desert.”
“They got what they deserved,” he said flatly. “There’s too much
darkness in some people, corruption that could never be cleaned out in
five lifetimes of rehabilitation. Evil is real, it walks the earth.
Sometimes the devil works by persuasion. Sometimes he just sets loose
these sociopaths who don’t have a gene for empathy or one for
compassion.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t have to be violent in some of these
situations.
Far as I can see, you had no choice. I just meant-it’s hard to see God
encouraging his messenger to pick up a shotgun.”
He drank some beer. “You ever read the Bible?”
“Sure.”
“Says in there that God wiped out the evil people in Sodom and Gomora
rah with volcanoes, earthquakes, rains of fire.
Flooded the whole world once, didn’t He? Made the Red Sea wash over the
pharaoh’s soldiers, drowned them all. I don’t think He’s going to be
skittish about a little old shotgun.”
“I guess I was thinking about the God of the New Testament. Maybe you
heard about Him-understanding, compassionate, merciful.”
He fixed her with those eyes again, which could be so appealing that
they made her knees weak or so cold they made her shiver. A moment ago
they had been warm; now they were icy. If she’d had any doubt, she knew
from his frigid response that he had not yet decided to welcome her into
his life. “I’ve met up with some people who’re such walking scum, it’d
be an insult to animals to call them animals. If I thought God always
dealt mercifully with their kind, I wouldn’t want anything to do with
God.”
Holly stood at the kitchen sink, cleaning mushrooms and slicing
tomatoes, while Jim separated egg whites from yolks to make a pair of
comparatively low-calorie omelettes.
“All the time, people are dying conveniently, right in your own
backyard. But often you go clear across the country to save them.”
“Once to France,” he said, confirming her suspicion that he had ventured
out of the country on his missions. “Once to Germany, twice to Japan,
once to England.”
“Why doesn’t this higher power give you only local work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever wondered what’s so special about the people you save? I
mean-why them and not others?”
“Yeah. I’ve wondered about it. I see stories on the news every week
about innocent people being murdered or dying in accidents right here in
southern California, and I wonder why He didn’t choose to save them
instead of some boy in Boston. I just figure the boy in Boston-the
devil was conspiring to take him before his time, and God used me to
prevent that.”
“So many of them are young.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“But you don’t know why?”
“Not a clue.”
The kitchen was redolent of cooking eggs, onions, mushrooms, and green
peppers. Jim made one big omelette in a single pan, planning to cut it
in half when it was done.
While Holly monitored the progress of the whole-wheat bread in the
toaster, she said, “Why would God want you to save Susie and her mother
out there in the desert-but not the girl’s father?”
“I don’t know.”
“The father wasn’t a bad man, was he?”
“No. Didn’t seem to be.”
“So why not save them all?”
“If He wants me to know, He’ll tell me.”
Jim’s certainty about being in God’s good grace and under His guidance,
and his easy acceptance that God wanted some people to die and not
others, made Holly uneasy.
On the other hand, how could he react to his extraordinary experience in
any other way? No point in arguing with God.
She recalled an old saying, a real chestnut that had become a cliche in
the hands of the pop psych crowd: God grant me the courage to change
those things I can’t accept, to accept those things I can’t change, and
the wisdom to know the difference. Cliche or not, that was an eminently
sane attitude.
When the two pieces of bread popped up, she plucked them from the
toaster. As she toasted two more, she said, “If God wanted to save
Nicholas O’Conner from being fried when that power-company vault went