Blood Red

Patrick was doing the cooking that particular Saturday and, as was often the case, he decided on pasta. The man should have been Italian with the way he went for pasta. Tonight it was lasagna and it very likely tasted as wonderful as it smelled. But all three men sat in silence as they ate, lost in their own thoughts.

And each and every one of them was remembering the girl they had seen in the church every Sunday for over a decade now, the girl who would be in the pews tomorrow and likely praying as fervently as she always did.

Each of them dreaded seeing Margaret Preston, the sweet-faced youth who had come to them and brought them pleasures of the flesh the likes of which they had never experienced before. She did so, as far as they knew, without provocation. She had surely never given any indication in the past that she found them attractive, and most assuredly she had never made advances before the week that had just come around. That she had been knowledgeable was a given. Maggie was talented and eager to teach things they had never willingly admitted to dreaming about, let alone ever expected to experience in their lives.

She had brought each of the men pleasure, deep abiding pleasure, and memories that would linger and haunt them for a long time to come. She had also brought each of them doubt. They doubted their own strengths and the strength of their faith in the Lord, if they were weak enough to give themselves over to a beautiful woman.

Each of the priests had thought of little else in their free time. The guilt was powerful and burned at them, as surely as her kisses had seared their flesh, as surely as their bodies burned for her, to be with her again, to experience the sensual gratification she had given to them once before.

They would see her at Mass and each of the men would remember what had happened. They would feel the guilt they shared more profoundly than ever and the desires as well. Each of the priests knew that this would happen but only knew it would happen for one individual. The men had often shared tales of their pasts during their Saturday night meals, and Donald Wilson had heard the confessions of his subordinates on many occasions.

There had been no confessions of their secret shared sins. Not a one of them ever seriously considered confessing. It was a secret, and it was a sin, but in each case, it was a sin that was still being savored.

And each of them had one more secret that they did not desire to share: despite the guilt involved, each and every one of them wanted to be with her again.

It was a silent meal that Saturday night. It was the last meal that all three men would share together. One of them would be dead before the week was over.

They ate in silence, lost in their sins and their urges. None of them even noticed. They were far too distracted to pay any attention to the men they ate with.

And that, of course, was exactly what Jason Soulis had been counting on when he hired Maggie: a secret shared is no longer a secret, and a sin held close to the heart is more often treasured than reviled.

Can you say Amen?

V

The night was starting to get long in the tooth and Boyd was beginning to feel married to Holdstedter, which wouldn’t have been that bad if the man looked as good as his sister did. Sadly, his partner was the wrong gender for him to even consider looking to get lucky.

“Are you thinking about my sister again?” Danny looked at him as he raised his mug of Sam Adams and smiled.

“Why would I be thinking about your sister?”

“You’ve got that look on your face that says you’re thinking about getting into the sack with a well-built blonde.”

“Only in your dreams, you loser.” That was another thing that annoyed him about his partner: the bastard could read him like a book and he didn’t like to be read.

“I can give you her number. She’ll probably chew you up and spit out the bones, but you’d have a good time.”

“Do you have any idea how wrong it is to hear you talk about your own sister that way?”

“Do you have any idea how wrong it is to know your partner is checking you out while you’re trying to drink yourself into a stupor?”

“You’re a sick man, Danny.”

“Yes, yes I am. Remind me never to change.”

“So how many are we up to for the day?”

“Seven. Seven more people who didn’t show up where they were supposed to or anywhere else. That’s seventeen to date, but who’s counting?”

“That prick we have to call sir.”

“O’Neill can eat my shorts.”

“He probably would. I hear he swings both ways.”

“That’s more than I need to know, Boyd.”

“Serves you right, talking about your sister that way.”

“You saying you don’t want to bang my sister?”

“What? You crazy? I’d fuck her through a wall. But that isn’t why we’re here.”

“No,” Holdstedter agreed. “We’re here to get drunk and bitch about the disappearing populace.”

“You think Freemont did in his wife?”