Jesse slammed the heel of his palm into his forehead violently.
He was so impressed with himself at getting the tip for Lucy, staying one step ahead of Frey, so caught up in the truth or fiction of it all, the chase, that he’d allowed himself to be either careless or suckered. One step behind.
“Goddamnit!” he cursed and speed-dialed Lucy.
Agnes and Lucy waited nervously in front of Cecilia’s apartment. Not anxious from the threats that seemed to be gathering around them, but because of what they had to tell her. This was the kind of neighborhood where nobody cared much about fame or celebrity unless it was their own.
Agnes was still shaking from Lucy’s vivid description.
Lucy’s phone rang. She checked her caller ID and sighed.
“It’s Jesse,” she said, declining the call.
“Could it be important?” Agnes offered.
“Not more important than this,” Lucy answered.
“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?” Agnes said. “You’re driving me crazy.”
“Oh, honey, we passed crazy several exits ago,” Lucy said.
Right then, they saw Cecilia approaching from down the block, leather guitar case slung around her body like a quiver. She was dressed in black, the necklace of hypodermic needles that Bill made her dangling from her neck. She fit right in with the Red Hook backdrop.
Cecilia stopped a few feet in front of them. Like Lucy, she looked very much like she had something to say. She and Lucy burst out simultaneously with their secrets.
“Frey was a priest,” Cecilia said, as Lucy said, “Frey doesn’t have his heart.”
“What?” Lucy and Cecilia said in unison once again. This time Agnes joined in.
“Frey was priest?” Agnes asked. “That makes no sense.”
“Fallen away,” Cecilia explained. “It makes perfect sense,”
“He knew who Sebastian was. He knows who we are,” Lucy added.
“He believes,” Agnes asserted.
CeCe continued, “I went to see him at the hospital. It was almost like he wanted me to know.”
“Why the hell would you do that?” Lucy asked.
“To confront him, about Sebastian’s heart and about Bill.”
“What about Bill?” Lucy asked.
“He’s dead, murdered right in front of me,” Cecilia said, fingering the necklace. “Frey was definitely behind it.”
“Fucking monster,” Lucy spat.
“I’m so sorry, CeCe,” Agnes said.
Agnes and Lucy each moved in for a long embrace. CeCe acknowledged their condolences somberly but with clear eyes.
“I would have bet my life he had the heart,” Cecilia said as they separated.
“Me too,” Lucy said. “Until I saw it.”
Cecilia was floored.
“Take us there.”
It was late. Car services were booked and cabs were scarce.
The G train from Metropolitan Avenue to Carroll Street was long, but better than walking. Lucy, Cecilia, and Agnes entered the subway, drawing an occasional stare or whisper or giggle from passing locals.
“Oh my God!”
“Is that them?”
They ignored it and continued down the flight of slick cement steps into the bowels of Brooklyn’s commuter rail system.
It was damp, dark, and dirty. The token booth was closed and the platform empty except for a homeless guy or three slumped over at the exits. The rush-hour crowd was long departed, likely in the middle of their second after-work cocktail at some Bedford Avenue boîte or another. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed and crackled, threatening to blow at any moment, and the sound of trains on other lines clacking in the distance faded into nothing. Not a stop-and-frisk cop in sight.
Lucy, Agnes, and Cecilia waited wordlessly.
They eyed the beer cans and candy wrappers littering the tracks, floating in oily leftover puddles of yesterday’s rain. Rats traversed the guard above the electrified third rail, testing their own mortality. Boards and beams from an ongoing repair project were partially tarped and piled up, unbound against the graffitied white-tiled walls.
“Some work is never done,” Lucy observed impatiently.
Then finally, it came. The headlamp from the front car blazed brightly at them through the musty tunnel as it approached the station. The letter G, encircled in green, rushing at them. The train was coming, but none of them were sure they wanted to get on. It raced through the station and passed the waiting women without slowing, without stopping. They could barely make out the digital OUT OF SERVICE signs blinking their red-lighted warning on the side of each car.
