how to go about it, and besides, he had obligations, duties. A priest could no more abandon his flock than a father and husband could walk away from his family. And so he went on with his life. He’d buried his father, celebrated mass, baptized a baby, read his breviary, tried to pray. And everywhere he looked, every time he turned around, it seemed there was another redheaded woman. Even the woman in the funeral home had red hair, although it was probably from a bottle since she was at least sixty. Who knew there were so many red-haired women in Galveston?

He heard the far-off ring of the telephone in the rectory and then silence. Something wasn’t right. It was too quiet. No one had entered the confessional box for a while now, and he could hear no movement out in the nave, no voices. Where were the tourists? They came every evening at this time, drawn by the setting sun, which turned the church’s famous giant white onion dome into a brilliant pink.

He parted the purple velvet curtain to peer out. Not a soul. Then a movement by the altar rail caught his eye, and his heart jumped. A woman in a bright yellow sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat genuflected and made the sign of the cross. Her hair was dark brown, though, not red, and he felt stupid.