Wages of Sin Read Online Free PDF Page B

hog's leg. Tony the Rat was a two-bit shark and weekend dealer who only had the one enforcer. Ironically, the enforcer's moniker was also the Rat. Guido the Rat. Guido had gotten his nickname as a kid, when for ten cents he would bite the head off a rat for your entertainment.
    “After you got away from Tony's goon,” Rourke said, “why come here?”
    The boy shrugged. “I wasn't thinking. Just running.”
    Fio had found another oil drum to stand on and was dusting the crossbeam with mercury and chalk powders. Carlos Kelly watched a moment, his throat moving as he swallowed. “All I wanted was a place to lay low for a while, you know?” He shuddered, hard. “I should've vamoosed soon as I saw the fuckin' bats.”
    Rourke looked up. Moths and palmetto bugs rattled around the lights, but no small furry bodies hung from the rafters. “Bats?”
    Carlos Kelly waved his hand at the catwalk that rimmed the factory two-thirds of the way up the wall. “They were roosting, or whatever they do, up there. I saw their wings flapping and I heard 'em squealing. Then I noticed the fire—leastways, I thought it was a fire. That some tramps were camping out in here, boozing and cooking up a meal. But when I got closer I saw…him. Hanging there. His breath was coming out of him hard. In bloody bubbles. He said, ‘Mercy,’ like he was calling on God to forgive him, or to help him, I guess.” The boy drew in a sudden, gasping breath. “Oh, Jesus. I thought it was meat cooking, but it was his feet.”
    “And so you put out the candles.”
    The boy nodded, and the light glinted off the tears on his cheeks. He'd been crying for a while now. “He was alive when I ran for help, I'd swear to it. He was alive…”
    “Yeah, okay,” Rourke said.
    Carlos Kelly was probably nothing more than a mutt, a bagman for a penny-ante loan shark who had then turned around and stolen from his employer and nearly paid the expected price. It had taken some courage, though, for the kid to leave his bolt hole, knowing that Tony Benato's goon was out there searching for him.
    Rourke looked from the boy's bent head to the body of the tortured priest, thinking. Fio had finished dusting the beam and was now shooting a close-up photo of the nail-pierced wrists. The New Orleans parish coroner had just arrived.
    “What I can do,” Rourke said, “is have you taken all the way out to Mid-City Precinct and held incognito as a material witness for a while.”
    Carlos Kelly let out a long slow breath. “How long?”
    “You got family, friends? Then long enough,” Rourke went on as the boy nodded, “for them to try to make things square with Tony Benato on your behalf.” He patted the boy's shoulder as he stood up. “Only stay out of that running pinochle game those cops've got going out there. Those guys, they would cheat their own mothers.”
    Carlos Kelly snorted a laugh, but it came out as more of a sob. He brushed his face then looked at his hand, as if surprised to find that it was wet. He made the sign of the cross, then flushed when he realized that Rourke had seen him do it.
    “When I first came in here,” he said, “it was so dark and with the machinery and the bats and the flames—it made me think of hell. And then I saw him…hanging there. I mean, who else but the devil would do that to a priest?”
    The beat cop, Jack Murphy, was ranting to Fio. “Must be a trial, having a guy like him for a partner—a pretty boy with a la-di-da college dee-ploma. Guy who just because he's got an angel in high places and he's banging a movie star, he thinks his shit smells like roses. I bet you do all the work, only he's the one all the time get-tin' his mug in the papers.”
    “Yeah, well it ain't always a fair or gentle world,” Fio said. He met Rourke's eyes and he wasn't smiling. They'd been working together for almost a year now and their partnership wasn't easy. Mostly because Fio was more than half convinced Rourke knew and was sitting on the