“Spare some change for a sinner, sister?”
CeCe was startled. She had been so distracted by the noise and her destination that she’d barely noticed one of the homeless guys from the other end of the platform approach. She reached into her pocket as Lucy and Agnes looked on. She knew what it was like to depend on the generosity of passers-by. They usually just tossed a few coins in her guitar case without even a glance in her direction. It irked her. CeCe wanted to show him more respect as she handed over the last few bills she had on her.
“You look familiar,” Cecilia noted, fixating on the area around his eyes. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“Around the neighborhood,” he replied, the ingratiating smile leaving his face.
He held up the bill to study the denomination and she noticed blood on it. Her blood. She felt a sharp pain.
First from the wound on her hand.
Then from his hands around her throat.
Before Lucy and Agnes could reach her, they were restrained from behind, held back. Lucy struggled, but Agnes seemed to wilt, almost fainting into a trance in the vandal’s arms. Cecilia could see Lucy immobilized and Agnes swooning but could do nothing about it, locked in a desperate struggle of her own.
“Don’t worry, they’re next,” her attacker assured, foaming like a rabid animal.
He grunted and threw Cecilia down onto the cement platform, keeping a firm hold on her throat. She tried to use her knees and elbows to strike him as he sat above her, but she was pinned, her head dangling over the edge of the platform. She turned to look down the tunnel and was met by a light breeze, a telltale sign that a train was on the move. Approaching.
On the verge of blacking out, Cecilia felt for the hypodermics hanging from her necklace and wove them in between each of her fingers, makeshift brass knuckles, and made a fist. She punched him as hard as she could in the neck, driving the middle casing into the soft spot in his throat. She slammed it upward through the bone of his bottom jaw into his mouth, impaling his wagging tongue to his palate.
“You were saying?” she asked bluntly.
He released her, blood gushing out of his nostrils and through his teeth, collapsing as Cecilia pulled the stalk from his throat. With the other hand, she reached for her cello bow belt buckle and unsheathed it, revealing a blade the length of a kitchen knife.
Agnes’s assailant rushed CeCe, leaving Agnes in a heap on the subway platform. Cecilia sidestepped him and grabbed him around the neck, putting a knife to his chest. “Who sent you?”
“The devil,” the arrogant assassin replied.
A few yards away, Lucy fought for her life. Suddenly, she felt cold metal against her temple and froze. The look in CeCe’s eyes told her all she needed to know. It was a gun.
“Drop the knife, bitch!”
CeCe’s attention was suddenly diverted by a sight she could scarcely believe. It was Agnes, walking up behind Lucy and her attacker with a two-by-four in her hands. CeCe looked down and there was Agnes also, still lying on the ground. A double take. Agnes raised the wooden stud, brought it back behind her shoulder, and swung it with all her strength against Lucy’s attacker’s skull. The force of the blow freed Lucy and sent her sprawling forward, nearly over the edge of the platform. Lucy pulled herself off of the cement.
The screech of metal wheels against car
bon steel rail signaled to all of them that a train was fast approaching. The platform was a scene of carnage.
“Two down,” Lucy said, glaring at the third.
He was unimpressed.
“See you soon,” he said, backing away and running up the exit staircase.
“Get Agnes,” Cecilia screamed, circling her malefactor and keeping him at knifepoint distance from them.
“Agnes,” Lucy whispered, kneeling beside her. “Agnes, wake up.”
Lucy touched her face and stroked her hair, which seemed to rouse the sleeping girl. Agnes stood slowly with Lucy’s help. Lucy slid along some unctuous tissue on the ground beneath her but kept her balance, kicked aside some shards of broken skull, and dragged Agnes along with her. Just in time to bolt inside the train as the doors were closing.
“You okay?” Lucy asked Cecilia.
“Yeah. You?”
They both looked at Agnes.
