Covenant Page 10

  From the outside, Thorne’s home was impressive. He wondered what kind of work Thorne did for a living. He found it dubious that a man so skilled with firearms and combat tactics served in an ordinary nine-to-five desk job.

  Avoiding the front, where bright lights shone, they approached the back entrance. The big French doors stood locked, moonlight shimmering on the glass.

  “Would you do the honors, Valdez?” he asked.

  She indicated the white sticker on one of the window panes, warning that the home was secured by an alarm system.

  “Go ahead and pick the lock,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got a hunch.”

  She removed a lock pick gun and tension wrench from a waist pouch and knelt to work on the cylinder pins. Within fifteen seconds, she sprang the lock.

  He had expected her to take longer. For a rookie fresh out of training camp, she was unusually skillful.

  When they opened the doors, the security system beeped once, and then quieted.

  “Ah, I was correct,” Cutty said. “They were in such a rush to get out of here they didn’t bother to arm the system.”

  Her eyes sparkled in awe at his keen instincts.

  With a generous sweep of his arm, as if they were entering his own home, he beckoned her to go in ahead of him. He lightly brushed his fingers across her ponytail as she swept forward, just a quick, innocent touch, and the feel of her hair across his flesh gave him a warm, tickly sensation.

  He put his fingers in his mouth for a moment, tasting her essence, and followed her inside.

  They were in a large kitchen furnished with ultra-modern appliances, granite counters and island, and hardwood floors. It was meticulously clean, the cooking surfaces, sinks, and countertops spotless and gleaming.

  Then he saw the bottle of alcohol on the counter.

  “Look at this, Valdez.” He read the label. “Hennessey? This looks like hard, vile stuff. Thorne must be an alcoholic.”

  He screwed the cap off the whiskey and upended the bottle over the sink drain. The pungent fumes drew tears from his eyes, but he didn’t stop until he’d poured all of it out. He tossed the bottle in a wastebasket.

  “Alcoholic beverages are a lure of the devil,” he said. “The nectar of the damned. But of course you know that.”

  “Si,” she said. “Is very bad.”

  The refrigerator was a stainless steel behemoth, and actually built into the wall. He pulled open the doors.

  It was stocked with temple-fortifying foods: fruit, vegetables, milk, juice, bottled water, a tub of butter, deli meats, cheese, condiments.

  “Uh oh,” he said. “Look what we have here.”

  She peered over his shoulder as he pointed out a lower shelf that held a six-pack of bottled beer, and a twelve-pack of a caffeinated cola.

  “Not only is Thorne an alcoholic—witness more alcoholic drinks—he drinks caffeinated cola, too. Caffeine is another drug, Valdez. We’ve got a serious addict on our hands.”

  “Ah, si.”

  Clucking his tongue, he removed the beer and the soda and methodically poured the contents of each bottle and can down the sink drain. He returned to the refrigerator and opened the freezer door.

  The racks were stuffed with meats, fish, more vegetables, and, disappointingly, a pint of gourmet vanilla ice cream, which he promptly trashed.

  The pantry beckoned on the other side of the room, and he saw a wet bar off the kitchen that surely contained a whole storehouse of poison, but he had done enough. Continued exposure to Thorne’s addictions would have only nauseated him, and he couldn’t afford to be ill. He needed to keep up his energy and eat a proper meal of his own, as he had a busy night ahead of him.

  “Would you mind preparing sandwiches for us, Valdez?”

  A frown. “Eh?”

  “Sandwiches. I prefer turkey, Swiss cheese, lettuce, and mustard. I’m sure there’s fresh bread in the pantry, but be careful in there. Doubtless it’s full of all manner of unwholesome things.”

  She hesitated, and then went to the pantry doors.

  “God bless you,” he said. “You know, I bet you’ll make some godly man very happy one day. You’ve got so many wonderful, wifely qualities.”

  She looked at him, eyes flat and indifferent.

