Breaking Loose

CHAPTER TEN

Shot and crushed. Oh, God, he hurt. He hurt so badly… everywhere. They’d shot him, the bastards, and then pulled a bank of shelving over on top of him.

Remy sucked another breath into his lungs, felt it rattle out in a bad way, then sucked in another, painfully, almost unbearably, and with each one he prayed it wasn’t his last.

There was blood all over him, all over his clothes, all over his hands, pooling on the floor where his savior had pulled him out from under a pile of broken shelves-sweet, sweet Jesus, my Lord Jesucristo, savior of the world.

Jesus Christ in blue jeans, kneeling down beside him in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and a snakeskin belt. Jesus with a gaze of holy compassion seeing all the way through him to his soul.

“I… I have… have sinned,” he said, his voice a bare breath of sound, the need to confess compelling him to speak.

“We’re all sinners,” Jesus said, his voice so matter-of-fact that Remy felt he’d been absolved-such was the Lord’s grace. Everyone sinned, everyone could be granted salvation, if they repented.

Lying in his own blood, lying in pain, Remy repented-oh, God, did he repent-and he forgave those who had sinned against him, everyone, even the damn policía for shooting him, the bastards, and tearing his gallery apart.

He dragged another breath into his lungs, felt the pain of it from beginning to end-and then he coughed… Jesusjesusjesus, the pain racked him, and the blood flowed.

“Open your eyes, Remy, look at me,” Jesus said, his voice deep and smooth and compelling.

Remy forced his eyes open, knowing what he’d see-his Lord Christ with his dark hair short and standing half on end, his saintly face a study in chiseled angles and perfection, his jaw strong, his cheekbones high, his gaze narrow beneath thick, straight eyebrows. Jesus was a hard, hard man, his arms powerful, his chest and shoulders broad beneath his dark T-shirt and the silky green shirt he wore open over the top of the T-shirt. The muscular length of his legs was visible beneath the worn denim of his jeans. Remy had never realized Jesus was so tall, six feet or more of power and grace, like an archangel, his body honed like granite. He had known his Lord was a warrior, and it was in his warrior guise that Jesus had come to Galeria Viejo tonight, to vanquish Remy’s enemies and save his soul. The air still thrummed with the power of his presence, the echo of it matching the rhythm of Remy’s heartbeat, and like his heartbeat, growing ever fainter.

But it was Jesus. Remy had seen the marks, and no one else could have saved him from the violence and chaos. The policía had fled at his entrance, but the savior had caught one of Asher’s men and hauled him up by the scruff of his neck against the wall. Eye to eye, no one could resist the Lord, and harsh words had been spoken before Jesus had released the man. All was quiet now, with nothing but the sound of his own labored breaths filling the cavernous room.

“You have a statue,” Jesus said, looking through the pockets on Remy’s jacket. He was so gentle, all his movements so smooth, so fluid, laying back the front of his coat, frisking him, checking his pants pockets. Remy didn’t mind. His savior was barely jostling him at all.

Jesus pulled a piece of paper out of his front pants pocket and unfolded it. Remy knew what it was, the lading document for the Sphinx, though, of course, it didn’t say “Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III” anywhere on it.

Jesus read the paper, then refolded it and returned it to the pocket where he’d gotten it.

“You do have a statue, Remy,” he said, very calm, very sure.

Yes, yes. Remy nodded. He still had a statue. He looked around himself and felt another wave of pain. The police had broken everything, his bookcases, the lights, the furniture, they’d broken down doors, smashed paintings and pottery, and the bastards had probably stolen him blind.

But they wouldn’t have found the Sphinx. They would never find it, and Remy wished to God he hadn’t either, found it in a plain wooden shipping crate addressed to him, a small crate banded in metal.

The death of him-that’s what he’d thought when he’d opened the crate and lifted the top half of the foam packing container off to reveal the Sphinx.

He’d known exactly what it was; he’d been expecting it, while at the same time never expecting that it would really come to him and his small shop, a dangerous gift with too few strings attached, only that he let it be known that he had it to sell, the profits to be his-the Memphis Sphinx, a mystery of the ages, its very existence a battleground of conjecture, its expounded history rife with riddles and theories. For a brief moment when he’d first seen it, his heart had soared, then had come the foreboding of doom, crashing down on him-the death of him.

And so it had come to pass. Death delivered to him upon the word of a white-haired stranger with a cultured American accent and lofty ties to the United States government. Bait, the man had said, to lure a shark home. For the million-dollar profit Remy had known he could make on the deal, he’d thought he could survive any shark who would come to feed on the fabled idol.

He had not.

Instead, he’d become the center of a maelstrom.

“The statue, Remy, the Sphinx,” Jesus said. “Where is it?”

Hidden, Remy thought, in a place where nobody could have come along and taken the thing away from him.

He wasn’t a fool, but Esteban Ponce was, a dangerous fool. Remy had taken precautions, knowing there could be trouble, but look at him-murdered in his own gallery.

He gritted his teeth against the pain. Ponce had brought this upon him. The cops in the city were easily bought, and they’d only been minutes behind the Brazilian. Ponce could have signaled them from the viewing room, thinking the Sphinx could be had for the price of three crooked cops instead of the opening bid of a million dollars.

Poor fool Ponce-he’d called his dogs in without even seeing the real statue. Remy and Jimmy Ruiz had gone to great effort to make the buyers think the gorgeous plaster and composite reproduction they’d had made, with cut-glass eyes and a “gold” mane, the lapis lazuli embellishments made of plastic, was the four-thousand-year-old artifact. No one knew fakes better than Remy Beranger. He specialized in the crap-and now he was going to die for it.

Stupid Ponce wouldn’t even have gotten the fake statue for his trouble. Remy had taken it with him when he’d left the viewing room and handed it off to Jimmy. No sense letting the marks get too close a look at it. When he’d seen their cash, he would have shown them the true Sphinx.

He swore it by the blood of Christ.

He had never wanted to keep the damn thing-too dangerous, too heavy for his spirit, too deadly.

“Remy, Remy, Remy,” Jesus was saying, reaching down and sliding his hand across Remy’s brow, smoothing his hair back off his face, his palm cool, his voice hitting a tone of comforting compassion. “Don’t go yet. Tell me where you put the Memphis Sphinx.”

It was the gentlest of caresses, made with a saintly hand-a hand made powerful by suffering and redemption, a hand of salvation. Remy knew. He’d seen. Jesus had made no attempt to hide his wrists, and in the center of each was a scar from the holy cross.

Scars and the frightful power of his presence. From where Remy had lain beneath the broken shelving, he’d felt the power of Jesus entering the gallery, heard the resonant command of his voice, and all Remy’s enemies had fled.

Who but the Lord could have vanquished them all?

He drew in another rattling, pained breath, hating the sound of it, knowing it meant the end was near.

“Dans la cage,” he said, using his last ounce of strength. In the cage. “Hidden in the… the cistern…” He wanted to say more, ask Jesus about Heaven, but the words wouldn’t come to him. Not now. Not on his last breath.

He lifted his eyes to his Lord, and Jesus spoke to him then, the words soft and consoling, a blessed comfort as the light and the darkness drifted into an endless blanket of gray.