Part II—Preparation H and Goose Shit

SONNY TOOK Ace's Coke right out of his hand, chugged it all down, and gave him back the empty can.

"So there?" Ace asked, wondering if that was the extent of Sonny's pushback.

"So there," Sonny said sourly. "What am I supposed to say to this, Ace? No, don't get the bad man who's hurting little girls? 'Cause that would make me a complete asshole."

Ace fidgeted. "Technically, Sonny, I'm the one who's going to go do something illegal here. Doesn't that make me the asshole?"

"That makes you the hero, jackass," Sonny snapped. "And yeah, I gotta let you go be the hero. You're taking Jai?"

"If he wants to—"

"Da," Jai said from behind Sonny, as he finished up on the car Sonny had been badgering him about all day. "Ace doesn't go into danger without backup."

"That's kind of you," Ace told him, meaning it. "But you know us. We don't force nobody to do nothing, right?" He grimaced. "Particularly not with something like this."

Sonny scowled. "There you go, getting all noble. See, if it was me, I'd walk into that man's home with an AK-47 aimed at his nuts, and I'd shoot until there weren't no nuts. You probably got something quick and clean planned cause you're a goddamned humanitarian."

"Yeah, that's me," Ace said dryly. "I'm a murderer, Sonny, that's real fuckin' noble."

Jai popped up from behind the fucking car then like a goddamned jack-in-the-box. "Nyet," he said, and it was great for him that his voice sounded like the hammer fall of doom. "There is a difference between a murderer and an… an administrator of justice," he said, sounding proud that he'd gotten "administrator" right.

"A what?" Ace shook his head. "Never mind. What matters here is that no matter what happens, these little girls gotta be kept safe, and this guy, he can't hurt them no more. I wish I could say arrest him, but…." They'd seen how these things had gone in the press. The pain the parents went through, the pain the kids went through.

"That is not always the humane option," Jai pronounced. "No. I think this is our service to the public." He gave a smile that was downright disturbing. "Perhaps it is a calling."

Ace stared at him, not sure whether to be relieved or horrified. "You know, I'm done talking. While we talk, this guy is probably teaching a preschool class and thinking about his next meal. That don't sit well with me. Let's go make sure it's not what happens, okay?"

"Da," Jai said. "Which car?"

Ace sighed. "Ernie's." From a strictly bureaucratic point of view, Ernie had been unalive for a number of years. In the spirit of that, Ace, Sonny, and Burton had kept him in a series of vehicles that were also… unalive. They'd been rescued in parts from local auto wreckers or sold on the down-low or patched together by hope and faith and bubblegum. Between Sonny, Ace, and Jai, the vehicles were always safe to drive, but they were never traceable. They'd tried at the beginning to have a dedicated vehicle for Ernie and one for Sonny and Jai as well, but they seemed to go through cars, SUVs, trucks, minivans, what-have-you, at a truly astounding rate. As long as Ernie's current vehicle was unalive and untraceable, whatever could be found of the thing when its final adventure occurred would remain a mystery to the authorities forever and ever, amen.

And they always—always—had one if not two of them in the wings, waiting to be Frankensteined into unlife. And in the meantime, there was always Sonny's vehicle of choice—right now it was a small blue four-door sedan—that Ernie could drive until they had him another Ernie-mobile all prepped and ready to go.

"Do you think it will survive?" Jai asked, and Ace shook his head.

"No. If George is right—and we don't got no reason to doubt him—and the brother-in-law the deputy is in on this, I have a feeling we'll need to get rid of him too."

Jai's smile literally stretched from ear to ear. "You are a truly good friend," he said. "Do you have ideas?"

Ace glared at him, because if he did have any ideas, he wasn't going to share them in front of Sonny. Sonny worried enough about him as it was, and Sonny's agitation could be a dangerous thing.

"We'll make something up as we go along," he lied blandly. "We always do."

SONNY INSISTED on making them a good lunch, and then on putting ghost chips in Ace's and Jai's phones, which were a little gift from Burton and Jason for no particular reason. Jason had no idea really why any of them might not want to be tracked sometimes. What an entirely unexpected idea.

"Okay," Sonny muttered, "we're set." He scowled at Ernie. "Are we set?"

Ernie opened his mouth, closed it, cocked his head. "They're going to be fine," he said almost absently, "but you and I will have unexpected company." He waved a hand at Jai and Ace. "It's going to be okay. Is George going back to work?"

