Phoenix Noir - By Patrick Millikin Page 0,12

knife through his ribs.”

The coyote paused, and O’Toole could not bring himself to reply. He felt a crawling sensation between his shoulder blades, and envisioned Walberto’s knife blade, plunging again and again through skin, scraping bone, exploding blood vessels, releasing scarlet geysers of life-juice. Silence fell as they knelt there in the sweaty heat, with the shadows of the church smothering them. Then, somewhere outside the church, O’Toole heard a light scraping sound.

“Shit!” whispered Walberto. “There’s somebody out there. Let’s take this into the sin-box. We don’t want to be seen together.”

A happenstance visitor? O’Toole didn’t believe it. He hadn’t heard a vehicle engine since Walberto had pulled up, and even the sound of moving feet—some hiker extending his distance over desolate territory—would have reached them in the dead quiet within the church walls. Most likely it was a wild dog or an actual coyote, some beast that could have made the approach without attracting notice.

“All right,” O’Toole whispered back. He rose quickly, his big legs twitching, and started for the priest’s side of the confessional.

Walberto took his arm. “Let me go in that side,” the smuggler whispered, grinning. “I always wanted to try out that priest’s seat. Besides, maybe you have a sin to confess.”

O’Toole felt tightness in his throat. His mind blanked. Dumbly, he nodded, thinking desperately about favorable possibilities. The pistol might not be easy to see. Out of caution, he had tilted a missal up against it when he’d placed it on the small shelf next to the priest’s seat.

He made his way to the penitent’s door on the confessional and creaked it open. It stuck a bit. Things in the church had never worked exactly right for O’Toole. He wondered about that. On the other side, he could hear Walberto bumping around, then settling down. O’Toole knelt on the hard bench, his face inches from the mesh that covered the square hole between them.

The coyote’s breath rippled the cloth. “Aren’t you going to say it, Father?”

“Say what?”

“What you’re supposed to say—Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Despite his nervousness, O’Toole felt anger rising in his throat. “You’re not a priest.”

The coyote was unfazed. “And are you a priest, Father? For sure? You sure do some slick things for a man of the cloth.”

“A man has to live,” O’Toole replied.

“Yes, that can be a problem.” Walberto seemed to be shifting around in the enclosed space. One of his elbows thumped the thin wall between them. “But once a priest, always a priest, even if you’re an asshole, right?”

O’Toole thought about his sins. Miserably, he replied, “Yes.”

“This is supposed to be a confession,” Walberto said, his voice now cheerful. “Have you been guilty of the eighth deadly sin, overconfidence? I think so. You thought you’d get this relic from me easy. But you won’t. The price goes up when somebody dies. And it would go up crazy for a priest.”

O’Toole heard metal clanking on wood from the other side of the confessional. His mind raced. His fatness in the confined space locked him in, he’d never be able to shift and lunge through the door in time. He was like a doomed cow in a butcher’s chute, waiting for the electric knife to buzz and slash its carotid arteries away.

“Look,” said Walberto teasingly, “there’s a gun in here.”

O’Toole could see the round muzzle of the .357 poking at the mesh, could see Walberto mockingly pushing his own face into the cloth right next to it.

“There’s a gun in here too,” O’Toole said, sweeping the tiny Beretta M21A from under his robes and firing twice. Blood bubbled on the screen as the .22-caliber long-rifle bullets punched into the coyote’s forehead. The hard chunks of meat that had been Walberto clanked and vibrated against the confessional. Then there was silence.

O’Toole reholstered the pistol and put a hand to his chest. It took him some time to calm his pounding heart, some time to get his breath down into the range in which it no longer whistled and strained. He was sweating like a man in a steam bath. He tilted his head against the cool wood next to the penitent’s window, let his headache subside, and, eventually, composed himself.

At last his thoughts turned to the relic and to spiritual duties. There was one more thing he had to do for Walberto.

He crossed himself, compressed his hands, and leaned forward.

“Oh Lord,” O’Toole prayed, “be merciful to him, a sinner.”

DIRTY SCOTTSDALE

BY DIANA GABALDON

Desert Botanical Garden

It was high noon, and 110°. The