Puritan

~One of my Noir York stories, like Angel and Two Days A Nightmare, Puritan concerns the tribulations of homicide detective Lucifer Hill, a neurotic individual who dropped out of the Seminary because he was struck with debilitating claustrophobia in the Confessional. And now a serial killer is preying on the Priests of New York.~

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01- The Holy Blood

“NYPD! FREEZE!”
New York’s finest had stormed the building, guns drawn they moved cautiously to surround the last survivor of the bloody trail that had started three days ago.
Three days.
It felt like so much longer, months maybe, years.
“Easy now, drop your weapon.”
I let the desert eagle slip from my grip to hang from the trigger guard and rock on my 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 on the events that had led me on the dark and winding path to this place.
I look back and I think about destiny, fate, call it what you will. Did I ever have a choice?
Does anyone?
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.
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.
I wonder what this other me would make of the path I have taken to this place…
* * *
It started with a corpse.
A couple of kids found it washed up along the Hell Gate, on the Queens side of the river, and like all good children everywhere they poked a stick at the grey, bloated mass until it burst.
“Jesus Christ that stinks!”
My partner, Burke had a way with words as subtle as a car crash, he did not regularly screen the thoughts that passed through his head before they reached his lips.
“Whaddaya think? Three days? Four?”
I waved a hand to chase away a few opportunistic flies.
“Gotta be at least four,” I squatted next to the prone form, I fought the compulsion to gag, “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. At a guess I would have said this was a heat of the moment thing, an emotional impulse gone out of control.
That guess was my first mistake.
“Looks like our boy was a member of your club.”
Burke had prised open the Doe’s sodden overcoat to reveal the clothing underneath, I found myself staring at a dog collar that had long since lost it’s priestly white to the stain of the East River.
I pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from my pocket and took a long drag, the smoke killed the smell of putrefaction and feeling the warmth hit 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 larger than the few scant pages I held in my hands 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 at his desk tossing a foam football into the air, “no shit.”
“Sixty two years old, from Boston,” I scrolled down through the few lines 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 their divine witness protection program?”
My partner continued to toss that ball, annoyingly this was when he thought the best, “You think that he tried to give his communion cookie to the wrong altar boy?”
I raised my eyebrows in agreement, it certainly looked as though that were the case. Father Norris fell back on old habits and somebody’s older brother had to explain to him how things were.
“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, there were echoes of the life that almost was that at times still resounded within my soul and occasionally I could forget that I am a cop.
I flicked across to the coroner’s report, the few succinct passages in it more dehumanising than even 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 the subject was held in a state of near starvation prior to death.”
“Starvation?”
Burke sat up nearly knocking his lamp from his desk as he swung his feet to the floor, “It was premeditated?”
That turned this case on it’s head and probably tripled our paperwork, we were no longer dealing with a relatively simple crime of passion.
This was now murder in the first degree.
The oldest of crimes, almost as old as sin itself.
The post-Giuliani years had left most homicide detectives with relatively little to do, compared to the bad old days at least, New York really had improved that much during his tenure as mayor. I couldn’t have been certain without going back over my case files but it must have been almost a year since I had worked a genuine case of Murder One.
“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,” before I said the word the dark realisation was already upon me. Someone went to a lot of effort to do Father Norris properly, to make it look like a random, violent act, but they took their time. They savoured it.
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, 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 concrete.
The umbrella above my head provided little comfort, the wind was able to make sure that enough spray reached my face.
Drenched, I pulled up the collar of my Mac and started toward the subway. This is the preferred form of travel in the Big Apple though for myself it was not a matter of choice but necessity. A few years ago I had tried the marriage thing, the wife got the car in the divorce.
I marched down the stairwell to the subway to be met by a smell like a wet dog, the collective scent of hundreds of damp and miserable human beings crammed together for their evening commute.
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.
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 am the root and offspring of David,” I muttered to myself, hearing the rumble of the oncoming train, “and the bright and morning star.”
The train ground to a halt before me and I found myself staring at the words in red paint ‘THE END IS NIGH’.
There must have been some bored Bible-bashers running around these nights.
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 had been pissed on by some lowlife with too much time on his hands or a transient taking shelter for the afternoon from the torrent above.
I gripped the overhead ‘Jesus bar’ and hung my head, the damp on my face mixed with the clammy air of the carriage, an uncomfortable, sticky mix 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 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 damp hotness on my cheek, I 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.
Trapping me.
It was all in my head, I knew that but still occasionally I was struck with terrifying bouts of claustrophobia. It was the heat, and the stickiness.
“Lucifer Hill!” The bum called loud over the rattle of the subway, “Priest beware for the judgement of the Lord comes on swift wings. 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 alone.
Glancing down at my coat I reached inside and drew my pistol from it’s 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.