Puritan (Second Draft)

Since I've now began to make a concerted effort to actually finish this story (and because I keep writing Lucifer Hill into other stories) I've revisited the first chapter to tie it in better with what happens in the later chapters I have written, and to generally darken it down. I also removed a few bits that never sounded right during read-back and have left this story now containing all the core elements that are required to drive the plot I have in mind, now it just needs to be padded out with 'scenery' depending on how much of a word count I'm looking.

UPDATE: This is now only a section of chapter 1, and even then has been modified, and has been released as my first full novel: Murder Incorporated.

Available to buy on Amazon.com and Kindle

And Amazon.co.uk

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Chapter 1            Life and Death at the Gate

“NYPD! FREEZE!”

New York’s finest had stormed the building with guns drawn, like a wave they moved as one cautiously to surround the last survivor of the bloody trail that started three days ago.

Three days.

It felt like so much longer, months maybe, years. A thousand days and a thousand spent shell casings.

“Easy now, drop your weapon.”

I let the desert eagle slip from my grip to hang rocking by the trigger guard from one finger, smoke from the last round still whispering from the barrel like a death sigh.

The gun fell to the ground with a heavy clunk, an exclamation point to the events that led me on the dark and winding path to this place, to the pyre before me and the body smouldering within.

I look back and I think about destiny, fate, call it what you will. Did I ever have a choice? Does anyone? Was I drawn inexorably to this place by an irresistible and predetermined flow, that I was always going to end up at this point, on this cold marble floor?

Of course I know really that destiny is an abstraction, something that you can think about after you have made your choice. Destiny is the ability to recognise alternatives, missed opportunities, and mistakes.

It is retrospect, and it has always been my curse.

“Identify yourself!”

Had you done anything differently it would not be yourself looking back but another you, a subtly different doppelganger, and he too would wonder of the path not taken.

“Lucifer Hill,” I said, “detective.”

I wonder what this other me would make of the path that has taken me to this place…

* * *

It started with a corpse, a prologue.

A couple of kids found it in Wards Meadow, washed up along the Hell Gate below the baseball diamond at Field 63 and like all good children everywhere they poked a stick at the grey and bloated mass until it had burst.

“Jesus Christ that stinks!”

My partner, Burke had a way with words as subtle as a head on collision, it wasn’t that he did not regularly screen the thoughts that passed through his head before they reached his lips, but more a fact that he didn’t care.

The body lay on the rocky embankment with the brackish water of the East River lapping at its feet, stringy weeds picked up from its journey downstream clung to the mud covered green overcoat and shaggy grey hair, it, he was missing a shoe.

Further up the embankment a small group of kids stood trying to peer around the group of concerned families and general busybodies hoping to catch even a fleeting glimpse at the gruesome sight. It was then that I noticed a young black kid had slipped through police line and was hanging around behind a tree closer and in full view of the scene. I nodded to a uniformed officer and ordered him to get the kid back behind the tape, there are some things no adult should see, let alone a child.

“Whaddaya think, three days? Four?”

I waved a hand to chase away a few opportunistic flies that even this late in the year were hovering around like harriers.

“Must be at least four,” I squatted next to the prone form, fighting the compulsion to gag at the necrotic stench, “looks like he was strangled.”

The telltale bruising was plain to see in a ring around his neck. Given the spread I assumed that it was a violent and sloppy job, a very sudden assault in the heat of the moment, an emotional impulse gone out of control.

I didn’t know then that I stood on the precipice of something far darker.

“Looks like our boy was a member of your club.”

Burke had prised open the Doe’s sodden overcoat to reveal the black clothing underneath and I found myself staring at a dog collar that had long since lost its priestly sheen to the stain of the East River.

“Huh.”

I pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from my pocket and took a long drag, the smoke killed the smell of putrefaction and the feeling of warmth hitting my lungs relaxed me somewhat, if only for a brief respite.

“I’ll call it in.”

* * *

“Father Charles Patrick Norris,” I read from the case file in my hands, the final brief acknowledgements of a life’s accomplishments. They almost never get more than the few scant pages I held in a manila folder now: name, the necessary in and out dates, a few personal stats, a couple of lines about their history, and like an afterthought tacked on at the end- cause of death.

That was one page, the other was the coroner’s report.

“Chuck Norris, huh,” Burke sat back in his chair tossing a foam football into the air, “no shit.”

“Sixty two years old, from Boston,” I scrolled down through the dozen or so short phrases that summed up a forty year dedication to the church, “reading between the lines it looks like he was shifted from his last parish in a bit of a hurry.”

“Part of the church’s divine witness protection program?”

He continued to toss the ball in the air but he wasn’t really paying attention to it, Burke had a tendency to bite his lower lip when in thought, “You think that he tried to give his communion cookie to the wrong altar boy?”

“Wafers,” I said idly, continuing to read.

“What?”

“In communion, they’re wafers not cookies.”

“So, not the body of Christ?”

I didn’t rise to that, the echoes of my life before the police still left the occasional ripple around me and sometimes I wondered how different I may have been, destiny and all that, but I never thought about it for long. Being in the police is where I am meant to be.

I flicked across to the coroner’s report, the few succinct passages in it more dehumanising even than the NYPD case report.

