robes, his heart bounced. The buzzing of the cicadas in the crazy heat tweaked his nerves. He had a Colt .357 Python stuffed full of potential detonations hidden in the confessional. Fine. But the varnish smell of the sin-box was cut through by the stringency of Hoppe’s No. 6 gunpowder solvent, and that could give away O’Toole’s play. He steadied himself, fought for faith. Surely, God would not let that happen, assuming God wasn’t taking a day off. That happened from time to time in the Hassayampa Valley.
O’Toole stood well back in the shadow of the vestibule of Mission Santa Dolores, taking what comfort he could from the relative coolness offered by the packed-earth walls. Built in the 1920s, a replica of older and more-honored antiquities, the church had been long abandoned, replaced by a modern church twenty miles away with the soaring lines of a department store. The mission was too old and shabby and isolated to serve the spiritual needs of the population oozing westward from Phoenix, but O’Toole had not let it languish. Carrying out a bit of personal penance, he had set himself the task of dusting and polishing the pews, swabbing down the tile, cleaning the plaster angels and cherubs that festooned the reredos behind the altar. In this heat, it had been exacting work for a fat man pushing sixty. But the police were so bothersome in this part of the world. Better to stay out of their way.
He’d had to break the lock on the door to get in, but of course that was no problem for him. He’d been at the cleaning for a week, while he waited. It gave him a cover story if someone came by, but nobody did. And aside from the psychic payback it offered him, it was something to do. There was no television or even a radio in the abandoned priests’ quarters out back, his comestible needs and water supplied by a Coleman camp refrigerator, his literary cravings fulfilled by some dusty paperbacks replete with the adventures of hard-nosed men and abandoned women. A small electric generator fed the battery that kept his cell phone alive.
The truck was closer now, growing larger, a Dodge Ram driven with more enthusiasm than sense—that was Walber-to’s way. Slipping through thirsty desert scrub and sandy dirt, it looked shallow and indistinct. Twenty-five yards away, the snarling of its engine snapped off. It clanked and stopped near a paloverde on the perimeter of the dirt-track turnaround. Was there a passenger? Hard to tell because of the dazzling brightness. Apparently not, for only Walberto emerged, closing the door with a thunk. His hands were empty, no package. Disappointed, O’Toole examined the rest of him. A black ball cap, a Dallas Cowboys warm-up jacket over a white T-shirt, jeans, cowboy boots tooled in Texas. O’Toole didn’t like the warm-up jacket, not one bit. In this heat, it must feel like a microwave on full power. He examined Walberto’s bony outline, but the jacket flapped loosely, showing nothing. Walberto darted forward, swift without effort, merging with the darkness of the vestibule.
“You’re hiding, Father,” Walberto said, smiling into the shadow as his eyes adjusted, his mouth slashed across by gapped teeth.
“It’s the heat,” O’Toole said.
“The heat, of course.” He fell silent, making O’Toole ask.
“Did you bring it?” He glanced over Walberto’s shoulder at the pickup. Was there someone else?
“Sure,” said Walberto, stepping in front of O’Toole to cut off his view. “It’s in my pocket.”
O’Toole scanned the outline of the jacket. Those pockets seemed quite small. Without taking his eyes off Walberto, he jerked his head toward the darkness beyond them.
“Come in,” he said. “Let’s go deeper into the church.”
“Sure,” Walberto said. He moved closer, so his whisper would carry. “I had to kill the man.”
O’Toole’s heart went cold, and he cursed his own greed. This is what his self-imposed mission to the illegal migrants had come to. As if he hadn’t known it all along. Two months ago, he’d been at loose ends in Buffalo. No parish for him, nothing he could sneak into at any rate, even with the Catholic Church in America desperate for priests. Then he got a call from an old friend in Arizona. Opportunities existed. Migrants being held in safe houses in Phoenix—indeed, all over the Valley of the Sun—needed to hear the word of the Lord. The smugglers liked the idea—a dose of religion helped the migrants accept the rotten conditions—and the money for a bit of spiritual