Chapter 2: When to Fold them
That evening, after dinner, I sat down at a table in my basement with four other men at a card table.
One was my partner Alex Packard. Alex was a slender, older man. He had an odd pot-belly in the middle of all of that skinny. His suit was gray and rumpled, just like he was. He was balding on top, with a graying mustache that Tom Selleck would have approved of. His suits always looked like he slept in them, even after they’d been pressed.
Also at the table was Jerry Brown. Jerry was our local postmaster. He’d been thirty years in civil service, and postmaster was the latest in a long string of positions he’d had.
Or, as Alex called him, “The Patsy.”
“So, Tommy,” Jerry Brown started, “given how Catholic you are, you allowed to play poker?”
I finished my shuffle and started dealing around the table. “As Chesterton says, I can afford to bet what I can afford to lose.”
Packard laughed and riffled his chips. “Which is why we both have really small stacks of cash to start.”
Larry Wright, a paramedic, rolled his eyes. He was a big guy, designed to wrestle patients and maniacs on the street. He didn’t have a combat style—he had combat blunt force trauma. He was, to some degree, even more cynical than Alex. He had bowling ball forearms, and I wondered if he bench-pressed the gurney between shifts.
“Yeah. Sure,” Larry scoffed. “You have all this time abroad. All that time in WitSec? Having bills paid by other people? Subletting the house to the department while you gallivanted around the world? You should have some savings.”
“I didn’t exactly gallivant, Larry.”
Larry looked at my hands and flinched, for a good reason. Both hands had scars on them about the size of a silver dollar. They were souvenirs from my London trip that gave the appearance that I had a recurring case of stigmata, including one in each foot and my side. I was close to collecting a whole set.
This ignored the actual stigmata I occasionally had. I was glad that condition came and went. It was less because I was ashamed of it and more because I didn’t want to flaunt it ... or explain it. It was bad enough that some headlines called me “Saint Tommy” while I was still alive.
Hopefully, the time abroad made the papers forget me.
After New York’s resident warlock had put a dark-web bounty on my head, I had been “reassigned” to the intelligence branch of the NYPD. As one of the few (perhaps only) city police departments that had outposts and assignments around the world, I was sent abroad, attached to the Vatican. Officially, I had chased down terrorists that would threaten the place I call home.
In real life, I had battled terrorists that threatened to destroy London, as well as sex traffickers that had tried to raise a prince of Hell in Germany. The trip to Boston was supposed to be a vacation but had trashed most of the Eastern seaboard.
The last year had been spent training at the hands of a special Swiss Guard unit, dedicated to fighting the forces of darkness.
Lucas Powe, a fireman, collected his cards and shook his head with a smirk. He was a thinner black gentleman, but he could haul oxygen tanks like no one’s business. “Oh, please, guys. Tommy’s gonna have a lot of endless bills coming his way soon. After all, did you see his souvenir from his European vacation?”
Lucas referred to my ward, Lena. When I found her, she was a Polish Orphan with some special powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men... Or she was merely telekinetic. I guess it depended on your point of view. She may not have needed my help to escape the sex traffickers who held her captive, but I had killed most of the men who took her prisoner. She had killed the rest with her mind. I had seen it myself. I had also seen her create a small sand storm that helped me fight an army of demons in Boston.
Did I mention I had a strange life?
Larry laughed as he threw in a dollar ante. “I know. Seriously, Tommy, another kid?”
Jerry sighed and tossed his in. He raised already. “Another? On top of the newborn?
Lucas saw the bid and raised it. He added, “And two kids who are going to be going to college at the same time.”
“Ha!” Jerry barked. “This is going to be the most expensive time in your child-raising.”
They continued to heckle me about this for a while. They were right about all of it. Grace was about a year old. She had been born right before the European trip where I had picked up Lena—the Vatican had helped me cut through the red tape of Lena’s adoption.
My son Jeremy was only a little younger than Lena. So he and Lena would probably go to college at the same time. By then, Grace wouldn’t even be in Pre-K. Assuming we went that route. Right now, Mariel and I were home-schooling both Jeremy and Lena. It was a trend we had started while we were out of the city, in WitSec.
When I suggested that Lena go to Mariel’s alma mater for her education, she had given me a look and told me plainly, “You want to send our telekinetic teenager to an all girl’s high school? Didn’t you see the movie Carrie?”
That was the end of that particular conversation.
Larry shook his head. “I call.” He sighed. “You’re going to need every dime you have.” He laid down his four of a kind. “Pity you’re going to lose some pennies.”
