Chapter 4: A Hole in the World
The explosion had destroyed the entire block. It had gone up in a great massive green fireball that shot ethereal energy to the sky like it was a signal flare from Mordor. The pillar of green energy had shot to the skies for only a matter of seconds, but that was enough to send everyone in a five-mile radius on alert. It had sent out a mild EMP, dimming the lights of every electronic device in range. Electric cars had temporarily shut off, and their drivers had to coast until the engines turned back on. Any camera that tried to record the image of the pillar of green fire had only filmed static. Pacemakers had glitched, causing arrhythmia in the entire tri-state area.
And when I say the explosion had destroyed the entire block, I mean everything. The hole left behind was sixty feet deep if it was an inch. Only the sidewalk remained. There was nothing left from the property line inward. The fire had consumed so much so fast, there wasn’t even enough fuel for fires to keep burning.
Thankfully, for once, this was not my block.
The block in question was the entire block of the local Church—Our Lady of Lourdes. This wasn’t my parish, even though we were on the border. I had often visited Lourdes for Morning Mass with Mariel, even though we sometimes regretted it. We attended Saint Gregory the Great back when we lived in Glen Oaks, and when we moved, Our Lady of Lourdes was only a short drive or a moderate walk away. Our Lady of Lourdes had been a church of brick on the outside, marble within, with terrible acoustics—no matter where you stood, you could still hear the pastor. It had been truly difficult to breathe in there—the air was mostly hot and filled exclusively by a pastor more interested in feeding his ego than the word of God.
But all the fancy marble and brickwork hadn’t lasted. There was a crater where the entire block used to be. The block had been the church, the school next door, and maybe ten homes on the remaining block. The Church had been so incompetent that they had mismanaged the Catholic school next door until it closed, also relocating the teaching order of nuns in attendance. The school had been purchased by the City, to become an even more mismanaged public school.
What was left of the church lay in the crater, smashed like a Lego house overturned by an angry toddler.
It wasn’t difficult to understand what had happened. Whatever eldritch fire had consumed the block had come from below. While supernatural fire, in my experience, had no effect on the holy (like the church), not even the holiest of structures could hold when there was no foundation. Even the earth below the foundation had also been disintegrated by the blast.
Either way, the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes fell.
What was difficult to understand was why someone had gone out of their way to destroy the church. Normally, I would say it was a terrorist attack. If you saw a headline about a soft target that had been destroyed, you’d probably say the same. But it was a Sunday after services. The staff wasn’t in the rectory. The priests were all out on call or at dinner elsewhere.
All that said, why target the church if there were no casualties? In fact, why target this church at all? It was in the back end of Queens. Heck, it was the back end of New York City. It wasn’t so much that we were out where the buses didn’t run, but we were out where the bus lines ended. Literally, we were the end of several bus lines. We were so far out on the edge of New York City, the end of the city bus routes overlapped with the beginning of other bus lines into Nassau County, Long Island.
You can see how it would look funny to me that anyone would bother blowing up anything out here. Supernaturally, the only thing interesting in Queens Village included me and a few toys I had collected over the course of my adventures.
I had a theory before the rest of the crime scene crew arrived.
This particular church was two blocks from my house. Of course, I was the first on the scene. The only people who hadn’t left the dinner table were my grandchildren, Grace, and Sinead’s husband the heart surgeon. All three kids were content with ice cream. Grace was happy to use the opportunity to talk anatomy and physiology. Despite how young Mariel and Michael were, they were always rapt with attention when Grace talked about her studies. Having a heart surgeon there gave Grace a chance to increase her medical conversation to a point past my understanding.
Even Jeremy smiled and called her a nerd. Which is saying something, coming from an MIT graduate who built with Legos.
But all of the adults at the dinner table had all arrived within a few minutes of the explosion. I ran diagonally across the street, ran a block, made a right so I could run a shorter block, and stopped, looking across two traffic islands to see where the block had been. I could smell the residue of evil from there.
A crowd hadn’t even gathered up the nerve to cluster around the sidewalk and ruin the crime scene. Which was a nice change. Sure, it was less than a minute since the explosion had happened, but it often felt like the spectators clustered before anyone called 911.
Sinead pulled up in her car right behind me. She hopped out and went for her own go-bag in the back. Only her bag included a roll of crime scene tape. Jeremy, Lena, Alex, and Father Freeman spilled from her other doors.
I stood on the corner nearest to my house. I was at least able to lean on a mailbox. It was strange to stand there and have a clear view of Springfield Boulevard without having the church in the way. “Alex, Lena, Jeremy, make sure to keep any bystanders back. We don’t need them to fall into the hole, or worse, screw up the crime scene. Sinead ... I really hope you have enough yellow tape.”
She smiled and hefted the bag. “I have five rolls.”
Sinead went north with the tape, and took Father Freeman with her. They started by wrapping yellow tape around a tree, then headed down the hill for the first sign pole warning about no parking on Thursdays.
