The Saint of Market Street, Part III: The Sins of Mercy

Mercy had blood on his hands and Dante’s name on his lips.

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The truth was always going to cost blood.

Caleb stood beneath the broken motel sign, staring straight at room twelve.

Rain rolled off the shoulders of his black coat. The red neon vacancy sign flashed above him, turning his face bloody, then pale, then bloody again.

Mercy moved behind me.

“Step away from the window,” he whispered.

“He already saw me.”

“Then step away before he decides to shoot through it.”

I let the curtain fall. My heart pounded hard enough to shake my ribs. The folder sat open on the bed between us, stuffed with bank records, photographs, names and enough dirty secrets to bury Reverend Voss beneath his own church.

None of it mattered if Caleb got through that door.

I looked at Mercy. “You said they wouldn’t find us.”

“I was wrong.”

“You’ve been wrong about a lot tonight.”

His jaw tightened. Micah Voss. The name still hung between us, heavy and rotten. Mercy was not some scared hustler running from a preacher. He was the preacher’s son.

A knock struck the door.

Three slow taps.

Mercy reached for the gun tucked into the back of his jeans. I grabbed his wrist before he could pull it.

“If you fire, every man outside comes through that door.”

“They’re coming through anyway.”

“Dante,” Caleb called. “I know you’re in there.”

His voice was calm. Too calm.

I released Mercy’s wrist and pulled my own gun from beneath my coat. Three rounds left. Not much of a prayer, but I had stopped believing in those years ago.

“What do you want?” I called.

Caleb laughed softly from the other side. “You know what I want.”

“Then go home and ask your reverend for it.”

“This doesn’t concern you.”

“Funny. You keep pointing guns at me like it does.”

Silence followed.

I glanced at the window. Through a split in the curtain, I caught the outline of two men near the ice machine and another beside a dark sedan. Caleb had not come alone.

“Give me Micah and the folder,” he said. “You walk away.”

Mercy’s expression did not change, but something behind his eyes did.

“That all?” I asked.

“Your sister walks away too.”

My grip tightened around the gun.

Mercy looked at me. “Dante.”

“Shut up.”

Caleb continued. “She still lives in that little blue house, doesn’t she? Keeps the porch light on all night. Must be lonely over there by herself.”

I crossed the room and pressed the barrel of my gun against the door, aiming where I imagined his chest.

“You go near her, I swear to God…”

“God isn’t listening to you,” Caleb said. “He listens to Reverend Voss.”

I pulled out my phone and called my sister.

It rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

Voicemail.

I called again.

Nothing.

“You have thirty seconds,” Caleb said.

Mercy grabbed the folder and shoved it under his jacket. “There’s a service alley behind the bathroom.”

“Window’s too small.”

“Then we make it bigger.”

He lifted the motel’s wooden chair and slammed it against the bathroom window. Glass cracked but held.

“Twenty seconds,” Caleb called.

Mercy struck it again. The frame splintered.

One of the men outside moved toward the back of the building.

“They know,” I said.

Mercy looked around the room, then grabbed the stained mattress and yanked it off the bed.

“Help me.”

“With what?”

“We’re going out the front.”

“That’s your plan?”

“You got a better one?”

Caleb reached ten.

We lifted the mattress between us and charged the front window.

The first hit shattered the glass but knocked us backward. Gunfire ripped through the door. Wood burst across the room, striking the mattress like hail.

“Again!” Mercy yelled.

We ran.

The window frame gave way. We crashed through it and landed on wet pavement with the mattress on top of us. A bullet tore through the fabric inches from my face.

Mercy crawled out first, firing twice toward the ice machine. One of Caleb’s men ducked behind it.

I rolled from beneath the mattress and fired at the motel sign. The bullet struck the metal casing. Sparks rained onto the awning, catching the dry edge of the canvas.

Fire climbed fast.

The smell hit me before the light did.

Smoke.

Burning cloth.

Turk Street came rushing back.

