“The riot squad is going to hit the church first, clear out and arrest anybody violating the mayor’s shutdown edict, then we’re going to charge in.” The chimpanzee pointed an overly long finger at Benny. “Benny, your team will seal off the south door, and Lupo, your group will seal off the north door. We want to box the priest in, but he’s mine. Understood?”

The ape stood on the hood of an unmarked car where the vehicles were assembled in one of the city’s fleet garages. It was Sunday, so the place was otherwise empty. These were unmarked vehicles used by the city government’s various departments: health, water, roads and public works, education, parks and recreation, accounting and management, etc. Today Caesar wore just a pair of slacks and a wife beater t-shirt under an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled up. He was barefooted: because of his prehensile feet, wearing shoes was like wearing oven mitts for Caesar, which limited his ability to use his feet to grasp things or hold weapons, like the black shillelagh he gripped with his right foot.

“Everybody’s wearing iron?” Caesar looked around him at the assembled men and waited for them to nod in the affirmative. “Nobody shoots or gets out a heater unless things go south on us. But if you need to, don’t hesitate to plug anybody.”

“When we hit the church, we’re going to move like lightning, which is fast, but silent. No shouting, no car doors slamming. You’re all wearing masks, and nobody shouts any names. Nobody is carrying a RAPE badge, is he?” Caesar’s eyes peered out from beneath his sloped brows and heavy eye ridges. “Remember, plausible deniability.”

One of the men at the back, Lemmie, wore a puzzled expression, as did several other men huddled up for the raid. Being a college graduate was not a prerequisite for joining the mayor’s RAPE squad.

“Plausible deniability means that the mayor can say, ‘It wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with it.’ People may have their suspicions, but they can’t prove anything.” Standing on the hood of one of the cars, Caesar looked around him, turning slowly around to see that the men understood him. “But if some palooka shouts, ‘We’re with the mayor,’ or waves around a RAPE tin, or drops it at the scene, we’ve been made, and the mayor is going to be pissed.”

Caesar waved the shillelagh with his foot. “To the crates!”

The men piled into the cars, which took off in a procession of five vehicles, each holding four men each, and a sixth, with just a driver and Caesar in the back seat, bringing up the rear.

The vehicles were not far from St. Michael’s Church. The driver in Caesar’s car mumbled something that was muffled by his mask.

“Take off the mask,” Caesar told him. “How the hell can I understand you?”

The driver pulled the mask down under his chin. “I thought we was supposed to wear the masks.”

“That’s for the rubes,” Caesar said dismissively, and looked out the window.

“Um, excuse me, boss, but aren’t you going to wear a mask?” The driver glanced into the rear view mirror, then quickly returned his gaze to the road.

“Number one,” Caesar began, “to you guys, we all look alike. I’d like to see somebody try to pick me out of a lineup of five other chimpanzees. Number two, nobody is going to talk. Anybody who tries to put the finger on me is dead, anyway.”

The head of a chimpanzee slopes downward to a point, so that its head ends in a wide mouth with oversized lips. If a chimpanzee forms the fake smile, as he often does in the movies, the result is comical, but if you have a chimpanzee sneering, the resulting expression is malevolent, with beady eyes embedded deep in a furry skull peering out over those large, snarling lips. That was precisely the expression Caesar wore, only more so when he saw that the paddy wagons were not parked in front of the church.

The cars rolled up to the church, and the men poured out. Despite his explicit instructions, more than one car door slammed. The RAPE goons were not about subtlety or stealth, and were used to loudly announcing their presence and yelling to intimidate residents of the city. The men looked around them, wondering where the paddy wagons were, which were supposed to spearhead the raid. Caesar waved forward, at which point Benny’s group split off to the left, while Lupo’s group went to the right, effectively sealing off the church’s side doors. The rest of the men charged up the front steps, carrying brass knuckles and nightsticks, often both, with a Billy club in the right hand and a set of brass knuckles in the left.

Startled parishioners turned in their seats to see who was thundering over the wooden floor of the foyer, and charging into the church. Women unconsciously squealed or yelped, while elderly men in tam-o’-shanter hats suddenly crouched down to move away from the aisles.

“Out!” the RAPE squad shouted, chasing congregants out of the pews by waving their nightsticks, and bopping or roughly shoving anybody who moved too slowly. A woman in high heels stumbled and fell to the floor in her panicked haste to leave and might have been trampled if several others had not helped her up. The frightened parishioners dashed out of the church onto the sidewalk, still dazed and unable to understand what had happened.

The priest was at the altar, circling it with the censer, creating clouds of pleasant-smelling smoke that drifted over the front end of the church, and rose up among the images of saints standing behind glass cases. The alarmed priest spun to see what the commotion was. The altar boys and sacristans ran for the side exits, but the doors snapped open, and the doorways were blocked by big, scowling men bearing clubs and brass knuckles. The altar boys then ran down the main aisle, ducking their heads in fear that they might be hit as they passed, and raced out to the sidewalk outside.

The church had been cleared out, except for the priest. Caesar entered from the front of the church, walking on all fours and carrying the shillelagh in his foot. The chimpanzee’s oversized lips quivered in a snarl.

“This is a house of worship,” the priest announced, trying to draw himself up straight in order to look authoritative, but his nervousness betrayed him.

