Free Altar of Bones by Philip Carter

including a pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun, in a wall safe behind a panel of wainscoting next to the fireplace in the living room. He fired most of the rest of the clip down the hall, then dropped and rolled past the open doorway. He commando-crawled across the floor, picking up his jacket on the way. He slappedone of the fresh clips into his gun and lay down another spray of fire. He got return fire, but it was still coming from the kitchen. He’d slowed them down, but he hadn’t stopped them.
    He popped the wall panel and spun the dial to the safe. Barely two minutes had passed since they’d blown in the window and battered down the back door, still he strained to hear the distant wail of sirens. The emergency response system had to be flooded with calls by now, so where were the goddamn cops?
    The safe clicked open. He jerked up on the handle, swung open the door—
    Shit
.
    Ry’s belly clenched into a fist of fear. The guns, the ammo, were gone. In their place were two brick-size packages of white powder wrapped in clear plastic. It could be powdered sugar or flour, but Ry didn’t think so. He had to be looking at six kilos of pure-grade heroin.
    Jesus. Who
were
these guys?
They’d bypassed his state-of-the-art security system, stolen his guns, and planted the smack in his locked safe, then staged what would look like a drug deal gone bad. He knew the D.C. cops weren’t coming now. Whoever these guys were, they had gold-plated connections. Federal, probably, and this operation would be completely off the books.
    He heard movement out in the kitchen, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, the metallic snap of weapons being readied. There’d be three guys, he thought, maybe four. And figure another couple guys waiting in the street, by the pizza van, in case by some miracle he made it through the front door alive.
    A bookcase flanked the other side of the fireplace. Ry jumped to his feet, spun around, and flattened himself against the wall. Now he had the bookcase between himself and whatever came at him from the kitchen, not that a few inches of walnut and bound paper were going to stop the 950 rounds per minute that came from an Uzi submachine gun.
    He was also vulnerable to the street here. At least the first shots through the window had blown out the lamp so the room was in darkness. Except for the red light on his answering machine. He desperately needed to listen to the rest of Dom’s message.
    Dad’s gone, and now they’re going to come after us, because of what he did
.
    Going to come, shit—they were already here. He’d been fucked before, but not this fucked.
    He reloaded, pointed the Walther in a two-fisted grip at the open door, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes.
    Galveston, Texas
    A T THE SAME time, in Sacred Heart’s peaceful quiet, Father Dom was hearing confessions. He sat behind the thick purple velvet curtain, in the closetlike darkness of the confessional box. He was adrift, empty of all feeling. He’d even stopped being afraid, but then he supposed that was because the human psyche could only live on an emotional knife-edge for so long.
    He’d thought about running, disappearing, but he had no idea how to go about it, and besides, he had obligations, duties. A priest could no more abandon his flock than a father and husband could walk away from his family. And so he went on with his life. He’d buried his father, celebrated mass, baptized a baby, read his breviary, tried to pray. And everywhere he looked, every time he turned around, it seemed there was another redheaded woman. Even the woman in the funeral home had red hair, although it was probably from a bottle since she was at least sixty. Who knew there were so many red-haired women in Galveston?
    He heard the far-off ring of the telephone in the rectory and then silence. Something wasn’t right. It was too quiet. No one had entered the confessional box for a while now, and he could hear no movement out in the nave, no voices.