CHAPTER 21

“Thanks again for dragging me into your crime scene, buddy.” Colarusso belted down his drink. “Man calls me away from a nice, clean burglary investigation to check out a couple of poor bastards with mix-and-match heads, I just feel a surge of gratitude. I didn’t even know you were still talking with Redbeard. Chief of detectives himself gave me the word. I never seen him so impressed with me.” He rapped his empty glass on the bar. “One more time, Padre.”

The Catholic priest sidled over from the other end of the bar, refilled Colarusso’s glass with fortified wine. He blessed the wine with two fingers, looked at Rakkim.

Rakkim shook his head. He waited until the priest had retreated down the bar, back to the argument over the greatest baseball team of all time with three retired cops who kept threatening each other with bodily harm. “I owe you, Anthony.”

“Yeah, but not enough to tell me what this is really all about.”

“I’ve told you as much as I can.”

“As much as you want.” Colarusso shook his head. “Forget it. I only met Sarah a couple times, but I liked her. You say she’s in trouble, that’s good enough for me.” He rubbed his bulbous nose. “Still, I see R U Having Fun Yet? written in blood on a crime scene wall, I got to think the killings were supposed to send you a sign. Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong.”

“Well, that’s good news. Thought I was losing my finely honed cop instincts, and where would law enforcement be without them?” Colarusso belched, dug a big hand into the bowl of stale peanuts on the bar, the overflow bouncing across the polished hickory.

“I thought you were supposed to eat Communion wafers with wine,” said Rakkim.

“Don’t fuck with my religion, okay?” Colarusso tossed the peanuts into his mouth one at a time, rapid-fire. “No pork chops, no Scotch whiskey, no dogs, no rock and roll, no titty bars,” he muttered, chewing noisily. “Ain’t there anything you people are in favor of?”

“Don’t blame me, I voted for all of the above.”

“You’re a lousy Muslim.”

“That I am.”

Colarusso nodded. “That’s okay. I’m a lousy Catholic.”

Rakkim took a swallow of wine. Terrible stuff. Colarusso had brought him to a Catholic church in Seattle whose basement doubled as an after-hours cop bar. Colarusso said after the crime scene he needed a drink, and he didn’t want to go to the Zone for it, he wanted to be around his own kind. Rakkim needed a drink himself, and even though this Communion juice was swill, he liked the quiet and the company. Rakkim might not be the first Muslim allowed into the basement, but from the looks he got, he might as well have been. Colarusso had introduced him to the dozen or so cops standing at the bar, said he vouched for him, and anyone who had a problem with it could say so. The cops went back to their wine and the priest set them up.

“You sure the surveillance team swept the whole house?” said Rakkim.

“Twice. Just like I told you. If there was a bug there, they would have found it. I called in pest control too, made sure the story don’t make the news, just like you wanted.”

“Good. Have them sweep it again tomorrow.”

Colarusso had been annoyed with Rakkim for disturbing the crime scene, but he knew Rakkim had his reasons. Seeing Marian laid out on her bed, discreetly dressed, the Qur’an in her hands…Colarusso had understood.

“This is one crazy case.” Colarusso gestured with his drink. “I say, you want to kill somebody, go ahead and do it. That’s your business and mine is catching your ass, but propping people up on the couch with their heads all jumbled? Who does something like that?” He shifted his bulk, his gray suit bagged out and stained with a week’s worth of handheld lunches. “I’m not lightweight, you know me. I’ve seen things that would make your eyes pop out like Wile E. Coyote.”

“Who’s Wile E. Coyote?”

Colarusso shook his head. “I feel old.” He grabbed some peanuts off the bar. “I put in a call to Major Crimes, asked if there was another thrill-kill gang in operation. You remember those huffers we had last year?”

“Glue sniffers, right?”

“Glue, gasoline, turpentine, you name it. They’d hit some nice neighborhood, kick in the back door, and butcher everyone inside. Fast and sloppy. We’d find ears in the refrigerator, bodies crammed up the chimney…but today seemed worse.”

“There was intelligence at work today.”

“There was something at work.” Colarusso drank half his glass of wine, his face going slack. “I just want to find the crew who did it.”

“It might not have been a crew. It might have been one man.”

Colarusso snorted. “The bodyguard was a hard-core vet with a chestful of ribbons. It would have taken more than one man to bring him down.”

Rakkim didn’t argue, exhausted, as much from the crime scene as from lack of sleep. He hoisted his drink. After the second glass, the wine tasted better. He remembered Marian in the bathtub, her hair floating around her. He remembered the stiffness of her flesh and the effort it took to get her dressed and the feel of her wet hair as he carried her. Wrestling with the dead. “I killed her, Anthony. I killed all three of them.”

“Well, that should make closing the case easier.”

“I thought I covered my tracks, but somebody must have followed me to Marian’s. I might as well have killed her myself.”

“Quit your blubbering. You want me to forgive you? I can do it. I used to be a priest.”

Rakkim stared at him.

“It’s true. I was ordained in Woodinville when I was twenty-one. Left the priesthood after the transition. I could see which way the wind was blowing…and the celibacy thing was getting to me. You think you can handle it when you start seminary, but you get out in the world and your pecker has a mind of its own. Anyway, I’m not a priest anymore, but I still got the instincts. Still go to mass every week. Father Joe there, he hears my confession…then afterwards we retire down here and he sets ’ em up. Can ’t ask for more than that from a man of God.” Colarusso leaned closer to Rakkim. “You want me to hear your confession.”

“Muslims only bare our souls to Allah.”

“You sure?”

“Well, mostly I keep my sins to myself. Allah has enough on his mind.” Rakkim was laughing…it sounded like laughter, but tears were rolling down his cheeks. “I must be drunk. I can’t keep up with you Catholics.”

“You’re doing okay.”

Rakkim finished his wine, rapped the glass on the bar for a refill. He nodded at the pool table off to one side, the green felt shiny, ripped in a couple of places, but still inviting. “I’m surprised nobody’s playing.”

“The table’s off-limits,” said Colarusso. “Last year a couple of knuckleheads got into it over a game of eight-ball, fists flying, just really tearing the place up. Father Joe had to break a cue stick over one of them.”

“Did it leave a scar?”

Colarusso grinned, rubbed the back of his head. “No, but I still get headaches.”

Rakkim watched the room in the mirror, took in the cops strung out along the bar, and was glad he had accepted Colarusso’s offer. It was a plain, dark, low-ceilinged room filled with hard cases, tough and bitter men who didn’t need the thrash and clatter of the Zone. The choirboys, that’s what Colarusso had called the regulars, although most of them weren’t practicing Catholics. Lutherans and Catholics, agnostics and atheists, it didn’t matter-sergeants and detectives and a few patrolmen, but no brass. The choirboys may not have been religious, but they were too proud to convert just for the career advantage. Dust was on the floor and photos of boxers were on the walls and a painting of Jesus with his heart pierced with thorns. The basement bar was a place to get peacefully hammered on quasi-legal wine, to sand off the raw edges of the day, one glass at a time.