FALSE GODS

A RAFFERTY P.I. MYSTERY

W. GLENN DUNCAN JR.

CONTENTS

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Wright & Wrong | Chapter 1

Wright & Wrong | Chapter 2

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There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.

The only choice we get is what to worship.

—David Foster Wallace, This is Water.

CHAPTER 1

“You’re my last hope, Mr Rafferty.”

Kathy-Lee Troupe sat straight-backed and tired-looking in my office and glanced around like she was afraid she might catch something.

I sighed. Did she really say that?

“I’ve tried everything,” she said. “I’ve spoken to her friends and no-one knows anything. The police listened but they can’t help me. Not without evidence, they say.” She twisted her wedding ring around. She’d been going at it hard since she sat down and I was starting to feel sorry for that ring finger.

I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: how weak her case was, or that I was already thinking of taking it on. But, if I had learned anything from the Akister case it was that I needed to make an adjustment to one of my rules.

Rafferty’s Rule Seventeen: Never take a client at face value. (Amendment B): Or a case.

My concerns didn’t seem to bother the woman sitting in front of me, because she gave that ring another twist and continued.

“I’ve prayed on it Mr Rafferty, and I know that God wants her to come home. He sent me to you.”

It was time for me to venture into the conversation.

“Okay.”

“And when you find my daughter, the Glory will be His.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at me. “You will find her won’t you, Mr Rafferty?”

I leaned forward, forearms on the desk and gave her my best disarming smile. Her eyes tightened and she pressed her lips together, so I might not have nailed it.

“Mrs Troupe, I’m good at what I do. I can find your daughter.”

“Thank you, Mr Rafferty. I knew I was …”

I held up a hand and let her wind down.

“However,” I said, “when I find Kimberly, I can only do my best to convince her to come home. I’m not in the business of relocating young women against their will.”

The silver crucifix around her neck twitched.

“Heavens no! God has told me that wherever Kimberly is, she’s scared and wants to come home. There won’t be any problems.”

I wished I was as confident. I’ve had too many people over the years tell me their case would be “no problems”. “Simple”, “easy” and “quick” were also regularly mentioned. No prizes for guessing how many of them turned out as advertised.

Still, Mrs Jorgensen, my landlady, didn’t care whether my cases were problematic, as long as I paid the rent. Which led me to …

“Okay. Now, Mrs Trou—”

“Please, call me Kathy-Lee.”

I resisted the urge to have her address me as Regis.

“My rate is two hundred and fifty dollars a day, plus expenses, and I don’t see this taking more than three or four days. You say she left you a letter.”

“Oh, to think that Kimberly will be home in three days.” She clasped her hands in front of her bony chest and looked to the ceiling. “Thank you, Lord.”

I thought for a second about getting a rate schedule typed up. You know, on a letterhead—Rafferty Investigations or some such horseshit—to make sure there was no confusion about who was doing the work here. Or who would be getting paid.

I waited.

The thought passed.

“Kathy-Lee,” I said. “The letter.”

“Oh, yes.” She reached inside a practical, black purse, retrieved a folded piece of paper, and passed it across the desk.

Unfolded, it was more a note than a letter. Written in purple pen with flowing, loopy letters. The I’s were finished with little heart symbols and the whole thing ran to only half a page.

Mom,

I can’t stay here. I love Brian and he loves me, no matter what you and Daddy think. I know you say that we’re only kids but I think you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young and in love.

I can’t put up with Daddy running Brian down all the time and you telling me to stay away from him because God has big plans for me.

What if Brian is part of those plans?

I love you and Daddy, but I’m not going to waste my life waiting.

I’ll write when I can.

Love, Kimberly

Shit.

This girl’s not missing, she’s getting on with her life. And Mom can’t handle it. That’s not a case, that’s a Census description of half the population. Or more.

“Kathy-Lee …”

She took a break from her ring-twisting and looked up with shining eyes.

“Were there problems between Kimberly and you or your husband?” I said. “I don’t want to find out you’ve been locking her in basements or waling on her with coat-hangers. If that’s what this is, I’ll make sure you never find her again.”

“What kind of people do you think we are, Mr Rafferty?” To her credit, and this would make all the difference later, Kathy-Lee didn’t storm out at that point. She sat up straighter and fixed me with a maternal glare that could’ve melted steel.

“We are ordinary hard-working, God-fearing folk, Mr Rafferty. Kimberly is our daughter and we love her to pieces. She’s been an A-grade student through high school, active within the Church, leading Youth Groups and such. Wayne—that’s my husband—and I may have misgivings about her boyfriend, Brian, but the things we said were only ever for her benefit. God has big plans for her and we didn’t want to see Kimberly give all that up over a boy.”

I made a mental note to ask about these big plans and how Kathy-Lee came to be in the know. For the moment though, I needed to start wrapping things up to have any chance of getting out of the office before dark.

“One last question. What is it that bothers you and your husband about Brian? Does he mistreat Kimberly? Is he violent?”

“My goodness!” she said. “Your mind lives in dark places, Mr Rafferty. Nothing like that. Brian was valedictorian of their high school and lettered in baseball. And he treats Kimberly well. He’s a real gentleman.”

I sighed again and was glad for about the twentieth time this week that I’d started smoking again. I reached for my pipe.

“Except …”

Hold that thought.

“Yeah?”

“Well, the family are Evangelical Christians. Vineyard Christians at that.” Her lips tightened again and she looked like she might be sick.

“I assume you mean that’s their church,” I said. “That’s a problem because …”

She shook her head and took her turn to sigh. I was obviously in one of the rear cars on this train of thought.

“We’re Episcopalian. So, I’m sure you can see why it will never work out for Kimberly and Brian.”

CHAPTER 2

“I swear Hil, I’m considering giving up the game.”

Hilda Gardner’s voice crackled down the line.

“Tough day, big guy?”

“It used to be easy.” I puffed blue smoke to the ceiling. “This guy’s bad because he killed his wife or the guy sleeping with his wife, or whatever. Simple.

“But now, I’m being asked by Mom to find her adult daughter because she can’t handle that the girl has run off with her boyfriend who, wait for it, believes in a different version of their god story.”

I puffed.

“I might as well go out and start blowing away Dukakis voters or people who answer wrong on the Pepsi Challenge.”

“Any thoughts on what you’d do if you stopped being a professional thug? Customer relations, maybe?”

I imagined Hilda’s dark eyes dancing with her voice. It almost broke my heart to have to imagine it.

“You jest, but that’s not such a bad idea; I could move more antiques for you than Ramon. I bet my blackjack can be more persuasive than his spit curls and purple shirts.”

“Hmm. Tempting. What’s the bet?”

“If you win, you can use my handcuffs and have your way with me for the whole weekend.”

“And if you win?”

“Same thing.”

Hilda’s laugh, even filtered by Ma Bell, balanced the world and not for the first time I counted myself the luckiest guy alive.

“How goes the oil-ionaire’s estate?” I asked.

“There’s a bunch of other dealers trying to get their hands on it, including a Jewish father and son who’ve flown in from New York, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to beat me in my own backyard.”

“Atta girl.”

“I hope to wrap up the deal tomorrow morning and then I want to spend the afternoon organizing transport. Bottom line, I should be back in town Friday mid-afternoon, ready for a weekend with you, Ugly.”

Houston always seemed so far away.

“Are you taking the case?” Hilda asked, jerking me away from a few nice thoughts about the upcoming weekend.

“Yeah, I am. I know how Patty Akister’s life would have turned out if I hadn’t listened when she asked me to find Sherm …” I shrugged. Stupid thing to do during a phone conversation but what the hell. “I’ll see what I can dig up. On the other hand, maybe this’ll be the first case that turns out to be just what it looks like.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. Handcuffs or not.”

I laughed. “No bet.”

A yawn oozed down the line.

“Hey big guy, I’m going to bed. Early morning wheeling and dealing tomorrow. But, I miss you.”

“You too, hon.”

“I love you, Rafferty.”

“You too.”

The next morning, after a second cup of coffee and throwing the mail into the wastebasket unopened—who said office administration needed to be time consuming—I dropped in at Dallas PD to see Ed Durkee and get his side of Kathy-Lee Troupe’s story.

“Hell, Rafferty,” Ed growled over the cityscape of files on his desk. No surprises, the lieutenant was wearing a brown suit, just like every other day. Ed must have owned the biggest collection of brown suits in the Southwest, each one rumpled and ill-tailored for his bear-like frame.

“Do you have any idea what our workload would be if we chased every instance of Mom being unhappy with junior taking off from the family home? This is Texas, for chrissake; Moms are supposed to hate their daughter’s boyfriends. Besides, I’ve barely got enough manpower to get through …” Ed waved his hands and jowls at the remainder of the office, where every horizontal surface was covered with files.

“I get it, Ed.” I puffed and tamped my pipe. “Mom’s sob story sounds the same to me. I want to see if she said anything different to you guys. Covering all bases, just like they recommended in the latest issue of Private Investigator Monthly.”

“Rafferty, I don’t have …. Oh hell, you’re not gonna leave me alone, are you? Don’t answer that.” He stabbed a finger at me, then at his phone.

“Get in here. I need you to talk to Rafferty so he can leave me alone and I can get some real work done.”

“What is there to tell, Rafferty?” Sergeant Ricco said. “I talked with the mother for ten minutes. Maybe less. No case, nothing.”

I looked up at him. “I like the trilby, Ricco,” I said. “A lot of people said you couldn’t pull it off, but you sure showed them.”

Ricco peered out from under the felt brim and picked at the blade-straight crease in his pants, making sure they fell perfectly over his wingtips. He was a good cop, despite dressing like he’d arrived at Police Headquarters by mistake on his way to a community production of Guys and Dolls.

“Har har. I don’t know how it is I stop myself from laughing.” Ricco stirred a toothpick between his thin lips and glared. “You want me to tell you what I know or not?”

I tilted my head and smoked. Kept quiet. Hilda might be right about using that more often as a strategy.

“The mother came in begging for us to find her missing daughter …” He checked a black notebook. “Uh, Kimberly. She’d been gone for a couple of months and Mom was getting worried. That’s a long time to wait before coming to see the police and I told her this. Mom said she had checked with the daughter’s friends but nothing. I wait. Then she starts telling me the truth. Turns out this Kimberly is eighteen and left a letter saying that she was going away.” Ricco flipped the notebook closed and shrugged. “I told her there is nothing we can do. The girl’s an adult and she’s run off with her boyfriend. Simple.”

“Did she say ‘god had told her’ that Kimberly wants to come home?”

“Yeah.” Ricco gave a wolfish grin. “I said that the Almighty makes an unreliable witness, so we would be needing more than that, most likely.”

Ed put his head in his hands.

I laughed.

Ricco continued. “I think she was praying for me when she left. Or cursing me to hell. She was talking quiet. I could not tell for sure.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it. You gonna take the Mom’s money on this one?”

I nodded. “I expect I’ll find Kimberly shacked up with her boyfriend and playing happy families. What happens then …” I shrugged.

“Poor Rafferty,” Ricco said to Ed. “So hard up for work, he is taking missing person’s cases for persons who aren’t missing. He might actually solve this one.”

“At least,” Ed said, “he won’t be getting in our way. And we won’t have to run around cleaning up after him. I might even be able to look forward to a weekend off.”

Ricco snorted and the corners of Ed’s mouth rose above horizontal which, for Ed, represented unbridled mirth.

I packed my pipe away and stood up.

