Acolyte, The by Cutter Nick

Author:Cutter, Nick [Cutter, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2015-05-08T00:08:05+00:00

The Damascus Towers

Stakeout.

I’d met Tom Swift only once, in the company of Angela Doe. If the thread wasn’t particularly long at least there was an end to grab hold of.

Doe had returned to her fourth-floor apartment near Nazareth Park. I took a room at the motel across the way with clean sightlines into her place. For three days I drank rotgut joe and spied on the woman I loved. I could not deny that my snooping was based at least partially on jealousy. But it wasn’t my sole motivation. People were dead and it was still my responsibility to discover who’d killed them. Tom Swift was as likely a candidate as any.

A dangerous man. Amid all the patsies and stiffs and losers I’d come in contact with in the line of duty there had been but a few truly dangerous men. Those ones you recognized right off: something in the voice, the eyes, the viperlike way they moved.

At quarter past eleven on the third night, a van rolled up. A man exited the passenger side and crossed the sidewalk. He did not push the buzzer. He had a key.

Angela’s kitchen light went on. I socked a pair of binoculars to my eyes and thumbed the focus wheel. Angela and Tom Swift. The two of them smiling, Swift touching her shoulder, Angela’s cheeks colouring, Swift tossing his head back in laughter.

They sat. I stewed. At some point Angela guided him to the front door.

I hustled to an unmarked prowl car in the motel lot and caught the van as it pulled away from the curb. I didn’t radio for backup—none to be had, not that I trusted.

The van meandered for twenty minutes before cutting off Mount of Beatitudes into one of the tony suburbs ringing the SuperChurch. It pulled up at a stop sign. A few people approached. Some looked like they might own homes around there; others looked to have crawled from cardboard shanties.

The van’s rear door swung open and the people vanished inside. When it opened again, those same people exited the van and went away down the street. Nobody appeared to be carrying anything, so what were they receiving—drugs? Benedictions?

The van hit three more neighbourhoods: Jewtown, Little Baghdad, Preacher’s Row. I surveilled from afar, idling in the darkness of smashed streetlights. I counted each person entering the van: forty-three in total. They went into the van, a few minutes passed, then they got out of the van and walked away. They fit no known demographic.

It was past midnight when the van rounded down a cracked two-block stretch of tarmac leading to the Damascus Towers. The Towers had been built decades ago to house the previous Prophet, an ex-monsignor. But, seeking to distance himself from the old Monsignor and all tokens of his regime, The Prophet had ordered the Damascus Towers shut down. They remained standing, if barely. Scavengers had gutted the insides, tearing out the marble counter-tops and brass fixtures and ivory carpeting. After the easy meat was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.