The priest whirled to run, but Caesar whipped out the shillelagh, striking the priest’s inner knee and sending him sprawling over the floor. The priest tried to climb up to his feet, but his right knee wouldn’t work, and Caesar repeatedly struck his hands and legs, aiming for the kneecaps and inner shins. The father found himself lying on the floor, trying to shell up to protect himself, but the loaded knob end of the shillelagh bludgeoned his hands and arms, breaking several bones. As the priest moaned in pain, a strike with the knob end struck him in the groin, followed by heavy blows to his stomach and chest.

The white eyes buried deep within Caesar’s thick brow glowed with pleasure, and the sneer became a twisted, writhing smile.

The men at the south side door witnessed the beating, and found themselves wincing, even though they had collectively beaten many a man into a long stay in the hospital. They were so intently focused on keeping parishioners from going out through the doors, and the beating that Caesar gave the priest, that they were oblivious to threats behind them, not that they suspected any.

The sound of the club crushing the skull of the man at the back of the group huddled in the doorway blended in with the sound of the priest being clubbed on the floor, so the RAPE goons were slow to realize that one of their own had just been taken out. They spun, some of them more quickly than others, but the fact that they were packed into the doorway limited their movement, and they fought each other to swing their clubs or punch at the killer behind them, whose face was painted black. In quick succession, the club struck with direct blows that sent it exploding forward, where it impacted brutes between the eyes, dropping them instantly.

On one strike, the heavy club snapped forward, but the nail embedded in the striking end became stuck in the goon’s forehead. The killer yanked on the club to retrieve it, but the embedded nail only pulled the beefy man’s head with it, and his eyes crossed as though he were studying the club stuck between his eyes.

One of the men reached for the spiked club to get a hold of it, and to try to wrest it from the killer, but the spikes pierced his hand, making him yell in pain. A knife came up backhanded, sinking into the grabber’s gut, and coming up under his ribcage to pierce his liver. The pain was too intense for the hulking man, and he slumped into the doorway, which was now cleared. The killer with the black-painted face let go of the embedded club to raise up a shotgun he carried on a sling, aiming it at Caesar, who had just wheeled about when he heard a struggle in the doorway behind him.

* * *

Jason spotted the unmarked vehicles pulling up in a line at the front steps of the church, and instantly knew that it was another element of the raid on St. Michael’s. He dropped his duffel bag and ran to the church, passing fleeing parishioners who hurried down the sidewalk, and hustled down the side streets to disappear into the neighborhood. He became even more alarmed when he saw the typical down-on-all-fours clambering gait of a chimpanzee scampering up the steps to the church.

Thanks to his conditioning, Jason arrived at the church steps warm, but not winded, and shuffle-stepped up the concrete steps to the wooden front doors at the landing, with the sap already in his right hand. Inside the foyer, tall, muscled men blocked the aisle, intensely watching a spectacle, like spectators in the cheap seats peering over each other’s shoulders to see a boxing match nearing the point when one of the fighters was certain to get knocked out.

Jason dropped the closest man to him, striking him in the back of the head, and actually hoped he killed the brute in the process. He whipped the sap into the man on his right, who was turning to see what had happened, smashing his face and crushing the fragile bones of his cheek with a backhand blow. The follow up forehand blow thwacked the hand of the goon on his left, who raised his hand defensively. Jason was loading up for anther strike of the sap to destroy the upraised hand in his way, when the hulk with the smashed face grabbed Jason’s right wrist with both hands.

With his right arm tied up, Jason reached into his left jacket pocket to grip the snubby and fired two shots through the already ripped and singed jacket pocket, shooting into the gut of the man on his left, then emptied the other three shots into the goon who had managed to latch onto his right wrist.

Now that his wrist was freed, Jason kicked the fourth hoodlum in the crotch, then whapped the brute’s outstretched hand until it dropped, which gave Jason a clear shot at the back of the head of the muscled man, who was bent forward at the waist to clutch his groin.

Because Jason fired from inside his jacket pocket, the shots were muffled, and the scene was too intense near the altar for anyone there to notice. Jason couldn’t see who stood behind the south side entrance to his left, but he saw the shotgun barrel rise up, aimed at the chimpanzee, who at the same moment had paused in his beating of the priest to see the threat behind him.

The shotgun boomed, but the chimpanzee moved with nearly incomprehensible speed and agility, vaulting over the first pew. The volley of buckshot unleashed by the thunderclap erupting from the muzzle of the shotgun tore through the goons blocking the door at the opposite side of the church. Another round was racked into the pump shotgun, which boomed again, punching a hole in the wood pew where the chimpanzee had been just an instant earlier. Another round was quickly racked into the shotgun, accompanied by the hollow clatter of an empty shell landing with a rattle on the concrete outside the south door.

The shotgun exploded again, tracking the chimpanzee who bounded back over the pew, zig-zagging his way toward the north door. The shot blasted off a chunk of the pew, immediately followed by a rack and a fourth shot that ripped through the men in the north doorway, who were slow to scramble out of the way. The chimpanzee plowed through them, knocking the big men down as if they were bowling pins made of paper mâché, and scampered off.

The smoking muzzle of the shotgun on the south doorway snapped back, and the shooter was gone—Jason was certain of it.

Jason ran down the aisle to the priest, who lay groaning on the floor, semi-conscious. Judging by the severity of his injuries, among them a broken arm that flopped unnaturally, and a split lip that bled ferociously, Jason thought that it would have been better for the father to have been knocked unconscious.

As Jason ran to the altar, he paused, and his eyes were drawn to the high, vaulted ceiling, where something was falling toward his head.