“In the spirit of ongoing co-operation with the Dallas Police Department and in my never-ending search for personal betterment, I will ignore your juvenile attempts for humor at my expense and continue undaunted upon my quest to do good in this dark and bitter world.”

“Uh huh,” Ed said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. Ricco’s mouth twitched.

I even closed his office door gently to show there were no hard feelings. The frosted glass pane didn’t stop the whoop of laughter as I did so.

Columbo never had to put up with shit like that.

CHAPTER 3

The Mustang and I stuttered through the city haze on the way to the Troupe house. Kathy-Lee had insisted that all had been quiet on the home front. I wanted to see for myself.

Cynical, Hilda called it.

I preferred to think of it as “thorough”.

Morning peak hour had come and gone, and I made it out of the city fast. That was good; the Mustang had been running hot over the past few weeks and I didn’t need to be stuck in traffic with the windows down, sweaty shirt plastered to my back, and the heater running full blast.

For this day though, the drive to Irving was heater-free and it wasn’t long before I pulled up next to a low-slung wooden bungalow not far off West Rochelle.

Pickups lazed in driveways and a gaggle of kids rode bikes down the middle of the street. A massive elm tree dwarfed the Troupe’s front yard and a lawnmower buzzed nearby.

“You must be Rafferty.” The man looked up from polishing the hood of the Oldsmobile parked in the garage. “Kathy-Lee told me you were coming.” He grabbed a rag from the fender and wiped his hands as he walked down the driveway. “I’m Wayne. It’s good to meet you.”

Wayne was average. Medium height, weight, even his hair was not quite brown, nor black. Ordinary polo shirt and scrubbed-clean jeans. Pleasant enough smile, a firm handshake and nothing to leave an impression one way or the other.

I got another glimpse into the sketch artist’s frustration of teasing out identifying marks and attributes from witnesses.

“Come on inside. Let’s tell Kathy-Lee you’re here.”

After re-meeting Kathy-Lee, handshakes, how-do-you-do’s and coffee for all, we were seated on floral-patterned lounges around a dark timber coffee table.

Kathy-Lee grabbed her husband’s hand and said, “I’m glad you’re here Mr Rafferty, and that you’ll be bringing Kimberly home.” She smoothed her skirt with her free hand and I felt relieved for her third finger. Hold on, Wayne.

“How can we help? What more can we tell you?”

They both smiled at me.

You could start by telling me why things were so bad that Kimberly felt she needed to run away. I thought it might come down to beating it out of them, because I wasn’t picking up anything weird about the house or the occupants at first glance.

The living room in which we sat—the house wasn’t big enough for it to be called a sitting room—was neat and clean. Cream painted walls matched the carpet. Aside from the couches there were two armchairs, covered in maroon corduroy. That sounds awful, but the color matched the flowers on the couches which made it work. Sort of.

A tall lamp stood between the two chairs, behind a glass-topped timber side table. Twin bibles, bound in blue leather, rested there. I assumed the bright fabric bookmark was Kathy-Lee’s which left no prizes for guessing who the all-business, brown one belonged to.

A shiny, black upright piano sat in a corner. Religious paintings adorned the walls, matched in number by family photographs, some showing all three Troupes, some just Kimberly at various ages.

I could see the kitchen poking out around a corner, all Formica and dark timber. A large carved spoon, with a clock face in the bowl, hung on the wall above a regiment of spice jars.

Looking out the windows to my right, the small backyard was neat and tidy. Sunflowers dwarfed the back fence and smiled at me. A tree-fort in the rear corner looked a little unloved. At eighteen, I guessed Kimberly wasn’t playing up there much anymore.

I realized I hadn’t answered their question, so I sipped my coffee.

Ugh.

Nice house, terrible coffee. Like television Jim before me, I wouldn’t be having a second cup.

“I often find it useful to meet clients in their own house, Kathy-Lee. It lets me get a feel for what Kimberly was thinking when she left.”

They smiled again and nodded.

“Wayne, tell me about Kimberly.” I set my coffee down, pulled out my notebook and pen. To work now. Professional.

“She’s always been our pride and joy, since the day God blessed us with her.” Wayne smiled again at his wife and let his free hand join the pile on her leg. “Kathy-Lee always wanted to be a Mom, and I knew she’d be a great one, but it took a long time for her to conceive. It’s testament to the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ that he healed Kathy-Lee and allowed Kimberly to enter our lives.”

Uh huh.

“She’s your only child, right?”

“Yes, she is, Mr Rafferty.” Kathy-Lee’s turn. “Complications during her birth meant I’m unable to have any more children. God decided that we would be perfect as a family of three. And we have been.”

Uh huh.

“I’m having trouble here. Help me to understand this,” I said. “Kimberly was desperately wanted as a child. She had a good childhood, got good grades and stayed out of trouble. You loved her and didn’t mistreat her.”

Kathy-Lee’s eyes narrowed and I patted the air between us.

“She started dating Brian last year, who, by your own account, treated her well and is quite the goal-oriented boy himself. They’re eighteen, in other words, adults. Two months ago, you find a note, explaining that she left because she felt you didn’t accept her relationship with Brian.”

I looked up from my meaningless doodles.

“Do I have that right, more or less?”

Wayne and Kathy-Lee looked at each other and turned to me. They nodded in sync but their smiles were gone.

“That’s right.”

“Okay. Here’s my problem.” I sighed and closed the notebook. “What you’re asking me to do is to track down an adult who left home over your objection to her point of view.”

“She’s our daughter, Mr Rafferty,” Wayne said.

“That’s the only reason I’m still here.” I shrugged. “What I’m saying is, I can’t go around forcing adult children to stay home just because their parents want them to.”

“It’s not that, Mr Rafferty,” he said. “I’m not saying that we wouldn’t like Kimberly to live at home forever. Sure we would. But we’re not that naive. We know she has to spread her wings and live her own life. And we know that she will make decisions that we don’t agree with.” Kathy-Lee didn’t look quite as convinced of this as her husband. “After all, God showed us his love by giving us free will. We wouldn’t be good Christians in His image if we didn’t allow our child the same now, would we?”

There was no way I could dig up an answer that wouldn’t be falsely sycophantic or, more likely, insulting, so I rolled out my strategy of shutting up once again. Wayne didn’t break stride.

“The truth is, Mr Rafferty, when Kimberly left and … well, when Kathy-Lee showed me the note, I was heartbroken.” He slumped and examined his hands. “I thought I’d driven my daughter out of our house. Out of the only home she’s ever known. Can you have any idea what that feels like?”

Kathy-Lee grabbed her husband’s hands and continued. “We both felt like we’d let her down. For her to feel like the best thing she could do was to leave home … I was heartbroken, too.” She squared her shoulders. “Wayne and I prayed on it and came to know that we needed to let her go. We will always be here for her, whenever she needs us, but it was time for her to start living her own life.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m still not sure—”

“Let me finish,” Kathy-Lee said. “That’s the reason why we didn’t do anything for so long after she left. It was hard, Mr Rafferty. If you have kids you’ll know how hard it is to let them go out into the world. But, we let her go. We waited for her to get back in contact, just like she said. And we prayed every day. For Kimberly to be safe and happy and for God to give us the strength to keep letting her go. Each day it got a little bit easier. Until the day before yesterday.”

“What happened the day before yesterday?” I asked, and then wished I hadn’t.

“God told me she was in trouble and needs our help.” Kathy-Lee’s eyes had again taken on the steel-melting glare I’d seen at the office.

“We won’t force our child to live a life she doesn’t want to, Mr Rafferty, but we also won’t sit by while she is in danger.”

“And you know she’s in danger because …”

The glare zeroed in on me.

“As I have told you repeatedly, God told me she is.”

Wayne nodded alongside.

“Uh.” I wished Hilda was there; she’s better than me at this type of thing.

“Let me ask you something, Mr Rafferty,” Wayne said as he patted his wife’s knee. She’d gone to work on the wedding ring again and I almost winced. “Are you a religious man?”

I shook my head. “Not even a little.”

“I thought not. I also guess that you don’t believe in God and might consider religion to be well-intentioned nonsense.”

“That’s a fair summary.” I thought it best to not get sidetracked with a debate over my real beliefs about organized religion.

“Well then, since we are your clients, just know that when we talk about God, He is our best friend, He is omniscient and he’s infallible. He sees everything and He’s never wrong.”

With a skillset like that I wondered about my chances of getting him on the payroll.

I cleared my throat.

“Okay, we’ve covered one of the basics. You want me to continue looking for Kimberly.” They nodded and gripped hands again. “As long as we’re all clear. You said you spoke to her friends, and they couldn’t tell you anything.”

Kathy-Lee nodded. “That’s right.”

“Including Brian?”

They looked at me like I’d shucked off my clothes and started a pagan worship dance.

If there was such a thing. Maybe there was. The Troupes certainly looked like it.

“Why would we talk to him?”

Huh?

“As her boyfriend, he might know where she is,” I offered. “Plus, he might be concerned about her.”

“If we were meant to talk to Brian, God would have told me,” Kathy-Lee said.

I don’t get lost for words often, and thought I’d better start moving before I found a few that the Troupes didn’t want to hear.

I slapped my knees and stood.

“Okay then. Did umm … did he give you any information on where I should start searching for her?”

They both looked up at me.

“You’re the Private Investigator, Mr Rafferty. I really think that’s your area of expertise.”

I drove home against the early afternoon traffic. The Mustang’s shadow led me down the freeway and the smoke from my pipe trailed out the open window.

I was pissed off.

I’d let myself get steamrolled into taking on a non-case by a couple of people who liked bad coffee and believed in a bearded sky-man. And it’s not like Wayne had to beat me up for it, either. He had creases ironed in his jeans, for chrissake.

Maybe I was getting soft in my old age.

A Buick with an unfortunate green paint job wobbled from an on-ramp, cut across two lanes and nearly side-swiped me before lurching back right and settling into a lane. I flipped the driver the bird and yelled some of those words that I’m sure the Troupes wouldn’t have approved of.

It made me feel better.

When the Buick driver turned out to be a blue-haired lady who graduated school the year before Moses I thought for a moment about going back to being pissed off.

I drove and smoked and mulled instead.

Thirty minutes spent in Kimberly’s bedroom had confirmed the picture-book story I’d gotten from her parents. The room was neat, clean and squealed “All-American Teen from Good Family” through braces and pigtails. The color scheme seemed to be Ice Cream and Candy Parlor white and pink. A desk stood in one corner with a view to the backyard. The matching white timber bed sat under pink striped blankets and a white lace pillowcase. Fluffy toys leaned against the pillow and looked to the door, waiting for their Mommy to come home.

A pair of cheerleader pom-poms on a shelf surprised me. I had thought that an only daughter in short skirts and tight sweaters might be too racy for conservative Mom, but notch up another point for Wayne and Kathy-Lee letting Kimberly live her own life.

Posters of clean-cut boys in jeans and leather jackets hung on the papered walls. The kid from that karate movie seemed to be a favorite. Recent photographs of Kimberly with friends—in jeans and sweaters, in bathing suits, in graduation gowns—smiling and laughing at the camera with arms around each other, were stuck to the wall alongside the bed. She had a natural ease and beauty in each one. Three Polaroids showed Kimberly with a boy. I assumed Brian. These were the only ones that showed her as part of a couple. Not a serial dater.

After I’d been through all the drawers, her closet and even the boxes under the bed, the overall picture hadn’t changed. I’d found clothes, school books, Church Youth Group flyers and her diary.