  “That was meant as a compliment,” he said.

  She said nothing. Had he offended her?

  He stammered. “Umm, anyway, while you do that, I’m going to look around some more and see what else I can learn about this heathen.”

  She turned away.

  He was puzzled. Women were so mysterious it was as if they spoke a foreign tongue. Had Adam endured these same challenges with Eve?

  He entered the main hallway, a long corridor illuminated with soft light from a crystal chandelier. Photographs hung on the wall, and he stopped to examine them.

  Evidently, Thorne had deciphered the language of women. In one framed photo, Thorne and a striking black woman stood face to face in front of an altar, holding hands, their eyes full of love, while a pastor looked on in the background with a benevolent smile.

  He thought he’d glimpsed someone in the passenger seat of Thorne’s SUV. Thorne’s spouse was a point against him. A husband on the run would have to consider his wife’s welfare, would be burdened by her womanly needs and weaknesses and inability to defend herself, and as a result, would be more vulnerable.

  If Thorne were wise, he would dump his wife off somewhere, and go about his business alone. But he didn’t blame Thorne if he kept the woman around. She was a looker.

  He moved to another picture. It was a black-and-white bridal portrait that showcased the wife to her full stunning effect. Clasping a bouquet, the woman gazed at the camera with her big, dreamy eyes, lips full and soft, lush cleavage tantalizingly displayed.

  He ran his finger along the picture, stopping at the mound of her cleavage. Delicious heaviness spread through his groin.

  He was thirty-two years old, but he’d encountered live, exposed breasts only once in his life. When he was thirteen, one of the teenage girls who’d lived on their commune, a sassy blonde named Holly, had enticed him into the loft of one of the barns. She’d lifted up her blouse and exposed her large creamy breasts and invited him to touch them, which he did, nervously at first and then with growing eagerness, and the next thing he knew she was massaging his crotch . . . and soon, he erupted in his pants.

  He’d been so ashamed of his sin that he’d fled the barn. He’d never spoken of the episode to anyone, and Holly, knowing their community’s strict rules, had thankfully kept it secret, too. If Father had learned of the incident, he might well have castrated him.

  But . . . he wondered how the breasts of Thorne’s wife would look, unfettered. How soft and warm and full they would feel in his hands. How the nipples would taste.

  The sound of clattering silverware in the kitchen shattered his reverie. He glanced down the hallway. Valdez was not watching him, but his face burned.

  You must not covet a man’s wife. Remember the command-ments.

  With effort, he turned away from the photo and entered a spacious great room. The room was immaculate, as was the rest of the house he’d seen thus far, and furnished with comfortable furniture, oak tables, and leafy, live plants. A marble fireplace looked commodious enough to spit-roast a hog.

  On an end table, he discovered a photo that instantly shed light on a few matters. It was a shot of a younger, yet stern-faced, clean-shaven Thorne in a United States Marine Corps dress uniform, one of those graduation-from-boot-camp portraits.

  A Marine. It explained the man’s facility with firearms and his gutsy maneuvers.

  This mission had suddenly become a lot more interesting.

  A doorway opened into another room: a library. He turned on the overhead light, an ornate brass fixture. The room had a marble floor, a couple of dark leather wing chairs, an oak cocktail table, Tiffany-style table lamps, and bookcases stocked with hundreds of hardcovers.

  He ran
his thumb along the spines. There were texts that pertained to American history and culture, but most of the books appeared to be fiction.

  Not surprisingly, there were no Christian books, no Bibles.

  A dismaying number of the fiction texts were mystery and crime stories, too, with words such as “blood,” “death,” and “fear,” appearing frequently in the titles.

  Cutty had never read any of these books, and never would. He read only the Bible and other approved works. If you weren’t careful, the spirit-polluting products of secular culture would lead you off the path of righteousness.

  He was about to turn away to visit another area of the house when he came across a series of books with the word “ghost” in the titles. The author of each novel was Anthony Thorne.