Leon screaming behind a wall of orange. My hands slipping on the stair rail. Skin burning. Somebody holding me back while the windows blew out above us.

I froze in the middle of the parking lot.

“Dante!”

I could not move.

The motel disappeared. I was back on Turk, staring up at Leon’s apartment while the roof caved in.

A hand caught the back of my coat and dragged me sideways. A bullet struck the pavement where I had been standing.

Mercy shoved me behind the dark sedan.

“Look at me.”

I stared past him at the flames.

He grabbed my face with both hands. “Dante, look at me.”

His eyes locked on mine.

“It’s not Turk Street,” he said. “You’re here with me.”

Another shot broke the rear window above us.

Mercy reached through the shattered glass, unlocked the door and pulled it open.

“Get in.”

He crawled over the front seat and dropped behind the wheel. Keys dangled from the ignition.

I fired my last round toward Caleb, then climbed into the passenger side.

Mercy started the engine.

Caleb stepped into the road and raised his gun.

“Go!” I shouted.

The windshield exploded as Mercy slammed his foot down. The sedan shot backward, clipped a parked truck and spun toward the motel entrance. I ducked as Caleb fired again.

Mercy shifted into drive and aimed straight for him.

Caleb jumped aside.

We tore out of the lot with smoke pouring through the broken windows and the red vacancy sign dying behind us.

For three blocks, neither of us spoke.

I kept calling my sister.

On the fifth try, she answered.

“Dante?”

I nearly dropped the phone. “Where are you?”

“At home. Why do you keep calling?”

“Is anybody outside?”

She went quiet.

“Answer me.”

“There’s been a car across the street for about an hour.”

My stomach turned.

“Can you see who’s inside?”

“A man. Maybe two. Dante, what did you do?”

“Listen to me. Don’t turn on any lights. Go through the back door and cut through Mrs. Bell’s yard. Take nothing but your phone and your keys.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Good. Be scared and move.”

Mercy glanced at me but kept driving.

“Go to the twenty-four-hour laundromat on MacArthur,” I said. “Call a cab from there and take it to Auntie’s old place in Richmond. Don’t tell the driver my name. Don’t call anybody but me.”

“What about you?”

I looked at Mercy.

“I’ll be fine.”

It was the same lie I had told her after Turk Street.

She knew it too.

“Dante…”

“I love you. Now go.”

The line went dead.

I lowered the phone and stared through the cracked windshield. Rain pushed into the car, cold against my face.

“If they touch her,” I said, “I’m killing your father.”

Mercy did not blink. “Get in line.”

We abandoned the sedan near Civic Center and took the alleys into the Tenderloin.

The rain had cleared the sidewalks, but the city was never empty. Men slept beneath plastic tarps. A woman in a silver coat smoked beneath a bus shelter. Somewhere down Ellis, somebody cursed at God through an open window.

Mercy led me to a narrow building above a closed tailor shop. The sign downstairs read ALTERATIONS while one of the windows had been covered with plywood.

He unlocked the side door and started up the stairs.

“Whose place is this?” I asked.

“A friend’s.”

“Does this friend have a name?”

He stopped halfway up.

“Gabriel Graves.”

The name pulled me up short.

“Leon’s brother?”

Mercy kept climbing.

“You knew him?” I asked.

“I knew both of them.”

“How well?”

He reached the second floor and pushed open the apartment door.

“Well enough.”

The place had been torn apart.

Cabinet doors hung open. Couch cushions covered the floor. Books had been ripped from the shelves and split along their spines. A framed photograph lay shattered near the kitchen.

Mercy rushed inside. “Gabriel?”

No answer.

He checked the bedroom while I picked up the photograph. Leon stood on one side, smiling beneath the brim of a Giants cap. Gabriel stood beside him, younger and thinner, with an arm around his brother’s shoulder.

The third man in the picture was Mercy.

His hair was shorter, his face softer. Leon had one hand pressed against his chest.

They looked happy.

I turned the frame over. A date had been written across the back.

Two weeks before the fire.