“What the hell was that?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “But I’ve been having these weird out-of-body experiences ever since Precious Blood.”
“No shit?” Lucy added, in a state of semi-shock.
“I think about being somewhere and I’m there,” she explained. “I can’t control it.”
“Until you need to,” Cecilia said.
The three of them sat silently, watching the stations go by out the windows, keeping a close eye on every entrance and exit in and out of their car.
The lights blinked on the ceiling as the train clacked along, strobed the fingermarks on Cecilia’s neck, which were turning from red to a nasty black-and-blue. They exited at the Smith–9th Street station, and Lucy led them to Perpetua’s house. To Sebastian.
The streets were quiet. Lucy, Agnes, and Cecilia arrived at the modest three-story brownstone and immediately sensed trouble. The Madonna statue that Lucy had admired was toppled over, its outstretched hand broken off and turned to painted rubble. The snake portion, the one that the Madonna was stepping on, was gone.
The lights were on in the parlor and Lucy climbed the steps and knocked. She grabbed the knob and found the door unexpectedly unlocked. She almost fell through the doorway.
“Perpetua,” Lucy called. “It’s Lucy.”
“Look,” Agnes said, pointing to the dimly lit hallway walls just in front of them.
There were splatters of reddish brown everywhere. Handprints, as if a toddler had been let loose with a set of finger paints.
“It’s still wet,” Cecilia said, moving in for a closer look.
Lucy reached for the light switch on the wall. It clicked lifelessly as she snapped it up and down. They moved cautiously down the hallway into increasing darkness, Lucy leading the threesome. Suddenly, she yelled out and fell to the floor.
Lucy was face to face with a dead man. A priest. His collar shoved down his throat.
“I know him,” Lucy said, shuddering.
Cecilia pulled out her cigarette lighter and raised it, illuminating the narrow space. Agnes helped Lucy to her feet and they continued down the hall toward the bedroom at the back of the house. It was a mess of broken furniture and window glass. Sheets torn, crosses splintered, photos ripped, and knickknacks—accumulated over the course of a lifetime—strewn carelessly about. CeCe’s lighter revealed scratchy phrases, Biblical ones, along the walls, handwritten in blood. Still wet and dripping.
Sobrii estote vigilate quia adversarius vester diabolus tamquam leo rugiens circuit quaerens quem devoret.1
A woman’s body lay in front of the open closet door, her head bashed mercilessly in.
“No!” Lucy cried at the sight of her murdered mentor, who’d obviously tried with her last breath to protect the relic.
Above her head were written mocking words of despair:
Cum me interficerent in ossibus meis exprobraverunt mihi hostes mei dicentes tota die ubi est Deus tuus.2
“Lucy!” Cecilia shouted. “Where is it?”
Lucy pointed at the open closet door. Cecilia approached with her lighter and looked inside, illuminating the altar.
“It’s gone!” Cecilia cried.
Agnes was transfixed by the bloody words above Perpetua. Where is your God? she repeated silently to herself.
Surveying the carnage all around her, she was wondering the same thing.
A rumbling at the front of the house startled them. Cecilia was doubly surprised because she had no inkling from her ever-present stigmata that danger was near. The only exit in the tiny room was the shattered window, and it was too small for a single one of them to climb through, let alone the three of them at such short notice. They were trapped. Whatever, whoever was coming, they’d have to face it together. Live or die.
Lucy stood up and joined Agnes and Cecilia, shoulder to shoulder, facing the doorway. The footsteps slowed as they got closer until the intruder suddenly revealed himself.
“Jesse,” Lucy said, relieved.
“What the fuck happened here?”
“His heart is gone.”
Jesse hung his head. “I’m too late.”
“If you knew something, why didn’t you stop it? Call the police or something?” Lucy railed.
“The police?” Jesse laughed. “I tried to call you. To warn you.”
“How would you know anything about this?” Agnes asked.