  He plucked one of the books off the shelf. The title was Ghost Hunter. On the inside back flap of the dust jacket, he found a black-and-white photo of his guy.

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” he said.

  Not only was Thorne a Marine, he was a writer, apparently, a successful one.

  Although doing so risked the contamination of his spirit, he read the story summary on the jacket flap. The novel concerned a character named Ghost, a Marine, who learned about the vicious murder of a young woman’s husband and offered to track down the killers when the police failed to apprehend them.

  “Ghost practices only one form of justice—the justice of the streets,” the copy stated.

  Intriguing.

  Anthony Thorne was looking like the caliber of challenge that could make a career for an ambitious young soldier and a loyal servant of the Kingdom.

  Part Two

  The Hunted

  21

  Barreling through the night, they traveled east on Interstate 20, away from Atlanta. Cool air fluted through the punctured front and rear windows, as if the Tahoe had been transformed into a giant wind instrument.

  Anthony didn’t know exactly where they were headed, and wasn’t particularly concerned about it. All he wanted to do was put distance between them and the maniacs.

  He’d equipped the SUV with an after-market stereo receiver that included a USB input for MP3 players and iPods. To get Lisa up to speed on everything, he plugged the miniature digital voice recorder into the port and played back his conversation with Bob at The Varsity.

  The recording was distorted by background noise, and the whistling wind added another annoyance, but when he turned the volume to the highest level, their dialogue was coherent.

  Arms laced over her chest, Lisa listened intently. At several points, she nodded, or shook her head, frowning.

  He remained quiet throughout the recording, scanning the road for suspicious vehicles. Hearing Bob’s voice again, however, made him wonder what had become of the man. Had the fanatics caught him, or had they lost track of him at the restaurant—and honed in on Anthony as their next best option?

  The conversation ended with Bob’s last words: “They’re on to you now, Anthony. Go home, get your wife, and stay on the move till you find the truth. Don’t let your dad’s death be in vain . . .”

  Anthony turned it off. “Well?”

  “Wow.” She pulled her fingers through her hair. “I agree with you—this is for real. Any doubts I might’ve had after listening to this are nullified by the fact that these people Bob spoke of just tried to kill us.”

  “Being shot at tends to be pretty convincing.”

  “I still want to know how they found out who you are, where we live.”

  “They have access to databases, like Bob said. I think they ran my plates against the DMV computers and pulled up our address.”

  “How the hell is that possible, Tony? There are privacy laws against that kind of thing.”

  Fire blazed in her eyes. She’d been taught to believe that the world was an orderly place regulated by laws mostly obeyed by a sensible citizenry. He’d always found her faith in the system endearing and refreshing, if a bit too idealistic.

  “They seem to be above the law,” he said.

  “No one is above the law.”

  “They were shooting at us as if they were on their own private firing range, not in the middle of a residential neighborhood, Lisa. Whoever they are, they obviously aren’t worried about getting arrested.”

  “We should call the police.”

  “No way.”

  “Why the hell not?” She was nearly shouting.

  He kept his tone calm. “Think about it. If these people are operating without fear of the cops, it’s because they have influence over law enforcement, which is something Bob said, too, remember?”

  “They can’t control every cop for God’s sake, as if all the officers are a bunch of mindless robots.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe they manipulate only the big-wig commanders who call the shots. Either way, we can’t take the risk. We call them, and they could be on our asses like white on rice in a hot minute.”

  “You’re being overly paranoid.”

  “No, I’m being overly realistic.”

  She glowered at him, sighed, looked away out the window.

  “We’re on our own,” he said. “Thing is, baby, we’ve always been on our own.”

  “What?” She swiveled to face him.

  “The system you love and trust, the laws you studied in school, this high-tech society we think is so great—they’re broken, ‘cause they’re products of people, and people are broken.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not broken. You aren’t.”

