‘`Thomas McGraw, dammit! Looking for my girl, dammit! Are you crazy or something? I like an your fAends. I don’t know why they locked me up again. It don’t make sense.”
“You must have slipped up, or you wouldn’t be here. That’s all I know. Except I know I slipped up once too often. The way I am, when there’s no action, I relax. I can’t stay wound up all the time. These characters are gung-ho every minute. Like a bunch of cheerleaders. You like them, huh? Because they spent the evening liking you. That’s the way it works. Barry, Sammy, and Ahman have had some action. Not much. Chicken-shit operations. Car bombs and burn-downs. In and out, like thieves. I had time in Nam, and then Zambia. We were in the hills near Refunsa. The way it worked, the Zambians would cross into Rhodesia and hit and run, and then suck the Rhodesian army units into Zambia, and we’d ambush them. Very tough people. Very tough country. I just can’t stand waiting around so long with no action. I get sloppy. Persival says we don’t move until maybe summer. Coordinated You never get to know much. You hear there are fifteen groups and then you hear forty. Who knows? When it comes time, we’ll get the word from Sister Elena Marie.”
4’Who?”
‘4I forgot you don’t know. The boss lady. They send out cassettes. I don’t believe in a lot of this stuff, but I believe in her. I believe in her all the way.” His voice and face were solemn.
There were questions I wanted to ask, but they
The Green Ripper were not questions Tom McGraw would have asked.
“Do you think this Sister Elena Marie would know where my little girl is?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’ve got any central records. I don’t know where she is, even, where she makes the tapes. They say there were like three hundred of them here at one time, and this was a small retreat compared to the others. They moved them out to where they could help raise the money. Everybody has to do that. Your daughter had to do it too. Teams go up and down the streets, hitting every house. Sometimes you say it’s for children, and sometimes for foreign missions. You sell stuff. Handicraft stuff. Also candy and artificial flowers and maybe fresh-baked bread. Once you catch on, it isn’t hard. Four on our team, we’d raise two hundred, three hundred a day, every day. Ride around in the black vans with the crosses. Twenty cents’ worth of junk candy for two dollars, to help the starving Christian children in Lebanon. You can claim one quarter of what your team raised when you have to stand up in the meeting and shout out what you turned in. They switch the teams around a lot. I’m so big people were always glad I was on their team. It’s harder to say no to big people.”
The door opened again. Four of them were there. Ahman and Sammy were in their coveralls, carrying the automatic weapons, left hands clamped on the forestock, right hands around the trigger assembly, long curved clips in place. Persival looked unlikely in an orange-yellow leisure suit and white turtleneck. Stone-faced, no-color, big-shouldered Author wore a wrinkled dark business suit, a white shirt with a frayed collar, and a narrow striped tie.
“Come along,” Persival ordered. The four of them walked a dozen feet behind us. Persival told us where to go. We went to the place where the flats sloped down to the splintered trees, near the spot where I had found the cartridge case.
“Stop there,” he said. “Move to your right two steps, McGraw. Now both of you turn slowly around and face me.”
My heart gave an extra thump. Ahman and Sammy were aiming the weapons at us. Sammy was holding on Mck, and Ahman on me. Ahman’s swarthy face and shiny black eyes revealed nothing. So maybe, when Persival had told somebody to check me out, they had checked more carefully than I had assumed they would, and found that Thomas McGraw had been dead for some time, and never had a daughter.