Dragonslayer Read online

  “Can’t say those boys of ours got no talent.” She cocked her head. “I’m betting Ferdinand Sanchez did that one. His mother taught him to draw like that. She was a pretty little thing. Used to spend hours with him teaching him to do stuff. Then one morning she just up and left. His father’s no good.”

  “I’ve crossed Mr. Sanchez’s path a time or two.”

  “Old Testament on this side—” Dorothy pointed to the opposite wall “—New Testament on that. Ferdinand could do it.”

  “Last time I saw Ferdinand, he was urinating on the front steps.”

  “Trying to get your attention.”

  “He succeeded.” Thomas folded his arms. “So it’s Mass this morning?”

  “Your turn next week.” Dorothy hiked her purse to her shoulder. “I spread myself around.”

  “Like icing on a cake.”

  “What am I missing here this morning? You gonna preach on something interesting for a change?”

  “The miracle of the loaves and fishes.”

  “Just don’t go getting down on folks like you usually do. They need some God on Sunday mornings. Get tired of hearing about how they’re supposed to change the world. Most of them just sitting here wishing they’d got a little sleep last night or had something to eat for breakfast.”

  “And God’s supposed to fill their stomachs?”

  “He got a better chance at doing it than you got.”

  “I’ll give them some God.”

  “Give yourself a little, too, while you’re at it.” She patted his arm. Before he could think of an adequate response she was gone.

  Thomas stared out the window, watching Dorothy’s small figure disappear into the fog of a Corners’ autumn morning.

  Three young men materialized out of the same fog. Two wore black hoodies left open to the elements, the other had chopped the sleeves off a denim jacket and covered it with custom patches. Underneath they wore muddy-hued plaid shirts buttoned just at the collar over black T-shirts and sagging khaki work pants. He knew that when they got closer, he would also see an array of piercings and tattoos, including the required knight's sword, tattooed on the inside of the right forearm.

  Along with similarities there were differences. One wore a black watch cap pulled low over his ears, one a generic cap with the bill turned up. One wore nothing on his head except a folded bandanna tied to one side over cornrows divided and braided with military precision. Thomas knew the boys well enough to realize that the one with the watch cap was the one to worry about.

  They weren’t walking fast, and they weren’t walking slow. They strutted as if they owned the sidewalk, the street and the neighborhood. If they had been on the other side of the street, their stride would have been jumpy and defiant. They were members of the MidKnights, often just referred to as the Knights, and the other side of the street, where the Wilford Heights housing project began, belonged to the Coroners.

  And this place, where Thomas stood, where his small congregation would soon gather to try to find meaning in their existence, belonged to a God that Thomas wasn’t even sure he believed in anymore.

  As the young men approached the sidewalk in front of the church, Thomas watched closely. The church was nothing more than a converted storefront, the congregation nothing more than a few souls who, in giving voice to the despair that plagued their lives, spoke for a whole community. But the church and this congregation were Thomas’s life.

  He would be no less ruthless than any MidKnight in protecting what was his.

  Despite her reassuring words to Serena, Garnet had expected trouble from the moment she promised Candy Tremira that she would go to Wilford Heights to examine her.

  Garnet always expected trouble, and she was rarely disappointed. Optimism was a waste of time and pessimism a waste of energy. She was a realist, and by expecting the worst, she could always be pleasantly surprised if it didn’t occur.

  Today there were going to be no surprises.

  “Where’re you going, babe?” Andre Rollins asked as she waited for the walk sign at the corner of Twelfth and Wilford.

  She turned slowly and raked him with her gaze. “Who’s the babe here, Andre? I was changing your diapers when I was eight.”

  “I asked where you was going.”

  “I’m going across the street.”

  Andre moved in front of her, and two other young men flanked her. She sighed. “Come on. You boys got nothing better to do than hassle me this morning?”

  “Don’t go dissing us, babe,” Andre said. “You show respect, or we’ll teach you how.”

