By Stan Dryer
Mary-Elizabeth had never thought of herself as a killing machine until the day she ran out of Bernadette’s favorite cat food. Until then, she had lived a complacent and well-regulated life. In the twenty-two years she had attended Saint Anthony’s Church, she had gone to Mass every Sunday at eleven a.m. and to confession every Friday at five p.m. If she left the Good Hope Shelter where she worked at four-thirty, she could easily make it across town to the church with time to spare.
On this day, she left the shelter a few minutes early. Unwilling to face the anger of a cat reduced to eating only kibble, she had decided to stop at Harold’s Market to pick up a couple of cans of Feline Delight.
She stopped her car at the mailbox on the far side of the mini-mall where Harold’s was located and deposited the shelter’s outgoing mail in the box. Then, rather than getting back in her car, she walked on foot over to the market.
When she reached the store, she discovered someone had flipped the sign inside the glass door to Closed. Something was not right; Harold’s was always open until six. She tried the door. It was open. She entered the store and froze. A young man wearing a black COVID 19 mask was just finishing tying Harold to a chair. The store owner was silent, having been gagged and blindfolded. The cash register drawer was open and empty.
At the sound of the opening door, the robber picked up his gun from the counter and pointed it at Mary-Elizabeth. “Perfect timing,” he said. “Just when I needed a getaway car.”
Mary-Elizabeth did not faint or scream. Her first thought was: He’s going to force me to drive him somewhere. Will he then kill me? Her second thought was: What would Faith do in this situation?
She knew Faith’s answer: In a tight situation, crush your fear and put together a plan. Mary-Elizabeth mentally gritted her teeth and discovered she had a plan.
The thief put the gun in his jacket pocket and picked up a plastic bag that obviously contained the contents of the now-empty cash register. “Let us walk quietly over to your car pretending we are a mother and son who just stopped at Harold’s for a few necessities,” he said.
Outside, Mary-Elizabeth pointed to her car. “Over there.”
They started across the parking lot side by side. “I think you should find someone else to drive you for your getaway,” she said.
“Just shut up and keep walking,” the young man said.
Mary-Elizabeth ignored his order and kept talking. “You see I’m on parole. If I get stopped with you in the car, the cops will assume I’m your getaway driver. I’ll be spending another six years back in prison.”
“I said shut up,” the robber said, but after a long moment he slowed his pace and looked over at her. “Wait a minute. What did you do to get six years in the slammer?”
“First degree Murder.”
“You only got six years?”
“That’s right.”
They had reached her car. “You’re driving. Go get in the driver’s seat,” the robber said. “And no funny business.”
She did as she was told. He got into the passenger seat and closed the door.
“How the hell did you get away with just six years for murder one?” the robber said. “You must have one hell of a mouthpiece.”
“Actually, I got my sentence reduced thanks to what my handler from the CCA said at the trial.”
“The CCA? Who the hell are they? What was this handler doing at your trial?”
“It’s the Centralized Control Agency. My handler explained to the judge and the jury how the CCA had programmed me to be a killing machine. When I was their operative, I was trained in Kang-Haifu, to act instinctively to kill anyone I saw as a threat. Even after leaving the agency, I carry that with me. I don’t stop to think, I just act.”
“And you killed someone like that?”
“Yes. It was kind of sad. He was a panhandler who approached me asking for money. Something in the way he acted, a motion of his hand, the tilt of his head, must have triggered my programmed reaction. Two blows to the neck and he was dead.”
The robber had edged closer to the passenger-side door. “And this guy from the CCA explained all that at your trial?”
“More than that. I think the CCA is still watching me; most likely they have a bug on this car so they know exactly where it is at any moment of the day. They probably want to stop me from killing again. Actually, I feel safer knowing I’m being tracked.”
“How’s that?” The young man was now pressing hard against the door.
“The CCA protects its own. If someone threatens or attacks me, they’ll use their full resources to hunt him down and dispose of him.”
“What do you mean, dispose of?”
“They don’t bother with arrests, reading you your rights or jury trials. You’re just found dead in an alley with a couple of slugs in the head.”
The robber suddenly pushed open the passenger’s side door and half stumbled out. “Forget I ever threatened you,” he shouted back through the open door. “For God’s sake, say nothing to the CCA.”
He slammed the door and took off at a run across the parking lot towards a woman who was getting in her car in front of the Dollar General. Regrettably for the thief, two police cars had just entered the parking lot. Harold had, apparently, been able to bump the alarm.
