Everyone Pays Read Online Free PDF Page B

name. The one I wanted most.
    I knew where to find him. Her instructions were specific: third floor in the back. The door wouldn’t have a lock. This was where he would be.
    Taking this route, I saw the city’s worst. The smells, the faces, the questions. They asked for money, even knowing He has a house where they might go to be helped and fed. But not these; they didn’t come for absolution, only recognized me as a black shape passing at 4:00 a.m. They had no want of change or saving, death their only end.
    I stopped at one I couldn’t pass: a black man with foam at his mouth and an unshaved chin, holding his hand out. His clouded eyes didn’t even recognize me from his meals.
    “Quarter? Dollar?” he asked.
    “You,” I said quietly. I pushed him back against a building with my hand, close enough to get his smell. He hadn’t bathed in weeks. “Absolution in the face of our Lord. Do you accept it?”
    “What, man? Why you coming up on me . . .”
    He tried to raise his arms, but I already had both his wrists.
    “What do you want?” I asked him. “Do you want to be saved in the eyes of the Lord? And live in heaven?”
    “What you talking about? What is this?” He struggled to break my grip but couldn’t. Not only was he weak, but he was undernourished as well. He couldn’t do a thing.
    “I can offer you absolution right now, for a price. Do you take it? Or do you choose to stay in this sinful place?”
    “No. Fuck, no. What the shit you saying?” He pulled his head back and angled his face away, trying to see me more clearly through the sides of his eyes. Who knows what he saw? In all likelihood, he hadn’t seen clearly in years.
    I used my left hand to hold his wrists. With my right, I drew the knife. A sliver of streetlight gleamed against its blade, and he saw this. Suddenly his vision cleared.
    “What you—”
    “One chance, old man. Don’t ask me why I’m giving it to you, but I am. One chance to be absolved of all your sins.”
    “How is . . . ? How can you?”
    “I take them on as my own, my son. Send you to heaven for eternity to live in His presence among angels.”
    He didn’t respond. I slid the knife’s tip down his jacket, slicing fabric.
    He shook his head, did his best to push me off. This time I let him. He danced away, down the wall, screaming no, over and over.
    No one bothered to notice. For all they knew, he was just howling at the night—seeing things, imagining ghosts.
    Then he fixed me with the clearest stare he could muster, a clarity of vision I had not seen in some time—from anyone—and he said, “I choose this earth and this life. This is where I’m gonna stay.”
    “Your decision.” I turned away. Perhaps if he had chosen absolution, it would have changed all that came after, kept me away from the pimp, saved us all.
    But he had not.
    The sinners chose their sins, the path toward faith presenting itself daily and lying untaken. Everyone had free will upon His earth.
    Everyone paid.

CHAPTER TEN
    DONNER
    Hendricks was late Tuesday morning, so I went to evidence myself to check out the pictures from Farrow’s studio to compare them with Piper’s.
    I took both sets to a white-walled interrogation room and laid them out in front of me on the scratched table.
    At Piper’s, the number of pics was precise, a lineup on his shelf of girls he had hurt. I studied one of the tech’s pics, the one that showed how the shelf looked when we arrived. One spot stood empty, as if one of the girls had been removed. The very middle picture. She was gone.
    With Farrow, the stack had no order, no way to tell if any pictures had been taken. His collection was just a mess spread across his desk.
    The murders were so different: Piper meticulous and calculated, Farrow carried out in anger and with strength. It almost looked like two different killers but with too many coincidences. I was starting to believe in the connection of the girls.
    I started putting together matches of