George was currently sitting in the front room in the air-conditioning, petting the dog disconsolately.

"I think we're going to have George stay here," Ace said. "If you're going to have company and all. I have a suspicion we shouldn't split up a lot today."

Ernie smiled, nodding. "I think that's a good idea," he said. "I think George will come in handy. I'll have him bring Duke out to the front office, and we can chat while Sonny gets to work on that damned minivan."

At this point in the garage, all minivans were "that damned minivan." Something about the chassis and the weight distribution made them prime candidates for needing things like new bushings and getting their belts replaced all the fucking time.

ACE AND Jai had the location pulled up on the tent-revival church—and yes, the main part was a big circus tent where people attended, but it was a parking lot away from the preacher's house. Ace had done a little bit of reading before he talked to Sonny. The preacher had a wife, a brittle middle-aged blond who was listed as the head of childcare and prayer meetings. Ace was pretty sure the house was being used as the church offices and day care—it would make sense—and he and Jai loaded into the car with nothing more than Ace's service pistol, Jai's favorite Glock, and Ace's knife. Ace assumed Jai had his own knife, but that had never been his style. Of course, Ace was fine with breaking tradition, as long as it got the job done and got them out of there without being recognized.

"You know," he said before he got in the vehicle, "this whole plan goes south if it turns out they've got some serious security and shit."

"They don't," Ernie said, cocking his head in that way he had when sometimes his gift answered shit he hadn't even thought of before. His eyes went blank, and when he blinked he said, "Do a little recon, find the secret staircase. It'll be fine. I think you'll be able to get shit done."

Ace and Jai met eyes. They'd planned to do a little recon. What soldier didn't? But they'd keep what Ernie said in mind and keep their eyes extra open.

The revival tent was on their side of Barstow, which was good, because even if there'd been anybody out, nobody would have seen them approach. Ace knew there was enough suburban life in Barstow to feed into a place like this: a giant white tent under a hazy spring sky, on top of a lawn made of mostly hardpan and crabgrass. He took perverse satisfaction at the crabgrass, though. After the impossible storm, when the desert had been flooded like a big muddy swimming pool, his own attempts at a lawn had died a muddy death. The only good part was that he'd rented a rototiller during the sweet spot, when everything was soft, and rototilled the area in front of the house, away from the road. It had been hard work in the evening, his body still recovering from… things… but he'd been able to plant some drought-resistant grass seeds there. A little bit of light watering and he was starting to get some hearty saw-tooth-edged blades of grass that were at least tall enough for the dog to piss on without stickers getting caught between its toes.

This asshole's entire driveway had turned to hardpan. There were even rocky little outcroppings of tire tracks from the last rain. Somehow this made Ace feel like his little lawn was a reward for clean living.

"Park behind the house, da?" Jai asked, studying his phone and interrupting Ace's musings. The hardpan driveway wrapped around the enormous newly painted Victorian mansion that seemed completely misplaced. Was this built here upon hope of water? Ace knew that at one point in time, all the water coming to this area had been diverted to Los Angeles. Had this once been a successful farm? Or had it hoped to be?

He had no idea, but as he followed Jai's directions and parked in front of an obviously added-on garage, next to a couple of dispirited minivans and one battered and ancient red Ford Fiesta, he did wonder what kind of car was inside the four-car garage. These were employees here, he thought, or parishioners here on church business.

"Recon?" Ace asked softly, and Jai nodded. "I'll go inside looking for my wife," he decided.

Jai nodded, then reached into the glove box and pulled out a small kit—multiple pairs of nitrile gloves, a packet of bleach wipes, and a distinctive red baseball hat with a deplorable slogan that nobody in their little group of people would be caught dead wearing, with the charming addition of little blond curls peeping out from under the edge.

"No," Ace said mutinously, glaring at the hat.

Jai glared back. "You are handsome," he said, but not like this was a good thing. "Women will notice you. You wear the hat, they'll be sorry they're married to another man who wears this hat."

"It's so dishonest," Ace whined. "And then I have to remember to bring it with me because it'll have my DNA all over it."

Jai stared at him as though bored.

"Fine," Ace muttered. "Let me go look for Sherry."

"Good name," Jai said with a nod. "You could be married to a Sherry."

"If I wasn't a gay assassin," Ace muttered, and Jai's chuckle followed him as he put on the hated ball cap and exited the vehicle.

