Read Online The Trinity Game by Sean Chercover - Free Book Online Page B

with the voices. But then the voices strengthened, and soon they brought the tongues. Tongues that came upon him like epileptic fits, completely beyond his control. The fits often came during his sermons, and they were good theater, but they also came upon him when he wasn’t doing his act. In the shower or driving his car, seemingly at random. They often woke him in the night, and he became exhausted. He knew he couldn’t keep going this way much longer. Something had to give.
    Then one night, Trinity sat in front of the television, flipping channels, afraid to fall asleep. He stopped on a documentary about addiction, and he heard a cocaine addict say that coke silenced the voices in his head.
    Trinity had never wanted anything to do with illegal drugs, had never even smoked grass, but he’d never in his life felt this desperate. He made his first drug buy the very next morning. And that night, when his head started pounding and the voices came upon him, he snorted his first line.
    The voices disappeared.

 
    D aniel stood in the shadows of Tim Trinity’s backyard, snapping photos through the window of his uncle’s den. Snapping photos of his uncle taking cocaine. He lowered the camera slowly, thinking:
What the hell did you expect?
    But whatever he’d expected, he sure as hell hadn’t expected this.
    Daniel had seen enough, and it was getting late. Time to terminate surveillance. He scaled the fence, dropping down into the wooded ravine that backed onto Trinity’s property. He moved quietly through the brush, listening to the singing of frogs and crickets, the chatter of distant coyotes. Moved to the ravine’s public access way, at the end of the street.
    He walked among silent mansions to where he’d parked his rental car, wondering what could’ve gone so wrong in Tim Trinity’s life that he was now snorting coke. He’d always been a drinker, sure, but for Southerners—and especially New Orleanians—alcohol is like mama’s milk.
    In all their years together, Daniel had never seen his uncle do anything as flagrantly self-destructive as what he’d just witnessed.
    What could’ve gone so wrong?

     
    Back in his hotel room, Daniel sat on the bed, propped up by huge pillows, his Bible open in his lap. An e-mail had come in from Nick. The e-mail read:
Dan,
Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m worried about you. I know being with your uncle will be difficult, and I feel somewhat responsible, having allowed you to take this case. But I need you to stay focused on your assignment, whatever personal issues arise.
Read the Book of Job tonight, and meditate on it.
That’s an order, not a suggestion.
Hang tough, kiddo. I know you can do this.
–Fr. Nick
    Daniel had struggled with the Book of Job in his youth and had never really come to terms with it. Reading it again didn’t help any. To Daniel, the God presented in Job was like a little boy pulling the wings off flies, just to watch them flail about. He seemed shallow, cruel, and ego-driven. He caused Job, his most righteous servant, to suffer excruciating pain and unfathomable loss, for no good reason. No, worse. For a juvenile, self-indulgent reason: because God had the cosmic equivalent of a bar bet going with Satan.
    Daniel did not like this God very much.
    The priests who took Daniel in at thirteen had tried to reframe the Book of Job for him. They said that the story does not tell us
why
the virtuous suffer, it tells us
how
to suffer. It doesn’t explain the existence of evil, but it tells us that the existence of evil is one of God’s many mysteries.
    The priests were big on God’s Many Mysteries. It was their default response to the most troubling of Daniel’s many questions. But Daniel had not come to the Church to embrace mysteries. He’d come in search of a miracle.
    He’d lived the first dozen years of his life believing that his uncle was a real apostle, working real miracles on God’s behalf. For a boy who’d killed his own mother while being