Dark Advent (Vatican Knights Book 8) Read online

  She leaned into his chest to embrace him. But Travys eased her back. “Hey, what are you doing? Not here where everyone can see.” When she pulled back he could see the pain on her face. “Hey, relax,” he told her. “This takes time, you know?”

  “Travys, I’m tired of going behind everyone’s back. I need to tell someone about us.”

  He pointed a forefinger at her. “If you say one word---one---there will be no us. You understand?”

  Her eyes started to well with tears. Then she nodded: Yes.

  “Good.” He stood back and appraised her lithe shape. Then he shook his head in appreciation: Ooo-eeee! You’re fine, girl! Then evenly he said: “I’ll see you tonight at eight.”

  She nodded: OK.

  Then Travys was gone, leaving Paula behind to wonder if this cloak-and-dagger relationship was worth it.

  The answer was ‘yes.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Johnnie Deveraux heard that his friend Carmen had disappeared, he knew exactly why: Vinny Cuchinata. He and Carmen liked to play the dogs at Suffolk Downs. And like Carmen, his skills of picking a winner was about as great as choosing the number of marbles in a five-gallon jar to win a prize.

  Whereas Carmen couldn’t temper his spending---the man always believing that he was about to hit the next jackpot or the next bonanza---Johnnie could at least moderate his spending to a degree.

  He knew Carmen was in debt to Cooch for more than seven grand. But Carmen refused to restrict his vice to any level. I just need that one big hit, he always told him at the racetrack. Just one. But the big hit never came and Carmen was gone.

  Now he had to wonder since he was in debt to Cooch for almost five grand. Did Cooch have his limit? Was seven thousand it? Johnnie had to wonder as he sat at the kitchen table looking out the window. He knew there was nowhere to run or hide from the likes of Vinny Cuchinata. The man was relentless in his pursuit of those who did. And word was that Cooch often had those killed for the inconvenience of tracking them down, and used the most heinous methods of torture, as well.

  Johnnie closed his eyes. He had a loving wife who stood by him, a son in high school who had the intention of entering college upon graduation---and here he was, a factory worker making a couple of bucks above minimum wage. When he opened his eyes he examined his surroundings. Wallpaper was peeling away from the wall in some places. Tufts and curls of paint were pulling away from a badly stained ceiling revealing amoeba-shaped spots a shade of deep brown from water leaks. The appliances were old and antiquated. And the tiles along the floor were cracked or chipped.

  This is my castle, he thought. This is the result of my forty-five years on Earth.

  Will there be a forty-sixth?

  His wife worked at a sixed convenience store, her hours always screwy. But they loved each other deeply. Through thick and thin, richer or poorer, they hung in there when all the marriages of their friends dissolved around them.

  So now he wondered if his marriage was about to come to an end by the hand of Vinny Cuchinata, just like Carmen’s life probably ended.

  He would sell his car and take the bus to work. He would ask for overtime at work, though it would most likely be declined. He would curb his gambling, which was easier said than done. And he would pay Cooch every penny owned and walk away from the racetrack forever.

  But plans rarely worked out the way they’re supposed to.

  Ask Carmen.

  Just then a door leading into the kitchen from the back porch opened. His son Connor entered with Kimball in tow, with Kimball in complete contrast to Connor with his towering height and incredibly broad shoulders.

  Johnnie smiled weakly at them. “Boys.”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  Kimball raised a hand in greeting. “How’ve you been, Mr. Deveraux?”

  “Fair to poor,” he said in gest. But in truth he wasn’t kidding at all. Not really. Then he turned away and stared out the window, making Connor wonder what he was looking for, if anything.

  “You all right, Dad?” he asked.

  Johnnie didn’t look away. “I’m fine,” he said evenly.

  Connor and Kimball stood waiting for the normally upbeat Johnnie Deveraux to say something more, the man overly gregarious by nature. But he sat silently and stared out the window, once in a while bringing the can of beer to his lips.