“I know. I’m frugal.” I laid out four aces. “It’s why I have to save every penny.”
I smiled at Larry as I collected the pot.
Larry frowned. “Just make sure you don’t end up like the two cops I treated today.” He shook his head as he gathered the cards and shuffled. “Got their ass kicked by a prisoner in the back of their squad car. He’d even been cuffed.”
I arched a brow as I caught the incoming cards. I hadn’t heard anything about it. But then, I had been trapped at a crime scene for the better part of the day. “Where was this?”
“Up on Braddock.”
I blanched, as did Alex. “Who were the guys?” he asked.
I didn’t even need to ask. I stated, “Griffin and Burkhardt.”
Larry blinked. He set aside the deck and fanned his cards. “Wow. I’m surprised you guessed. How did you figure?”
“We were near Braddock today,” Alex said, throwing in his ante.
“We busted a perp who I had to be put down hard. He didn’t want to go.” I frowned. I sorted my cards. They were all crap. A good thing. The news had screwed up my focus. “I fold.”
Alex looked at Larry and shook his head with a frown. “Griffin and Burkhardt. Wow. How bad were they knocked around?”
“Bad. They’re both in the hospital.”
Jerry Brown, the postmaster, frowned and anted up. “Wait. He’s a bad guy who beat up some cops and escaped. What’s the big deal? Doesn’t this happen every day?”
Alex sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Griffin and Burkhardt are the uniforms we call in when we want to wrestle a three-hundred-pound steroid case who’s mainlined PCP. They don’t look like all that, but they’ve held their own against damn near everything Queens has thrown at them.”
Jerry shrugged and anted up. “Well, that sucks.” He dealt some cards, going through the motions. He looked over at me and said, “So, Tommy, what do you think of this Bergolio guy?”
I forced myself to focus on Jerry. I thought about his question a moment, racking my brain for an answer. I shook my head. “I don’t know him.”
Jerry reached down into his briefcase on the floor. He came up with a newspaper and handed it over the table. It had gone through the usual subway origami, folded over to the article Jerry wanted to ask me about.
Apparently, Father Arturo Bergolio was the Superior General of the Society of Jesus. And yes, I checked—he was only a Father. He wasn’t a Bishop or a Cardinal.
The photo for Arturo Bergolio showed him with a white buzzcut that narrowed into a widow’s peak. He had a patch of goatee thick enough to be visible in the black-and-white photograph. He carried a huge iron staff with a large cross on the top of it.
The headline, below the fold, read “SATAN ISN’T REAL, SAYS TOP SJ.”
I sighed. It was more BS about how Satan was “just a metaphor” and how demons and devils weren’t real ... I rolled my eyes so hard, I literally hurt something.
There were a great many temptations here. Laugh at it because I had personally met demons? Scream at it?
Then I saw why Bergolio was coming to America. He was coming in advance of Pope Pius XIII visiting America and the United Nations. The Pope was coming to the UN because of the devastation from a year ago.
Aw crap.
The devastation referred to was caused by a Kaiju demon named Tiamat, a demon that I had failed to stop from emerging fully-formed into the world. It had arisen from the ocean like Godzilla's bigger, meaner parent. It spat fire. It seeded acid into the sky. It drew mass from the ocean, and the water it hadn’t absorbed had been knocked aside as it stomped to shore.
It had only spent a few minutes in this reality before the intervention of God, His angels, and a certain relic on par with the Ark of the Covenant, all came together to send Tiamat straight back to Hell where it belonged.
But while we had stopped the emergence, that wasn’t enough to stop the havoc that came with it.
It turned out that even the mere arrival of a demon a mile tall was enough to trash most of the North Eastern seaboard of the United States. There were tsunamis from Maine to New York. There had been literal acid rain going out as far as Pennsylvania—just a drizzle, but that was enough to destroy entire neighborhoods and several small cities... and Pittsburgh, but the remainder of Pennsylvania declared that it wasn’t a loss. There were lightning storms that went out just as far—each lightning strike had created a hole in the ground where whole blocks had once been. There was a mysterious firestorm that drifted into Canada and wrecked part of Quebec.
Now, the Pope was coming to the United States to discuss what happened.
I passed the paper back to Jerry, returning my mind to the head of the Jesuits declaring there was no Satan. “The Pope’s going to spank this guy when he gets here. Just remind me to not drive into Manhattan that week.”
Larry smiled as he raked in the chips. “Hey, Tommy, I guess this is a college education, huh?”
I smiled. I just saw my next investment cache. As the cards for the next hand came around, my next thought was, I’m going to have to start looking into the Sergeant’s exam.