Steven laughed, looking at his friend.
“Fucking terrified.”
That made Remy laugh, too, and shake his head.
“I wish there was something I could say or do to take away your fear, but . . .” Remy stopped, considering his words. “But it doesn’t change the fact that those threats are out there, and now with what happened in Back Bay . . .”
“You were involved with that,” Steven stated. “How did I fucking know you were involved with that?”
“You are a police detective,” Remy said. He leaned forward in his chair and reached for the bottle.
“I was out there,” Steven suddenly stated.
“Where?” Remy asked as he poured more scotch over the dwindling ice in his glass.
“The streets around where that business was happening.”
Remy sat back. “Did you see . . .”
“More shit that I wish I could unsee,” he said.
“Why would you go anywhere near something like that if you knew . . .”
“I saw it on TV and just about shit myself,” Steven explained. “I knew it—as soon as that special news report started, I knew that it must’ve had something to do with the crazy shit that you’d gotten me involved with.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you would go out into it,” Remy said. “Especially after what you’d gone through before. I don’t get it.”
“I was afraid,” Steven said.
“Yeah, I get that, but it doesn’t tell me why—”
“The fear was eating me alive,” he interrupted. “It was all I knew. . . . I woke up with it. I had lunch with it. . . . It was with me constantly, and it liked to remind me that it was the fucking boss.”
Steven took a big long drink, almost draining his glass.
“And when I saw that business on the television I wanted to pull the curtains and hide myself away. . . . That was what the fear was telling me to do.”
Remy continued to listen, urging him on with a glance.
“But I didn’t want to listen anymore,” Steven continued. “I didn’t want to hide anymore.”
“So you went out there, out onto the streets to confront your fears? Is that what you did?”
Steven chuckled, taking another cigarette from his pack.
“Sounds pretty fucking stupid doesn’t it?” he said, starting to laugh harder.
Remy laughed, too. “It really does.”
“But that’s what I did. I put my gun in my pocket, drove as far as I could, and walked as close as I was able.”
“And did you face your fears?” Remy asked.
“I don’t know what I fucking faced,” Steven said. “It was pretty horrible . . . but I faced it, and I lived to tell about it.”
Remy raised what was left in his glass to him in a toast.
Steven lifted his empty glass in response.
Remy finished off his drink, thinking of how he was going to word his next question.
“So what now?” he asked. He decided to have something more to drink. “Are you planning on walking the mean streets looking for evil to vanquish?”
Steven smiled. “Nothing so dramatic,” he said. “I’m back at work, doing my thing, but I see things differently now.”
“How so?”
“I know what’s really out there now, waiting in the shadows, as do a lot of people, I think, since what happened at the Hermes Building.”
“They were blind, but now they see,” Remy said grimly.
“Yeah, but I at least understand what I’m seeing,” the homicide detective said.
“So, you’re good?” Remy asked. “You’re dealing with this okay?”
“As good as can be expected,” Steven said in all truthfulness. “Am I still afraid of what could be waiting for me around the next corner? You bet your ass I am, but I’ll be damned if I let the fear win.”
They again raised their glasses in a toast, both of them drinking at the same time.
“Marlowe wasn’t the only one who missed you,” Remy said casually.
“You just missed the free booze,” Steven said with a knowing nod.
“Am I that transparent?” Remy asked.
“I was blind but now I see,” he said, throwing Remy’s quote back at him. Steven was smiling and finishing his latest cigarette when . . .
“Ah!” he said, turning in his chair toward his friend.
“‘Ah’?” Remy asked. “‘Ah’ what?”
“Malatesta,” Steven said, snapping his fingers. “The guy from the Vatican . . . What was that all about?”
“Guy from the Vatican?” Remy asked. “What guy from the Vatican?”
A sick feeling swirled with the alcohol that had pooled in his belly.
“His name was Malatesta,” Steven explained. “He was waiting for me outside my apartment right after the business in Back Bay.”
“What did he want?” Remy asked cautiously.
Steven shrugged. “He wanted to know what I could tell him about you.”
“And you told him . . .”
“Everything,” Steven said, his face suddenly very serious.
Remy wasn’t quite sure how to react when his friend caved.
“I’m just fucking with you,” the detective said. “I told him that I knew you were a Boston PI, and that we’d crossed paths a few times in our chosen professions, but that was about it.”
“Did he ask you anything else?”
Steven shook his head. “He verified your office address, thanked me, and left. I figured he was on his way over to talk to you.”
“No, never saw him,” Remy said, suddenly slightly concerned, and very curious.
“I wonder what it’s all about,” Steven pondered.
“I haven’t a clue,” Remy answered.
“The Pope doesn’t know that you’re . . .” Steven made flapping movements with his hands.
It was a tricky question, and one that Remy wasn’t sure he wanted to answer in detail at the moment, so he decided to keep it simple. “No. No, he doesn’t.”
But there had been other popes in his lifetime upon this planet, and one in particular a very long time ago.
The angel Remiel, wearing the guise of a man, sat upon the edge of the child’s cot, holding her hand.
The plague was about to claim her life, as it had her father, mother, older brother, and sister.
And he did not wish her to pass from life alone.
The child was burning with fever; the fingernails on the tiny hand that he held were black with gangrene. She thrashed on the straw-filled mattress, and he leaned in close to whisper words of comfort and ease her into the arms of death.
“Fight it no longer, sweet one,” Remiel whispered into the tiny ear inflamed with fever. “Let the sickness that has already taken your family take you, and you will no longer be alone.”
She was looking up at him now, eyes red and bleary with the intensity of the warmth radiating from her small body, mouth moving as she struggled to speak.
The angel listened intently, trying to understand. Squeezing her hand in his, he brought it to his mouth and