What I hadn’t found: bad grades, threats, drugs, razor blades, sexy underwear, satanic books, or diary entries bitching about school friends. Not even a discreet copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover pushed to the back of her sock drawer.

Do kids still read that?

I had left the Troupe house with a photograph of Kimberly, Brian’s address, a burnt coffee taste in my mouth, and not much else. Least of all, the willing help of the missing girl’s parents.

The Dr Pepper plant peeked through the haze above the freeway railing and I snapped out of auto-pilot. I was almost home, there was beer in the fridge and Hilda would be back from Houston tomorrow.

And after all that I’d learned today, it was unlikely that Kimberly was in any real danger, so I saw no reason to start losing sleep over it.

Boy, when I’m wrong, I’m all the way wrong.

CHAPTER 4

I was into the office early the next morning, tracking down Brian’s home phone number from a Coles reverse directory, and leaving a message on their answering machine a little after nine. They were in Irving too, which meant I’d have to make another trip out, and I wasn’t going to waste time heading back on the hope they might be home.

I’d thought about talking to Kimberly’s friends. Figuring I’d hear the same story as I got from Mom and Dad, I decided to save that for if, or when, things got desperate.

Brian looked good to me. Mom and Dad might choose to not read between the lines of Kimberly’s note, but it was obvious that they’d run off together.

Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is more likely to be the right one. Rafferty says: Find Brian, find Kimberly.

I spent the next hour or so sipping coffee, leafing through an old gun shop catalog and trying to decide between taking Hilda out tonight for BBQ or trying that new Japanese place she’d mentioned. With heavy decisions like that weighing on my mind, I was able to avoid cleaning up the office. What the hell, the tower of phone books and reverse directories in the corner wasn’t going to be any more useful stacked alphabetically. Or geographically.

I was pleased with the day’s progress and was starting to consider a nap to finish the morning off, when the phone rang.

“Crime Busters Incorporated. Vice-Chancellor Rafferty speaking.”

The voice on the other end of the line was light, brittle and tired. “Hmm, perhaps I don’t have the right number. This is Helen Garrison. Someone left a message for me to call.”

“Yes, Mrs Garrison. I’d like to talk to you about Brian, and Kimberly Troupe.”

“What is this about?”

Brian’s whereabouts weren’t front of mind in the Garrison household. Interesting. Either they weren’t concerned that Brian was missing, or they knew where he was.

I bet it was the second.

Hot damn.

I could have this wrapped up by the time Hilda got back this afternoon and we could spend the whole weekend together. I got sidetracked into thinking about all the things we could do in two days, or maybe it was the same thing over and over …

“Hello? Are you there?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes. Mrs Garrison, I’m looking for Kimberly. Her parents are worried about her. I understand that she might be with Brian.”

“I see. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Why not?”

“Because Kimberly isn’t with Brian.”

Huh?

“You know this for certain? You’ve spoken to him?”

“Of course I have. He’s my son.”

“When did you last speak? Did he tell you where he is? Did he say where Kimberly is?”

“Too many questions, Mr Rafferty.”

“Where is Brian?”

“He’s at church right now, helping to prepare for tonight’s service. He should be home in the next hour.”

I sighed.

“How can I reach him? What’s his number?”

“This one, Mr Rafferty.” My sigh was echoed back down the line. “This is his home and, aside from the week he wasted trying to be a good boyfriend to that … that whore, he’s lived here his whole life. Why don’t you come out and talk with Brian yourself? He’ll tell you what happened.”

I wanted to dislike Brian Garrison.

He had turned from my best lead in finding Kimberly into just another Texan teenager and, in doing so, had ruined the possibility of closing this case before Hilda got back. Just one of those was enough to earn him a place on my shit list and it would be only my self control and critical reasoning that stopped me from beating him to a pulp. That and the other thing.

He was a helluva nice kid.

“I’m not sure what I can tell you, sir. I haven’t seen Kimberly in six … no, wait a minute, seven weeks.” He shook my hand firmly when we met, introduced himself and had looked me in the eye the whole time we’d been talking.

Brian was tall, a couple of inches over my six-two.

What the hell were they feeding the kids these days?

He had straight blonde hair which flicked over his forehead to threaten his eyes. Only repetitive head twitching and the occasional swipe with his long fingers kept ocular catastrophe at bay.

Except for the small differences in color schemes, we could have been sitting in the Troupe’s living room. Smallish house, equally neat. Tidy backyard, visible through the big windows on the rear wall. A rose bush exploded bright pink in one corner. Inside, blond timber instead of dark for the furniture and blue stripes, rather than flowers, seemed to be the theme.

The Garrisons also liked music, a Casio electric piano their instrument of choice. Sheet music for a gospel song sat open on the music stand, as if I’d interrupted a revival. Brian’s mother fussed in the kitchen and probably thought I didn’t see her take two different cartons of milk from the fridge, lingering both times to look around the corner at Brian and me. He was talking again, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

“Kimberly and I left home together two months ago, sir. She told me how her parents were always saying bad … maybe not bad, but saying things about me, like how she could do better and such. We had both turned eighteen and finished school, so we decided to go away.” He looked down at his lap. “I know it sounds kind of childish, sir, but we were in love and were thinking about starting a life together.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone where you went? Were you running away too?” Mrs Garrison needed more milk; I heard the fridge door open and saw her head pop into my peripheral vision.

“What?” Brian swung his head towards the kitchen. “Who told you that? Mom knew where we were going and what we were doing.”

“Okay then, why didn’t you let Kimberly’s parents know once you came back?”

He sighed, a big long one, and pinched his lip.

“We’d broken up by then and she’d chosen another path. I didn’t see any reason to tell them about Kimberly.”

“I can also answer that,” Mrs Garrison said, swooping in from the kitchen with a tray of cups and a plate of cookies. “I was happy enough to let Brian and Kimb … and Kimberly see each other. Who knows where love will take us? Even if things had worked out, though God himself only knows how, our families wouldn’t have been close. During the time that they were dating, I don’t believe I said more than two words to her mother, and that was on the street when it would have been rude to ignore her. There was no real reason to speak to them when Brian returned.”

She handed out coffee for us and a hot chocolate for Brian. I grabbed a cookie from the plate as she sat down.

“Help me out here,” I said. “I’ve never had a situation where good people have been so reticent to help. What’s going on? The kids had a thing before the breakup and both families allowed it to continue, so at some point everyone was okay with the kids being a couple. What was going on between the two families?”

Mrs Garrison, took a small sip of her coffee, pursed her lips and placed the cup on the table and her hands in her lap.

“Mr Rafferty, you say you’ve been to their house. Surely even someone like you could have seen and heard the foulness spouted inside those walls. The blaspheming and mockery of Our Lord.”

She crossed herself and continued.

“Well, I couldn’t stand five minutes in their presence before needing to pray on the impure thoughts I just know I’d be having, so I can’t say that I’m disappointed that Brian won’t be seeing any more of that whore.”

“That’s the second time you’ve referred to Kimberly like that, Mrs Garrison,” I said. “Based on what I’ve seen, I’ve got a very different impression.”

I turned to Brian.

“In less than a cup of coffee, your mother has moved from letting you two run off into the sunset, to referring to your ex-girlfriend as the devil’s spawn.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs Garrison swing her arm up and I almost flinched. She crossed herself twice and muttered under her breath.

“What happened?” I asked. Brian swallowed a mouthful of hot chocolate and wiped the milk mustache off his upper lip. Before he could draw breath however, his mother had chimed in.

“She behaved as all fallen women do, Mr Rafferty. Like it says in Proverbs 7, ‘… the forbidden woman, from the…’”

She ran down under my stare. I turned back.

“I’d prefer to hear it from you, Brian. What the hell happened with Kimberly?”

“We left here together, but after we got to Austin, she ran off with another guy.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “So, you both went to Austin. For the moderate climate and the casual, yet cosmopolitan lifestyle, I bet.”

“No, not that,” Brian said and his smile never wavered. “We went for Christ Alive! The largest gathering of Christian youth in America. It’s been held twice before but never in Texas.” He flicked the hair off his forehead and continued. “Over eight thousand Christians in one place. A week where we could come together as a community of God’s people to learn more about Jesus Christ, deepen our faith and provide service to the less fortunate.”

The whole thing sounded like a warped version of Woodstock: less music, less drugs, less free love, and a lot less fun.

Brian continued on his rapturous way.

“Where we could profess our love for God without judgement. Kimberly and I had been planning all year to go, ever since we heard it was going to be in Austin. I can’t tell you how excited we were to get there. We figured that after Christ Alive!, we’d spend a couple of days camping, just the two of us, and make decisions about our future before coming home.”

“She was planning to come home?”

“Sure she was, sir. She didn’t want to stay away from her family. The letter to her parents was her way of saying that she wanted them to treat her like the adult she was becoming.”

Nothing had smelled like Kimberly was a runaway, and it turns out she wasn’t. Not at first. But that still didn’t tell me where she was now.

“Did you go with a group of people, or was it just you and Kimberly?” I asked.

“It was a group from high school. A lot more wanted to go, but they were under the minimum age of fourteen. It was hard to tell them that they couldn’t go. They were heartbroken to miss out on such a spiritual opportunity.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, and grabbed another cookie. “Wow, what a bummer.”

“You get it too, then,” he said, and I felt like an ass.

Only for a second. I don’t dwell.

“Was this other guy part of your group? Could Kimberly have been seeing him before this trip to Austin?”

“No, he wasn’t part of our group, sir.” Brian leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “And I don’t think Kimberly already knew him. We met at a mixer on the first night and Kimberly introduced herself like she’d never met him before.”

“Does this guy have a name?”

“Um, Darius? Darien? Something like that.”

“Last name?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear one.”

“Where did he come from?”

“I thought at first he might be one of the event organizers because he was older—like you—and he was always followed by a group of men. Wait a minute, there was one woman with them. She was a bit older too, so that was another reason I thought they were part of the event.” Brian shrugged. “Someone said he was from another church but I never heard anyone say the name of it.”

“And you’re sure that this is the guy that Kimberly ran off with?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m certain of that.”

He took a deep breath.

“From the second day, Kimberly kept talking about him. How his flock was growing, the connection he had with our Lord and the amazing work he was doing. I think she’d done community service work with him and they must have talked then. After a couple of days of hearing all this stuff about his church, I asked her to tell me more about him. She said there was no way I would understand.

“Looking back, I should have thought how that was odd because we’d always been open with each other. We were both busy with a lot of event stuff going on and so I didn’t say anything.” He blew out a breath. “If I’d just said something then maybe it would have turned out different.”

“She was spending a lot of time with Darius?”

“Yeah. She would go to prayer sessions with him. I trusted her. I never guessed there was anything wrong. I was happy for the way she was deepening her relationship with God. On the fourth day, when I got back from community work, I went to find her at one of these prayer meetings and the two of them, Kimberly and Darius, were having …” A breath. “… having sex in one of the chapels. She looked straight at me when I opened the door but didn’t say anything … or even stop what they were doing. I walked out.”

“Ouch,” I said. “That sucks.”

“I told you. A little whore,” Helen said, her pinched tone reflecting her face.

“Mom,” Brian said. “Let me tell it. We, Kimberly and I, had talked a lot about our future together, and that included sex.” Brian’s face reddened, but he held his nerve and carried on. “We’d agreed to wait until after we were married. It wasn’t like we didn’t want to, we sure did. It would have been the first time for both of us. That’s why I knew straight away that it was over. She had gone back on her purity promise to me with a guy she’d only known a couple of days.”

