and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Angel read along silently from the form as the priest droned the prayer, and then she said “Amen,” as it directed the penitent to respond. She raised the pistol slowly, bringing the bulbous makeshift silencer in line with the small rectangular screen over the kneeling rest.
“There’s one more thing,” Angel said.
“What?” Father Moros asked.
“This is your lucky day,” Angel said. “I think you’re going to see God.”
“I don’t quite understand. .,” Father Moros said.
The texture of light in the screen shifted slightly, and Angel placed the end of the green bottle dead center in the grille and extended her arm. “Tell me, Father Moros, why did you have to leave the parish in Albuquerque in such a hurry?”
“Wait a minute. .” Moros tensed, combative.
“I thought you guys went in for little boys. But your thing is teenage girls, huh?” Angel said.
For a moment Moros was stunned. Where did this come from? How? Then he gritted his teeth to contain the welling anger, raised his fists, and shouted at the screen. “Lies, all lies. Not even lies; more like stupid gossip. .”
Angel jerked the trigger twice in rapid succession, the sound of the hammer falling on the chamber louder than the muted
Angel picked up the two ejected shell casings off the carpet, then exited the private confession door and entered the face-to-face confession door. The priest had pitched back off his chair, knocked over a lamp, and lay on his side on the floor. Angel was not even breathing heavily. She did notice that the priest had sleek black hair that was combed back with great care. Perhaps he was vain. Whatever. Hit in the right cheek and throat, he was still breathing. She was a little disappointed that his eyes were clamped shut. One of the things she relished in the memory of Ronald Dolman’s last seconds was the fear in his eyes. Angel quickly shot him again in the temple, and he shuddered and the breathing stopped. The small entry wounds leaked threads of blood. The small.22-caliber bullet did not exit the skull. Tidy. Self-contained.
Efficiently, Angel retrieved the tiny spent cartridge casing and stripped off the wig, shoes, gloves, jacket, sweatsuit, and the bulky body stocking.
Her disguise hid skimpy shorts, a sports top, lean runner’s legs, and a flat tummy. Angel set the awkward stage shoes aside and pulled a pair of Nikes from the shopping bag, pulled them on, and laced them tight.
The shopping bag contained a backpack. Promptly, she stuffed the pack with the sunglasses, the shopping bag, the clothes, padding, the wig, the paper bag containing the pistol and the plastic bottle silencer, which was now ragged with three holes. She removed a damp washcloth from a Ziploc bag and wiped off the cosmetics and lipstick, carefully replaced the cloth, closed the plastic bag, and dropped it in the pack.
Then, ritually, she left the signature.
Okay. Take one last quick look around. Angel cocked her head. There was this narrow stained-glass window over the askew confessor’s chair. Except it wasn’t real stained glass. It was Contact paper, like from Menard’s.
“Fake,” Angel said as she slipped on the pack.
Then she ducked from the confession booth and paused in the hallway to make sure she was alone in the church. No one in sight. Not a sound. Just a faint blur of gunpowder smeared in the air.
Like incense.
She walked under the blind plaster eyes of Jesus and Mary, went down the hallway on the left side of the altar, and exited through the back door. The walls of the church and the rectory shielded her from the street. She crossed the backyard patio and disappeared down a brushy knob and came out on a gravel road. It only took a few minutes to trot through the dusty North End streets. Soon the Nikes thudded on city pavement.
Angel opened up her stride.
A jogger gliding in Patagonia shorts and top, she slipped anonymously past the whispering sprinklers on the chemically enhanced emerald lawns with their little signs: Warning-Unsafe for Children and Pets. She ran past the gleaming SUVs parked in the broad driveways and the meticulously painted gingerbread trim of the old North Hill homes.
Chapter Two
Now who the hell was calling before five in the morning?
Groggy, Broker grabbed the ringing phone beside the bed, brought it to his ear, and mumbled, “What?”
“Broker.” The brusque male voice in the phone receiver sounded like a cop’s voice. A cop who’d been up all night. A cop Broker knew.
“John? That you?” Broker said.
“Yeah. C’mon, wake up.”
Broker blinked, looked around, and tried to focus his eyes. All he saw was black, as if he were suspended in warm ink. He shook himself and sat up. When you got a call in the dark at his age, it meant:
“Somebody’s dead,” he said as the careful knitting around his heart drew tight.
“Yeah, somebody’s dead,” John Eisenhower said. “Relax, it’s nobody we know.”
Broker sat up straighter. “So what. .?”
John talked over him. “Remember all those times I saved your life?”
“Bullshit, you never saved my life,” Broker protested.
“Okay, what about those times I saved your job when we were in St. Paul together?”
John had a point there; they’d come up together in the St. Paul department, and more than once he’d run interference when Broker had tangled with the bureaucrats. “Okay, okay. What’s up?” Broker yawned.
“Is your license current?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I need a big favor,” John said.
“When?”
“Starting at about daylight,” John said.
“Great.” Broker knuckled the sleep from his eyes. “You know where I’m at?”
“Guy like you comes into my county, I make it my business to know where you’re at. That’s why I’m the sheriff.”
Phil Broker was keeping to the back roads this summer. He had to figure a few things out. That said, Milton Dane’s river house was still a nice place to start the day, even after an early wake-up call from the Washington County sheriff.
Even when you’re estranged from your wife.
Even-count ’em and weep-on your forty-eighth birthday.
Broker sat up on Milt’s king-size bed, so his sweat dribbled down his bare chest and pooled in his belly button. Real smart. He had not turned on the air-conditioning, preferring to sleep with the windows open. He’d been hoping for a breeze off the river. There was no breeze. Just the ceiling fans stirring the humidity in slow circles.
Now it wasn’t even dawn yet, and the relative humidity had to be way over seventy. Yesterday the humidity had topped eighty, which was tropical.
Broker sat for a while and stared out banks of tall, east-facing windows as the darkness ebbed away, and, slowly, the St. Croix River came into focus, motionless as a painted floor. Gray mist draped the bluffs on the
