from the nearby Mexican restaurant. I could hear the birds in the trees.
He stood close to me, looking at me intently, looking at me the way I'd want a brother to look at me, but I had no brother, because my little brother had died a long, long time ago.My fault. The original murders.
The breath went out of me. The breath just left me. I looked directly into his eyes and I saw the love again, the pure unadulterated love, and acceptance, and then very gently, cautiously, he laid his hand on my left arm.
"All right," I whispered. I was shaking. "You've come to kill me because he sent you. He thinks I'm a half-cocked gun out here, and he's dropped the dime on me."
"No, and no, and no."
"Am I the one who's dead? I somehow got that poison into my veins and I don't know it? Is that what's happened?"
"No, and no, and no. You're very much alive and that's why I want you. Now the truck isn't fifty feet away. You told them to keep it at the entrance. Get the ticket out of your pocket. Complete the few gestures required here."
"You're helping me to complete the murder," I said angrily. "You're implying you're an angel, but you're helping a killer."
"The man upstairs is gone, Lucky. He had his angels with him. And I can do no more for him now. I have come for you." There was an indescribable beauty to him when he spoke these words, and again that loving invitation, as if he could somehow make everything in this broken world right. Rage.
I wasn't going out of my head. And I didn't think The Right Man could come up with this brand of assassin if he searched for a hundred years.
I moved forward with my legs shaking and I handed the ticket to the boy who was waiting, putting a twenty-dollar bill on top of it, and I climbed into my waiting truck.
Of course he climbed in beside me. He appeared to ignore the dust and dirt everywhere, the peat moss and the crumpled newspaper and whatever else I'd added to make it look like a working vehicle rather than a prop.
I pulled out, made a sharp turn, and headed for the freeway.
"I know what's happened," I said over the roar of the warm air in the open windows.
"And what precisely is that?"
"I've made you up. I've concocted you. And this is a form of madness. And all I have to do to end it is ram this truck into the wall. Nobody else will be hurt but me and you, this illusion, this thing I've created because I've come to some sort of end of the line. It was the room, wasn't it, doing it there. I know it was."
He just laughed softly to himself and kept his eyes on the road. After a moment, he said, "You're going a hundred and ten miles an hour. You're going to be stopped."
"Do you or do you not claim to be an angel?" I demanded.
"I am indeed an angel," he responded, still staring forward. "Slow down."
"You know, I read a book about angels recently," I told him. "You know, I like those kind of books."
"Yes, you have quite a library about what you don't believe in and no longer hold sacred. And you were a good Jesuit boy when you were in school."
Again the breath went out of me. "Oh, you are some assassin, throwing all that in my face," I said, "if that's what you are."
"I have never been an assassin and never will be," he said calmly.
"You're an accessory after the fact!"
Again he laughed lightly. "If I had been meant to prevent the murder, I would have done it," he said. "You do remember reading that angels are essentially messengers, the embodiment of their function, so to speak. Those words don't come as any surprise but the surprise is obviously that I've been sent as a messenger to you."
A traffic jam brought us to a slower pace and then to a crawl and a stop. I looked at him intently.
A calm came over me, that made me conscious that I'd sweated through the ugly green shirt I was wearing, and my legs were still unsteady, with a throb in the foot that pressed the brake.
"I'll tell you what I do know from that book on angels," I said. "Three-fourths of the time, they intervene in traffic incidents. Just what exactly did your kind do