He put his head in his hands.

“I don’t know what happened,” Brian whispered into his lap. “I thought we were meant to be together. I loved her.”

“And you haven’t seen her since?”

Brian looked up. His eyes were wet but his voice was firm.

“Once, on the last day. I was loading up my car and saw her in the window of a bus in the parking area. Our eyes met, but it was like she didn’t recognize me. She didn’t wave, or smile, or anything.”

“Do you know where it was headed?”

“No sir. If it helps, the woman I saw with Darius and his group was sitting right next to Kimberly on the bus, talking to her. Then the bus pulled on to the main road and that was the last time I saw her.”

Brian dropped his head into his hands again.

“She never even tried to apologize. I wish I could help you more, sir, but that’s all I know.”

As Mrs Garrison was showing me to the door, she grabbed my arm.

“You see what this girl is, Mr Rafferty. He did the best he could, and you feel sorry for her like a lost soul. She’s lost alright, and I’ll never forgive her for what she did to my son. I just hope her God is more forgiving than I am.”

CHAPTER 5

I had missed Hilda’s flight by the time I left the Garrisons, so I drove straight to her house in Richardson, trying to keep it under the speed limit and occasionally succeeding. The high cloud was splitting apart, leaving a warm afternoon in its wake, clear and blue.

As I wheeled the Mustang onto Blue Lake Circle, I saw brake lights wink from between the street trees.

I slammed down the gas pedal, got the car up to a respectable thirty-five, before throwing out the anchors and sliding to a stop on the wrong side of the road. Hilda looked up, startled, her black leather overnight bag in one hand and the other on the raised trunk lid as I came out of the car with my finger and thumb cocked in a mock pistol.

“Freeze lady! Drop the bag and put both hands on the car.”

Her eyes twinkled. Those gorgeous, coal-black eyes with the color flecks that I could never quite pin down. She smiled and hefted her bag. My heart melted.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll have to charge you with resisting, ma’am.” I walked across the street, hand held low at my hip like a film-noir bad guy.

“I’d better be compliant then.” She bent over—way, way over—and placed the bag down next to the car. Staying bent, she looked back at me while straightening the seam of one stocking. As I walked up behind her, she reached out to close the trunk lid and placed both hands on the bright red metal.

“Should I be worried about police brutality?” Hilda pushed away from the car and wiggled her backside into me.

“Maybe. If we don’t go inside soon, Mrs Kendall will be calling 911. Or Billy Graham.” I looked to my left and waved. The white lace curtains in the house next door fell back into place.

She stood up, turned around and leaned into me.

“Rafferty, you scared the shit out of me at first. God, I’ve missed you.”

We kissed and necked for a few minutes until I could sense the next door curtains stirring again. We broke and I held her at arms length.

“I’m not convinced. Felt like you were faking it for a minute there.”

“Get my bag and the purse from the front seat and meet me inside. I’ll ease your mind.”

She walked over and unlocked the front door, blowing me a kiss as she stepped inside.

By the time I picked up the bag the door was closed. I grabbed her purse and locked both cars, moving as fluidly as possible with a half boner.

I pushed the front door open, and my eyes took their time adjusting to the darkness of drawn curtains. A black flower shape on the floor turned out to be Hilda’s skirt. I put her bag down and dropped her purse on the kitchen bench. I picked one stocking off the hallway floor, and held it to my nose, breathing deep. I dropped it again and started to peel off my clothes. By the time I’d walked the length of the hallway, passing the other stocking and her black lace panties lying on the carpet, I was naked.

I leaned against the doorframe.

Hilda looked up from bed, nude, her legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Her eyes shone and her hair cascaded black ringlets over the pillows. The afternoon sun beat through the shutters, slashing light and shadow across her body.

Time stopped and I understood the artist’s inescapable compulsion to capture a moment of pure beauty and, at the same time, the crushing anguish of knowing that no matter how hard one tried, a reproduction would never, ever be close to the real thing.

“Hey, Ugly. Are you gonna keep standing there with a hardon and that blank look on your face?”

I smiled.

“Or are you going to come down here and fuck me?”

Later, much later, the streetlights popped into life and bled yellow into the room. One kept shining through a gap in the shutters into my left eye. It was going to drive me nuts if I didn’t move but that would’ve meant twisting and lifting my head from Hilda’s bare stomach. I decided insanity was worth the risk.

They don’t call me wild and daring for nothing.

As we lay there, I kissed Hilda’s stomach—and a little higher than that, too—stroked her thigh, and watched the smoke from her cigarette rise to the ceiling.

“Okay, I’m prepared to call it,” I said. “No faking involved.”

The cigarette glowed as she took a drag and winked at me. “You can never know for sure though, can you?”

“Don’t try that Meg Ryan mind game stuff on me. Billy Crystal? How hard can it be to fool a poor sap like that? I, on the other hand, am a trained investigator, with my detective instincts honed to a keen edge through years of dealing with society’s underbelly. There’s no way you could fake it, babe. Nothing gets past me.”

“Uh huh.” She crushed out her cigarette and turned to me. “So when your eyes rolled up into the back of your head when I did this …”

And she reached down and did that again.

My eyes rolled up into the back of my head.

I’m not sure how long it was before I came back to my body.

Seconds? Days? I didn’t care.

“… keen edge of your instincts now?”

“Hmmm. Give me some credit, woman. I’m exhausted after performing miracles here tonight. Not Jesus himself, even with his twelve-piece backing band, could have had an infidel screaming ‘Oh God, Oh God,’ that quickly.”

“Infidel?”

Raised eyebrow. Mock outrage.

“Heathen. Unbeliever.”

“Tell you what, big guy. You can call me anything you like if you feed me soon. I’m starving.”

We decided on Japanese and made it downtown in time to get squeezed around the last empty table—a tiny, wobbly one near the bathrooms. Everyone else in Dallas had the same idea about trying out the new place.

I thought about being angry that we hadn’t chosen BBQ instead, but with Hilda sitting across the cheap plastic tablecloth from me, and the lanterned table light throwing her cheekbones into soft relief I couldn’t muster up enough energy to be angry about anything.

Besides, we had lucked out.

The early arrivals, all seated on stools at a bench which wrapped around the cooking area, were being made to catch their food as the chef threw it at them, hot from the grill. Fried egg was flying everywhere and while they seemed to be okay with it, I couldn’t see the goddamn point.

If we were meant to still be catching our food, there’d be no reason for Safeway.

Our drinks arrived. Hilda had forgone the offer of traditional sake for a chablis and I embraced my inner samurai by ordering an Asahi, which was surprisingly good.

With a table full of salmon sashimi, sushi rolls and chicken teriyaki we dipped, ate, drank. The Asahi went down quickly, as an offensive countermeasure against the wasabi. Hilda and I held hands and talked about our respective weeks.

She had fended off challenges from the local and interstate antique dealers to secure the estate of the recently departed Henry Morgan, tycoon and founder of Blackrock Oil, the third largest oil drilling enterprise in the continental US. Henry had been single when he died, having survived his wife by fifteen years and though the Houston social pages had linked him to no fewer than eight different women since then—waitresses and aspiring models mostly, with a lone dermatologist standout—none had swayed his heart or loins enough to be included in the will.

Gardner Antiques was now in charge of the largest estate of the last twenty years in Texas.

“Proud of you, hon,” I said licking up a rivulet of teriyaki sauce working its way down my hand and threatening my shirtsleeve.

Hilda chose to ignore my self-grooming.

“Thanks, I’m proud of me, too.”

“You should be. Not many women could do what you did. The graceful way you pivoted and twisted to move from kneeling to sitting without letting go of my—”

“Rafferty!” Her eyes flashed. “Yeah, that was good, wasn’t it?” She poked her tongue out between her perfect teeth. “But before you get me distracted, tell me, are you any closer to finding the girl?”

“Wow, I almost got whiplash from that segue,” I said. Told her about the morning meeting with the Garrisons and Kimberly running off with this other guy, Darius what-his-face.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” she asked. “Brian, I mean.”

“I think so. He struck me as being genuinely upset about finding Kimberly cheating on him.”

“What now?”

“I think you should finish your wine and we head back to your place for Round Two.”

“You’re not too tired, poor boy? You sure you don’t want to just cuddle? Save your strength for tomorrow.”

“Me, tired? Hah.” I stifled a yawn. “Damn. Bad timing. Maybe I’ll tell you what I’m planning for the case before I fall asleep, instead.”

Hilda tilted her head and smiled.

“It shouldn’t be too hard to track down this Darius guy. Brian gave me the names of all the kids from his school who went to Christ Alive! and if that doesn’t bring any joy I’ll talk to the organizers. They should have a complete list of attendees, with contact details. A couple hours on the phone on Monday and I should have Darius all tied up.”

“Tied up? Hmm, I like the sound of that. You sure you’re too tired?” Hilda must have slipped a shoe off because her stockinged foot was soft and warm when it probed my crotch.

“Waiter? We’ll have the check now.”

CHAPTER 6

They say that weekends are for resting between the physical strain of working weeks.

Monday morning, I dragged my sorry ass into the office more drained than I’d been three days before. An hour earlier, Hilda had kissed me good-bye and bounced out of her door with a spring in her step and a swing in her hips. The weaker sex? No goddamned way.

Not that I would ever tell her that.

I didn’t need to; she knew the truth.

I pounded a couple of aspirin, poured the first of several cups of coffee and fired up the pipe. With the window cracked, the sounds and smells of a downtown Dallas morning leaking into the office and the first flush of caffeine and nicotine sloshing through my system, the old body turned over and engaged first gear. It was time to hit the phones.

The first kid I spoke to from Brian’s school was no help at all.

Not that she didn’t try. Like Brian, she seemed genuinely sorry that she couldn’t tell me more, but in the end her story matched with the one I’d already heard. An older guy, with a group following him, had been around during the first night’s after-Mass drinks. Non-alcoholic, you understand.

Of course.

She hadn’t caught his name. She had seen him during the rest of the week, always with a group of people around him. She hadn’t been invited to any special prayer meetings. She had seen Kimberly with the group later in the week.

The other nine calls, not counting the ones I had to leave messages for, were similar.

A couple of the kids told me they had caught his name though they differed on whether it was Darius or Darrell. No-one had spoken to him after that first night. In fact, they all said that the mysterious Darius ignored them for the rest of the week. As did all the people with him, including Kimberly. Nothing new, but I was reassured that my assessment of Brian not being a liar seemed to be holding up.

Honest questioning was getting me nowhere.

Time for subterfuge.

“Good morning. Christian Ministry Events. Rebecca speaking.”

“Well, hey there Rebecca, you sweet thang. This here’s Stew Bayless from Rising Day Church down here in Dallas.”

The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. I’m sure someone said that once. Right then, I couldn’t think of who.

“Hello, Mr Bayless. How can I help you today?”

“Well, down here at Rising Day, we’ve been watching what y’all are doin’ up there. Watching very closely, I can tell you. And we’re impressed with your recent Christ Alive! event. Mighty impressed. Every day we see signs that people, especially our vulnerable young people, are being led from the path of righteousness and tempted towards wickedness. We want to, we need to, help them before the Devil gets hold of them and we lose them forever.

“That’s why the congregation here at Rising Day has agreed—agreed unanimously, I should say—to support your next event. We’ve formed a Crusade Committee (did I really just say that?) to get busy working on raising money to help you spread the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and bring light to this wicked world.”

