Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(94)

I looked up at the stained-glass Jesus, his arms held open above the gold tabernacle.

“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Explain that.”

I can’t.

Can’t or won’t?

No answer. God can calm up with the best of them.

You put a child on this earth, give him eight years of life. You allow him to be kidnapped, tortured, starved, and raped for fourteen days—over three hundred and thirty hours, nineteen thousand eight hundred long minutes—and then as a final image You provide him with the faces of monsters who shove steel into his heart, cleave the flesh from his face, and open his throat on a bathroom floor.

What’s your point?

“What’s Yours?” I said loudly, heard my voice echo off stone.

Silence.

“Why?” I whispered.

More silence.

“There’s no goddamned answer. Is there?”

Don’t blaspheme. You’re in church.

Now I knew the voice in my head wasn’t God’s. My mother’s probably, maybe a dead nun’s, but I doubted God would get hung up on technicalities during such a time of dire need.

Then again, what did I know? Maybe God, if He did exist, was as petty and trivial as the rest of us.

If so, He wasn’t a God I could follow.

Yet I stayed in the pew, unable to move.

I believe in God because of…what?

Talent—the kind Van Gogh or Michael Jordan, Stephen Hawking or Dylan Thomas were born with—always seemed proof of God to me. So did love.

So, okay, I believe in You. But I’m not sure I like You.

That’s your problem.

“What good comes from a child’s rape and murder?”

Don’t ask questions your brain is too small to answer.

I watched the candles flicker for a while, sucked the quiet into my lungs, closed my eyes to it, and waited for transcendence or a state of grace or peace or whatever the hell it was the nuns had taught me you were supposed to wait for when the world is too much with you.

After about a minute, I opened my eyes. Probably the reason I’d never been a successful Catholic—I lacked patience.

The rear door of the building opened and I heard the clack of Angie’s crutches against the door bar, heard her say, “Shit,” and then the door closed and she appeared at the landing between the chapel and the stairs leading up to the belfry. She noticed me just before she turned toward the stairs. She swiveled around awkwardly, looked at me, and smiled.

She worked her way down the two carpeted steps to the chapel floor, swung her body past the confessionals and baptismal font. She paused by the altar rail in front of my pew, hoisted herself up onto it, and leaned her crutches against the rail.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

She looked up at the ceiling, the painting of the Last Supper, back down at me. “You’re inside the chapel and the church is still standing.”

“Imagine,” I said.

We sat there for a bit, neither of us saying anything. Angie’s head tilted back as she scanned the ceiling, the detail carved into the molding atop the nearest pilaster.

“What’s the verdict on the leg?”

“The doctor said it’s a stress fracture of the lower left fibula.”

I smiled. “You love saying that, don’t you?”

“Lower left fibula?” She gave me a broad grin. “Yeah. Makes me feel like I’m on ER. Next I’m going to ask for a Chem-Seven and BP count. Stat.”

“The doctor told you to stay off it, I suppose.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s what they always say.”

“How long you have to wear the cast?”

“Three weeks.”

“No aerobics.”

She shrugged again. “No a lot of things.”

I looked down at my shoes for a bit, then back up at her.

“What?” she said.

“It hurts all over. Samuel Pietro. I can’t get my head around it. When Bubba and I went to that house, he was still alive. He was upstairs and he was…we—”

“You were in a house with three heavily armed, very paranoid felons. You couldn’t have—”

“His body,” I said, “it…”

“They confirmed it was his body?”

I nodded. “It was so small. It was so small,” I whispered. “It was naked and cut into and…Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” I wiped at acidic tears, leaned my head back.

“Who’d you talk to?” Angie said gently.

“Broussard.”

“How’s he doing?”

“’Bout the same as me.”

“Any word on Poole?” She leaned forward a bit.

“He’s bad, Ange. They don’t expect him to pull through.”

She nodded and kept her head down for a bit, her good leg swaying back and forth lightly off the rail.

“What did you see in that bathroom, Patrick? I mean, exactly?”

I shook my head.

“Come on,” she said softly. “This is me. I can take it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Not again. Not again. I think about it for a second—I see that room flash through my head—and I want to die. I don’t want to carry it around with me. I want to die and make it go away.”