  “I respect you,” Garnet said. “Only not as much as I used to.” She felt a hand on her arm and fingers making bruises. She forced herself not to turn her head or wince. “See, I used to think you were somebody,” she went on. “Back when you didn’t need your enforcers to make you feel like a big man.”

  Andre barely inclined his head, and the fingers no longer squeezed her arm. “What call you got crossing that street?”

  “My job, Andre.” She moved a little closer to him.

  “There’s no clinic ‘cross the street.”

  “There’s a woman across that street who’s afraid to come to the clinic because she knows you boys are waiting for her to show her face over here.’’

  “Candy?”

  She turned to the young man who had spoken, the same young man who had probably left fingerprints on her arm. He wore a dark watch cap pulled over his ears and rolled just to his eyebrows. The pale face that leered at her was one she never wanted to glimpse on a night when she was out on the streets alone.

  “Demon, let it go,” she said. “So maybe Candy took off with another guy. You think you’re the first man that’s happened to? It doesn’t matter. You’ve got another woman now.”

  Sadly, that was true. Another young woman had replaced Candy Tremira in Demon’s life. Another young woman who would learn that macho posturing and smoldering good looks meant nothing next to the reality of living with his erratic temper.

  He smiled, and she was chilled by it. “Candy and I are going to have a conversation,” he said.

  “Andre.” She turned to appeal to him. “I’ve got a job to do. You show me where it says a nurse or doctor can only help patients who wear the right colors. Show me where it says this stupid war between you and the Coroners is going to do anything for the Corners besides make life harder here.”

  Andre put his fist under her chin. She didn’t flinch. She felt Demon and Ferdinand, the third MidKnight, close ranks around her.

  “You go on over to Wilford Place,” Andre said, “and you walking into trouble.”

  She looked straight into his eyes. They were the color of his skin, a deep, rich brown. “Look, I’ve watched you grow up. I know what you can do and who you can be. I know who you are. Don’t do this, Andre.”

  There was always something flickering, simmering in Andre’s eyes. Some of the kids who patrolled these blocks had eyes that were as empty as the futures they had been bequeathed. Andre’s weren’t. She stared into them, willing him to face the struggle going on inside himself, willing him to make the right decision.

  “Get your hands off the lady.”

  A man’s voice cut through the tension and splintered it into a thousand evil pieces. Garnet felt a hand on her shoulder, and before she could do anything, she had been flung to one side. In an instant a man’s large body was wedged protectively between her and the MidKnights.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the man asked.

  For one confusing moment Garnet didn’t know to whom the question had been addressed. Then she saw the sneer on Andre’s face and knew it hadn’t been addressed to her. She had been cast aside as if she no longer had a part in the confrontation. A man in a plain gray suit was facing the MidKnights for her.

  “Nobody’s talking to you, Padre.” Andre stood taller than he had with Garnet. He and the man, who easily topped six feet, were staring eye to eye. “Don’t get yoursel
f involved in things got nothing to do with you.”

  “Anything that happens in this neighborhood’s got something to do with me. You’re standing in front of my church. I live here.”

  “That what you call it?” Andre reached into his T-shirt pocket for a cigarette. His gaze didn’t waver. He snapped his fingers, and Ferdinand moved around Thomas to light it for him.

  “Who are you?” Garnet demanded. She tried to move, but the man continued to shield her.

  “Thomas Stonehill,” he said shortly.

  “Padre,” Andre said. He blew a puff of smoke in Thomas’s face. “Got himself a real important church right over there, with at least two, three people coming of a Sunday. Got himself an idea he’s gonna save the world. Starting right here on this spot.”

  Shock began to recede, and anger seeped into its place. Garnet couldn’t fault the man, this Thomas Stonehill, for trying to protect her. Every time she had an audience she preached the gospel of people in the neighborhood watching out for each other.

  But she could fault him for thrusting her aside when she had been in the midst of working out her problem with Andre. The good reverend had committed two unpardonable sins, and she was probably going to pay for them.