I had to stop at that point. Rebecca told Stew Bayless that he should speak to the head of their Organizing Committee, who would be better placed to help him. Uh, me.

That, and I was about to start laughing at my own pulpit caricature.

“Good morning, Mr Bayless, and may the blessing of our Lord be on you.” The flowery voice syruped down the line. “I’m Pamela Lovegood, and I’m the chair of the CME Organizing Committee. Rebecca said you wanted to speak to me?”

I wound up good ol’ Stew Bayless and rolled him out. As it turned out, Pamela was exactly the one he should speak to.

“Oh, Mr Bayless. What a generous offer. Though I don’t know your church well, I’ve heard of the simply amazing work you’re doing down there. I can’t tell you what a difference your support of Christ Alive! will make to the young people we try to help. Of course, CME would be more than happy, and blessed, to work with Rising Day.”

Four minutes and several more promises from the Crusade Committee later Pamela had agreed to send Stew copies of the Austin event program, profiles on the speakers, a list of all the churches represented and the names of all the community service programs that the event had supported.

Oh, and would it be too much trouble to include a copy of the attendee list from the latest event?

No, it wouldn’t be any trouble at all.

All this goodness would be delivered by registered mail to Rising Day’s Dallas office in two to three days. Imagine my own surprise to find out that Rising Day Church shared an office address with yours truly.

Who’d’a thunk it?

I was getting somewhere, but with two to three days to kill, depending on whether US Mail lived up to its promises, a gap in the work-flow now presented itself. I almost panicked, but another coffee, pipe and the chance for an afternoon nap settled me right down.

CHAPTER 7

A couple of mornings later I opened the office door to a small mountain of manila envelopes on the floor below the mail slot. They made a healthy slap landing on my desk after I’d scooped them off the floor.

Morning routine of coffee and pipe underway, I sliced the envelopes open with an old hunting knife from the bottom drawer. Pamela Lovegood had sent Stew Bayless everything he’d asked for, and then some. A handwritten note conferring all sorts of divine and otherworldly blessings upon the generous Mr Bayless accompanied the photocopied pages. I pitched everything except the lists of churches and attendees from the Austin event.

I poured another cup of coffee, threw my feet up on the desk and dove into the Christ Alive! Documents, soon realizing that choosing the name Rising Day for my fictitious religious enterprise hadn’t been as hokey as I’d thought. There were honest-to-god churches with similar monikers. The Church for Everybody, Abundant Life, The Fields and New Horizons. And that was only the first page.

I needed to lift my game; these people were outdoing me with their outrageous name play.

I turned back to the list of attendees, sure that there would be an answer within. I stood, or sat, undaunted in the face of eight thousand names.

Two hours later I stood up, mostly daunted.

I felt the blood drain back to my feet, cracked my back and popped my shoulders. I hadn’t expected to find a name highlighted—here he is!—but not a single Darius popped up in the roll. There were twelve Darrells with various spellings, seven Darnells, and two Darians. And more than a few attendees with D as a first initial. One hundred and eighty-two to be exact. That gave me upward of two hundred possibles to run down. If the kids had his name right. If it was his first name, not a middle initial. If he’d used his real name when he registered. That sounded like a lot of ifs.

I don’t like ifs.

I could figure every male at the event, except for Brian and his classmates, could be my guy and I’d have to weed them out one by one.

No way I could get through that volume.

Also, I needed an approach to eliminate people. I couldn’t get on the phone with each of these guys. “So, hey, I was wondering … fucked any virgin cheerleaders recently at a christian youth rally? No shit? Her Mom wants her home, so if you could put her on the phone, that’d be great.”

Plus, they’d come from everywhere to congregate in Austin. Within the twenty-two D-names I had on the list, home addresses included Montana, New York, Texas, Nebraska, Washington State, Oregon, and Iowa. And Hawaii. Include the “D as first initial” group and I’d need manpower rivaling the FBI to check on them all.

So, I couldn’t track them and I couldn’t call them.

I needed another plan.

I went and had lunch.

As I climbed the stairs to the office, I knew I needed to take a new slant on this case. I needed a way in to the church world if I had any chance of tracking down Darius. Normally, there was a call I could make to someone who knew someone who knew someone, but none of the someones I knew spent any of their time near a confessional.

That wasn’t completely true.

Apparently, Freddo Lombard had prayed to any god that would listen when he was tracked down by the Chicagoan family he’d been ripping off, but I’m not sure that counts for finding religion.

Plus, that had been the last time Freddo talked to anyone at all, his voice drowned out shortly thereafter by the splash of the Ford engine block he was chained to hitting the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Not even a priest could have helped him at that point.

I leaned back in the chair, fired up a pipe and played with that thought.

A priest.

The name floated up from the past.

Father McIlhenny.

A distant past.

Normally I’m not much for dredging through the cobwebs of time and memory, but I didn’t have anything else in the diary for the afternoon.

What the hell.

“Rafferty!”

“Sir!”

“Get those people off the fences or all hell is going to break loose.”

“Yes, Sarge!”

I run to the nearest barricade, where a group of white, college-age youths are trying to climb over. I draw my nightstick and look at these kids, a few of them probably older than me. The firelight flickers across their faces and I hope they can’t tell how shit-scared I am.

I slam my nightstick down on the barricade.

“Get back,” I yell, with as much force as I can muster. They back up a step as the baton clangs on the metal fence and look at me sideways.

“It’s not right, man,” they yell. “Black people in a white church. It’s against God’s law.”

“He doesn’t sign my paychecks, so I’ll stick with the real law.” I’m trying hard to control my voice, but it still sounds all high and squeaky.

“It’s an abomination.”

“The Civil Rights Act says everyone can worship wherever they want. So, until LBJ and my sergeant say different, we’re gonna have to disagree on that one.”

“They’ll have to come out sometime. You can’t protect them forever.”

I turn from the catcalls and jeers to look up the hill to the church. Silhouetted in the doorway, the torchlight reflecting off his bald head, Father Don McIlhenny raises an arm. I wave back, look over my shoulder to make sure the college kids aren’t trying another run, and walk to the brightest part of the barricade.

“Crazy times, huh Sarge?”

“Damn straight, Rafferty. Never thought I’d live to see the niggers get treated equal, but now that it’s here, we got to do our job and keep the law, whether we like it or not.”

Not more than twenty feet away, on the other side of the fence line, a group of white-hooded figures—gender and age impossible to discern underneath the hoods—stand in silence and look to the church. Most of them hold burning torches while a flaming cross, ten feet high, rises from the centre of their circle.

I can hardly hear over the crackle of burning wood.

“Law or not, I’d sure be happier if the padre had been a mite discreet when he invited the niggers to worship with him. An advertisement in the Post Tribune, fur chrissake! What did he think would happen? I jes’ hope he understands how lucky he is. If it weren’t fur us here now, we’d be cuttin’ him down from a tree in the morning.”

Looking at my fellow police officers—a collection of burnt out old-timers, aspirational future Chiefs and a couple of greenhorns like me—I wondered if anyone else was struggling with the idea of protecting people we didn’t know from being killed by other people we didn’t know, all because of their skin color.

When I’d joined the police force a year earlier the idea of “protect and serve” had seemed simple. I was no idealist; I knew I wasn’t going to save the world. But it seemed simple enough: those that lived within the law deserved to be protected from those who lived outside it. But …

What if I disagreed with the law? Could I enforce a law I didn’t agree with?

I’d have to wait to answer those questions because I can see the college guys, cheered on by their girlfriends, making another assault on the fence. I run back across the wet grass, and smack the fence as hard as I can with my baton. The shock that runs up my arm almost dislodges the nightstick and the boys let go of the fence like they’ve been electrocuted.

“Fuck man. That hurt.”

“Stay off the fence then.”

“Sure. So tough while you’re over there, huh. Come out here and show us how tough you are.”

“That’s not gonna happen.” I lower my voice. “Knock it off, okay. Guys? Go home. What’s it to you?”

“How stupid are you, boy? Niggers don’t belong in our churches.”

“What about Father Don?”

“What about him?”

“Does he belong?”

“Course he does. He’s God’s voice.”

“Don’t you think that if god’s voice says it’s okay, then it’s okay?”

I feel the weight of the nightstick in my hand and slide it back into the holder. I lower my shoulders, put my hands in my pockets and try a smile. Just another country boy trying to get along.

The stockiest of the college boys unclenches his hand and blinks several times. He takes a long pull at his beer bottle without breaking eye contact. I force myself to do the same, though I think I’d do a better job if I had a beer, too.

“Sheeiit, boys. I don’t have the foggiest what this lame-ass cop is talking about, but I’m not gonna stand out here all night listening to him. Let’s split.”

The group stalks back to their cars with girlfriends in tow, pause briefly to throw their empty beer bottles at the fence, and then peel out of the parking lot with defiant wheel spins.

I watch the tail lights turn the corner and disappear, but I’m still keyed up and when a hand grabs me, I go for my gun.

Father Don steps into the light and smiles.

“Shit, Father! You scared the bejesus out of me.” My body shakes with adrenaline. “Oh hey, I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to curse. You just caught me off guard, that’s all.”

“Son, don’t ever give words more power than they deserve. They’re just words. They can’t hurt us unless we let them.”

I start breathing again. My hands are jittering.

“Son, that was mighty impressive.”

“Just doing my job, Father.”

“Nonetheless. What’s your name?”

“Rafferty.”

“Well, Officer Rafferty, we’re blessed to have a fine young man like you here tonight. The church is thankful for your service. I’m going to check on the others now and I’m sure your sergeant could use your help over at his post. Thank you again.”

He shakes my hand and turns to walk along a path that winds behind the church. I call after him.

“Father?”

He turns back.

“Why do you do it? Let the colored people in to your church. You must have known it was going to make people mad.”

“I think the question we all should ask is, how can we stand by and not do it? Everyone one of us is a child in His image. His only Son told us that we should treat each other as we would be treated ourselves.”

“But Father—”

“Let me ask you something. Are you a religious man?”

“No, Father.”

“Why did you do it, then? You’re protecting the church, and those praying inside, from a group of people who don’t understand why they’re angry.”

I swallow.

“You don’t believe in the church and you’re not sure whether all people deserve the same rights.” He shrugs. “Why bother?”

“It’s my job.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “It’s not only what you did; it’s how you did it. You could have beaten one of those boys with your nightstick, or worse. This is Texas, and you’re a police officer.” His eyes tear me apart.

“It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Amen,” he said and his smile grows. “If only more people in this world were like you, Officer Rafferty. I hope we’ll see each other again.” He nods twice, turns the corner and disappears behind a large tree.

We hold the barricades that night, with Klan members eyeballing us until daybreak before marching off, silent still. The Chief of Police and Mayor hold a public press conference the next day calling for calm and reason. At the same time, three hard-bitten detectives from the DPD meet privately with the local Klan chapter and convince them that there’s no future in harassing this particular church.

An uneasy calm descends on the chapel grounds.

For the next few months the church is ringed by a perimeter of protestors with nothing more dangerous than loud epithets and badly-spelled signs. The odd paint bomb finds its mark on the wall of the church but the Birmingham tragedy doesn’t have a Dallas sequel.

Father Don never wavers in his commitment to treat all people equally, nor does he keep a low profile doing it. He comes to the gate every day to meet worshippers and protestors alike, his bald head gleaming as bright as his smile.

In the end, he simply outlasts everyone.

When it becomes clear that Father Don isn’t going to change his stance or go away, the last protestors leave one night and never return.

