And then there were the old dogs who are slow to change. Count me in. I wouldn't feel as if I were learning anything if I weren't in a library building toting around a stack of ungainly books. It felt cozy.
I had optimistically prepared to spend an afternoon discovering exactly what God was. When I reached the religion section, I realized that I'd underestimated by about three lifetimes.
After an hour of randomly walking about peering at titles, I had a stack of books under either arm that covered each major religion. I felt like a student cramming for finals. I suppose I was.
Hell, I was being paid for it.
The next several hours consisted of reading one definition after another, either totally contradictory or as clear as the La Brea tar pits. Apparently, God is self-surpassing, an unmoved mover, a standard of reality, the supreme reality, the sole reality, temporal, eternal, infinite, finite, infinite-finite, an object of direct experience (that would be just my luck), one with man, apart from man, apart from
, part of everything, everything. The beginning, the beginingless...
By closing time, my head pounded as if it had been borrowed for a performance of the Anvil Chorus. I left the library knowing less than ever. Before, at least, I'd had some idea of God. He was this hairy thunderer that some people thought was necessary to keep them from bumping into telephone poles. I'd gotten along quite well without Him for fifty-two years. Now I suddenly had to know who He was and the only image I could conjure up was that of some blob of something out somewhere doing somesuch somehow.
Not much to work with. This contract had more false leads than a hooker's smile.
A cold wind from the west blew down Fifth Street, kicking up rubbish and dust. I kept my head down and watched the garbage eddy around my feet with each step.
Kill God.
The idea seemed even more absurd now, away from the calm confidence of Zacharias. Maybe I had been right all along, and this was some sort of plot. Entrapment. Psych warfare. Revenge.
It was all too complicated, though. In my profession, death moved at the speed of a roadster, a bullet, a beam of laser light. No assassin ever received the kindness of an elaborate death scheme, no matter how artistically he conducted his own kills.
No. I knew at the time what I was agreeing to. I hadn't merely sold my soul. Souls he handled like petty cash. I had contracted for the Supreme Patricide.
I should have asked for a thousand a day.
Kill God? What a joke. Do I make it look like an accident? Natural causes? Or just a bullet in His third eye?
I needed a professional opinion.
The wind died down as I walked over the Fourth Street Bridge, to be replaced by a thin autumnal fog. The overhead lamps glowed with the light of another age. My feet scuffed concrete, heels tapping against cracks, soles grinding over rubble. In the distance, traffic roared along the Hollywood Freeway. Only a whisper of engines reached me through the fog. A thin crescent moon rose in the east. It would be morning soon.
At the Fourth Street onramp to the southbound Hollywood Freeway stood the Church of St. Herman of Alaska. Actually, it was a run-down slum hotel that a priest friend of mine had converted into a mission. He usually kept the front door unlocked, so I let myself in.
Father Joey Moreno leaned forward in one of the church's two pews. His thick right hand grasped a bottle of Chianti that he snorted down lovingly. A pink stain colored most of his white collar.
'Hey, Joey. Too much sacrament.'
He belched, twisting around to see me. His rust-hued locks blended into his beard to frame his dark face in a soft triangle of frizzy hair.
'Dell! How goes? Come to convert? Or converse?'
I smiled and sat next to him. 'I'm looking for God, Joey.'
The bottle slid from his fingers into the next pew. He twisted around. 'Won't find Him, Dell. Been looking for Him for years.'
He peered down at the floor, then stamped his foot. 'God's a cockroach, hombre. Split Himself into myriad parts to