  After they grabbed a few snacks, Connor and Kimball headed off to Connor’s room, leaving Johnnie Deveraux alone with his thoughts.

  When the kitchen was once again quiet, Johnnie started to interrogate himself with voiced concerns. Are you out there, Cooch? Are you waiting to grab me like you did Carmen? Then a calmer voice prevailed. He would have given you fair warning. Like he did with Carmen. Only Carmen didn’t listen. You would.

  “But if I don’t have the money,” he whispered softly to himself. Then what?

  Then you’ll be keeping company with Carmen.

  Johnnie nodded to himself, concurring. That’s what I thought.

  He sipped his beer.

  #

  For seventeen years of age, Kimball Hayden was a large boy who was ruggedly built to be a man twice his age. The breadth of his shoulders and the natural size of his barrel chest often caused jealousies amongst men---those who wished to be so enormous by genetics alone rather than to earn such mass in the weight room. His arms and legs were like tree trunks, as was the size of his neck. And when he moved he did so with incredible agility for a man his size, a true freak of an athlete. Connor, however, was more like his father---a boy with no athletic ability at all, but one who found his comfort zone within the world of academia. He was smart, had goals, and wanted a true castle to live in instead of the eyesore he occupied with his family.

  He was going places.

  The walls of his room were adorned with posters of rock bands and female movie stars who posed provocatively to promote boyhood crushes. There was a desk for his studies, a PC and a lamp. Clothes were lying on the floor and the covers to his bed were peeled back, the room unkempt.

  When Kimball lay on the bed the mattress sunk almost to the floor against his weight. “I’m in love,” he told Connor straightforwardly. “I’m telling you, it’s L-O-V-E.”

  Connor gave him a sidelong glance. “Don’t you mean L-U-S-T?”

  Kimball shook his head. “No. This time it’s different.”

  “You talk to her yet?”

  “No. She doesn’t even know I’m in her class. I’m dead to her.”

  “Then make yourself undead. Introduce yourself.”

  “I try. But I clam up. My chest starts pounding and I begin to sweat. And when I sweat I’m afraid she’s going to smell me and turn her off.”

  Connor gave him an incredulous look. “Seriously, man? Do you have any idea how stupid that just sounded? To begin with, you can’t turn someone off if you never turned them on. You need to go out there and make yourself available. You need to show her that you’re not invisible.”

  Kimball lay back against the bed and drove a hand nervously through his hair. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But it’s hard. She’s seeing Travys D’Orazio.”

  Connor scoffed over the whole matter. “We sound like a couple of girls,” he said.

  Nothing more of Vicki was discussed from that point on. What they did discuss was Connor’s father, who seemed distant.

  “He’s not right,” Connor said. “I’m thinking he blew through the money again and doesn’t have enough to pay rent this month. We’re already two months behind.”

  “And what’ll happen if he doesn’t?”

  “Same thing that always happens. We get evicted. Find a new place. And start the cycle all over again.”

  “That’s sad, man.”

  “It’s life.”

  For the next hour they listened to the stereo. But neither really listened to the melodies because their thoughts lay elsewhere. Connor thought about his father. And something was telling him that Johnnie Deveraux had finally crossed the line in
some way, whatever that line may be, or was at least getting close to doing so. And if he did, then the consequences would be significant.

  Kimball, on the flip side, thought of Vicki Pastore.

  But in the end it came down to the boys existing in two different worlds. One was real and the other was steeped in fantasy.

  But the world of fantasy was about to shatter and a new reality was about to take its place and become horribly real for one, and a life-changing event for the other.

  Sometimes life had a way of dealing dirty.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  By the time Kimball returned home later that afternoon, his father was sitting at the table reading the paper and drinking a beer. He was a small man with ropy, sinewy limbs and with little body fat. His face was thin and lean, his features sharp and angular, especially at the points of his chin and at the mild flare of his cheeks. He was a welder who came home every night smelling like the metals he burned, an odor that was so acrid and tart that it clung to him like a second skin.