“Subject male, approximately sixty two years of age, found Hell Gate, East River. Ecchymossis around the neck and subconjunctival haemorrhages would appear to indicate strangulation as the cause of death. High levels of ketones in the blood stream indicate that subject was in a state of near starvation prior to death.”

“Starvation?”

Burke sat up so quickly that he nearly knocked his desk lamp across the room as he swung his feet to the floor, “It was premeditated?”

This was now murder in the first degree, the oldest of crimes, almost as old as sin itself.

“Well, shit,” I said, with some feeling now that this case was going to be a bad one, to plot and execute a murder is one thing, but to imprison and starve a person first took a different kind of mentality.

“So, our Suspect X starves the guy, and then strangles him?” Burke was up and pacing around his desk, “Doesn’t seem very… eloquent. Why go to the bother of starving the guy? Shits and giggles?”

“Torture,” I said it and the word hung in the air like a black shadow.

Someone went to a lot of effort to do Father Norris properly, to make it look like it was everything that it wasn’t, a random and violent act. But in truth they had taken their time, they had savoured it. A different kind of mentality, sadistic… depraved.

The whole thing stank to high Heaven.

This was only the beginning.

* * *

It was raining heavily when I left the station for the evening, it was always raining in New York these days, or certainly it always felt that way.

Great tear-like raindrops hammered upon the ground at my feet in a constant roar that only the really good city downpours could manage, the slap of a billion tiny beads on cold, hard concrete.

The umbrella above my head provided little comfort or reprieve, the wind was able to make sure that enough of the cold and bitter spray reached my face.

Drenched, I pulled up the sodden collar of my mac and started toward the subway, the preferred form of travel in the Big Apple, through for myself it was more a form of necessity than desire. A few years ago I had tried my hand at whole the marriage thing, the wife got the car in the divorce.

I trudged down the stairwell to the station to be met with the collective scent of hundreds of damp and miserable human beings crammed together for their evening commute, the air hot and clammy from the bodies packed tightly together.

On a pillar next to the tracks the words ‘Bright and Morning Star’ were spray painted over a poster for the Catholic Church depicting the Crucifixion, a subtle assault on an organisation that had taken a battering since the dawn of the Information Age. When I thought about the past of the late Father Norris and the subsequent game of chequers between dioceses I couldn’t help but think that the church had become a victim of itself.

“I am the root and seed of David,” I muttered to myself, hearing the rumble of the oncoming train, “and the bright and morning star.”

The paint referred to chapter 22 verse 16 of the Book of Revelation, the last page of the Bible when Jesus reveals himself to be the Morning Star of Christian dogma, Lucifer. I snorted.

The train ground to a halt before me and I found myself staring at the words in bold red paint ‘THE END IS NIGH’.

There was a deep sense of foreboding that I could feel the universe was trying to instil in me, disappointingly it seemed that Christian anarchists were to be the chosen messenger, because there was no portent greater than spray paint and fundamentalism.

The train as always was crowded, the sodden multitudes of New York jostling for whatever bit of comfort could be found on the hard plastic of the subway chairs with their illusory cloth covers.

As usual the one chair that was free contained a slightly yellowish puddle, a signature of some lowlife with too much time on his hands or some transient taking shelter from the torrent above.

I gripped the overhead ‘Jesus bar’ and hung my head, the damp on my face feeling tacky as it mixed with the damp air of the carriage, an uncomfortable blend of rainwater, body heat, and sweat.

Audibly sighing I took solace in the fact that my journey home would not take long, that I would only have to tolerate this interminable heat and shuffling of bodies for a few minutes.

Up ahead I could see a bum making his way through the crowd, the commuters parting like a tide rather than let the dirty and dishevelled soul rub up against them.

He was muttering incomprehensibly and shaking his head as if locked in a permanent twitch, the thin strands of his dirty grey hair swishing about over the midnight black sunglasses he wore despite the weak light.

As the train swayed he knocked against me and I caught a whiff of what I’m certain was Sterno, I mumbled an apology and went back to my thoughts of going home and cold Chinese takeout.

I felt a sudden damp hotness on my cheek and stepped back in shock when I saw the bum was only inches from my face, staring directly at me.

“You. Cop,” his words rasped and slurred, “I know you.”

“I’m sure you do,” I turned my shoulder to him.

“Fallen one. Turned his back and was damned.”

I started walking away from the rambling old fool, edging through the crowd that seemed to have gotten tighter in the last few moments, clustering together like a human wall. Crushing in on me.

Trapping me.

It was all in my head, I closed my eyes, it was all in my head, it was the heat and the stickiness bringing on the old terror, it was just a bout of claustrophobia. It would pass.

“Lucifer Hill!”

The bum called loud over the rattle of the subway, “Priest! Beware for the judgement of the Lord comes on swift wings and will consume the non-believers in glorious fire. Repent your path and rejoin your flock!”

Upon hearing my name I had turned and saw the man point directly to me, the other commuters ignoring the affair in the hope that he would go away and leave them in peace.

Glancing down at my coat I reached inside and drew my pistol from its holster with the intention of arresting the man, the train lurched on the tracks and the lights momentarily flickered.

When I looked again he was gone.