Parishioner Read Online Free Page B

whether it was Benol through the viewer in the wall. Neither did he retrieve the file immediately. Instead he thought, once again, about Juju’s blood under his bone-colored shoes and Tommy Tom’s brains coming out of the bullet hole over his left eye.
    Neither he nor Swan was ever even questioned about those murders. The authorities wererelieved that the Easties, who were a threat to civilians, had been kept at bay by the more conservative and predictable duo.

    The knock at the door, maybe forty-five minutes after the folder slid through, was a surprise. Xavier went to the wall eighteen inches to the right of the door and removed a paper calendar hanging there. Behind the calendar was a small screen connected to an invisible electric eye over the door.
    She was wearing a little black dress.
    “Hey, Ire,” Ecks said upon opening the door. He looked both ways but the dim hallway was empty.
    “Can I come in?” she asked. In her left hand she carried a small, test tube–like vase that contained a single iris.
    “Is this a visit?”
    When she didn’t answer he stepped aside and she walked past, going directly to his yellow table and placing the vase and its purple flower dead center.

    The table was set under the window that looked down on the dark alley. The sun had gone down but the sky was aglow with electric light shining from tall buildings just out of sight.
    Iridia and Xavier sat across from each other. He had served her sour mash whiskey and taken a Mexican beer for himself.
    “Are you doing a job for Frank?” she asked. “One of his special jobs?”
    “That’s a question you’d do better to ask him.”
    “I work for him now and then,” she said. “I’ve gone as far as Hong Kong and Mumbai.”
    Xavier sipped his beer and sniffed. He was bothered by her visiting so soon after his memories of murder. The scent of one seemed to rub off on the other.
    “I’ve never seen you not wearing robes,” he said.
    “You only know me as a church lady.”
    “I’ve seen you outside church.”
    Iridia smiled and let her head lean to the right as Father Frank often did.
    “Why haven’t you asked to have sex with me, Ecks?”
    “You got Chapman.”
    “That has nothing to do with us.”
    “Us?”
    “The congregation,” she said, “is like a hill clan. No matter what we do or how far we go, we always know the special smell of our sweat.”
    Again Ecks was reminded of the odor of rotted meat and the dead men.
    “What are you doing here, Ire?”
    “You were waiting for me after the service.”
    “I wanted your opinion. You gave it to me.”
    “You wanted more than that.”
    “You got Chapman.”
    Iridia smiled and reached across the table to touch his dark killer’s hand. He remained still. She stood and moved over to sit on his lap.
    “You need this, Ecks,” she said. “You need this if you’re going out to work for Frank for the first time.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    She kissed his lips lightly.
    “You’re fairly new to the congregation,” she whispered. “Frank’s sermons are only the beginning. We are his Bible and he studies us like a religious scholar analyzing scriptures. But it’s not just that. When he sends us out it’s not only for the obvious. He’s also teaching us something, folding our pasts up into who we are becoming.”
    “I don’t know what you mean, Ire.”
    “The first man I destroyed,” she said, undoing one button and slipping her hand in against the skin of his chest, “was a billionaire from Oregon. He was young and very innocent. When I was through with him he had killed a man in Seattle, and it took a big bite out of his father’s fortune to keep him from going to prison.
    “When Father Frank sent me to Hong Kong I had no idea that my first victim now traded in sex slaves. His demolition, as Frank says, had been complete, and it was my job to destroyhim again.”
    “You saved the women,” Xavier said.
    “And children,” she added, “from a monster