  When Kimball tried to sneak silently up the stairway his father called out to him. “Boy!”

  Kimball rolled his eyes. “What.”

  “Come here. I got something to say to you.” His voice had a hard edge to it, but it always had a certain roughness whenever he spoke. And as long as Kimball could remember it was always that way. There was nothing gentle or soft to it, there was never a measure of kindness to his tone ---it had always been harsh and abrasive like the raking of fingernails across a blackboard.

  “Boy!”

  “I’m coming!”

  Kimball took the seat opposite his father, who laid the paper down and tagged Kimball with a hard stare.

  Kimball lifted his shoulders questioningly. “What?” he asked.

  “Got a call from the football coach. Seems you didn’t show again to schedule yourself a role on the team. They need a linebacker and the season’s winding down.”

  “Pop, I already told you. I don’t want to play football. I never did.”

  His father slammed his fist hard against the tabletop like a mallet. Veins were sticking out of his neck in cords along with the landmark vein in his forehead, the one that was shaped like a Y. His face was red. And when he spoke spittle formed at the corners of his lips like froth. “You lazy son of a bitch,” he said. “You got no direction, no ambition, and you continue to sit around this house as if you were the one paying the mortgage. Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Paying the mortgage.”

  “No.”

  His father fell back in his seat and raised his hands to indicate the area around them. “So you think this is all free? You think all this was given to me? No!” He leaned forward and placed an elbow on the table, then pointed a long and bony finger at his son. “Nothing is free in life, Boy. You have to earn your keep. If you think for one minute that you’re going to lay around after you graduate from high school, you best think again.”

  “Are you kidding me? All this because I don’t want to join the team?”

  Another slam with his fist to the tabletop. “Don’t you sass me, Boy? Look at you. You’re as big as a house---could’ve been a star player on the team! You could have earned a scholarship and had your schooling paid for! But no! All you do is hang around with that loser Connor Deveraux!” His eyes started as if the bulb of enlightenment just went off over his head. “Tell me the truth, Boy! Do you hang around with Connor Deveraux because you’re a kee-wear? Is that what you are? A kee-wear.”

  “No, Pop. I’m not queer or gay or however you want to put it. And neither is Connor. Why do you have to talk like that? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “The matter with me? You got incredible physical gifts and all you do is sit around and piss them away! That’s what the matter is!” Then after a beat, he said, “You’re wasting your life.”

  “I’m only seventeen--”

  “Old enough to know what you want to do with your life! You don’t have one friggin’ goal, do you? Not a single one!”

  “I was thinking---maybe---of joining the military. Or maybe I’ll work a few years, save some money, and go back to school.”

  “That’s bull and you know it,” he said harshly. “Once you stay out of school it’s hard to go back. You’re gonna end up like your old man.”

  “You look like you’re doing OK.”

  “I’m miserable, Boy! Can’t you see that? You too stupid or too blind to see? I work fifty hours a week at a job I can’t stand! But I work it because I have no choice! You do have a choice! Or maybe you just want to be one of those kee-wear fashion designers or fancy hair-dressers! That what you want to be, Boy? A fashion designer or a hair-dresser.”

  “I think this discussion is over.” Kimball got to his feet and towered over his father.

  “Maybe I’ll change your name, too,” his old man said. “Maybe I’ll start calling you Kimmie. You like that name, Boy! You like me to call you Kimmie?”

  “Call me whatever you want,” he returned. “I can’t remember the last time you called me Kimball anyway. All I remember is you calling me ‘Boy.’”

  “Never liked the name Kimball anyway! I wanted to give you a tough-guy’s name like Brock, or Rock or Butch! But no! Your mother had to name you after one of her crazy uncles!”

  “I’m going upstairs to my room.”

  “You do that, Kimmie. You run up to that room of yours and continue to waste your life! You do that now!”