I hadn’t seen Father Don since that night, but given that I was running short on clergy contacts, it seemed like a good time to look him up. A quick riffle through the phone book and I was talking to a volunteer at our Church of the Held Barricades from sixty-five.

“I’m sorry sir, there’s no-one here by that name. Father Beare is our priest.”

He sounded so young, I could picture the peach fuzz on his chin.

“I know he was there in the mid-sixties. There must be records of which church he moved to?”

“Umm, I wouldn’t know about where he moved to, sir. Uhh. Or when he moved. Sir.”

“Why do I get the feeling you just don’t want to tell me?”

“It’s not that, sir. Umm.”

“Isn’t it a sin to lie?” It looked like Stew Bayless still lurked under the surface.

“Yes it is, sir. Bearing false witness is a sin and only God can provide forgiveness. Oh, damn.”

His voice trailed away. I’m glad he got there by himself, because my next step was to threaten him and, to be honest, I don’t like doing that to folks who don’t deserve it.

Don’t tell anyone.

The volunteer’s next words were a whisper. I imagined him looking left and right.

“I’m not meant to tell you, sir. No-one here is meant to speak about Mr McIlhenny since he left. The last I heard, he had moved to Austin. That’s all I can say.”

“Mister? What about Father McIlhe—”

The line clicked and I was left with dead air.

I had to tear down the pile of phone books to get to the only Austin directory I had, two years old. Then, while moving back to sit down, I tripped over one of the new stacks I’d made and banged my right thigh against the corner of my desk. Damn.

The directory had three listings for McIlhenny, D. and I went down swinging with the first two.

I had the receiver wedged against my shoulder and was rubbing my leg, thinking about getting up to get a beer when the third answered.

“This is Don.”

I sat up straight and winced.

“Ow, hi. I’m looking for Don McIlhenny.”

“I’m Don McIlhenny.”

“Actually, I’m looking for Father Don McIlhenny.”

A chuckle. “You’re about ten years too late for that.” The voice flattened. “Who is this?”

“Rafferty,” I said. “Father McIlhenny might remember me as Officer Rafferty. It was a long time ago.”

“Officer Rafferty.” The line whistled with his breath. “I haven’t heard that name for a long time. I think I read about you saving that little girl, what, it must have been fifteen years ago?”

“It’s just Rafferty now. And I guess that means you are Father McIlhenny?”

“Were. I was Father, but like you, it’s just plain Don now. A long story and one I won’t bore you with. I had hoped we might meet again, so it’s good to hear from you. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Damn again. With him no longer a priest, I didn’t see how he could help me. But he was on the phone now, so, what the hell.

“Don, I’m looking for a girl who went missing at a Christian shindig down in your neck of the woods.”

“Let me guess …” He sighed. “Christ Alive!, right?”

“Yeah. You know anything about it?”

“A lot. I’ve spent the last four years trying to get the damned thing shut down. You can imagine my embarrassment when they stage the thing in my home town. Pissed me off, and good.”

I paused, trying to reconcile the person on the other end of the phone with the Father Don I knew years ago. It felt like I was bringing on an aneurysm so I gave up.

Don continued, oblivious to my near death experience.

“Still, I’m not sure what use my loathing of this event would be in helping you find this girl.”

“She was last seen there with a man. I don’t know where he’s from, and I only have a possible name to go on. I was hoping that something might ring a bell, but if you’re not wearing the dog collar anymore …”

If it was possible to hear a person’s eyes narrow in their voice, then I knew what Don’s facial expression was.

“How old is this girl?”

“Couple months shy of nineteen.”

“Who reported her missing?”

“Mom and Dad.”

“They’re not with her?”

“Nope. She went to Christ Alive! with her boyfriend. The family didn’t know anything about it.”

“The boyfriend missing too?”

“No. He came back by himself after discovering her fuc … uh, with another guy.”

“Rafferty. One of the things I’ve always believed is that words have no power other than what we choose to give them. She was fucking this other guy. Okay. How long has it been since anyone’s heard from her?”

“Almost two months.” Worked on getting back on track after hearing a priest say “fucking”.

“What’s this possible name you have?” Don asked.

“From the people I’ve spoken to, I think his name’s Darius.”

“Shit!”

A sigh chased the expletive down the wires.

“I’ll bet my left arm that it’s not Darius, it’s Dariell. With two elles. Dariell Thof.”

“So who is he?” I asked.

“He’s a nobody masquerading as a would-be priest, leading a pissant little commune like he’s God’s gift to …” Another sigh. “Anyway, just take it for the moment that he’s so fake not even his name is real.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. He was born Jakob Friesen. The name he uses now, Dariell, is just one he took on for himself, along with his calling. But it’s not his real name. Anyway, that doesn’t matter, if he’s involved it can only be bad news.”

Could this case get any weirder?

“How do I find him?”

Don was working hard on his sighs.

“I’ve got some ideas. Nothing conclusive, to be honest. But no matter where he is, if he’s got your girl, she’s in big trouble, my boy. Bigger than you or she knows.”

“Don, I need help here. Give me something I can use.”

“There’s too much to cover during a phone call. And I need to show you some of it. How soon can you get to Austin? We’ve got a lot to do if you want to save her.”

CHAPTER 8

Don and I agreed to meet on the weekend.

We would talk in the morning and then Hil and I could explore the city in the afternoon. Solving cases and messing about with Hilda; sounded like my perfect day.

I fired up a pipe, grabbed that beer, and thought about what Don had told me.

It could be that he was overwrought and melodramatic. That didn’t sound like the Don I knew when we were younger men, but time changes us all. I’d only know for sure when we met again.

What if he was right?

What danger could Kimberly be in? And how could it have got as bad as Don indicated?

Strait-laced girl, low risk factors, and while I didn’t follow the same doctrine, the commitment to her religion seemed genuine and unlikely to place her in danger.

What was I missing?

I grabbed another beer and puffed away.

Thought about Cricket Dawes. On her back in an apartment parking lot, drowning in her own blood. The philandering husband, Walter, puking on the expensive carpet in his home office. The body of Max Krandorff bleeding all over the floor of his own shop and his business partner floating face down in a Galveston ship channel.

Families broken and lives ruined for stupid reasons. What a waste.

I stopped myself thinking about old cases—those had been busted long before I got involved. Nothing I could do.

I’d get this one right.

An image of Kimberly sucker-punched me behind the eyes.

Small room. Dark. Barren.

Kimberly in a dirty robe. Lying on a steel cot.

Tangled hair. Wet eyes. Snotty nose.

Lips moving without sound.

The image faded.

I blinked a couple of times and realized I’d been grinding my thumb into the bruise on my leg. I had no idea how long I’d been doing it.

And I couldn’t feel a thing.

I called Kathy-Lee to bring her up to date, and then wished I hadn’t.

My leg was throbbing, my ear was sore from the phone and I was craving another beer but I couldn’t reach the fridge without putting the receiver down. I vowed to reorganize the office next week to provide better efficiency in desperate moments like this.

“It’s been four days now, Mr Rafferty. I had hoped for better news,” Kathy-Lee said. It sounded like a huge effort for her to stay composed and that the facade might crack at any moment. I pictured her wedding ring being put through its paces.

“So did I, Mrs Troupe. At the time it seemed like Kimberly had run away with Brian and it would be a simple matter to find them. I spoke to Brian at home, and with the extra, uh, details he gave me, it’s clear that Kimberl—”

“Brian’s at home?” she screeched. “How long has he been back? Don’t they know how worried we’ve been? What did he do to Kimberly?”

“At this point, I’m satisfied that Brian is not involved. And the—”

“What did he say?”

“Mrs Troupe. Kathy-Lee.” I paused and her breathing slowed. “Brian has given me as much information as possible. I will find Kimberly, but there’s nothing more that he can say that will help.”

“Why didn’t his family call?”

I had a fleeting pang of sympathy for Kissinger trying to broker peace in Vietnam. Didn’t matter, he was still an asshole.

Kissinger, not Brian.

“It doesn’t matter, Kathy-Lee. What does matter is chasing down the leads I have. That’s why I’m going to Austin.”

“Are there people down there who can help you find her?” Flat voice.

She didn’t need to know that I was sitting on a big can of nada and was down to following a very thin, very old thread.

“Among others,” I said. “This means that the case is taking longer than I first thought, so …” I let my words trail off, aiming for sensitivity.

“Of course, Mr Rafferty,” she said, letting me know that I’d missed. “You’ll be paid. Do you think we care about the money? This is our daughter.”

She blew her nose.

“Kathy-Lee, has something happened that I need to know about?”

She paused, as if deciding whether I was worthy.

I stayed silent. Good move.

“God has spoken to me again.”

She paused again, no doubt waiting for me to finish my eye-rolling.

“He says she’s in a small, dark room, alone and frightened, wearing rags. She’s being stripped of her beauty, Mr Rafferty. My little girl’s color is fading.”

Her last line was a whisper.

“Please find her, Mr Rafferty. Find Kimberly.” I hung up the phone after I’d listened to the call-disconnected signal for a while. The back of my neck was cold and prickly.

I looked at the open window.

When I got up a moment later, to close the sash and turn off the lights, the flag on the building opposite hung limp and lifeless.

It was after midnight and I was still too keyed up to sleep so I sat out on the back porch with the stars and had another pipe and one more beer. My mind was full of Kathy-Lee’s words and, though I didn’t want to admit it, how similar they were to my image of Kimberly.

Fuck off, Rafferty. Are you saying you’ve had a psychic vision? C’mon. You don’t believe in that stuff.

That was true; I didn’t believe in that stuff.

I’d never seen any evidence, at all, of visions or voices or any such shit. Sure, a lot of people said they had a connection to a different realm, and even more people were willing to believe them—and part with hard-earned currency to prove it—but saying so doesn’t make it true.

What about hunches?

I’d always thought of my hunches as my gut processing things faster than my brain. Hilda had laughed and said it wouldn’t be hard for lots of things to move faster. She swore there were times she could hear the gears grinding.

Putting aside my beloved’s attempts at humor, all the hunches I’d ever had that were right—and there were plenty that weren’t—were aligned with a logical extrapolation of available facts, even if I hadn’t been able to connect them yet at the front of my brain.

In my line of work, I’d seen almost everything there is to see when it comes to my fellow human beings. I’d seen the horrible things they do to each other for the stupidest of reasons.

I’d seen the random, the improbable and the downright unfair.

Thorney, being in that cell, at that time, when the junkie was brought in. If just one of those elements had been different, would he still be alive today?

Would Edie still be alive if I hadn’t yelled at her in high school? Would Kate still be alive if—.

Stop it.

I told you I don’t like ifs.

And none of them would change a goddamn thing.

In the end, fair or not, improbable or not, everything’s explainable. Action. Reaction. Simple. Anything else is fantasy or rationalization, no matter what comforting outer skin you want to wrap it in. And I couldn’t afford to load myself down with fantasy no matter what I saw; there was a missing girl to be found, and I wasn’t going to do it by sitting around navel gazing and making “omm” noises.

Besides, I’ll take a loaded .38 over a holster of rationalization any day.

I knocked my pipe against the edge of the porch. The ashes winked as they tumbled into the flowerbed. I swigged the last of the beer, locked the rear door and headed to the bedroom. I stripped and slid into bed, trying not to wake Hilda. She stirred and pressed against me. As I drifted off to sleep while she resumed her soft snores, a random thought left shiny trails through my brain. I could hear its echo but couldn’t get close enough to grab it and throw it out.

