Altar of Bones (13 page)

He staggered, reached out blindly, and his hand got caught in the yellow tape. He ripped it away with a snarl. A bloodred haze filled his eyes, rage and a terrible, tearing grief. The bastards who did this, the
bastards
.

I’m gonna hunt you down and kill every last fucking one of you
.

He fell to his knees, wrapping his arms around his belly, hunching over. His eyes burned and his throat felt raw. He wanted to scream his guts out. He hated that he’d been too late, hated that he and Dom had seen so little of each during these last ten years because they’d taken such different paths.

He hated that he was still here, and alone.

He slammed his fist into the marble floor, so hard he nearly broke it. But the pain was good—it focused him, hardened him.

Slowly, he straightened. He looked at the small altar shrouded in black shadows, at a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and the large bronze candelabra to the right of her that looked oddly out of place. As if there ought to be another, matching, candelabra on the other side.

He stared at the Virgin’s too sweet face for a long time. Then he made himself look at the rest of it. A votive-candle rack tipped over, hardened drops of wax and scorch marks. Blood smears and splatter soaked into the porous marble floor. And something else he still couldn’t bear to look at, couldn’t bear even to think about: the outline in chalk that marked the place where Dom had died.

It would be at the morgue now, Dom’s body. Inert flesh and bones, organs and trace evidence, but not his brother anymore.

Not Dom.

R
Y SLIPPED OUT
the back way through the sacristy door, but he stopped while he was still within the thick shadows cast by Sacred Heart’s stone walls. He ripped the priest’s collar off his neck, drawing in deep breaths of wet, steamy air, trying to wash the smell of his brother’s blood out of his head.

It helped a little, at least enough to get him thinking straight again. Except for the occasional car that rolled by on its way to somewhere else, the streets around the church looked deserted. But the killers, Ry thought—they could still be nearby. They would have been in contact with whoever planned the raid on his house in D.C., they’d know about his escape, and they would figure he’d have heard from his brother. So they’d also figure this would be the first place he’d run to.

They were out there, all right—he could practically
feel
them. Watching the church, waiting for a chance to have another go at him.

They, they, they … Who
were
they?

They’d murdered Dom, and they were trying to kill him, and he still didn’t know why. But he knew where he might find some of the answers.

Buried with Lafitte’s treasure.

S
O AS SOON
as I hang up
, Dom had said,
I’m going to write down everything Dad said and put it with Lafitte’s treasure
.

He and Dom had grown up in a small Queen Anne–style cottage a block from the beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, an isolated strip of land that separated the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston and accessible only by ferryboat.

One summer’s day, when he was eight, Dom ten, they were exploring the marshes and sand dunes and they came across an abandoned shack, weathered and rotting. Ry was sure the place had to be at least a hundred years old, but Dom said anything that old would long ago have been eaten up completely by the salt water, and they were arguing about that when Ry’s foot went through a floorboard and into a hole.

In the hole was a wooden chest, banded with iron, and Ry said it had to be Laffite’s treasure chest. Jean Lafitte, the swashbuckling privateer and spy, was one of his heroes, and one story he especially liked had the pirate trying to help Napoléon escape exile only to end up getting his hands on the emperor’s treasure instead. Lafitte had buried the treasure, so the story went, near his camp on the Bolivar Peninsula, the secret of its location disappearing along with the pirate into the mists of time.

Dom said a pirate as smart as Lafitte would never bury his treasure in a place where just any old body could stumble across it, and he and Dom argued about that until the moment they broke the padlock with a rock, opened the chest, and found, to Ry’s disgust, not jewels and gold doubloons, but a bunch of moldering old newspapers from the 1930s and a single Indian-head nickel.

They got good use out of that old chest, though, using it to stash their own treasure, such as cigarettes and
Playboy
s, and later booze and pot and that pack of jumbo-size condoms Dom had shoplifted from Walgreens the day after Lindsay Cramer said she’d go with him to the Ball High School homecoming dance.

Ry started to smile at the memory, then his throat closed up and his belly clenched against a fresh wave of pain. Homecoming. Home.

