Phantom Fire

On a cold December morning in 2005 the actor John Coltrane walked into Bishop Francis Xavier Healey’s office with the express purpose of trampling on everything the Bishop held dear. Of course, his first thought had been to kill him. But that seemed empty, too easy after all Healey had done. What good does it do to inflict pain on the dead? You might as well kick a shoe across the room because it no longer fits. The dead are as impervious to a kick as the old shoe. No, true revenge can only be exacted on conscious beings. Cochran knew that it is only when someone loses everything and still has the power to feel that is revenge ever truly complete.John Coltrane was really two people, the world famous Academy Award and Tony winning actor, and Jack Cochran, the poor son of Irish immigrant parents born and raised in the little steel town of Duquesne that huddled next to the Monongahela River ten miles from Pittsburgh.Jack Cochran Senior, like so many of his generation, was a World War Two Veteran. He was also a drunk and violent man. One horrific night in 1956, nine-year-old Jack Cochran Junior lost his father. Cochran Senior, in an alcohol fueled rage, tried to kill his wife. The night ended with Senior lying dead on the floor, his throat opened by his namesake.Young Jack Cochran grew up with many gifts, among them good looks, brains, and athletic ability. He became a football star and hometown hero. He went to school at the University of Alabama and played quarterback in the Sugar Bowl. After college he joined the Air Force and became an elite fighter pilot. He flew numerous missions in Vietnam where he won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Star. After his Air Force tour he fell into acting after he brought the house down at an amateur karaoke singing contest at a plush New York nightclub. Broadway and Hollywood soon called and by his early thirties Jack Cochran, now John Coltrane, was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. To outsiders, he made it all look so easy.Yet here was on the last day of his life, full of hatred, seeking to destroy a Roman Catholic holy man. As Jack Cochran confesses his sins to the Bishop, in both real time and in flash backs to earlier events, the reasons for the conflict between Cochran and Healey becomes apparent. The reader gets a ringside seat to the conflicts that fueled their hatred, among them rape, and kidnapping. We also get an insiders view of the Vatican Bank, The Irish Republican Army, the Vietnam air war, and the corruption of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy all told in terms so real, and sometimes violently, that the reader finally comes to understand how very difficult it was for Cochran’s after all..