  “This is between me and Andre,” she said, trying to step in front of Thomas. “Thank you, but we can finish this ourselves.”

  Thomas hardly seemed to do more than shift his weight, but he cut off her path to Andre anyway. “I don’t think the young man’s intentions are the best.”

  “That’s for me to decide.”

  Thomas acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “The lady has a right to walk these sidewalks without you kids bothering her. Everybody has that right.”

  “Think so?” Andre tossed his cigarette at Thomas’s feet. It bounced off his shoe. “Well, I think she don’t. I think she crosses that street today, she gonna wish she never did walk these sidewalks, ‘cause we be walking them right behind her.”

  Garnet’s heart sank. Andre had committed himself now. If she ignored his warning, she would pay. She wasn’t afraid; she was only sorry the chance to change things had been taken out of her hands.

  Futilely, from Thomas’s side, she made one last attempt to bring Andre to his senses. “Andre, taking care of Candy’s my job. Even warring nations let the Red Cross come on to their battlefields to care for the wounded.”

  “Candy flipped sides. She hang with the Knights first, and now she be hanging with the Coroners. She not wounded,” Andre said. “Yet.”

  “She’s dead,” Demon said, with a smirk. “You’re dead if you help her.”

  “Don’t make threats, son,” Thomas said. The words were mild; the tone was steel.

  “You gonna stop me, Padre?” Demon stepped right up to him. He wasn’t as tall as Thomas, but his adolescent body had been fired in the furnace of hot city streets. His chest was broad, and under the stretched-out hoodie, Garnet knew that his shirt bulged with muscle. And quite likely something even more sinister.

  “If I have to.”

  Demon took a step backward and looked away, as if his bluff had been called. Then he sprang.

  Garnet leaped back in horror as Thomas Stonehill came crashing toward her. It took her a second to realize that he had not been taken unaware. As she watched he twisted, using his weight to take Demon down with him. In moments Demon was pinned underneath him. Thomas had the side of one hand against Demon’s Adam’s apple and a knee in Demon’s groin.

  Demon seemed to be in shock; then he raised a fist.

  Thomas slammed Demon’s arm to the ground with his free hand. “Hit me, son, and I’ll have to choose between cutting off your air or your chance to make babies.”

  Andre and Ferdinand had just looked on, used—Garnet guessed—to Demon fighting and winning his own battles. Now they started toward Thomas.

  “Leave him alone!” Garnet kicked off her shoe, a pump with a sizable heel. She grabbed it to use as a weapon.

  Andre glanced at her, but he kept coming. Ferdinand backed off, not from fear, she guessed, but from a deep-seated belief that fighting with women was not masculine.

  Garnet moved forward as Andre closed in, but before she could attempt to strike, Thomas’s foot shot out and connected with Andre’s ankle. The kick had just enough force to make him stumble backward.

  A siren sounded. For a moment Garnet couldn’t believe it. The Corners had inadequate police protection, as well as every other type of public service. Response time on direct calls was often longer than it took to dismantle a building brick by brick, and police patrols were few and far between. Now, for the first time in her memory, a police car was where it was supposed to be, when it was supposed to be.

  She wondered if the Reverend Thomas Stonehill had somehow found time to pray for intercession.

  Before her eyes, Ferdinand melted into the fog and disappeared down an alleyway. Andre started toward Thomas and Demon again, but Thomas had already rolled to the side. Demon was suddenly free. He sat up and looked around wildly, as if considering whether to go for Thomas, a gun, or to escape before the police got out of their car. Andre jerked him upright and made his decision by grasping his arm and pulling him toward the alley where Ferdinand had vanished.

  The police car door opened, but for a moment Garnet and Thomas were the only ones on the sidewalk.

  Thomas got easily to his feet. “Are you all right?”

  Garnet stared at him. She was filled with confusing emotions. His black hair was ruffled, and his suit was dusty, but otherwise he looked as if his fight with the MidKnights had been no more taxing than a Sunday school class.

