They came home with medals, scars, and a ledger full of sins the Church doesn’t have enough candles to cover. The Corps spit them out, patched but not whole, and they drifted together the way broken men do — pulled by gravity, guilt, and the need to keep something innocent alive in a world that keeps trying to crush it.
So they opened a detective agency. Twelve men in all — every one a veteran, every one carrying ghosts. And at the center of it stands Padre McCaffery, the wounded priest who once choked out four Japanese soldiers to save his dying Marines. The head wound changed him — made him stranger, quieter, more dangerous — but it didn’t dim the fire in his chest. If anything, it burns hotter.
He preaches on Sundays, drinks on Fridays, and kills when he has to. He calls it protecting his flock.
Mac, Wojo, and Burke sit in the pews like penitents who know damn well they’ll be back next week with fresh sins. They work cases no one else wants — the kind that bleed, the kind that stink, the kind that end with a body on the floor and a prayer whispered over it.
They kill now the same way they killed in the jungle — fast, clean, without hesitation — but only for the innocent. Only for the ones who can’t fight back. Only because someone has to.
There aren’t enough hours in a day to ask forgiveness for the things they’ve done. But deep down, in the quiet places they never talk about, they believe they’re working for God.
And maybe they are. Because in a city full of sin, corruption, and midnight alleys, sometimes the only angels you get are the ones with blood on their hands.
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