  As Kimball climbed the stairway, he could hear his father’s ceaseless ranting. Then in moment of teenage angst, Kimball retaliated by slamming his bedroom door.

  For a moment he stood there looking at the door, half-expecting his father to run up the steps to challenge him in some way. But he never did. So Kimball turned away and fell into his bed, the wood of the box-spring protesting under his weight.

  Unlike Connor Deveraux’s walls that were adorned with rock- and movie stars, Kimball’s was obsessively covered by posters and photos of Bruce Lee. To Kimball, the man was magic. At 135 pounds Bruce Lee could crush his opponents with so much as a single punch, no matter the size of the competitor, and send the man reeling through space.

  That was the type of power Kimball wished he possessed, such as owning the magnitude of the force behind a punch or the kick, or the skill set to take down the likes of Travys D’Orazio with a simple flick of his hand to impress Vicki. But in the end it came down to one thing: His father was right. You only possess skills by determination, perseverance and training. Not by romancing the thoughts of achievement or by inactivity. He needed to set goals. He needed a target to shoot for, no matter how impossible they maybe. And he needed to do it soon.

  But as Kimball laid there with his hands clasped behind his head he started to fade, the weight of his eyes growing heavy.

  Some other time, he told himself. Maybe tomorrow. Pop will be proud of me for making a goal. So tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, then the day after.

  And if not then--

  Kimball slept.

  CHAPTER SIX

  That evening Becki Laurent was able to make two scores on johns, earning eighty dollars, hardly a windfall but enough to keep the habit going. So Dennis, with four twenties in his pocket, went to the Bellrock section of town where Cooch held an exclusive franchise for heroin sales.

  It was dark and late, the city for the most part asleep. Behind a small appliance shop and standing within a ring of light cast from an overhead lamp, two beefy-looking men wearing tank-tops waited. One was playing with his butterfly knife, perfecting his speed and agility with the way he opened and closed the weapon with artful swings.

  Dennis, though terrified, was motivated by the nausea that washed over him like a wave. His stomach had cramped into a slick fist and was tightening by the minute. And sweat began to roll profusely down his face that had the chalky pallor of a corpse.

  “Dude,” said the knife wielder, “you ain’t looking so good.”

 
; Dennis swallowed the sour lump cropping up in his throat, reached into his pocket, and held out a wad of crumpled bills to the guy sitting on a stack of old milk crates.

  “What?” the man said. “Do I look like the type of guy that takes money like that? I like my bills neatly stacked, Dennis. Not rolled up like candy wrappers about to be thrown away.”

  “Um, sorry.” Dennis took the money and smoothed the bills out as best he could, all to the malicious amusement of the two peddlers. When Dennis was done he handed the bills to the milk crate guy. “There’s eighty.”

  “Eighty?” The milk crate guy took the money and looked at it as if the exchange was an insult. Then he held the bills up to Dennis. “Eighty?”

  “That’s all I could get.”

  “You know what eighty bucks buys you today? It buys squat, Dennis. Squat!”

  Dennis winced at the pain in his stomach. “Please, man. It’s gotta buy something, right? I mean, it’s eighty bucks.”

  The milk crate guy leaned forward. “Haven’t you been listening? I wipe my ass with eighty bucks. We don’t do below-cost deals. You know that, Dennis. Minimum purchase is half a K.”

  “Please, Jesse--”

  The milk crate guy eased back. Then: “I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep the eighty, you take the product valued at two-fifty, but you’ll owe me five hundred in two days. Can you do that, Dennis? Can you come up with five hundred in two days?”

  “You want me to pay five hundred dollars for only two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of Smack in two days?”

  The milk crate guy held up the bills. “This amount won’t even get you through the night. Make your choice or walk away. Regardless, the eighty’s mine to keep no matter what you decide.” He tucked the bills into the pocket of his jeans.

  “Jesse, please--”

  “Choose . . . or walk.”

  “It doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all.”

  “That’s why Cooch is king. He gives you one choice, one chance.”