What if I’m wrong?

“I want to hit something or shoot someone, Hil,” I said as I walked back into the bedroom. “All this paper shuffling and talking to people is getting on my nerves.”

She was lying down with her eyes closed as I set the breakfast stuff on the side table. By the time I’d walked around the bed and got in, she was awake, sitting up and making serious inroads into her Denver omelette.

After all these years, I still don’t know how she does that.

“Mmm, I can tell. You were a bit … aggressive … last night,” she said. I think that’s what it was. Her egg consumption hadn’t slowed.

I frowned.

“Hush woman. This is no time for a sexual performance appraisal.” She raised an eyebrow. “I think I’m getting soft, for chrissake.”

I looked over. She’d already finished breakfast, and reached for her coffee cup.

“You might as well trade me in for Alan Alda.”

“Not a chance, Rafferty. He’s thin and gangly, and you know that’s not a turn on, even if we would go for walks in the woods, discuss women’s rights and he’d read Germaine Greer to me and … well, maybe I could overlook the thin and gangly thing.”

She fished her morning cigarette out of a pack, lit up, and grabbed her cup of coffee again.

“I’m teasing honey, lest you take me seriously in your moment of new-found liberalism.”

I scowled. “That did it. No one calls me a liberal.”

“Atta boy. Knew you’d snap out of it.”

“I am getting antsy, though. This god and religious shit is getting to me. It’d be nice to have a straightforward case. You know: Girl goes missing. Rafferty finds girl. Girl returns home. Rafferty gets paid. Fade to black, roll credits. Easy. Simple.”

“You know what they say.” She blew smoke towards the open window. “If it was easy, anyone could do it.”

As she got out of bed, stubbed out her cigarette and walked to the bathroom, I was concentrating more on the delicate flexion of her calves and thighs and I lost track of what she was saying.

“Course if it’s too hard, you could hand it over to All-Tex Investigations and look for a job that’s more in keeping with your sensibilities. Maybe there’s an opening down at the Crystal Cave.” By the time I’d registered the words, she was in the shower with the water running, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown her chuckles.

“Okay,” I said, walking into the bathroom. “Ha ha …”

Her laughter drifted steamily over the shower screen.

I reached over and flushed the toilet.

Almost couldn’t hear her squealing when I got to the kitchen.

CHAPTER 9

I looked around Scott White’s office again to reassure myself I was in the right place.

In the time since I’d last been here, he’d changed the decor. Gone was the dark timber and the burnt orange feature wall, replaced by a new paint scheme. Muted gray and a weird version of peach. New furniture too. All low, long, black leather and chrome. New artwork on three walls, including what looked like a Lichtenstein behind his desk. And I was sure the Marantz stereo system and Pioneer speakers that dwarfed the far wall were new, too.

None of that surprised me. Scott was constantly updating everything he owned. A true slave to fashion—hell, he was the slave to fashion—no matter what it was, if it was more than two months old, it needed to go. And whenever he bought, he bought the best.

“Rafferty!” Scott boomed into the office. He boomed everywhere. The office, a gallery opening, across the street in rush hour traffic. Everywhere.

“How have you been Rafferty? Are you getting by?”

It was his oldest line, made funnier by his self-perception. I followed with my half of the well-rehearsed couplet.

“Good Snowy. How about you?”

He’d picked up the high school nickname in reference to his last name and white-blond hair. The five-to-eight stretch he did after college for selling coke cemented it for life.

“I’m getting by Rafferty. Just. You know how hard it can be.”

Snowy was the only guy I knew pulling down upwards of three hundred g’s a year who could refer to himself as “just getting by” with a straight face.

“Hey Rafferty, you must see this. I had it installed yesterday.”

He walked to the single artwork-free wall, made up of a series of square fabric panels. He touched one corner of a panel. Three squares swung outwards and upwards at his touch to reveal a screen the size of your average drive-in looming in the space beyond.

“The latest, my friend. A Sony Videoscope KP-5040 fifty-inch projector TV. Only two in the US. Not even Trump has one yet.”

That was Snowy all over. The biggest and the best. And if Trump didn’t have one yet, Snowy had achieved his goal for exclusivity. A year ago, I’d seen Snowy get rid of a perfectly good Mercedes 560 with only two thousand on the clock. “Now that Trump has one,” he had said, “they are as good as common.”

I bet The Donald didn’t even know who Snowy was and if he had he wouldn’t have given a damn either way, but it all made sense to Snowy, so I made the appropriate noises.

“Wow, Snowy. That’s a sweet set. I didn’t know they made them that big.”

Snowy hurdled the sarcasm and launched into a dizzying array of statistics; screen resolutions, lamp lumens and the future market for cinema-like screens in every home.

Usually I wouldn’t waste time listening to people rhapsodize over commercial crap. Bored the hell out of me. Snowy was a special case; he had what I needed. Manpower. And since I didn’t represent his usual clientele, I needed to provide the occasional ego assist and fake some sycophantic fervor now and then.

The things we do.

See, after Snowy returned from his federally-funded holiday, he had needed to find a racket to keep himself occupied and less likely to see the inside of another cell. So, with the record like a noose around his neck and nobody wanting to give him a job, he figured doing investigative work, like yours truly, was a good place to start. No-one to tell him what to do and, let’s face it, we’re not exactly the white-collar end of town. He fit right in.

He wangled an insurance company as an early client and, in a fit of brilliance, instead of charging them a flat rate for his services, he negotiated a percentage of the money he saved the company.

Snowy always was a mover and shaker, even back as a small-time coke pusher. An organizer, lieutenant, not a foot soldier. Soon, he had a couple of other reformed citizens working for him and he’s orchestrating the business. Building, marketing, growing. And buying the newest and the best stuff along the way.

Fast-forward a few years and his business reaches nation-wide, with fifty or sixty staff, and a downtown office building. Snowy lives in a nice pile in Highland Park, drives a new Porsche 911 and watches Cowboys games on his Sony Videomacallit.

Snowy decided to wrap up his projector pitch, “… guy at Sony Japan will put one aside for me as soon they arrive from the factory. Not even Trump has a deal that good.”

He closed the hangar doors to take the behemoth out of view and sat down on the couch. He crossed his legs, adjusted the razor sharp crease in his silver-gray suit and played with his tie until it looked perfect. Once he was again the picture of sartorial elegance he flashed a smile at me and said, “Enough about my toys, Rafferty. What can I do for you today?”

It was classic Snowy and a gambit designed to trap the unwary.

Don’t get me wrong, he’d been a big help over the years, but I’d learned long ago that Snowy needed to be needed. Providing a service wasn’t enough for him. If you just wanted a favor, then you’d tell your story walking. If, however, you were on your last legs, with nowhere else to go, and Snowy was the only guy who could help, then maybe he’d think about it.

I wasn’t yet ready to accept Don’s word on Dariell. Jakob. Whatever the fuck his name was. The problem was that my research capabilities were limited to the results found within phonebooks and reverse directories for the Lone Star State.

I needed help.

“I’m looking for someone, Snowy. It sounds simple, but I don’t have the resources. And, as you know, money … well, Sony’s not boxing up a new Video Thingamajig to send to my place.” I shrugged.

Shameless, I know, but I’m not above, or beneath, playing the game that’s in front of me.

Snowy waved a hand.

“Rafferty. Think nothing of it.” I knew he expected the exact opposite. “I sleep better at night with the help you gave me those three years ago.” It was Cowboy who took down the nutcase gunning for Snowy, but I wasn’t going to remind him of that.

“My resources are your resources,” he said. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers steepled in front of his lips.

Now we’re talking.

“I have a name and alias but no address. How wide can you search for that?”

“I assume you mean Dallas and suburbs.”

I shook my head.

“I’m not sure he’s in Texas. He could be anywhere.”

Snowy’s face split into a huge grin.

“Now that is a challenge, Rafferty. I am ready for it. Who is this person that you seek?”

I gave him the Friesen and Thof names, as Don had spelled them for me.

He reached out and pressed one of the twelve buttons on the phone console resting on the coffee table.

“Max? Run me searches on Thof, Dariell and Friesen, Jakob. No known address.” He confirmed the spelling, put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to me. “Don’t worry about it Rafferty, Max will find him. Max is ex-FBI, I hired a couple of months ago. Max is the best. You will know of the people Max has tracked down over the years. They have always made the papers. And the inside connections to different databases, from time with the Feds … well, you don’t want to know.”

The receiver squawked. As Snowy listened his face morphed from that of a young boy showing off his new bike to the same boy watching a garbage truck run over said bike.

“Thanks Max.” He put the phone down and looked at me, worried.

“You should check those names, Rafferty. Max got almost fifty hits on Jakob Friesen, too many to give useful information.”

“And Dariell?” I asked. Snowy’s frown deepened.

“Max tried a couple of spelling variations in addition to yours, and says this Dariell Thof doesn’t exist.” He rubbed his lip in thought. “And if Max says that someone doesn’t exist, you’d better believe it to be true.” I wasn’t sure which of us he was trying to convince.

That didn’t give me anything extra to put to good use before seeing Don on the weekend. On the other hand it didn’t give me any less, either.

After hearty handshakes and back slaps, I left Snowy to his burgeoning empire. As I closed the door he was sitting behind his desk, crestfallen.

He was probably worried about where to find a new Max and whether Trump already had one.

CHAPTER 10

With no new answers, nothing else I could do for Kimberly until I met Don, and even though it was still before noon, I straightened up the office, turned the lights off and left for the day. In truth, I only turned the lights off, the office was as straight as it was ever gonna get.

Rafferty’s Rule Fifteen: Sitting in the office waiting for something to happen is not a good use of time. Neither is cleaning.

I poked the Mustang through the city streets to see how close I could park to the only antique store I gave a damn about. The temperature on the Mustang was starting to climb and I had both windows down and the heater going. Only on low, thank christ.

I nosed past the store, turned into Fairmount, where a giant Caddy pulled out of a space a few up without indicating. From the volume of hair above the driver’s seat, the driver was either Aretha Franklin or that weird hairy elephant thing from that kids show. I had no problems swinging the Mustang into the now Cadillac-less space. That was no real claim to fame; the USS Forrestal would’ve fit with room to spare.

I reached for the key, and the car died. I closed the windows and locked up, more out of habit than anything else. Walked back down and around the corner, with a goofy grin you couldn’t have punched off my face.

I stopped outside the store, leaned against the green painted timber work. Looking past the gold lettering of GARDNER’S ANTIQUES on the front window, I used a gap between a hall-stand and an armoire, to watch Hilda doing her thing. She stood with her back to me, black hair curling past her shoulders, burgundy business suit accentuating her figure, serious and sexy at the same time.

The couple she was talking to—at one end of a gleaming dining table the size of my first apartment—fell into that category of people for whom money could never buy taste, no matter how many frogskins they threw at it.

Or perhaps they just didn’t give a shit.

The woman had bright pink hair, which might have worked if she was forty years younger and in a punk-rock band, but even then should never have been teamed with the silver pantsuit she was wearing. Gold dripped at every extremity and bright green finished her finger tips. The Jackie Kennedy sunglasses seemed to be the only part of the ensemble which worked, but I have no idea how she could see anything in the shop while wearing them.

Her husband’s suit wasn’t shiny. What with it being bright orange and lined with shoulder pads a Cowboys linebacker would’ve been jealous of, that wasn’t saying much.

