The priest nodded. In a low whisper he said, “Sometimes just a voice, the word of God, can penetrate a sleeping man’s soul. The power of prayer aids recovery.”
The veiled, black eyes held on Gleason. The deputy felt tension and embarrassment at the same time. There was something about this priest that didn’t seem right-but he was a man of God, and who was Gleason to judge him?
“Father, I’m a firm believer in prayer for healing the sick.”
“Bless you, my son.”
“Thank you, Father.” Deputy Gleason stepped aside. “You can go on in.”
“Thank you. Please open the door. I hurt my wrist playing tennis.”
FIFTEEN
Sam Spelling dreamed in shades of red, pink, yellow, and purple, like film processed in morphine and projected through stained glass onto the front of his brain. He saw himself in waders fishing a Montana stream, the cool air traveling deep into his lungs. He pulled a bull trout from the water, the iridescent colors bright and alive. Spelling removed the hook and lowered the fish back into the clear stream.
He smiled and slowly opened his eyes. The morphine dripped from the IVs into Spelling’s bloodstream, his vision was like looking though opaque glass, smoky, clouded.
A man dressed in black stood next to Spelling’s bed.
“Father?” he asked. “Is that you, Father John?” Spelling smiled. “You said you’d come back.” He coughed. His chest pounded, his vision growing watery.
“Yes, it’s me. Good to see you again, Sam.”
The voice.
Even through the fog of drugs, Spelling could tell the voice didn’t come from Father Callahan.
Spelling opened his eyes as wide as he could. Focus. The man wore a priest collar, but the face. He couldn’t see the face clearly. Vision blurred from drugs. But the man’s voice was there. He remembered where he’d heard it. “It’s you!”
“Who else?” The man stepped closer and leaned over the bed.
“Get away from me! Guard!” Spelling’s lungs were too weak to scream. He could only whisper. “Why are you here?”
“I think you know why. You are the reason I’m here. You decided to talk after all these years, eh? I’m so disappointed. I compensated you. We had a nice little agreement. Then, after you blew all the money, wound up back in prison, I get a note from you. Clever how you got your letter mailed out of prison without raising eyebrows. Your coding was exceptional-suggesting that I visit your mother’s home to exchange Christmas gifts. Impressive. After I read it, though, I knew you were about to cause me a lot of trouble, and I’d never be safe with you alive because you violated our agreement. Too bad the rifle bullet didn’t take out your heart. I aimed for it.”
Spelling wanted to crawl out of bed. “It was you! You shot me?”
“Even you find it hard to believe. That’s good. Police will never figure it out. When the marshals delivered you to the courthouse to testify in a drug trial, it gave me the perfect opportunity to take you out. No one, not even you, would have suspected it was tied to a murder years before. Timing is almost everything in life…and death. You’ve got a really big mouth that must be sealed…forever.”
Spelling looked to his left and then to his right, his eyes searching. Where’s the emergency button? “Get away from me!” Spelling’s heart hammered in his chest, the pain crushed him in a vice, the taste of metal erupting from his stomach like butane.
“You’ve become quite a liability, Sammy. Having a little heart palpitations, are we? Perhaps it’s time for our bedside prayer.”
“No!”
“You can say a nice prayer in the time it’ll take you to die. And you should begin right now. Shhhh, it’s painless. You will go to sleep. This is how I seal big mouths.”
Sam Spelling struggled as the man placed a wide hand over his mouth and pinched his nose. His lungs burned. He could hear the heart monitor beeping. Faster. Where were they? Somebody! The single handcuff restrained his free arm. He struggled and felt stitches rip in his chest, the heat of his blood flowing across his stomach like warm soup. He could see the digital white light from the monitor reflecting off the killer’s wide eyes- eyes the blackness of coal. He could see his own heartbeat beginning to slow, the reflection fading from the eyes like a flashlight dimming. His mind flashed back to the evil in the eyes he saw when he was dying in the emergency room. Now he saw the bull trout’s eyes, its mouth gasping for air, its body thrusting. He held the trout under the stream, a calmness returning to the fish. Then he released it and watched the trout swim into the cool translucence.
Spelling smiled. The little sparrow with the lost foot had retuned to the windowsill. Spelling saw himself open the window. He reached down and cupped the tiny bird in his hand. It was as light as a cracker and its heart raced. “ You’re okay, little bird. You’ve got wings. I do, too.”
Sam Spelling jumped from the windowsill, soaring over the parking lot, flapping his wings, feeling the heat of the morning sunrise as he flew toward the light.
SIXTEEN
Father John Callahan stood in the sanctuary of St. Francis Church and lit seven candles. Lightning, from a storm blowing off the Atlantic coast, illuminated the sanctuary’s massive stained-glass windows. The priest stepped toward a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, made the sign of the cross, and whispered a prayer. He reached inside his coat pocket and retrieved the letter. He wanted to read Sam Spelling’s letter one more time before Sean O’Brien arrived.
As he finished reading, Callahan stood next to the pulpit and folded the letter once in the center of the paper. He opened the large Bible that sat on the podium, and he carefully placed the letter in the first chapter of Revelation, slowly closing the Bible.
Lightning struck close to the church, the sound of thunder exploding and rumbling like echoes bouncing off canyon walls in the night. The lights in the church flickered and faded out. Father Callahan found a lighter, lit a candle, and picked up the church phone. No dial tone. He lit more candles. He plugged his cell phone in the charger just as he heard a noise. He looked up to see the back door to the sanctuary open, the wind blowing rain into the dark alcove.
“Thought I locked that,” he said, walking toward the rear of the church to close the door, the chill of wind and the smell of rain meeting him.
Lightning popped and the wind blew rainwater into the hall. Father Callahan glanced in the direction of the alcove to see a man step out from the shadows, the burning candles tossing a soft light on the left side of his face.
“Who enters the house of our Lord?” Father Callahan asked.
The man was silent.
Father Callahan assumed the bearded stranger, who wore a hat pulled down low, was homeless, someone needing a dry place until the storm passed. He had always extended a helping hand to the homeless. But as he walked toward the new arrival, he could tell the man was not a homeless person.
He was a priest.
“Welcome,” Father Callahan said. “Glad you could duck out of the rain on a night like this. Just took me ol’ nerves back a notch. Most folks come in the front door.”
The man said nothing.
Sean O’Brien looked at the GPS navigation map on the screen in his Jeep. He signaled, pulled off the highway,