He kept his head down as he walked up to the entryway with a sign that proclaimed Church Business and included an arrow. He noted two security cameras as he did so, one of them aimed right out in front of the house but not catching most of the parking lot by the garage, and one of them aimed at the foyer.

Yup. He was glad for the ball cap after all.

He thought about knocking and then figured Church Business probably eliminated that sort of need and simply pressed the old-fashioned lever on the front door. He slid inside and walked down the hallway, listening for sounds of people.

The interior of the house had been completely redone. The floors in the kitchen he passed were tile, and the hallway he was in boasted a bright, cheery laminate. The walls were white with brightly colored art—much of it featuring children playing or wearing adult clothes and looking somber or sleeping in flower costumes or….

Ace shuddered. Great. What was supposed to be a wholesome—if cloying—niche of commercial art had been rendered totally creepy by this man.

Fucking. Eww.

Then he heard it, what sounded like a large room with lots of space and the high-pitched chatter of children.

He kept walking and stuck his head in briefly, taking in several things at once.

It was a good-sized playroom, with kids in it from crawling-in-diapers age to reading-cardboard-books age (because what would Ace know about kids?) and a couple of women minding them. One woman, a little older, was setting down a tray with food and juice on it, along with little paper cups on a child-sized table.

"How's your Anna doing?" she asked one of the other women. This woman was cradling a girl, about five, looking like she'd stepped out of George's description. Blond, blue-eyed, precious as a porcelain figurine.

"Well, she stopped crying," the obviously distressed young mother said. "It was the darnedest thing. I told her that if she couldn't stop crying, we'd go get the pastor to see if he could make her feel safe, and… she went dead still. It was like his name was a magic spell."

She smiled at the older woman with troubled eyes, and the older woman gave her a carefully neutral stare that froze Ace's soul.

"We don't like to talk about magic," she said gently. "It's not Christian, you know."

Oh God. She knew. This woman knew what her husband was doing.

Ace had seen and done some awful shit, but he didn't ever remember having to repress his gag reflex with such absolute force. Some of his hesitancy about this whole enterprise drained away. This woman deserved to be caught up in the cleanup. Even if it just embarrassed her, caused her some inconvenience—or some nightmares—she deserved to have her husband's monster exposed to the world.

So women and children were there, got it, and after that the layout of the house was pretty easy. The playroom was a grand ballroom of sorts in this big old house. Next was a smaller place, an office, and that would be the—whatzit? The rectory? Whatever it was, Ace paused before walking down the hall to the door because he spotted the security cameras right above the doorframe.

Yup. This was the private office, Ace bet, and no doubt the preacher had the equivalent of a bell over the threshold to keep people from interrupting him.

At that moment the women started talking again.

"Is the reverend busy right now?" murmured another woman. "My second grader has been having some terrible nightmares, and I thought I'd talk to him about her. He's so wonderful with the children—I'd really love his guidance."

"I'm afraid he's deep in his afternoon prayer time," said the wife, who knew damn well why the children were crying and screaming in their sleep. "I'll wait until the red light over his office door goes off and then ask him if he's ready to see you."

"Thank you so much, Maureen," said the other mother. "You're a treasure."

Yeah, sure. Maureen was a fucking peach, Ace thought murderously. But one monster at a time.

The camera over the office door was the fish-eye kind, but Ace stood right outside its span if he knew his security—and at this point, he did.

He pulled out his phone and, glancing around to make sure there weren't any more of those little goodies parked inside the house, texted, Fisheye camera outside the hall of his office. Ideas?

Jai texted back, Secret staircase. Go back outside and climb to second window.

Ace blinked. How in the hell did you know that? he asked, although he was already doing what Jai told him. Ernie had mentioned the secret staircase, but Ace couldn't fathom the where to save his life. He burst outside, hoping the soft-soled boots he'd changed into had kept his steps from being too loud, and took a hard left after clearing the camera range on the front porch. Jai was on the other side of the house, hugging the shadows next to a chimney, holding a phone image that he must have taken while Ace had gone inside.

Yup. Ace could read the relatively simple infrared schematics, as well as judge the difference between the outside dimension and the inside dimensions.

"I'll be damned," he said, staring at the infrared image. "Why didn't you tell me you had this toy?"

Jai shrugged modestly. "I've been playing with it," he admitted. "Jason is a very helpful neighbor."

"You think?" Ace said, not entirely sure he was comfortable with how high tech they were at the moment, even if he was grateful. "All right, then, think you can give me a boost up the side of the chimney? See the ledge up there? Give me a running start and a boost up, and I can hook my fingers in that and pull myself up to the open window."

