The Trinity Game

carrying her?’”

His uncle smiled at the story. “Damn, son, you been carrying that girl a donkey’s age.”

“That I have,” said Daniel as the television switched over to a commercial for prescription pills guaranteed to give you an erection whenever you want one. “Fourteen years.”

“Danny…I never meant to bring you any harm. I never thought what I did to support us would drive us apart.”

“No, you didn’t,” Daniel agreed. With no bitterness in his voice he added, “You were too busy thinking about the money.”

Trinity took a pull on his beer and nodded. “That I was.”

The commercials ended and Anderson Cooper came back on, but now there was a BREAKING NEWS banner along the bottom of the screen.

Cooper said, “I’ve just been handed something during the break…” He shuffled through some photographs and handed them across to Julia, but the camera stayed on him “…CNN has just received pictures of Reverend Tim Trinity. They came to us anonymously and we don’t know when they were taken but they appear to be fairly recent, and I’m told by our staff that they don’t appear to be digitally altered…”

Daniel felt a rush of vertigo as he recognized the photographs that now filled the television screen—shots of his uncle snorting cocaine in the den of his mansion. Guilt began twisting in his gut like an oversized worm.

“Wow,” said Trinity. “Didn’t see that one coming. You’d think they’d start with something like this, then ramp up to killing me, not the other way around.”

Daniel struggled to find the words. What could he say? “These pictures didn’t come from Samson’s superiors. They came from the Vatican.”

“Oh.” Trinity lit a cigarette. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” said Daniel. “I took them.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Yeah. I came to Atlanta to debunk you, hard. I was convinced you were running a con, and then everything started happening and I didn’t delete them in case it turned out you were running a con, and then the billboard came down and I just forgot about them and flew back to Rome planning to convince my boss you were a miracle.”

Trinity let out a smile. “You know what the Jews say: Man plans and God laughs.” He chuckled out a cloud of blue smoke. “Right you are, Rabbi.”

“I’m sorry, Tim.”

“Yeah, well, don’t sweat it, son. I messed up a couple times myself, as you so frequently feel the need to mention.” He reached sideways and clinked his bottle against Daniel’s. They both drank. Trinity picked up the remote, muted the television. “So what’s the plan now?”

“We drive straight past New Orleans tomorrow,” said Daniel, “down into the bayou. I’ve got a friend in Dulac. Pat Whalquist. Worked with him on a case in Honduras.”

“A priest?”

“Not hardly,” Daniel let out a grim laugh. “Pat’s a mercenary.”

Trinity’s eyebrows went up. “A mercenary? Oh, you have got to tell me that story.”

Daniel remembered the dampness of the church basement, the fear in the eyes of the politician, the weight of the pistol as Pat pressed it into his hand. He remembered the sound of automatic gunfire above and the thundering of soldiers’ boots coming fast down the wooden stairs. He remembered not knowing if he could do it, not knowing if he should do it, and then doing it without hesitation when the door banged open. The bucking of the pistol in his hand, the muzzle flashes and smoke and the smell of gunpowder. The blood and gore and the smell of death.

Daniel drank some beer. “Not much to tell,” he said. “Pat was there to protect a politician and I was there to investigate a miracle claim. We helped each other out, I guess, and we became friends. Anyway, we’ll drive to Dulac, stop with Pat one night, maybe two. See, we can’t beat them to New Orleans, so we wait ’til it becomes clear you’re a no-show and they start thinking about where else you might be headed.”

“Then what?”

“One step at a time,” said Daniel. “Pat’ll help plan our strategy for getting you in and out of the Quarter without getting killed.”

Piedmont Park – Atlanta, Georgia…

Drums and guitars and tambourines lay silent on the grass, the time for singing and dancing now past. The Kumbaya spirit had deserted Tent City #3, and Trinity’s Pilgrims were fast falling away.

Families mumbling their dejection aloud as they collapsed their tents and rolled their sleeping bags. Couples speaking sharply to each other, pushing the bitter pill of blame back and forth. Litter strewn all over the place. A girl of about fifteen, who looked like—and probably was—a streetwalker, sitting under a tree, knees pulled to her chest, face in her hands. Weeping.

Andrew Thibodeaux wandered numb through the crowd, taking it all in but unable to form either thoughts or feelings in response to the input. Disconnected from it all. Disconnected even from himself.

A young man stood perched atop a milk crate, a replica Tim Trinity blue Bible open on his palm. He had the look of a straight-A student at some evangelical Christian college. He was saying, “Lest we forget, brothers and sisters—Matthew 11:19—The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they said ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ Now they say Reverend Tim is a drug addict! It’s the same thing! Don’t you see?”

“Hush your mouth, boy,” called a very large, middle-aged black woman. She stopped to face the loyal pilgrim. “Jesus didn’t snort no damn cocaine, and you got rocks in your head.”

“They didn’t even have cocaine in the Holy Land in those days,” he insisted.

A powerfully built white biker stepped out of the gathering crowd and came to a stop between them. He was bald and wore a horseshoe moustache and black leather pants. He was shirtless—his entire back covered by a tattoo of Christ on the cross. His right bicep featured a cartoon red devil, complete with horns, cloven hoofs, and pointed tail. A buxom Bettie Page angel graced his left. He pointed at the kid on the milk crate.

“The lady’s right. Shut the fuck up, we don’t want to hear it.”

The kid persisted, despite the terror on his face, saying, “Please, Reverend Trinity is the Messiah. I’m just trying to help you see—”

“I’m gonna help you see the inside of an intensive care unit if you don’t shut yer fuckin’ yap.” The biker stepped closer. No one moved, except the kid, who fell off the crate when his knees went wobbly. He managed to recover his footing after one knee hit the grass, and stood there, visibly trembling. The biker said, “The Savior doesn’t run away, dipshit. Here’s what happened: The going got rough, and Trinity saved his own ass.”

The kid fought to get the words out. “I’m-I’m sorry, sir, but the Savior does run away. Jesus ran from the temple the first time, then he came back. Reverend Tim will return to us, and it won’t be long…” Tears breached the levees of his eyelids and flooded down his cheeks. His bottom lip danced violently, and he blubbered in a very small voice, “Please, we must keep the faith.”

The biker took two steps forward and swung with his right, and the kid’s nose popped, splatter-painting his chest crimson.

“Don’t you fuckin’ bleed on me!” bellowed the biker as the kid dropped to the ground. He cocked his arm again, but froze in place. After a few tense seconds, he shook his head, lowered the arm, and started opening and closing his hands repeatedly. “I warned you.” He stormed away, disappearing into the crowd. Nobody tried to stop him.

The kid lay on the grass in the fetal position, hands to his nose, blood running through his fingers, gulping air