Ten Plagues

Keren began checking corners and behind rubbish.

“Your time is up,” the voice sang.

Paul unmuted the phone. “No, Pravus, they’ve agreed. They’re going to let your people go, just as you asked.”

Keren glanced over at him with her brow furrowed. Paul shrugged helplessly.

Keren went on with her search. Paul walked the edges of the basement, checking every socket, every outlet.

“No, Reverend, scum like that never learn. They never change.”

Keren pulled the electric wires out of the jugs, then she looked behind a rusted-out furnace and a pile of toppled boxes and gasped with shock.

She hissed at Paul, “Keep him talking; there’s another socket behind this junk. I’ve disconnected it from the bomb, but I’ve got to unplug the cord. Even a spark could set this whole place off.”

Paul followed her to the dusky corner. All the while he kept talking, trying to buy her the time she needed as she scrambled over the debris. “They believed you, Pravus, and they fear you. I told them your people have been enslaved long enough. Come in here, Pravus, come and see how you’ve humbled them. Your message reached Pharaoh, just as Moses’ message did. It worked.

They’re going to let your people go.”

Keren slipped out of sight. Paul had to clench his jaw to keep from yelling at her to get out—save herself and let the building blow. Instead, he stood and listened to Pravus like a useless bystander.

“Do you think I’m a fool, Reverend? I don’t like to be treated as if I’m a fool.”

Paul leaned back and saw Keren wrestling with the plugs. The crackle of sand crumbling off the cement walls told Paul just how quickly and utterly this place would collapse if Keren didn’t get that connection broken in time.

“The trash in that house will die. LaToya will die. This time you will die along with them.”

Pravus hung up.

Keren pulled out the last stubborn plug. A snapping erupted from every outlet in the basement. But no sparks. Paul held his breath. The fumes didn’t ignite.

“He did it. That murderous lunatic pushed the button,” Paul said bitterly.

“We knew he would.” Keren sagged against the wall. “You held him off for long enough.”

Paul lifted the phone and quickly punched in the number he’d seen on his LCD screen. He was almost surprised when Pravus answered.

“What happened?” Pravus demanded. “What have you done?”

Keren quickly pulled out her phone and set it to record. Then she carefully picked her way out of the corner she’d gotten into.

Paul wanted to scream at Pravus, threaten him with lightning bolts and the wrath of God. He held a tight rein on his temper because of LaToya. “The bomb didn’t go off. Don’t you see, Pravus? God knew these people weren’t ready to die. It is God’s to give life and death.”

Keren hurried over to him, listening intently on her phone.

“I do the will of a greater God than yours,” Pravus shouted.

“There is no greater God than mine, Pravus. There is no other God than mine. And this destruction is not His will. He still has plans for these people. When your bomb didn’t go off, it was God telling you to stop. He was telling you to let LaToya go without further harm. You must accept God’s will.”

O’Shea appeared at the top of the staircase, and two uniformed officers were right behind him.

Stepping away from Paul, Keren spoke quietly to O’Shea. “Pravus is on the phone, be quiet. This basement is full of gas fumes. It’s a ticking bomb. If one of the crackheads so much as drops his pipe and strikes a spark, the whole place could still blow.”

O’Shea turned to give murmured instructions to the police gathering behind him.

“I’m doing His will! I’m trying to drive the evil out of the world!”

Paul felt sick at the violent fury in Pravus’s voice and what it meant for LaToya. God, please, tell me what to do.

All he felt was his own fury. The power of it was too strong to let the voice of God in. He continued to try to soothe a madman. “I’m the one you’re angry at, Pravus. Aren’t I the one who hurt you?”

“Yes! Yes, you hurt me,” Pravus screamed. “But you were such a fool. I saw them, the dancer and her mother. But you never knew.”

“Yes, I knew. I knew what you did to them.” Paul fumbled around, trying to make sense of Pravus’s ranting.

Laughter crackled through the phone line, the rapid shift from fury to humor to pure madness. “No, you never knew. No one did. From the first, I was too smart for this world.”

“Let LaToya go. Prove you’re strong. If you’re angry at me, come for me and leave her out of it.”

“I’ll come for you when it’s the plague of the firstborn. That’s your time. Until then, I’ll prove my strength one plague at a time.” Pravus’s voice rose until it was a scream.

“If LaToya dies, you’ll never prove it to me.”

“I’ll prove it! I’ll prove it for all the world to see.” A hollow dick, and Pravus was gone. And LaToya was alone with a lunatic.

CHAPTER NINE

Paul hit the REDIAL button, but this time there was no answer on the other end.

“We’ve got to get back to the files,” O’Shea said as soon as Paul gave up on his phone.

“Whatever this is about is rooted in your work as a policeman.” Keren took Paul’s arm and urged him toward the stairs. “He made another reference to your past as a cop. Somewhere you brushed up against a serial killer who was just getting started. You must have stopped him somehow but not nailed him for what he really did.”

Paul nodded. He flipped open the phone again and reached for the REDIAL button. Keren wrestled the phone away from him. “Not now, Paul. Let him cool off a little.”

“He killed Juanita after his last call to me,” he said in a voice so weak and frightened Keren wouldn’t have recognized it as his if he hadn’t been standing right in front of her.

Keren glanced up at O’Shea. She saw her partner’s face twist into a look of compassion. O’Shea shook his head and left to finish rousting the people from the house.

“No, Paul.” Keren grabbed Paul’s arm. “That’s not right. The ME said Juanita was killed hours after the explosion. And if he killed her at that fountain—or even just before he took her there—we have a chance of anticipating where he’ll go. We have to keep pushing.” She shook him, hoping to shake some courage into him. “We go on the assumption we have time to save her.”

“But we didn’t thwart his explosion before. You heard him, he was so furious he was raving. He’s killing her right now.” Paul faltered, and Keren worried that he might collapse. “I can’t get to her. She trusted me, maybe the first person she’s ever trusted in her life, and now she’s dying because of it.”

Keren knew she ought to yell at him, goad him, and harass him to bring out the cop in him. When he was being his old, logical self he was more useful; unfortunately, she couldn’t stand him when he acted that way. She was drawn to the gentle pastor, but he felt everything so deeply he couldn’t function. Not in the face of this insanity.

She’d seen the pictures of LaToya on the wall in her apartment, and she’d seen pictures of her from old arrest records. The change in the young woman was enough to prove to anyone there was a God. It was possible that a sweet, redeemed woman was dying horribly right this moment, and Keren couldn’t play tough with Paul right now, even if it might help solve the case.

So she hugged him instead.

In the midst of the gas fumes and dinginess and thwarted destruction, he grabbed her and clung until she couldn’t draw a breath. She hung on, knowing she was only feeling a fraction of his despair.