Thirty seconds after we arrived, so did Anne DiLeo, and her husband, D, coming in from the West.
Daniel David DiLeo, or “D”, was a friend and business associate going back decades. While he both played and physically looked the part of “big black bad guy #3,” it was mostly a front. Yes, he was big, and he was black, but that was it. He had gone from being a numbers runner when he was twelve to an MBA when he was twenty-two. But he also knew that sometimes education meant people thought one was weak—so he used his MBA to quietly build up his business interests while publicly putting on a show of force that made people think he was a gang-banger.
Due to his usual public image of jeans and leather jackets, it took me a moment to recognize him in his Sunday church clothes, in plain vanilla shirt, red tie, and black suit.
His wife, Anna, stood out in a bright cream-colored dress with matching hat and gloves.
It occurred to me that D’s church was only a few blocks over. And he couldn’t make it to Sunday dinner because his own church’s services were around the same time.
D looked at the devastation and gave a low whistle. He saw me clearly at the other end of the block and gave me a wave. I waved back and we walked towards each other.
D looked from me to the hole. “That wasn’t your church, was it?”
I shook my head. “Nah. I go to the one northeast of here. Saint Greg’s. I was only here after that one burned down. I left when it was rebuilt.”
D nodded. “Ah, that’s right. I forget. You worked with my church down the street while you were here.”
I nodded. “I recall.” I glanced to Anna. “Good to see you again.”
She grinned. “Same here, Tommy. But why do you always have to have something blowing up around you?”
I shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I just work here.”
D looked into the hole from the middle of the sidewalk. He didn’t want to get too close to the edge, and I didn’t blame him. “You figure they were after the church?”
I nodded. “There was no other reason to nuke the entire block, otherwise. A gas leak would be easier if someone wanted to blow up one house. It may even have done for the school building.”
D didn’t look away from the deep black pit in the middle of town. “So, why?”
I frowned. “I’d rather not speculate without evidence.”
D tilted his head at me, eyebrow raised. “You don’t, huh?”
I looked around. The evening was gray, and getting darker. The wind picked up, making me pull my top coat a little tighter around myself. It was probably the first day the weather would be affected by the hurricane that was supposed to be coming up the coast. Current projections said that it would hit us before the week was out.
I didn’t read anything into it that the storm had been called Hurricane Tommy.
I turned back to D so I could answer his question. “Location, location, location. It’s less why this church, and more why this corner of the city. Why target something this big without a body count? You make an attack look like something else. There were so many flames, I bet you ten-to-one that even the press will think it’s just a gas leak. Or just a fire. The block was mostly devoid of people. It’s possible no one died; even if the residences were fully occupied, it wouldn’t have been more than a handful of people. Without a body count, it’s just a massive property crime.”
D nodded slowly. “And?”
“And blowing up Queens is easier than blowing up Manhattan,” I said ominously.
D’s eyes narrowed. “Supernatural terrorists?”
I nodded. “Wouldn’t have been the first time.”
D frowned in disgust. He remembered my tales of Arturo Bergolio and Imam Abu Hamza Kozbar, both of whom had resorted to dark arts to create terrorist weapons that couldn’t be sniffed out by trained dogs. What was worse was Bergolio’s possession of the Spear of Destiny.
“Ugh, just great.” He frowned. “I’m going to make some phone calls. I have to tell all the boys that their weekend ended early.”
I smiled and nodded at him. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
D chuckled. “Don’t appreciate anything, boss. You have us on retainer, remember?”
I didn’t laugh. I had been the biggest investor for his current company, a private security venture that had lots and lots of guns. After the first few times that he and his men had come to my aid, I figured that the massive influx of cash I had received a decade ago was more than sufficient to pay them for their charitable work of saving my ass.
From the north and across the pit, lightly jogging up the hill, was Father Freeman. He stopped as soon as he saw me and waved his hands to get my attention. I nodded deeply to let him know I got the message. I looked back to D and said, “Gotta go. Unless you want to look at a crime scene?”
Anna shook her head. “No, thank you, Tommy. We’ll see you around. You take care, dear.”
I nodded at her. “Yes ma’am.” I held my hand out for D. “D, I’ll listen for your ring.”
He shook my hand. “Deal.”
I turned and strode after Father Freeman. Only a few feet in, the block went downhill relatively steeply. Only halfway down, Sinead knelt down near the edge of the property line. There was an object on the ground near the edge of the hole. Sinead took photos of it from multiple angles, trying to establish exactly where it was before she touched it.
However, next to it was a bright yellow evidence marker with a black numbering that labeled it “2.” Behind Sinead was another marker, “1,” but it seemed to mark nothing except a plastic bag.
One thing at a time.
I walked up to Father Freeman, and he led me to Sinead. “You should see this.”
As we got closer, I saw exactly what Sinead was looking at.
Evidence marker #2 was next to a human hand.