'I'm going to have to shave some hair off.'
'Go ahead,' I said. 'I was getting tired of the two-tone effect anyway. Take it all off.'
'I'm not a barber.' He rummaged in a drawer to find a razor. 'Your preacher friend was looking for you a while ago. Moreno. He looked awful.'
'Awful drunk?'
'Worse,' he said. 'Sober as a judge on election day.'
I snorted. He'd copped that line from me.
'I told him you might be around somewhere, so he went up to wait for you.'
That gave me a little bit of the chill I've been feeling only too often lately. Joey had been worried enough on the phone when he said he'd wait for me at the church. Could all this psychic pyrotechnics have reached him, too? Why else would he walk all the way over to my office at night?
must have him scared.
I waited patiently for La Vecque to disinfect the wounds and lay down a bunch of tape sutures. He reached for a roll of gauze.
'That's good enough,' I said, standing up. 'I'm going to check in on the padre.' I turned to Ann. 'I'll rustle up something for the kid to wear. Wait for me here.'
I picked up my gun and-paper robe fluttering-rushed out of the good doctor's office and hit the stairs like an aging greyhound after the iron rabbit. The concrete steps stung my bare feet with each bound. A few gasping strides brought me to my floor. I had energy that seemed to come strictly from panic. Events were closing in around me. Too much was happening at once.
I eased the stairway door open to listen.
Silence. As complete as snowflakes on cotton.
I held the automatic up and crept toward the office. My feet appreciated the carpeting.
The door stood slightly ajar, permitting a wedge of light to spread across the hall and climb up the side of the far wall.
I stood beside the doorway to hear the kind of total silence that an inhabited room cannot maintain. The room smelled of burnt gunpowder.
I kicked the door inward and dropped to one knee, scanning the room with eye and gat. Nothing moved.
Not even the body on my waiting-room couch.
11
Priest
Father Joey Moreno sat on the couch staring off into space. The bullet hole rested right between his eyes, just above the bridge of his nose. He looked surprised by it. They always do.
Some blood had trickled down the end of his nose to drip on the crotch of his black pants. It had dried. His face matched the color of his preacher's collar.
I didn't say anything, just looked around the room for clues. Joey hadn't left a dying clue-that's for the movies. This kill had been clean, quick, and professional. The torpedo had picked up the cartridge, or perhaps used a revolver.
Joey didn't care. He just stared in my general direction-two glazed eyes and a third dark, bloody one. The entire run of events had obviously alarmed him immensely.
Something smelled in the air, beyond the scent of cordite. I tried to identify it while I searched Joey's corpse. His bearish body resisted me no more than if it had been a couple of sacks of cement.
A bulge in his left rear pocket yielded a swollen wallet. I retrieved it and let Joey slump back while I perused it.
The cheap brown cowhide contained the usual accumulation of ID, credit cards-in the Church's name-and business cards of practically every other church in the area. Clannish sorts, I thought. I hardly ever kept tabs on my own colleagues.
Everything in the wallet suffered from varying degrees of wear. Most of the cards had smears of ink on them from the other cards.