Mary-Elizabeth watched as the police officers forced the man to the ground and handcuffed him. She knew she should go over to explain to the police how she had almost been kidnapped. Then she thought of the hours of her time it would take for her to give her statements, try to identify the robber in a lineup and sit waiting endlessly for nothing to happen. She would definitely miss confession and have to face a hungry and hostile Bernadette when she got home. She started the car and swung out of the parking lot onto the highway. She knew the thief would not mention their little encounter. Harold had been blindfolded, and she had not spoken a word in the store. The forces of justice would never know she had even been there.
# # #
Mary-Elizabeth made it to St. Anthony’s with just ten minutes to spare. She hurried down to the confessional and pulled the curtain closed behind her. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said to the dim figure behind the screen.
“How have you sinned?” Father John asked. She wasn’t supposed to know who was hearing her confession, but the voice behind the screen had the same slight lisp as Father John’s voice had when he offered Mass.
Mary-Elizabeth’s sins were usually those of omission. While she seldom committed a truly sinful act, she had no trouble thinking of compassionate things she ought to have done, but failed to do. Some of the men who came to the shelter disgusted her with their straggly beards and body odor. She often treated them curtly, failing to speak those few kind words which would have given them welcome and a shade of self-confidence.
However, she had the feeling Father John was bored when he listened to her sins of omission; she always detected a touch of weariness in his voice when he absolved her of her imagined slighting of strangers.
Today, however, she had a real live sin. “A grievous sin, Father,” she said. “I lied to someone. Actually, I told him a whole lot of lies.”
“And did these lies cause harm to the person to whom you lied?”
Mary-Elizabeth thought of the police pinning the poor thief to the ground as they handcuffed him. “In a way, I guess so,” she said.
“You better tell me the whole story.”
So she did. When she got to the part about the young man jumping out of the car, she thought she heard a little gasp of laughter on the other side of the screen.
“If you don’t take my confession seriously,” she said, “I’m going to leave.”
“I am taking your confession very seriously. Please continue.” Father John’s voice was steady and emotionless.
“After he jumped out of my car, he ran across the parking lot, looking for someone with another car. Then the police arrived.”
“They arrested him?”
“They were really mean about it, making him lie down on the dirty pavement so they could handcuff him. I feel terrible I made that happen.”
“You have not sinned.”
“I haven’t?”
“No. You were protecting yourself in a commendably non-violent way.”
“I don’t need absolution?”
“Definitely not. Now remember, when you say your prayers tonight, be sure to thank God for showing you how to use words instead of violence to protect yourself.”
“Yes, Father, I will,” she said. Then she had a sudden thought. Did I actually have a choice?
It took Mary-Elizabeth an extra ten minutes to drive over to the Cornucopia Super to pick up the Feline Delight. When she came into her apartment fifteen minutes behind schedule, twelve angry pounds of orange conceit glared at her from the kitchen countertop.
“Awfully sorry,” she said. “They were out of your food at Harold’s so I had to go to the Super.” She didn’t think lying to a cat was any kind of a sin.
She took the can of Delight out of the bag, pried it open and put it in front of Bernadette. It was an important part of their ritual. The cat sniffed at it and gave a short grunt of satisfaction. She emptied the can into the dish marked Her Royal Highness and placed it before Her Highness.
It was not quite time for her to cook her own dinner, so she made herself a cup of herb tea, carried it to the soft armchair by the good lamp and picked up the new issue of Blood Crimes Magazine, which had just come in the mail.
She saw, with pleasure, the first story was another adventure of Faith Trueblood, the CCA agent who, disguised as a simple worker at a homeless shelter, had penetrated and destroyed a half dozen crime rings. Mary-Elizabeth took a sip of tea and began the new story.
Faith looked down at the bodies of the three Russians and tried to reconstruct what had happened so quickly. She had been alone in the alley when the three men with truncheons had suddenly come out of the shadows. The rest was a blur. She must have acted instantly and instinctively. There was no blood; that was the advantage of being trained in Kang-Haifu. Her handlers at the CCA had always proudly said they had programmed her to be a reflexive killing machine. Once more it had paid off.
Mary-Elizabeth let the magazine fall into her lap. She had had another sudden thought: Do they teach Kang-Haifu at the Martial Arts Academy down on Pleasant Street?
(This story was originally published in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. )
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