years younger than her, lucky woman.’ She smiled sadly.
The name meant nothing to me, but I was sure that Sebastian and his people would already be working on locating the man who bore it.
Gordy Lister watched as his brother’s coffin disappeared through the beige curtain. There had been three living people to send him off-apart from Gordy, a balding funeral director in a too-tight black suit, and a young Hispanic woman with a spectacular chest. Gordy didn’t know what Hispanics normally wore to funerals, but he was pretty sure tight gold tops with sequins and thigh-hugging shorts weren’t favored. Not that he was complaining. If she was one of Mikey’s friends, then his brother had more going for him than he’d thought. Gordy had chosen the closing music himself. Mikey had always had a thing for underdressed female singers, so Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ it was. It was only as the song came to an end that he remembered the video that had accompanied it. The male lover had ended up burned to death. Which was appropriate for a cremation, but in even worse taste than the Star Reporter would have dared try.
Outside, the funeral director gave him a sharp-toothed smile and said he hoped he could be of service again in the future. Gordy wiped his brow and watched the asshole head for his corpse-mobile. This was the last time a Lister would be in Florida. It was hot, sultry and full of wrinkled people wearing not enough over their shrunken limbs.
‘You Mikey’s friend?’ the bronze looker asked, blowing smoke past his left ear.
‘Brother. You?’
‘Lucky,’ she said, extending her hand.
He stared at her. ‘Lucky I’m his brother?’
‘No, my name is Lucky,’ she said, with a wide smile. ‘Lucky Sanchez.’
‘Oh, right. So, you a friend of Mikey’s?’
‘Sure.’ The woman tossed her cigarette. ‘Terrible thing he die.’
‘Yeah.’ Gordy moved closer to her. ‘Say, you didn’t happen to be around when he…when he was hit by that car?’
Lucky suddenly looked shifty. ‘No, no. But I talk to his neighbor next day.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Gordy led her under the shade of a palm tree. ‘What they say?’
‘Saw pickup truck come very fast, drive into Mikey.’
‘See, that’s strange. The police told me there were no witnesses.’
Lucky raised her smooth shoulders. ‘People no talk to police.’ She paused. ‘You pay me for telling this?’
Gordy studied her. He was interested, and not just in her bod, but he wasn’t going to show it. ‘Nah, Mikey should never have been out in the road. It was his own fault.’
The woman glared at him. ‘How you say that about your brother? He need fresh air like anyone else.’
‘Fresh air? It’s winter and it’s like a sweat bath down here.’
Lucky Sanchez looked at him suggestively. ‘I tell you more, you pay?’
‘What more is there?’
‘Hundred, okay?’
He had a stab at looking reluctant.
‘Hundred and blow job?’
Now you’re talking, he thought. He handed her the C-note and led her to the rental Taurus parked by the crematorium wall.
‘Driver was woman,’ Lucky said, as she tugged down her top. ‘Short, blond hair.’
Gordy Lister grabbed hold of her breasts as she went down on him, unsure whether the lead or her mouth was giving him greater pleasure.
Quincy Jerome was sitting at the table with the rest of the guys, but his mind was far away. He hadn’t the first idea how to track down this Fred Warren, so he left it to the law enforcement professionals and Matt, who seemed to be full of ideas. He was replaying what had happened over the last twenty-four hours. Never mind his first trip in a Learjet-he’d almost forgotten that.
He’d seen plenty of dead bodies in Iraq, but none of them was as creepy as the human jawbone in the barn house. The local detectives were trying to locate the rest of the body, but there was nothing in the immediate vicinity. Then there was the explosion at the house and the total destruction of everything inside. The crazy old woman had set it off with some kind of remote timer before slipping away. He had a bad feeling about what else had been in the bag she took with her-the knife she’d left behind was wicked-looking enough. And then there was Matt playing interrogator and pulling it off. The guy had hidden depths, even if he had the advantage of knowing the blonde woman from before.
But all that was nothing as compared with the upturned crosses in the barn house. They had really bothered the shit out of him and he was struggling to understand why. After all, he was Jewish, his mother belonging to a tiny group of Somalis who had ended up in Mobile. His father had been a drifter, a bluesman who showed up every few months to yell at them and drink away his meager earnings from the road. He’d been a Southern Baptist and he wasn’t marrying no Jew woman, not that his mother wanted a ring. She was the mystical type and she’d instilled in her son a high regard for things with symbolic value. He wasn’t the kind of Jew that went to synagogue often, but he stood up for his religion when he had to-often enough when he was a kid and before he got his stripes. He had one big problem. Because he was both black and a Jew, he hated racists twice as much as other people. That made him the perfect person to take part in the hunt for Hitler’s Hitman and the Nazi piece of shit who had messed with Matt’s brain, even if Matt and the cold-eyed FBI man didn’t know it-or maybe Sebastian had read his service file.
Being Jewish also made him careful. His mother had taught him that. He never admitted to his faith unless it was necessary. And he never gave out his real name, which was a lot weirder than Quincy Jerome. He’d cobbled that together from a high-school football player and the maiden name of Winston Churchill’s mother, a woman his mother admired for her spirit. The downside of his background was that he knew more than was healthy about evil-and those upturned crosses had breathed malevolence to him even before the human remains had turned up.
‘How about this?’ Quincy heard Matt Wells say. ‘It’s not a person’s name, it’s a place name.’
That prompted a clatter of fingertips on keyboards.
Eighteen
There wasn’t anywhere called Fred Warren in the U.S. Or Warren Fred. There were, however, numerous places named Warren and even a few named Fred. The clincher was the number.
Major Hexton wondered if 1943 referred to a road. It only took a few seconds for him to find a farm to market road in Texas. It ran between two towns called Fred and Warren, about seventy miles northeast of Houston.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Quincy Jerome.
I pointed to the map that had appeared on Hexton’s laptop. ‘In the Big Thicket National Preserve.’
‘The Big Thicket?’ Peter Sebastian repeated. ‘What exactly is that?’
‘I know,’ Quincy said, raising his hand. ‘We went on a school trip. It’s part of the Piney Woods that take up a lot of East Texas. As far as I remember, the Big Thicket’s about 80,000 acres. It’s got everything a nature lover could want-wetlands, pine uplands, sandy lands. There are carnivorous plants, hickory, tupelo and all kinds of animals-deer, bobcats, armadillos, alligators, some real nasty hogs…’
‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘Southern Gothic in spades.’
Quincy grinned. ‘You got that right, my man. Some of the locals are straight outta Deliverance.’
‘It gets better by the minute,’ I said.
Sebastian dropped his pen onto the yellow pad in front of him. ‘Obviously because the Antichurch has got some kind of presence there.’ Major Hexton kept his eyes down, no doubt hoping that the cult had a minimal following in Maine. Nothing attracts undesired attention like murderous Satanists.
‘Well,’ I began, ‘where the Antichurch goes…’
‘Heinz Rothmann and his acolytes are bound to follow,’ Arthur Bimsdale completed. ‘It’s pretty thin.’
‘You got a better idea?’ Sebastian demanded. ‘I didn’t think so. Get on to the field office in Houston and find
