the third pew, where I had left my ID and that belonging to Sam Whittle.
Although I had no use for Flashlight Guy’s wallet, my own would come in handy in the event that I was stopped by the highway patrol while behind the wheel of Hutch’s Mercedes and needed to produce a driver’s license. I found mine, shoved it in my hip pocket, and left Whittle’s wallet where it was.
As I returned to the center aisle, the lights came on.
In the sanctuary, just this side of the sacristy door, stood Chief Hoss Shackett.
FORTY-FOUR
CHIEF HOSS SHACKETT DID NOT LOOK WELL. IN the interrogation-room disturbance, he had suffered an abrasion on his forehead, one black eye, and a contusion that had darkened the left side of his face. His nose had once been as straight and proud as every sadistic fascist facilitator of terrorism would like his nose to be; now it resembled a mutant pink zucchini. His stiff brush-cut hair appeared to have wilted.
Someone, I assumed, must have found my wallet in the hymnal holder and figured that I would return for it.
Dispelling that notion, the chief said, “Lime. Harry Lime.” He did not seem to have discovered that my name was Odd Thomas.
Tucking the flashlight under my belt, I said, “Good evening, Chief. You’re looking well.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, except that before the question mark he inserted an epithet that was disgusting but not inventive.
“I was hoping,” I said, “that you had another Almond Joy. I’ve regretted not accepting your offer of half the one you ate.”
He took two steps away from the sacristy door, limping to favor his left leg, but then he halted, as if he didn’t want to get too close to me. We were about forty feet apart.
“What’s happened to the tugboat?” he asked.
“Is this a riddle, sir?”
“What have you done with them?”
“The? Them? Is it one or two tugboats?”
“This time, smartass, I am not going to play amnesia with you.”
“Do you have amnesia, sir?”
His right arm had been hanging slack at his side, and I had assumed that it had been injured in his disastrous encounter with Mr. Sinatra.
Now he raised the arm, revealing a fearsome gun in his hand. The firearm appeared to be so large that the weight of it might fracture his wrist, and it wobbled slightly in his grip. A silencer had been screwed to the end of the barrel.
I drew the small pistol that I had confiscated on the bridge of the tugboat. At that distance, I would have to have been a crack shot to hit him with such an intimate weapon.
“I need those nukes,” the chief said. “I need them, I need them right now.”
“I don’t want to be an enabler, sir. I’d rather get you into a twelve-step program to help you break this addiction.”
“Don’t push me, kid. I have nothing to lose.”
“Oh, Chief, don’t undersell yourself. You’ve still got a lot to lose. Your arrogance, your self-importance, your greed, that insane gleam of historic destiny in your eye-”
When he fired a round, the only sound issuing from his pistol was a whispery
Although I believed that he intended to wound or kill me, the round went well wide of its target, cracking into one of the pews six feet to my left. Perhaps the injuries to his face had blurred his vision.
If Hutch had thought it took chutzpah for me to try playing Harry Lime, he should have seen me attempting to convince the chief that I was Superman: “Put the gun down, Shackett. I don’t want to have to damage the church with my telekinetic power, but if you give me no other choice, I’ll take you out like I did earlier tonight.”
He was so impressed that he carefully aimed at me and squeezed off another shot.
I did not juke, in part because Superman would never do so; therefore, a feint would disprove my claim to telekinesis. Besides, the chief’s aim was so bad that I feared I might lean into the slug instead of away from it.
Another pew spat up a shower of splinters.
“I’m giving you one last chance to put down the gun,” I declared with the confidence of an invincible man in blue tights and red cape.
“I don’t know what happened in that room,” Hoss Shackett said, squinting at me as he tried to line up his third shot. “But if you had the power to do all that crazy stuff, you would have had the power to get yourself out of the leg iron. You didn’t, you had to wait for me to unlock it.”
An invincible man might have issued a gentle pitying laugh at such shallow reasoning, but I could not pull that off without a year or two of acting classes. Instead, I said, “Any child could see the flaw in your logic.”
His third round slammed into a center-aisle column behind me and six inches to my right.
As he aimed again, the chief said, “Any child, you think? So bring him to me, and I’ll kill the little bastard after I’m done with you.”
When he squeezed the trigger, no
I sprinted to the chancel railing, leaped across it, and ran onto the altar platform. From a distance of twelve or fifteen feet, I emptied the magazine of my girly gun into his abdomen and chest.
The pistol proved to be nicely balanced, with little recoil, and I prevented the muzzle from pulling up on the target. Maybe three or four shots missed, wide to one side or the other, but five or six tore into his torso; I saw them hit.
The impact of the slugs staggered Hoss Shackett back against the wall, and his body spasmed with each strike. Yet he did not go down.
He grunted in pain, but I was counting on a scream and a dying gurgle.
Exhibiting a riveting theatricality with which I would not have credited him, the chief ripped open the front of his uniform shirt to reveal the flattened slugs, like puddles of lead, adhering to his bulletproof Kevlar vest.
The six rounds had winded but not wounded him.
This was so unfair.
If I had known that he was wearing Kevlar, I would have aimed for his head. I had gone for his torso because it was a much bigger target. A head is an easy thing to miss, especially at a distance of fifteen feet, when the shooter is a person with an intense dislike of guns, in a situation of extreme stress, firing a Tinkertoy pistol designed for use in close quarters.
The chief had found another loaded magazine. He ejected the depleted one from his weapon.
I dropped my pathetic gun, retreated at a run, leaped across the chancel railing,