"Now who is bragging," Jai said sourly, but he'd tucked the phone in his pocket and was shooing Ace back to where he could make the run.

The trick to doing this sort of thing was to run balls out toward the wall you were planning to climb, without hesitation, and then use the springboard—in this case Jai's laced fingers—to change all that forward momentum to vertical momentum. The decorative ledge to the chimney was a good twelve feet off the ground, but Jai's laced fingers were held about three feet above the ground, and Ace was around five ten. A good hard run, a foot down to vault, and perfect trust in Jai, of course, and Ace found himself catapulted into the air and grabbing at the ledge with hands made hard and strong with manual labor. Whoop, whoop! A few swings of his legs and hips and he let go of the ledge and grabbed the window, hauling himself up into what appeared to be a guest bedroom with a few grunts and a plop onto a hard-tiled floor.

Ace glanced around the room itself and had to fight his bile again.

It was a kid's room. It had clowns and circus tents and rainbow colors on the walls, on the drapes, on the sheets. And stains on the sheets that Ace didn't want to think about, ever.

The staircase—little more than a crawl space between the back of the house and the brick chimney that probably never got used—was accessible through what looked like a closet door from a kid's movie on the outside but didn't even pretend to have stuff hung in it on the inside.

Who would go inside?

The space was wide enough for Ace's shoulders and chest as he walked quietly down the stairs, his boots not even creaking the carpeted planks underneath them.

He got to the bottom of the stairs, saw the closed door, and paused to put on his gloves.

Somebody was in the office. He could hear somebody making dog noises to himself—little grunts and ohs like a dog finding the perfect position, not to mention a repeated licking noise…. No, was that flesh on flesh? Or was that…?

Eww.

"Baby…." The voice was a man's, whispered harshly like somebody calling out in passion, and Ace looked through the old-fashioned keyhole and sucked in a breath.

The man was sitting with his back to Ace, staring at the computer screen and, Ace was pretty sure, jerking off.

The images on the computer screen were taken from that horrible room upstairs, and….

Ace saw enough to be sickened and then closed his brain.

This man had to die.

It was so easy. Frighteningly easy.

The preacher man had his earbuds on, which helped a lot. Ace opened the door quietly and slid out into the room, aware when the man—midforties, innocuous "white middle management with a comb-over" kind of guy—saw his reflection in the computer screen, because he jerked right before Ace put his hand over the good reverend's mouth and whispered, "If you scream, everybody will see what you're looking at."

The man relaxed in his grip, which made everything easier.

He was wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and Ace kept one hand over the guy's mouth while he sighted the blue artery on the inside of his white arm, creeping into his elbow.

Ace pulled his knife out with his other hand, spun it open and made the cut so quickly the man barely had a chance to struggle, to moan against his hand. He stopped, satisfied when the wound started to spray.

"Shh…," he murmured, using the preacher's body as a shield as his lifeblood pumped out alarmingly. "I'll let you go in a second. I will. But first I'm going to have you unlock your phone for me. Don't scream or I'll slit your throat, okay?"

He got an excited nod in response, and Ace watched as that wound kept spraying the desk, the computer, the terrible images on the screen. It didn't matter. Reverend… Kuntz—that was what George had said the pastor's brother's name was, Ace remembered—probably thought he would get a chance to clean up, but he wouldn't. Ace had nailed his brachial artery dead to rights, and the good reverend wasn't going to be all right. And soon, another minute, maybe, he would realize he was dead.

He had enough juice left now to grab his phone from the desk and punch the code into the screen. Ace kept his position, one hand over the mouth, the other on the knife, as he memorized the six-digit code. Keeping the hand in place, he grabbed the phone and used one hand to pull up what he needed.

"Okay," Ace murmured, scrolling through recent contacts. "Donald Kuntz, your brother?"

He got a weak nod in return.

"Ooh," Ace said, finding the text stream that featured stills of some of the same dirty work that the preacher had on his computer. Well. Nothing like knowing your next target. Ace had to swallow bile again before taking a deep breath and moving on.

"You feeling a little woozy there, champ?"

He got another nod, and he felt the tension in the man's body begin to drain. He knew bleeding to death was supposed to feel like a burning cold sensation as the life trickled out, followed by a terrible lassitude. He hoped this fucker could think of all the ways people would see him, naked, helpless, and corrupt.

