Mean Streets

His eyes narrowed. 'Son, I'm not a fool. Don't tell me that you've never been behind this particular eight ball before.'

I looked for something appropriately sarcastic and edgy to say in response, but all I came up with was, 'Touche.'

He ran a hand over his mostly bald scalp, and I suddenly saw how much older Forthill looked than he had when I met him. His hair was even more sparse and brittle-looking, his hands more weathered with time. 'I'm sorry, Harry,' he said, and he sounded sincere. 'If I could… is there anything else I could do for you?'

'You can hurry,' I said quietly. 'At the rate we're going, someone is going to get killed.'

At the rate we'd been going, probably me.

I approached the park with intense caution. It took me more than half an hour to be reasonably sure that Buzz wasn't there, somewhere, lurking with another fifty-caliber salutation for me. Of course, he could have been watching from the window of one of the nearby buildings-but none of them were hotels or apartments, and none of the pictures taken in the park had been shot from elevation. Besides. If I avoided every place where a maniac with a high-powered rifle might possibly shoot me, I'd live the rest of my life hiding under my bed.

Still, no harm in exercising caution. Rather than walking across the open ground of the park to the softball field, I took the circuitous route around the outside of the park-and heard quiet little sobs coming from the shade beneath the bleachers opposite the ones where I'd sat with Michael.

I slowed my steps as I approached, and peered under the bleachers.

A girl in shorts, sneakers, and a powder-blue team jersey was huddled up with her arms wrapped around her knees, crying quietly. She had stringy red hair and was skinny, even for someone her age. It took me a minute to recognize her as Alicia's teammate, the second basem-person.

'Hey, there,' I said quietly, trying to keep my voice gentle. 'You all right?'

The girl looked up, her eyes wide, and immediately began wiping at her eyes and nose. 'Oh. Oh, yes. I'm fine. I'm just fine, sir.' 'Right, right. Next you'll tell me you've got allergies,' I said.

She looked up at me with a shaky little smile, huffed out a breath in the ghost of a laugh-and it transformed into another sob on her. Her face twisted up into an agonized grimace. She shuddered and wept harder, bowing her head.

I can be such a sucker. I ducked down under the bleachers and sat down beside her, a couple of feet away. The girl cried for a couple more minutes, until it began quieting down.

'I know you,' she said a minute later, between sniffles. 'You were talking to Coach Carpenter yesterday. A-Alicia said you were a friend of the family.'

'I'd like to think so,' I agreed. 'I'm Harry.'

'Kelly,' she said.

I nodded. 'Shouldn't you be practicing with the team, Kelly?'

She shrugged her skinny shoulders. 'It doesn't help.'

'Help?'

'I'm hopeless,' she said. 'Whatever it is I'm doing, I just screw it up.'

'Well, that's not true,' I said with assurance. 'Nobody can be bad at everything. There's no such thing as a perfect screwup.'

'I am,' she said. 'We've only lost two games all year, and both of them were because I screwed up. We go to the finals next week and everyone's counting on me, and I'm just going to let them down.'

Hell's bells, what a ridiculously tiny problem. But it was obvious that it was real to Kelly, and that it meant the world to her. She was just a kid. It probably looked like a much larger issue from where she was standing.

'Pressure,' I said. 'Yeah, I get that.'

She peered at me. 'Do you?'

'Sure,' I said. 'You feel like people's lives depend on you, and that if you do the wrong thing they're going to be horribly hurt- and it will be your fault.'

'Yes,' she said, sniffling. 'And I've been trying so hard, but I just can't.'

'Be perfect?' I asked. 'No, of course not. But what choice do you have?'

She looked at me uncertainly.

'Anything you do, you risk screwing up. You could do a bad job of crossing the street one day and get hit by a car.'

'I probably could,' she said darkly.

I held up my hand. 'My point,' I told her, 'is that if you want to play it safe, you can stay at home and wrap yourself up in bubble wrap and never do anything.'

'Maybe I should.'

I snorted. 'They still make you read Dickens in school? Great

Expectations}'

'Yeah.'

'You can stay at home and hide if you want-and wind up like Miss Havisham,' I said. 'Watching life through a window and obsessed with how things might have been.'

'Dear God,' she said. 'You've just made Dickens relevant to my life.'

'Weird, right?' I asked her, nodding.

Kelly let out a choking little laugh.

I pushed myself up and nodded to her. 'I never saw you hiding over here, okay? I'm just gonna go do what I gotta do, and leave you to make the choice.'

'Choice?'

'Sure. Do you want to put your cap back on and play? Or do you want to wind up an old maid wandering around your house in the rotting remains of a wedding dress and thirty yards of bubble wrap, plotting heartlessly against some kid named Pip?' I regarded her soberly. 'There's really no middle ground.'

'I'm pretty sure that's not right,' she said.

'See there? I'm not much good at offering wise counsel, but that didn't stop me from trying.' I winked at her and walked on, around behind the backstop to where Michael sat on the bleachers on the far side of the field.

Molly sat on a blanket underneath a tree maybe ten yards away, with earbuds trailing wires down into her shirt's front pocket, as if she was listening to a digital music player. It was an effort to blend into the background, I supposed, since she couldn't have been listening to one of those gizmos any more than I could have. She was wearing sunglasses, too, so I couldn't tell where her focus was, but I was sure she was being alert. She gave me the barest trace of a nod as I approached her father.

I sat down next to him and waited for it.

'Harry,' Michael said. 'You look awful.'

'Yes, I do,' I said. I told him about the attempted assassination and about my discussion with Forthill.

Michael frowned out at the children practicing, his expression quietly disturbed. 'The Church wouldn't do something like that, Harry. It isn't how they operate.'

'People are people, Michael,' I said. 'People do things. They make mistakes.'

'But it isn't the Church,' he said. 'If this person is part of the Church, he isn't acting with their blessing or under their instructions.'

I shrugged. 'Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think they were too happy with me when I was a couple of days late turning over the Shroud.'

'But you did return it, safe and sound,' Michael said.

'How many people know about the swords? How many knew that I had Amoracchius?'

He shook his head. 'I'm not certain. Given the sorts of foes they contend with, the knowledgeable people within the Church are more than mildly secretive and security-conscious.'

I gestured around us. 'Ballpark it for me.'

He blew out a breath. 'Honestly, I just don't know. I've personally met perhaps two hundred priests who understood our mission, but it wouldn't shock me if there were as many as six or seven hundred, worldwide. But among them, that kind of important information would be closely kept. Four or five, at most. Plus the Holy Father.'

'I'm going to assume that Il Papa didn't personally attempt to blow me away,' I said gravely. 'How do I find out about the others?'

'You might talk to Father For-'

'Been there, did that. He isn't talking.'

Michael grimaced. 'I see.'

'So, other than him-'

He spread his hands. 'I don't know, Harry. Forthill was my primary temporal contact.'

I blinked. 'He never talked to you about your support structure in the Church?'

'He was sworn to secrecy,' Michael said. 'I just had to trust him. Excuse me.' He stood up and called to the Softball team, 'Thank you, ladies! Two laps of the park and we'll call it a day!'

The team began discarding gloves and such, and fell into a line to begin jogging around the exterior of the park, in no great hurry, talking and laughing as they went. I noticed that Kelly was among them and fell a little less like a complete incompetent. 'I'd really like to keep my brains on the inside of my skull,' I told him when he sat down again. 'And if one of the Church's top guys is leaking information or has sprung a gear, they need to know it.'

'Yes.'

I stared out at the now-empty softball diamond for a minute. Then I said, 'I don't want to kill anybody. But Buzz is playing for keeps. I'm not going