man went to the car, where the short man whispered something to him. Beneath the light of the streetlamp in front of the house I could see their dark complexions. It occurred to me that while no one bought a Lincoln Town Car, people did rent them. At airports. When they were in town on business.
The men reached inside their suit coats, pulled out guns, and headed down the walkway toward the door to the rectory.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbed the phone, and dialed 911.
I cupped my hand over the phone and kept my voice at a whisper. “This is Father Nathan, from St. Valentine’s Church on Huyshope Avenue.”
“Yes, Father.” It was the same dispatcher as before. Muted voices barked in the background. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Two men with guns. They’re here. They’ve come for Maria and Manuel. The woman and the boy who are staying with me.”
A siren sounded on her end. “Please hold, Father.”
An unbearable number of seconds followed. I held my breath to try to hear what was going on outside, but the sound of my heartbeat filled my eardrums.
When the dispatcher finally picked up again, a combination of sirens, screaming, and static echoed from her end. “I’m sorry, Father. Are these the kids that have been bothering you all week?”
“No. They’re not kids. They’re two men with guns. They came in a Lincoln Town Car. They’re assassins. The woman who’s staying here — her husband was a prosecutor who was murdered in Mexico. They’re here for her. For her and her son.”
“Please calm down, Father. These men, are they in the house?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Officers will respond as soon as possible. Please keep the doors locked —” A knock on the front door.
I hung up the phone and limped down the stairs, cursing the creaks in my prosthetic leg. When I got to the foyer, I faced the door and held my breath.
Three more short knocks followed. It was a smart move, I thought. A church was a shelter for all. A priest’s first instinct was to open his door to anyone who needed assistance. Why break into a house when you can wangle an invitation?
It took the cops ten minutes to arrive the first time, twenty minutes the second time. It seemed, based on the background noise during the call with the dispatcher, that the natives were restless this evening. The odds the cops would arrive faster than the previous two times were zero.
I didn’t own a gun. The closest thing I had to a weapon was a butcher’s knife. But the idea of using it, the thought of sinking a blade into another human being’s flesh, was unimaginable under any circumstances.
Sweat streamed down my back and created an itch beneath my cassock but I didn’t dare scratch it. A minute passed. Still, I didn’t dare move, for fear of making any kind of noise. Perhaps I’d misread the situation. Perhaps they weren’t killers. Perhaps I could will them away with my thoughts.
Something clattered outside the living room.
I forced my feet to move, crept around the corner into the living room, and hid behind a curtain. A night-light cast a semicircle of light beside a red-velvet couch. Above the sofa, the window rattled gently. They were checking to see if a window was open. Why break a window if you can slide it open?
They were killers. They were here for Maria and Manuel.
These words should have motivated me. They should have summoned an adrenaline flow and spurred me to action. But they didn’t. Instead, I stood solemnly in place, resigned to my fate.
It simply wasn’t in me. Twenty-three years ago, a stranger had groped my girlfriend’s breasts as we filed out of a rock concert at the Civic Center. When we got outside, I broke his jaw with a single punch. Unbeknownst to me, he followed us to a bar in his monster truck, and when we parked, he drove his vehicle through the passenger door. Matilda died and I lost two limbs, all because I raised my hand to another man. I couldn’t do it again. Two decades of meditation and three million, six hundred, and sixty-six repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer had absorbed all my rage.
The glass broke inward with a muted crack. I remained behind the curtain, feet frozen in place, my vision wet and blurry. One of the men reached inside with a gloved hand, wiggled a shard of glass free, and removed it. After he repeated the process several times, a third of the window was gone. In sixty seconds, they would slip into the house.
“Kill the cripple and the boy,” one of the men whispered, “but not the woman. She’s dessert.”
Images of the killers raping Maria and then strangling her with their bare hands flashed before me. I slipped out from behind the curtain and headed straight for the kitchen closet. Swinging the door open just a smidge so the rusty hinges wouldn’t squeak, I thrust my good hand inside in search of my Hillerich & Bradsby bat. No luck. I felt the broom and mop handles but no stick.
Another crack in the adjoining room told me the window was half gone. I had thirty seconds, if that. I lowered my reach and got the fire extinguisher. Better than nothing, but not what I wanted. I raised my hands six inches and grasped again. Pay dirt. The cold, hard wood felt good as soon as it hit my hand.
I pulled the bat out of the closet. It was a vintage 1967 Roberto Clemente model, 36 inches long and weighing 36.4 ounces, a gift from my high school coach in Rockville after I hit thirty-four home runs in thirty games my junior year.
I slipped into a nook between the living room and the staircase. The killers could not get upstairs without passing me, and they wouldn’t see me until it was too late. I’d drop the first man with a tomahawk swing and pulverize the second one’s skull with an uppercut blast. I hadn’t crushed a baseball in decades. There was nothing like the sensation of hitting the ball square on its sweet spot, the thud of the wood generating maximum force, the satisfaction of slamming one out of the park.
Abraham waged war. Abraham was a warrior.
Joshua laid siege to Jericho. Joshua was a warrior.
A priest must be a warrior.
I must be a warrior.
I couldn’t see the window from my hiding place, so I had to rely on sound and shadow. I heard a scratching noise, followed by a gentle thud. One of them was inside. The short one, I suspected. The second man made almost no noise. He had the first one to help him. The living room was small, and there was only one way to go.
The night-light cast ghoulish shadows on the wall. The ghouls moved.
They were upon me faster than I expected. I raised the bat with both hands high in the air. As soon as I saw the first man — the short one — I swung downward with all my strength. My left hand led, but the right arm seemed slow to react — of course it was; the prosthetic lagged — and then it just stopped. In midair. My left arm fought to bring the bat down but it wouldn’t move.
My prosthetic arm was locked. It had malfunctioned.
The killer saw me. He jumped back. The taller man with the fedora came into view. The three of us stood there for a couple of seconds, frozen in mutual disbelief. A priest, posing like an ax murderer for a wax museum, and two assassins, silencers attached to the barrels of their guns.
The short one laughed. It was the deep, resonant laugh of a lifetime scoundrel and smoker, coarse enough to sand wood without touching it. The tall one chuckled like the calculating kind of person for whom genuine laughter was too frivolous. They raised their guns in tandem and pointed them at me, grins etched on their faces.
Gunshots exploded. The floor shook. Pain racked my eardrums.
I opened my eyes. I hadn’t even realized I’d closed them.
The killers lay on the ground, the left sides of their chests riddled with multiple bullet holes.
Manuel appeared in the stairwell, arms outstretched, clutching a gun with both hands. When he spoke for the first time, his voice had a youthful pitch, but his delivery was shockingly composed.
“Leave my mother alone,” he said.
When I saw Manuel’s arms stretched out, I realized how his appearance had changed and figured out what I’d failed to detect when we’d shared a glass of lemonade in the afternoon. His wrist was bare. His father’s gold watch was gone. He’d met the Aztecs to trade his father’s watch for a gun.
By the time Maria arrived, hysterical, I’d removed my prosthetic arm from the socket and the gun from
