Free Parishioner by Walter Mosley Page A

on you, then tell ’em that you drove me to my car, that I forced you. Don’t lie for me but for yourself, kid. Understand?”
    “What was goin’ on in there?” Winter asked then.
    “I’m on a job,” the Parishioner said. “I’m looking for three boys went missing twenty-three years ago.”
    “You think that was them in the basement?”
    “Maybe so. Maybe. I got a lead or two and so I’ll see. But right now you order a fewshots of cognac and drink ’em down. After that I’ll give you a ride home and you sleep on what you should do.”

    After dropping an inebriated and distraught Winter Johnson at his apartment on Crest Drive, Xavier drove down to the beach using surface streets.
    On the way he took out his cell phone and entered a number.
    “Yeah?” a gravelly voice answered midway through the second ring.
    “I need you to take my route for the rest of the week, Bud,” Xavier said.
    “Starting when?”
    “In the morning.”
    “Okay,” the voice said. “You all right?”
    “Canned peaches and sour cream.”

    At the ocean he veered right, heading up the Pacific Coast Highway. A twenty-four-hour jazz station was playing early Thelonius Monk for no particular reason. The complex rhythms reminded the killer of his late-night Harlem apartment home after the beatings and turmoil subsided, when peace reigned in the living room and the record player cooed with trumpets, saxophones, and piano. His mother had cried herself to sleep by then and the old man was passed out, or nearly so. Xavier would sit in the doorway to the bedroom he shared with his brother and cousin, listening to the music and the silence.
    It was a quarter to three in the morning and the road was fairly empty. His forearms no longer ached for violence.
    Ecks is an ambidextrous mothahfuckah. He can kill a man with either hand
, mocha-colored Swan used to say about his friend.
He’s the Sugar Ray Robinson of the street
.
    He’d never counted the number of lives he’d taken until Father Frank had him confess at Expressions: twenty-two if the white man died, twenty-nine if you held him accountable for the times he’d been an accomplice.
    For a brief moment he considered driving off the cliff to his left.
    “Even the criminal cannot pass judgment,” Frank whispered from somewhere in the car.

    He reached the Seabreeze City limits at four forty-five in the morning. It was still shy of five a.m. when he rolled to a stop on the unpaved parking lot.
    The iron-strapped ebony wood doors opened when he placed his thumb on the tiny crystal plate that operated the sophisticated locking system.
    The overhead lights came on as he walked down the narrow aisle between the simple pews, through to the back door, and out into the yard. He strode up to Frank’s rectory, intending to walk right in, but before he got there the door swung inward and Frank was standing there fully dressed in his signature black.
    “Come on in, Brother Ecks. I’ve been expecting you.”
    And it was true. There were two chairs facing each other before an iron candelabra set with more than a dozen wax sticks burning intensely. Frank used candles that burned brighter than normal tapers. They were more like small torches.
    “Have a seat,” the self-proclaimed minister offered.
    “I don’t want to sit.”
    “Do so anyway, Brother Rule.”
    Xavier obeyed even though he promised himself that he would resist the man who had sent him out to break his oath.
    “Soto called,” Frank said as he seated himself. “He told me about a subterranean killing field, one man sorely wounded, and another man dead.”
    “The white man’s not dead?”
    “Not yet.”
    “I lashed out at them as if I had never spent one Sunday in this church,” Xavier said.
    Frank allowed these words their own space. He did not dispute or deny the Parishioner’s claim.
    Light began to break upon the ocean from the eastern sky.
    For a moment Xavier shivered uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his face and