“I listened to the video of Lucy and Perpetua when we were here yesterday.”
“She said nobody knew they had Sebastian’s heart here,” Lucy reminded him.
“Frey knew?” Agnes asked.
“No. If he knew, he would have sent his creeps for it long ago.”
“What are you saying, Jesse?” Lucy pressed.
“Frey was watching Mayfield. We were followed, Lucy. We led him here. You and me.”
“That’s why we’re still alive. He knew we’d come eventually,” Lucy said.
“So that’s why we were attacked tonight,” Agnes said. “He doesn’t need us anymore.”
“How could I be so stupid?” Jesse repeated inconsolably.
“He has Sebastian’s heart. These beautiful people, who believed in us, who had faith in us, are dead!” CeCe cried in anger.
Lucy nodded in a devastated, trance-like state, staring at Jesse. “It’s all because of us.”
* * *
1. Be sober and alert: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5: 8-9
2. My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?” Psalms 42:10 41:11
The crowd gathered quickly in front of the police precinct house on Union Street. Lucy, Cecilia, and Agnes were escorted in one after another. It wasn’t exactly a perp walk, but it was close. To the faithful, it was nothing short of a thrill to see the three of them march in together, just as they’d marched out of Precious Blood through haze and fire a few months prior. To the skeptics, a relief to have these dubious latter day saints off the streets and their minions corralled behind police barricades.
“Free them!” some supporters in the crowd shouted, worried that they might be blamed for what had happened.
The three were ushered into a small drab room with a frosted-glass door. They were seated at a rectangular table with a single empty chair at the head of the table.
“Don’t tell them anything,” Lucy whispered angrily. “They can’t be trusted.”
“Maybe they can help?” Agnes wondered. “Protect us? Or something?”
“Remember what Sebastian said: Save yourself,” Cecilia reminded them, closing the button on her vintage black Victorian lace high-necked collar to cover her bruises. “It’s up to us.”
The door opened and a harried looking officer stepped through it, sixteen-ounce coffee firmly in hand.
“Back so soon?” Captain Murphy asked, taking a seat.
Even he reacted to the three of them together. In one room. They were a sight, whether you believed in them or not.
>
“You’re right, it’s much too soon for another interrogation,” Cecilia said to the other girls. “It’s basically the same shit we said before. Are we done here, then?”
“What’s the rush,” the captain asked. “Lose something?”
The girls settled back down into their chairs. Whether he knew something or was just being a wiseass was still up for debate.
“Yeah,” Lucy answered, taking the offensive. “I’ve lost my patience with this charade.”
“This is getting to be a habit,” Murphy said, eyeing Lucy. “First the church, and now this. Let’s forget about the number of complaints we deal with from those nuts that follow you around, blocking traffic, trespassing, loitering around the neighborhood. I’ve had to assign half the precinct just to deal with this hysteria. Do you know how much you three are costing the city? The taxpayers?”
“We had nothing to do with this,” Lucy shouted.
“I’m not accusing you of anything. You’re not charged with anything.”
“Then why are we here?” Cecilia said. “Why were we fingerprinted and taken into custody?”
“Standard operating procedure when somebody stumbles upon a double murder. More importantly, it was for your own safety.”
“How considerate of you, Detective, to come to our aid,” CeCe replied, batting her lashes. “By jailing us overnight.”
Murphy was unimpressed. “There was another incident last night. Two junkies dead on the G train platform in Red Hook. A fight most likely.”
Cecilia fiddled nervously with her collar. “Shit happens.”
“Nothing ever just happens,” he said angrily. “You’re always in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re going to get hurt. Badly hurt.”
“Is that a threat?” Cecilia asked.
“No,” he said. “A warning.”
“You’re a little late.”
“If you see something, say something,” Lucy mocked.
“We’ve been lucky so far,” Cecilia said. “Blessed, you could say.”
“Not everyone takes kindly to that sort of sentiment,” Murphy advised. “Especially the Church.”