That little yellow house with its white gingerbread trim was gone now, destroyed by Hurricane Ike along with everything else on the peninsula. Mom, Dad, Dom—all of them gone now. The entire O’Malley family was dead, except for him.

But had there ever really been an
O’Malley
family, or was that name just another part of the lie that had been Michael O’Malley’s life? For all of Ry’s own life, his father had lived in that little house, making only a so-so living by renting out a small string of fishing boats to the few tourists who made it out to the peninsula. Sometimes, during the lean years, he’d even had to work a few shifts down at the shrimp-canning factory just to make ends meet. Bolivar was hardly a place you’d pick to live if you wanted to get either rich or noticed, it was too isolated, remote; the only way you could even get there was by ferryboat.

No, what Bolivar was, was the perfect place for a killer on the run to go to ground.

A killer such as his father.

R
Y LEFT THE
shadows, walking slowly, even stopping once directly beneath a streetlamp to go through his faux-cigarette-lighting routine, giving whoever might be watching a good look at his face. If the hunters were here at the church, he wanted to flush them out now.

He walked to where he’d parked his ride, a twenty-year-old white Chevy pickup that he’d picked up in a used-car lot near the Houston airport. It was a clunker, but it had the virtue of having come cheap.

This late on a wet Sunday night there wasn’t a lot of traffic. He needed to get over to Port Bolivar and see if Dom had a chance before he was killed to write down the old man’s confession and bury it as he’d said he would, in that old chest they’d used when they were kids. Lafitte’s treasure. But first he drove around Galveston Island, making random turns and flipping U-eys, running red lights and stop signs. A little ditty from when he was a kid kept running through his head:
Come out, come out, wherever you are…
. But he saw no sign of a tail.

He idled at a stoplight on the Strand, a part of town that had once catered to sailors and whores, now lined with T-shirt shops, condos, and
trendy cafés. Like that cybercafé on the corner,
SIP ‘N SURF
in blinking orange neon.

Ry checked his watch. He still had over thirty minutes before the next ferry, the last one of the night, left for Port Bolivar.

T
HE ONLY OTHER
customer in the café was a pimply kid, wearing Harry Potter glasses and a T-shirt that said
TALK NERDY TO ME
. The barista, a guy with a scraggly goatee, acted put out by Ry’s request for a double espresso and a half hour’s worth of access to one of the computer stations.

In his message, Dom had said a woman called Katya Orlova had made a film of this “big kill.” Ry logged on to the Internet and googled the name. More than eight hundred references popped up. He skimmed through them, but nothing looked even remotely helpful. A dog-grooming business in Des Moines, a Russian gymnast, a Facebook page belonging to a Berkeley coed. Michelle Pfeiffer had played a character of that name in a movie called
The Russia House
…

And then he found her. Maybe found her.

It wasn’t much, just a few lines in an article, for an academic journal, titled “Women Behind the Camera: The Feminist Struggle in Hollywood, Yesterday and Today.”

Still, the following years saw little improvement in the dearth of opportunity for female cinematographers. Even the few kept on salary by the major studios were rarely assigned directive roles on any major projects. Katya Orlova, for instance, put in four years at Twentieth Century–Fox as second assistant cameraman before her name finally appears in the credits as a camera operator for
The Misfits.
Other women—

Outside, a car door slammed. Ry looked up to see one of the island’s horse-drawn tourist carriages roll past the window, momentarily blocking his view. Then he saw a woman crossing the street from the direction of a big, black Hummer.

He couldn’t see her face clearly through the rain-smeared glass, but he knew she was beautiful just from the way she carried herself—shoulders back, head held high, her hands stuffed deep into the pockets
of a swinging, black leather trench coat. Her stiletto boots clicked on the pavement in long, purposeful strides.

She passed beneath a streetlight, and he saw dark red hair that shone like wet blood.
This woman came out of the ladies’ room and she had red hair, and after what Dad said, I thought …

Ry dove for the floor just as the café’s front window exploded under a hail of gunfire.