"You should be. See all that blood pooling on your lap, on your limp little STD wiener, on the floor?"

"Yeah," croaked his victim.

"That's gonna be about three pints, going on four. You're about thirty seconds away from bleeding to death there, champ. And you're naked and jerking off to kiddie porn featuring that same tiny little white wiener. Everyone's going to know. Everyone."

And with that, Ace stepped to the side and took a picture of the sorry sight, including a side view of the computer screen and what was on it and the man's limp, blood-pooled penis. He held the camera away from his body, away from his face, and out of the reflection of the computer, because some of those crime shows got it right.

"No!" cried the preacher, but he'd lost enough blood to hamper his organ function, and his lungs were already laboring for oxygen.

"I'll just send this to your brother," Ace said, doing that. "And to the AP news and the staties."

Ace had only just learned that California had its own bureau of investigation. It tickled him to text them the picture. He thought momentarily about dropping the phone in Kuntz's blood-soaked lap but changed his mind at the last minute and used a bleach wipe to clean it off before slipping it into his pocket and sliding back through the doorway and up the secret stairs.

He took the stairs three at a time, taking off one pair of gloves and replacing it with another, putting the soiled gloves in the plastic bag provided in the little kit. He double-checked his body then, pleased. The knife had blood on it, but he'd moved quick enough—and stayed on the far side of the victim enough—to have avoided most of the spray.

Of course Ace knew there was always a mistake—had he left a hair follicle on the premises? A skin cell? Those cop shows made it look like all they did was dump evidence in a processor and get out a result. But Ace had always suspected—and Jason had confirmed it—that the machinery for DNA tests and fingerprints moved very slowly. Ace and Jai would be on the far side of the county before the first cop car got there, and since Ace had a plan for that, he thought that maybe what the good reverend had been doing when he got killed would be far more interesting than his death.

In fact, Ace sort of wished he'd been able to leave his beloved knife behind to make it look like a suicide, but they'd been through too much together, him and this blade.

After stashing the bloody gloves in their plastic bag in his pocket, he approached the open window from that gawdawful bedroom on the top floor cautiously. When he peered out, Jai peered back, curiosity writ large on his broad face.

"So?" he asked.

"So, think I can jump down without breaking my ankle?" he replied.

"You have new gloves?" When Ace nodded, Jai added, "Then wipe off the ledge from your trip up, and then dangle. I will help you down. Like circus performer, yes?"

Well, better than waiting here for screams and such.

After doing the wiping off thing with the bleach, Ace crawled out of the window and hung by the ledge for a moment until he felt Jai's hands around his ankles.

"Keep legs locked until you touch ground," Jai said. "And let go."

Ace had the idea. He kept his body stiff and dropped, and Jai guided him down, slowing his descent. Ace relaxed his ankles and knees when he got to the ground so he didn't snap anything out of joint, and Jai steadied him just enough for the two of them to turn and run.

Ace followed Jai's guide for where the camera radius was, knowing it would look like a big blond country boy walked into the house on the security cameras and then walked out—and nothing else. Those "home movies" the preacher had been looking at had been shot with a cell phone. Ace had checked twice while the bastard had been bleeding out. No cameras in the rectory—probably a tripod. And there hadn't been a damned thing in the circus room of every kid's nightmares.

The fucker had probably thought he was protecting himself, keeping that sort of evidence confined to his phone, his home computer, and whatever network of pedophiles and scum eaters he engaged with. But no security cameras on the inside of that room, nor on the inside of the office.

Outside, as a warning system.

Not inside, where the feed could incriminate him.

Detectives—good ones—might figure out how the intruder had gotten in and out, but there would be no pictures of Jasper Atchison that could be used as evidence.

No pictures that would identify him at all.

He and Jai climbed into the car in a rush, and Ace was peeling out of the driveway before either of them were properly belted in.

He kept on the hated hat and sweaty gloves, though, because he had an idea.

"What next?" Jai asked, sounding pumped.

Ace opened the phone and handed it over. "Look up his brother's contact number," Ace said. "Track his phone. He's going to be racing down this road, coming toward us, and I've got an idea for how to take him out. We're only halfway done."

"How do we get home?" Jai asked, apparently reading Ace's mind.

"Maybe you want to text Ernie?" Ace told him, and he heard Jai's satisfied grunt.

Yup, they were only halfway done, and the next part? The next part had some fun in it. Maybe some finesse too.