SWNOVELS Sinners Anonymous : Chapter 8
Dip.
It’s a small, modest building, bar the towering spire that can be seen all the way from Devil’s Cove on a clear day. It sits stupidly close to the edge of the cliff, and the stones are eroded by the salty sea air and years of neglect. In front of it, ivy-covered tombstones clutter the graveyard, including those of my parents.
Standing in front of the rotting oak door, I tighten my grip on the crowbar and take a deep breath. Nine years ago, I threw the key off the side of the cliff and I can’t be fucked to find out if either of my Uncles have a spare. Instead, I jimmy the bar in between the wood and the iron lock, and unsurprisingly, the rot makes it easy to pop open with a good shove.
The musty smell hits me first, followed by a wave of bitter nostalgia.
Fucking hell. I haven’t stepped in this church since my parents’ funeral. Slowly, I stroll down the aisle, my footsteps echoing off the broken beams in the ceiling. My fingers graze over the benches, gathering a carpet of cobwebs as I pass.
It’s a shit hole in here, and I’m solely responsible for that. The Cove clan offered to maintain it, just like they do the port, but I insisted they burn the entire fucking thing to the ground.
We compromised by sealing it off.
I take my old seat—on the edge of the left front bench—and I wait.
It’s not long before the wind carries in a purr of a car engine. I hear footsteps. The groan of the door. Then my brother’s booming laugh fills the church, a sound that brings me right back to my childhood.
“Out of all the churches in the world, you chose this one.”
“I was in the neighborhood.”
It’s fascinating to watch Rafe unlock a million memories. None of his are poisoned like mine. Hands in his pockets, he strolls down the aisle, a lopsided grin on his face as he gazes at the vaulted ceilings, drinks in the altar and finally seeks out the confession booth in the far right corner.
He gives a small shake of his head and comes to a stop next to me. “We’ve been doing this for nine years, and yet, we’ve never met here,” he mutters in disbelief. “Unbelievable.”
He’s right, it is unbelievable. Westminster Abbey in London, St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. For the last nine years, we’ve met in a church somewhere around the world on the last Sunday of every month, but never the one we grew up in. Ironic, because it’s this very church where our game started.
I was twelve, Rafe ten, and Gabe eight when my father sat us down in Sacristy and told us it was time we became men. We’d been listening in on confessions for months, crawling into the gap between the stone wall and the confession booth and straining to hear all of the townspeople’s darkest sins and secrets. Most were pathetic—married men paying whores, Devil’s Coast Academy students cheating on the school’s entrance exams—but some made me sick to my stomach.
Among all the candles, robes, and dusty stacks of Bibles, our father told us that from then on, on the last Sunday of every month, we’d have to decide which was the worst confession we’d heard.
And then we had to do something about it.
Our special game bonded my brothers and I together like glue. While the locals called us the Angel’s of Devil’s Dip, they didn’t know that we were the judge, jury, and executioners of this town too, and throughout our teens we buzzed with our secret power.
We continued this ritual, all the way up until I was eighteen, which was when I left the Coast to study business at Oxford University in England. Rafe and Gabe didn’t want to continue the tradition without me, so it fizzled away into nothing more than a fond memory we’d drag up whenever we came home for the holidays.
And then our parents died. A few months after the funeral, Rafe turned up at my London office, unannounced. He was drunk and bleary-eyed, fresh off a jet from Vegas.
“I miss us,” he’d slurred, leaning against my desk to stop himself from swaying. “I miss the game.”
Sinners Anonymous was all his idea. A bigger, shinier version of the game that forced us to become men. He’d hatched a whole plan as he flew thousands of feet above the Atlantic, fueled by liquor and nostalgia. An “anonymous” voicemail service instead of a church confession booth. A reach that touched all four corners of the globe—not just the cobbled streets of Devil’s Dip. We wouldn’t meet at Saint Pius’s at the end of every month, but a different church anywhere in the world each time.
My first instinct was to shut him down because I’d meant what I said when I left Devil’s Dip—I was going straight. But the ache to be bad throbbed under my skin, and I was experiencing withdrawals akin to a crack addict. And when you’re sweating and shaking and glaring at your bedroom ceiling at 3:00 a.m., then you always find a way to justify your bad habits.
Mine came in the form of our mother’s favorite expression. Ironically, it’s the reason I went straight in the first place. Life is all about balance, Angelo. The good always cancels out the bad.
Sure, I’d play my brother’s game, and not just because I needed to scratch the itch, but because I owed it to our mama to cancel out the bad.
I told Rafe I was in.
Now, he sinks down on the bench next to me, and I can hear the click-clack of his dice as he rolls them between his thumb and forefinger in his pocket. Our childhood game shaped him a lot more than it did me. In fact, his whole life is a game—he owns half the hotels and casinos in Vegas and collects protection from the ones he doesn’t. He wins when others lose, and when others win, well, they’d better hope it wasn’t because they cheated. There’s nothing Rafe hates more than a cheat.
My brother is a fucking shark. All pearly white teeth and charm, but nobody survives his bite.
A few moments pass, then the growl of a Harley Davidson seeps through the open door and down the aisle.
“Here he is,” Rafe mutters, a sly grin splitting his face.
Gabe’s heavy footsteps make the old stained-glass windows rattle.
“Fuck me, brother,” Rafe barks down the aisle. “Do you own any footwear that aren’t steel-capped boots? You stomp around like the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood.”
