SINNERS

SINNERS

CHAPTER SIX: JUDGEMENT

Three weeks later

Bucky BonAires went into custody with the same fury he had preached about: loud, defiant, teeth bared. Detectives Mike and John had ambushed him and his flock during Sunday service — a raid that smelled of burning candles and fear. SWAT moved in like a thunderstorm, boots and rifles and a chorus of terrified prayers tearing the air. On the pulpit, beneath a tangle of hymn books and a toppled cross, Bucky lay with his hands zip-tied behind him, spitting curses that tried and failed to sound like prophecy.

He arrived at Blackgate prison already infamous — not for the crimes listed on his file, but for the rumors that had hardened around him: clandestine sermons, midnight rites, disciples who spoke of miracles and of hands that burned like winter. The cells were a contraband of stale air and rust; Bucky sat on a narrow bunk reading the Bible as if it were both a weapon and a wound.

“Don’t you get tired of reading that thing?” his cellmate, Fred Briggs, asked one afternoon.

Fred had the look of a man who’d gambled on violence once and lost everything — a kidnapping that turned into murder, the kind of story that leaves a person hollowed out. Bucky’s eyes lifted, pale and cool.

“It’s the Word,” he said simply. “It nourishes. It sharpens.”

On a warm Saturday a small, dangerous thing happened: Fred asked for deliverance. Maybe it was loneliness. Maybe terror. Maybe the old hunger for absolution. Bucky bent over him like a priest at an altar and laid those lanky, knuckled fingers across his brow.

“Lord, use me as your vessel,” he whispered. “Let this man be cleansed. Let his soul not rot in Hell, but dance among the stars. Amen.”

The change in Fred was abrupt enough to be visible. He walked straighter, laughed more easily, and began sharing scripture like a new currency. He preached in the courtyard, his voice carrying between the concrete like a bell. Men who had been muttering behind their doors followed him to stand beneath the sun and listen. For a while the yard hummed with something like hope.

Then the nights turned sharp.

One by one, inmates began to die by their own hands. The first was sloppy and sudden, a towel tied where laughter used to be. The second followed like an echo. Each morning the warders found another body and the silence afterward was heavier than any law. Rumor braided into fact: each of the men had given a sermon before they died. Each man had seemed, in his final hour, serene.

Detectives John and Mike watched the list grow like a ledger of failures. They called Bucky into the interview room, fluorescent light humming overhead, the air smelling of bleach and despair.

“Why are you killing them?” John demanded. His voice had the flatness of a man who’d been awake too many nights.

Bucky smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes. “I only do the Lord’s work.”

Mike pushed an envelope across the table and spread photographs — pale faces, closed eyes, too-smooth hands. He slammed his fist down as if the motion could force sense into the scene. “These were fathers. They had families. They had futures.”

“They wanted the peace I gave them,” Bucky said, soft as a benediction. “Deliverance is not the same as life.”

John’s hand slammed the door. “Guards!” he barked. Men in riot gear flooded the corridor and hauled Bucky away, cuffed and laughing like a man who had already seen the other side of the sentence.

They put him in solitary. The cell was a mouth with no echo, concrete and a single slit of light. Bucky only laughed softer there, as if the walls themselves were a congregation. The killings didn’t stop; they spread. News vans appeared at the prison gates. Anchors said massacre with a hollow voice; city lights swallowed the story and spat out outrage.

Warden Mayweather moved prisoners in a frantic shuffle to the West Wing, an attempt to build distance between the menace and the vulnerable. It felt, to the men who watched from their new cells, like someone sweeping ash under a rug and calling it safe. Outside, Bucky’s followers turned from prayer to protest. They filled the streets with placards and slogans, roadblocks that became flame-lit mobs. They chanted his name the way other people chant for kings. On camera, they were both enraged and benign — human faces animated by belief.

Then the legal system delivered a blow that felt absurd and bone-deep at once: Judge Ramirez ordered Bucky’s release on grounds of false imprisonment and defamation. The courtroom had the sterile clang of inevitability as lawyers argued semantics and precedents while the living waited for the dead. Detectives Mike and John begged, pleaded for the judge to see what they’d seen — to understand that a man could kill with a prayer. Ramirez’s gavel fell anyway.

Within a week Bucky walked out of Blackgate a free man. He stepped past reporters and cameras with the calm of someone who had not lost anything. He had been cleared, but nothing about him had changed; if anything his conviction had hardened into something colder.

He returned to Vaughan like iron returns to the forge: to shape, to burn, to remake. The town, small and tender, did not yet know what he had brought home. Bucky smiled for the cameras and muttered about persecution. He had not won by force — only by the cruelties of law and faith and human weakness — and that victory tasted like fuel.

He stood with his back to the rising sun, and for the first time in a long while he allowed himself not a preacher’s smile but a soldier’s. Vaughan would be his sermon now, and if it burned, he would tell himself, the flames would be deliverance.

He would burn it down if he had to.