  “We all are, in different ways. We’ve all got chips and fractures in us, like pieces of old china at a garage sale. Broken.”

  “You have this incredibly pessimistic opinion of people, Tony, and I can’t buy into that. I won’t. Most people are good and want to do the right thing.”

  “Please. Most people are too self-absorbed to care about doing the right thing. Sure, we talk about it a lot, and every now and then we’re moved to stand up for a cause bigger than ourselves, but for the most part, all we want is our own little comfortable island, and we don’t give a damn about what happens beyond it. All of us are guilty of that, Lisa—we’re guilty of apathy and self-absorption, and that’s why the system fails us, that’s why it always will.”

  She stared at him. “Is your name Anthony, or Ghost?”

  He stopped himself—he hadn’t intended to launch into a rant. Until then, he’d used his writing as a vehicle to vent his deepest emotions and beliefs about this stuff. When questioned, as he often was by readers and media, whether he actually believed in the things his characters said and did, he offered up the indifferent response, Hey, lighten up, it’s only fiction. That means I make these things up.

  As Lisa studied him as though seeing him anew, he felt too exposed.

  “Anyway,” he said, “no cops. Okay?”

  “You’re so stubborn.” She shrugged. “But fine, no cops.”

  It was a few minutes past midnight. Highway traffic was sparse, but those on the road were roaring past at speeds in excess of eighty miles an hour, typical Atlanta drivers who drove with death wishes.

  He kept to the far right lane and maintained his speed at a relatively modest seventy. With the damaged windows and a presumably shattered taillight, he didn’t want to risk attracting the attention of a cop and be put in the position of explaining what had happened.

  From between the front seats, Lisa picked up the Bible that Bob had left him, riffled through it. “Back to Bob. Why did he leave you this?”

  “We’re assuming he left it for me.”

  “And who the heck is Kelley Marrow?”

  “Who?”

  “The Bible belongs to her, according to this.” She tapped the first page.

  “Oh, that. I’ve no idea who she is. But remember, Bob enjoys giving clues through the scriptures. He’s done it twice so far. I figure it has to have something useful in it.”

  “There’re probably hundreds of passages highlighted in here.” She ran her f
inger along some of the verses marked with the multi-colored pens. She snapped the book shut. “I’m way too frazzled to read this right now.”

  “We can check it out later.”

  “Furthermore, if he’s accumulated evidence that he claims can destroy this organization and bring your dad’s killer to justice, why not give it to you directly, or at least tell you where it is?”

  “He might be worried about the security of the information, decided to hide it within a bunch of clues.”

  “Possibly.” She yawned, but cut the yawn short as if angry at her body slowing down on her when she was finally getting into a groove. “Let’s work from the bottom up, then. What religious organization do you think these people represent?”

  “A cult, but one more mainstream than your average bunch of isolated fanatics. They’ve got deep resources, as we’ve seen, probably lots of money backing them.”

  “The Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious organization in the world,” she said. “But I really don’t think Bob was talking about them. This group sounds smaller than that.”

  “But big enough to pose a real threat.”

  “Bob said your dad tried to bring them down, and that’s why they got him. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Your dad was a sports writer, Tony. What could he have done?”

  “Maybe he got wind of a damaging story about these people, started to dig deeper, and they found out.”

  “Does that sound like him?”

  “Not really. He loved his job, but he wasn’t obsessed about it. I can’t imagine him risking his life to write some kind of expose in a subject area that wasn’t even his beat.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “At this stage, anything’s possible, don’t you think?”

  “What church did he attend?” she asked.

  “Greater Hope Baptist. In Decatur. All of us went every Sunday. It was a small church, had maybe three hundred members, everyone knew each other.”

  “Sounds like our church,” she said.

  He considered the small United Methodist church of which she spoke to be hers, not his. He hadn’t visited the church since their wedding ceremony three years ago. But Lisa and her family were longtime members and rarely missed a Sunday service.