Gabe looms over us like a storm cloud and scowls down at Rafe. “All the better to kick your head in with, my dear,” he growls.
“Holy shit, that’s the most I’ve heard you talk all year,” Rafe shoots back with an easy smile. “Good to see you, bro.”
Gabe grunts something unintelligible, then shifts his gaze to me. “Nice stunt at lunch today.”
“Thanks.”
“Not gonna tell us why you pulled it?”
“Nope.”
He nods, then pulls out an iPad from under his jacket.
“Let’s get on with it then.”
Rafe’s gaze heats the side of my cheek. “Hold the fuck on. You’re shitting me, right? You take down a lackey at Big Al’s Sunday lunch, follow it up with some bullshit excuse about the Russians, and you’re not going to tell us why?”
I huff out a lungful of stale air and drag a knuckle through my beard. Truth is, I don’t know why the fuck I did it. And the reason I think I did it is utterly fucking insane.
Her.
I wish I could say I walked into the dining room and saw that kid’s hand gripped tightly around her wrist and the fear in her eyes. That I was protecting my uncle’s honor, or at the very least, stopping his fiancee from being manhandled by his lackey. But that’d be bullshit, because I’d already picked up the gun from Alberto’s office and tucked it into the back of my waistband before that, when the only information I knew, or thought I knew, was that she was fucking him behind Alberto’s back.
But as I sat there eating lunch, listening to Rafe describe his latest poker game with the Hollow clan, I was watching them—the way he was all over her like a fucking rash, how she squirmed uncomfortably under every touch—and I realized I was wrong.
But I was going to kill him anyway.
Like I said, utterly fucking insane.
“My trigger finger was itchy,” I drawl, lazily checking the time. “Can we get on with this? I’ve got shit to do.”
“Shit to do in Devil’s Dip?” Rafe quips back. “That’s how I know you’re bullshitting.”
I ignore him and turn back to Gabe. He unlocks the iPad and holds it up so we can both see the screen. “You know the drill. We’ve each chosen four callers.” He stabs the big “Generate Random Numbers” button on the screen. A spreadsheet populated with twelve names appears, each with a number between one and twelve beside it. “Over to you, Rafe.”
Rafe chuckles and brings the dice out of his pocket. “My favorite time of the month,” he murmurs, bringing his fist up to his mouth and blowing. With a flick of his wrist, he releases the die, letting them scatter and bounce over the wooden floorboards and iron grate.
Silence. Then Gabe takes the three steps over to inspect them.
“Six.”
“Yes!” Rafe hisses. “Lady Luck never lets me down, baby.”
“So, who we got?” I ask.
Rafe reaches for the iPad and peers down at the screen. “Phillip Moyers. Some old bastard in Connecticut. Called to confess to a hit and run.”
“Big fucking deal,” I mutter, rolling my eyes. “Out of all the calls you got around to listening to this month, that was the best you could find?”
“He was off his tits on coke. Didn’t realize she was wrapped around his bumper until he’d dragged her for three blocks. When he finally heard the screaming, he peeled her off and left her for dead.” He scoops up his dice, gives them a small kiss, and slips them back in his pocket. “The coroner’s report said it wasn’t the accident that killed her, but the exposure of being left in the dirt overnight for seven hours. Oh,” he adds, rising to his feet and pinning me with a sour glare. “She was eight months pregnant.”
Gabe pops his knuckles. “Mine.”
I shift my gaze to him. “Yours?”
He nods. Tucks the iPad back in his pocket and strolls out the church without another word. A few moments later, his motorcycle engine roars to life, then melts into the howl of the wind as he rides off.
Rafe and I stand shoulder to shoulder, staring at the open door.
“What happened to him, man?” Rafe says, more to himself than me.
I don’t reply, because, like him, I don’t have an answer.
Gabe’s a goddamn mystery. Has been since he came back to the Coast one Christmas, shortly before our parents died, with a whole new personality and a fresh scar running from his eyebrow to his chin. He won’t share his shit. Everything we’ve pieced together comes from Chinese whispers and half-baked rumors. Some say he’s building and testing new weapons out of a Siberian military base. Others say he’s working as a hitman for the Palermo outfit. All we know for sure is that on the last Sunday of every month, he’ll turn up wherever in the world you ask him to.
Rolling back his shoulders and cracking his neck, Rafe turns to me. “What you really doing here, bro?” As I open my mouth, he lands a sucker punch on my shoulder. “And don’t fucking lie to me. I’m not Dante.”
I snarl at his hit and he’s lucky I don’t disconnect his jaw from the rest of his skull for that cheap shot. Instead, I take a few steps down the aisle, and then turn around to look back up at the predella. I can practically see our father standing behind it, banging his fist against the altar, his voice booming around the nave.
If he was really there and I had a gun, I’d put a bullet between his eyes, just like I did to Max hours earlier.
“Bro?”
My eyes fall back to Rafe. “I won’t lie to you.” I just won’t tell you the truth.
“I know.”
“So I won’t say anything at all.”
I feel his gaze burning between my shoulder blades as I stride toward the door. Just before I step out into the blistering wind, I stop and turn back around. He’s still standing in front of the altar, arms crossed over his chest.
“Dad wasn’t the hero you thought he was,” I say quietly.
He stays silent, his jaw as hard as steel.
“And Mama?”
I pull my collar up, dig my hands into my pockets and get ready for the fall chill.
“Mama was a fucking saint, and don’t you ever forget it.”