Outside the air felt even hotter, and I realized I had no goddamn clue what I was doing in a place like Louisiana. I thought I saw a gator cross the street with the corner of my eye, but that could’ve been a shadow of a dog. A dog that looked mighty like a freaking gator.
“Oh Lord,” I muttered to myself as I descended the steps and walked toward my car. There wasno wayI had chosen this to anchor down.
The apartment above the food bank was, indeed,clean.And that was about everything it was. Walls were white, the ceiling fan shook off at least an inch of dust the first time I turned it on, and the shower had practicallynopressure. But it, for sure, was better than a motel room with a dead rat in the sink.
For sure.
So, I unpacked my one bag and stayed.
The cellar beneath Grace Eternal was a stone lung, breathing in the damp rot of southern Louisiana and converting it back into something vile. The silent whimpers of the sinful.
The pleas of the damned.
Or, like today — the hard footsteps of a singular judgment day.
The place had been a root cellar once, then a hiding place during some war — which war depended on who you asked — and now, it was a sanctuary for a different kind of silence.
Twelve feet down, and the Louisiana summer still managed to crawl through the mortar with feverish vigor. The air was a thick, wet weight, tasting of lime-wash, copper, and the salt of human terror. Judah had stripped off his jacket and shirt, his back slick with a fine sheen of grease and sweat that made the ink look like it wascrawlingacross his skin. The tan expanse of his shoulders was a map of contradictions: the suffering Christ, the jagged psalm fragments, and the older, blurred marks of a life spent in the dirt.
Curtis Fontenot had been skimming. Fucking rat.
It wasn’t a bold theft. It was the insult of a small-minded man — four hundred here, seven hundred there. A petty rerouting through a cousin in Lafayette who thought distance was the same thing as safety.
Under the watchful eye of the Lord, distance was a myth.
Judah poured two fingers of whiskey, the amber liquid catching the glow of the single overhead bulb. He stood with his back to Curtis, thinking about the divine punishment the rat would soon bask in, and he drank.
Curtis was suspended with his arms in the air, bound by thick, prior-judgment roughened rope. He’d been here a day and had started talking only after the sixteenth hour. At first, he’d told Judah togo fuck himself, and Judah had. Leaving him for ten hours. When he came back, he’d been covered in all sorts of fun things — from piss to vomit. Yet he still wouldn’t talk. So Judahhad fucked off again, came back, and suddenly Curtis was a lot more talkative.
Could do with the heat. Could do with the fact that Curtis realized Judah meant what he said — he wouldn’t get out of here alive.
“Tell me about Lafayette,” Judah said.
It took a second for Curtis to find his voice, then the words started tumbling out in a rush of a bayou-thick accent. “It’s nothing. Ain’t but a bait shop my cousin runs. I swear it ain’t no serious thing. I sent him the cash thinkin’ it’d wash clean through his books. Thought… thought ye’ wouldn’t notice.”
Judah turned slowly, the whiskey glass loose in his grip, his grey eyes narrowing. The tattoos on his chest seemed to shift in the dim light — a serpent coiled around a cross, its fangs bared in eternal warning. He stepped closer, the heat from his body mingling with the cellar’s fetid breath, and Curtis flinched against the ropes, his wrists raw and weeping.
“Wouldn’t notice,” Judah echoed. He set the glass down on a scarred wooden crate, the clink echoing off the stone walls. “Your greed is one thing, Fontenot — your lack of common sense something else entirely.” He reached out, but Curtis flinched away. Judah smirked. “I won’t punish you for your greed, Curtis.”
Curtis lifted his head — face sweat-drenched and pale. “You ain’t?”
“No.” Judah moved to the far wall.
“Oh, praise the—” Curtis couldn’t finish because he saw what Judah reached for. And it was no small thing.
The whip was coiled beneath the hook like a sleeping snake. It was heavy leather, gone dark with age and saturated with oil until it had become as supple as skin. His grandfather's. His father's. A legacy of iron and wood.
He picked it up. The leather felt warm.
“Preacher,please!”Curtis begged when Judah walked back. “God was merciful, God wasgood!”he blurted. “Godforgave! Please.”
Judah tested the whip — it snapped the air in half.
Curtis flinched, his eyes filling with tears.
“Your fault is thinking the Lord and I are one and the same,” Judah said. “I preach the Lord’s word but I follow no religion.”
The first strike was a crack of thunder in the small space. It opened a welt across Curtis's shoulders that went a sudden, violent red. The man’s body lurched against the ropes, a raw, animal sound tearing out of his lungs — the sound of a body realizing it no longer belonged to itself.
