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 ringing, 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 his lips, he hammered his fists into the priest’s midsection, two hard punches.
Quickly stepping out from behind the lute-playing angel, I tried to draw the Glock, but it caught on the lining of my jacket pocket.
As Father Tom doubled over from the two blows, Pinn locked his hands and clubbed them against the back of the priest’s neck.
Father Tom dropped to the floor, and I finally ripped the pistol out of my pocket.
Pinn kicked the priest in the ribs.
I raised the Glock, aimed at Pinn’s back, and engaged the laser sighting. As the mortal red dot appeared between his shoulder blades, I was about to say enough, but the mortician relented and stepped away from the priest.
I kept my silence, but to Father Tom, Pinn said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. If you can’t be part of the future, then get the hell out of the way.”
That sounded like a parting line. I switched off the laser sighting and retreated behind the angel just as the undertaker turned away from Father Tom. He didn’t see me.
To the singing of the chains, Jesse Pinn walked back the way he had come, and the jittery sound seemed to issue not from overhead but from within him, as though locusts were swarming in his blood. His shadow repeatedly darted ahead of him and then leaped behind until he passed beyond the arcing sword of light from the swinging fixture, became one with the darkness, and rounded the corner into the other arm of the L-shaped room.
I returned the Glock to my jacket pocket.
From the cover of the dysfunctional crèche, I watched Father Tom Eliot. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, in the fetal position, curled around his pain.
I considered going to him to determine if he was seriously hurt, and to learn what I could about the circumstances that lay behind the confrontation I had just witnessed, but I was reluctant to reveal myself. I stayed where I was.
Any enemy of Jesse Pinn’s should be an ally of mine—but I could not be certain of Father Tom’s goodwill. Although adversaries, the priest and the mortician were players in some mysterious underworld of which I had been utterly unaware until this very night, so each of them had more in common with the other than with me. I could easily