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” she exploded.

  He stared at her as if she were crazy.

  “You come here and think you can change this place, but you don’t know a thing about it,” she said. “You’ve just made sure that the Knights will stay on my case. Well, Reverend Stonehill, you’d better say your prayers loud and clear tonight. Because the next time those boys come looking for me, they might well use the guns they had tucked away today!”

  2

  Thomas Stonehill had committed two unpardonable sins.

  First, he had made Garnet lose face with the MidKnights. She had few pluses on her side when she negotiated with either the MidKnights or the Coroners, but she had always commanded their grudging respect. She had never showed them she was afraid; she had never avoided them. Now, by coming to her rescue, Thomas Stonehill had given Andre and his friends the idea that she couldn’t take care of herself. And since they preyed on weakness, that was a dangerous idea for them to have.

  The second sin was even more serious. By confronting Andre head-on, adult to child, Thomas Stonehill had made it impossible for Andre to compromise. There was no way that Andre could back down without appearing weak. And weakness was worse than death for kids like Andre. They had nothing except their pride. They would die for it.

  They would kill for it.

  On Monday afternoon Garnet sat alone in her office, shooting rubber bands into a wastepaper basket. The score was seven to three. Not bad, considering that her mind was somewhere else.

  The morning had been busy. On Monday and Thursday mornings Mother and Child held prenatal health clinics. Garnet and Tex, her assistant, weighed and took blood pressures and did nutritional counseling and urine checks in preparation for Wednesday and Friday afternoons, when a rotating staff of volunteer physicians saw patients.

  The system worked most of the time. The nurse practitioners handled routine care, and the physicians handled problem pregnancies or patients close to their due dates. It didn’t work when a doctor’s Wednesday afternoon golf game took precedence over his commitment to the clinic, or when a patient’s fears or disinterest kept her from keeping an appointment.

  The same was true of the pediatric clinic on Tuesdays. Most of the time the residents from a local hospital, who served a portion of their pediatric rotation at Mother and Child, were excellent, reliabl
e physicians. But sometimes their middle-class disdain for what they saw in the Corners was so obvious that embarrassed or angry parents never returned with their children.

  Garnet’s job was to make sure everything ran smoothly. She trained residents to work effectively with the poor and pleaded with practicing physicians to do their part. She knocked on doors and persuaded mothers-to-be and mothers-who-were to use the clinic’s resources. She spoke at suburban club meetings, wrote grant proposals, organized fund-raisers and started new programs the moment more money arrived.

  And sometimes, like now, she shot rubber bands into wastebaskets simply because she had to sit and think.

  After her accusations yesterday Thomas Stonehill had been taciturn and cold. The police had come and gone quickly, and they had been left alone together.

  He was a man anyone would take note of. His hair was coal black and his deep-set eyes a soul-piercing blue. His brow was wide; his nose and square jaw would have looked at home on a Roman centurion. There were no smile lines at the corners of his narrow lips, no crinkles around his eyes to soften his face. The frown lines in his tanned skin had been put there by dogged concentration, by brows drawn together as he stared at a world that was less than he wanted it to be.

  Until that moment she had never met Thomas Stonehill, but she guessed that he was a man who not only never stopped to smell the roses, he probably trampled them underfoot on his way to his next mission.

  Unfortunately, this time his mission had been one Garnet Anthony.

  Between one rubber band and the next she was transported back to the corner of Wilford and Twelfth.

  “Do you want me to walk you somewhere?” he had finally asked.

  She shook her head. “You don’t get it, do you? The only reason I’ve been allowed to walk these streets at all is because these kids think I’m not afraid of them. I listen when they talk, and as often as possible, I do what I can for them. But when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty, I’ve just gone on and done what I had to, no matter what they think. And until today, they’ve let me. I can’t show them I’m afraid now, or I’ll never walk these streets again.”