priedieu, and You’d surrender yourself to them in ecstasy, in a sick
ecstasy, reveling in the pain, suffering for your God-that’s the way
You’d see it-suffering for your dead God, suffering your way straight
into Heaven. You dumb bastard. You hopeless retard.
You’d even pray for them, pray your heart out for them as they tore You
to pieces. Wouldn’t You, priest?”
To all of this, the chubby priest responded with lowered eyes and mute
endurance.
Keeping my own silence required effort. I had questions for Jesse
Pinn.
Lots of questions.
Here, however, there was no crematory fire to which I could hold his
feet to force answers out of him.
Pinn stopped pacing and loomed over Father Tom. “No more threats
against You, priest. No point to it. Just gives You a thrill to think
of suffering for the Lord. So this is what’ll happen if You don’t stay
out of our way-we’ll waste your sister. Pretty Laura.”
Father Tom raised his head and met Pinn’s eyes, but still he said
nothing.
“I’ll kill her myself,” Pinn promised. “With this gun.”
He withdrew a pistol from inside his suit coat, evidently from a
shoulder holster. Even at a distance and in this poor light, I could
see that the barrel was unusually long.
Defensively, I put my hand into my jacket pocket, on the butt of the
Glock.
“Let her go,” said the priest.
“We’ll never let her go. She’s too . . . interesting. Fact is,” Pinn
said, “before I kill Laura, I’ll rape her. She’s still a good-looking
woman, even if she’s getting strange.”
Laura Eliot, who had been a friend and colleague of my mother’s, was
indeed a lovely woman. Although I hadn’t seen her in a year, her face
came readily to mind. Supposedly, she had obtained employment in San
Diego when Ashdon eliminated her position. Dad and I had received a
letter from Laura, and we’d been disappointed that she hadn’t come
around to say good-bye in person Evidently that was a cover story and
she was still in the area, being held against her will.
Finding his voice at last, Father Tom said, “God help You.”
“I don’t need help,” Pinn said. “When I jam the gun in her mouth, just
before I pull the trigger, I’ll tell her that her brother says he’ll
see her soon, see her soon in Hell, and then I’ll blow her brains
out.”
“God help me.”
“What did You say, priest?” Pinn inquired mockingly.
Father Tom didn’t answer.
“Did You say, ‘God help me’?” Pinn taunted. “‘God help me’?
Not very damn likely. After all, You aren’t one of His anymore, are
You?”
This curious statement caused Father Tom to lean back against the wall
and cover his face with his hands. He might have been weeping; I
couldn’t be sure.
“Picture your lovely sister’s face,” said Pinn. “Now picture her bone
structure twisting, distorting, and the top of her skull blowing
out.”
He fired the pistol at the ceiling. The barrel was long because it was
fitted with a sound suppressor, and instead of a loud report, there was
nothing but a noise like a fist hitting a pillow.
In the same instant and with a hard clang, the bullet struck the
rectangular metal shade of the lamp suspended directly above the
mortician . The fluorescent tube didn’t shatter, but the lamp swung
wildly on its long chains; an icy blade of light like a harvesting
scythe cut bright arcs through the room.
In the rhythmic sweep of light, though Pinn himself did not at first
move, his scarecrow shadow leaped at other shadows that flapped like
blackbirds. Then he holstered the pistol under his coat.
As the chains of the swinging light fixture torqued, the links twisted
against one another with enough friction to cause an eerie grining, as
if lizard-eyed altar boys in blood-soaked cassocks and surplices were
ringing the unmelodious bells of a satanic mass.
The shrill music and the capering shadows seemed to excite Jesse
Pinn.
An inhuman cry issued from him, primitive and psychotic, a caterwaul of
the sort that sometimes wakes You in the night and leaves You wondering
about the species of origin. As that spittle-rich sound sprayed from