I leaned and watched Hilda as she sold her heart out. She stroked the surface of the table and I knew she would be talking about patina, providence, and the value of long term investment. I could have stood there and watched her all day but Ramon hoisted his disapproving face into my line of sight and simpered. I shifted my weight and tried to look past him. When he moved into the gap between the furniture and crossed his arms, I gave up and went to the door.

The bell was still tinkling when Ramon was coming at me again, gliding across the floorboards.

How did he do that? If I’d been walking that fast, with that much venom, the USGS would’ve been forced to issue an earthquake alert.

“You cannot lurk outside the store,” he spat through pursed lips.

“Ah, now I understand your confusion. I wasn’t lurking, I was leering.”

He let that one go through to the catcher.

“Our customers don’t like the look of …” He looked me up and down. “… people like you.”

I looked myself up and down and laughed.

“I’m not the one wrapped in a sheet that came off the Lunar Landing Module.”

“Ahh.” He prodded his forehead with his manicured fingers. “That’s Baron and Baroness Vonn-Woods. They’ve flown in from Germany and are very interested in the Henry Morgan estate, so …” He looked over his shoulder and leaned in close. I could smell peppermint. “Don’t fuck it up for Hilda, you lout.”

“Such language, Ramon,” I said, but he was already mincing his way towards the middle of the shop, where words like priceless and one-of-a-kind floated back to me.

I tiptoed, as quietly as a guy my size can, back to Hilda’s office and was waiting in her chair, with my feet propped up on a cowhide covered stool, when she came in an hour later.

“Finally,” I said. “I was running out of things to do. I’ve finished your Antiquer’s Digest magazines and I even took the three-page quiz ‘Which Schleiger Number are you?’ Turns out that I’m four-ninety-seven, something called The Amstel. Sounds like a beer to me, but what the hell would I know?”

She stood with her back against the doorframe, and the sunlight from the shop’s display room haloed around her. It ruffled her edges, crinkled through her hair and peeked between her calves where she had her ankles crossed. It would have peeked between her thighs too, I bet, if her skirt had been a little shorter. She smiled and frowned all at the same time.

“The Amstel?” she said. “That’s a delicate rose pattern, so that quiz isn’t accurate. I’d pick you more as thirteen-seventy-five. That’s known, rather colloquially I might add, as Hammer and Anvil.”

“Har de har har,” I said. “You’re threatened by the thought of me being in touch with my feminine side.”

Her eyes flashed.

“Let me tell you buster, mine better be the only feminine side you’re touching, or I’ll show you what hammer and anvil really means. Now stand up and kiss me for chrissake.”

I stood up and kissed her, for chrissake.

When we finally broke, after Ramon harrumphed his way down the hall for the third time, she held me at arm’s length.

“Don’t you have a job, a case, or something else to do? Since when did hanging out in my office become your idea of a good time?”

“Hey, I didn’t hear you complaining that rainy day we spent on the Chesterfield you were holding for that rich bitch.”

“That was fun,” she breathed. The flecks in her dark eyes danced and, for a moment, I could almost tell what color they were. “Though I’d prefer you didn’t refer to my clients as bitches.”

I shrugged. “Just returning serve. Don’t forget that she passed me coming into the store and told you that she’d seen a vagrant outside.”

Hilda threw her head back and laughed. When she laughed, really laughed, it infused her whole body. Her shoulders would shake, knees bend and she’d nod her head. Once she got going, she’d even been known to snort. Once she snorted, that would get her laughing even harder, to the point where she would snort again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

“And she wanted to look at the Chesterfield one more time and tell me all about her little dogs and I had to wait until she was done and had paid to tell her ‘that was no vagrant, that was my boyfriend.’” She snorted then and we were off and rolling.

When she’d got herself back under control, I said, “So, let’s blow off the rest of the day, grab lunch and ease on in to the weekend. Whaddya say?”

“As tempting as that offer is, I need to get through a bunch of paperwork this afternoon. The Vonn-Woods are coming back next week and I want to make sure I’ve got the whole estate documented. I don’t want to miss this opportunity to sell them the entire package.”

“Don’t say that I never offered.”

“Never would, babe. Your place or mine tonight?”

Uh, oh.

“It’ll need to be yours. The car died as I was parking. We’ll have to take yours tomorrow.”

An arched eyebrow.

“Will we?”

“Something wrong with that?”

She held the gaze a second longer than comfortable, then smiled.

“I was expecting to. I don’t think I could handle six hours in that rust bucket you call a car.”

“Rust bucket?” I said. “I think you mean ‘classic’. Lots of people would be honored to own the Mustang.”

“For parts?”

We were still debating the value of American muscle versus imported luxury when I left a short while later, with plans to meet at Hilda’s at six thirty.

The Mustang started on the second try (hah!) and I wheeled it into McLeod’s Auto Repairs on South Riverfront before the temperature got all the way into the red. McLeod’s son, Peter, who took over the joint after his father Kevin had been confined to the wheelchair, asked me to give him a couple of days to track down the cause of the overheating. I told him no problem.

It was just on one o’clock, the sun was out and one of my favorite bars was a four minute walk away.

No problems at all.

Dealey Plaza was full of lunch-time workers as I cut across.

Sitting in ones, twos and a couple of larger groups, eating sandwiches and take-out, enjoying the sunshine and fresh air. The dedicated ate and scurried back to their cubbyholes, concerned about being out of the corporate hamster-wheel for too long. Others enjoyed their breaks at a leisurely pace; young women with rolled-up skirts sunning their legs and men with suit jackets off and ties loosened. A couple of boys on vacation from Delaware (so announced their T-shirts) threw a baseball back and forth until it rolled out onto Elm Street and Mom put a stop to the game.

A gaggle of tourists in shorts and walk-socks stood facing north, taking photographs of the grassy knoll and an ethereal Abraham Zapruder, before swinging their cameras to the building previously, and forever, known as the Texas School Book Depository.

I was nineteen when those shots rang out and things changed. In the years since, there’s been a lot of talk about how that day reshaped the world. If JFK, and RFK for that matter, had lived, the Vietnam war wouldn’t have dragged on, Martin Luther King would have kept dreaming, etcetera, etcetera, and we’d now be living in a different social and political landscape.

I’m not sure.

I was in class at the time, an Aggie sophomore working hard on suppressing the hangover from the previous night’s bull session. About the only thing I can remember through the haze is that there were a few extra empty seats in class that day. Hangover or not, there was no chance I would have been in Dallas to see what happened.

My childhood had been filled with Dad railing about the “bleeding-heart Democrats” ruining this country “that I fought for” and that “these two, Jack and Bobby are more of the fucking same.”

Having Camelot come to our hometown seemed like no big deal at the time.

Besides, Dad was on duty that day and with Mom the way she was, I was headed home after class to help Kate look after her. Dad was late home most nights, but when everything turned out the way it did, we didn’t see him for three days.

After John was dead and the whole country cried, and Oswald was dead and no-one did, life went on the same. School for me and Kate. Drinking and running around with my friends on the weekends.

The only change I noticed was Dad’s mouthing off about the liberals died down. Sure, when his friends were at the house, grilling and drinking beer in the back yard, it was still clear which side of the political fence he stood on, but everything he said, had said with so much fervor pre-11.22.63, now sounded forced.

Like his heart wasn’t in his words anymore.

Dad stayed on the force for another ten years, but when Mom and Kate went within eighteen months of each other it became too much, and he retired.

I looked up at that ordinary window and tried to imagine being here, in this spot, on that November day with everything unfolding right in front of me. Did it happen like they said? I’d seen the footage and heard the theories. Who hadn’t? Castro. The Mob. The Russians. Hell, lotsa people say LBJ was behind the whole thing.

In the end, the simplest answer is most often the right one.

A discontented loner, for reasons only he knew, fired three shots and took the life of a sitting President. It wasn’t the first time for the country, and it wouldn’t be the last attempt, though Reagan would fare better. Two days later, in the parking garage of the DPD, that same discontented loner would be gunned down, taking his reasons with him.

Would the country, or the world, have been any different? Or was this the way that everything was meant to work out, as I’d heard others say?

I stood in the sunlight a couple of minutes longer.

It didn’t make a goddamned difference either way.

As my high school football coach said, what did or didn’t happen on the previous play is irrelevant, the only thing we can control is what we do on the next one. Let’s focus on that.

Good advice.

I turned my back on the railway overpass, walked up the hill and went to get that beer.

CHAPTER 11

Saturday morning we rumbled through the outskirts of Dallas in Hilda’s BMW.

The day was still cool. We had the top up and The Everly Brothers strummed away on the stereo as we tooled down I-35 to Austin. I wasn’t about to admit it out loud, but not having to peel my skin from the duct tape patches on the Mustang’s upholstery had a lot going for it.

A couple of hours, a few hundred miles of dirt and mesquite and one stop in Waco for fuel and coffee later, Austin welcomed us with open arms.

We followed Don’s directions and parked in front of a Spanish-Revival house in the suburbs east of the city. The grass lawn needed watering and cutting and a few unloved succulents dotted the gravel planter beds. We walked up the flagstone path to an undercover porch where a heavy knocker rapped on the arched, dark timber door.

“Are you sure you want me to come in, Rafferty?” Hilda said.

“I’m sure Don won’t mind, and I’d like to get your thoughts. God knows, there’s a lot of things the ol’ Hammer and Anvil misses when he runs around smashing things.”

She squeezed her arm around my waist.

“You’re sweet. I’m not sure how that is, but it is.”

The door opened. Don was recognizable, still bald and proud, though his beard had grown impressively and he was heavier than I remembered. I’m not pointing fingers; we all were. That he was wearing jeans, a loose chambray shirt and desert boots seemed to be just right and not the jolting contrast that I was expecting.

“Rafferty,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Don. It’s been a long time,” I said, both because it had been and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Despite my lack of social niceties, we shook hands warmly and I introduced Hilda, who received a peck on the cheek and a double hand clasp.

“Please, come in,” he said and led the way down a hallway laid with salmon-colored tiles. The walls were more cream than off-white and dotted with big canvases of bright abstract artwork. The hallway opened into a large family room, low ceilinged with wide windows and doors out to a terrace dotted with more succulents in mismatched pots. A fabric couch settled in one corner of the room, while the rest of the floor was covered in cardboard boxes and piles of loose paper.

Files and documents, it looked like.

A stone counter separated the room and the mess from the timber kitchen, where Don now fussed with a coffee machine and boiling kettle.

“Don’t stand around here, grab a seat outside. Coffee alright for everyone or did you want tea?” Coffee would be fine we assured him, stepped outside, and pulled up two scattered iron chairs to the dusty glass-topped outdoor table.

I’d finished packing a pipe when Don came out and plonked a tray of cups and pastries on the table. He creamed and sugared while I got the pipe blazing away and blew a stream of smoke over the backyard.

“I’m lost here, Don,” I said. “When I called the other day, I was hoping you could help me track down this missing girl. I didn’t have much else to go on which was the reason for pulling on such a thin thread. You indicated on the phone that there’s a bunch more to this story.”

I sipped my coffee. Great coffee.

“Tell me how you can help.”

Hilda shot me a glare which I resisted. Don smiled.

“First,” he said, “I need to cover a little ancient history.”

“I’m all for woolgathering Don, but we don’t need to relive that week at your Dallas church following the introduction of the Civil Rights Act.”

The glare turned to an arched eyebrow.

“Nah, it’s not that. You need to know what happened, otherwise none of this is going to make any sense. You need to know why I no longer wear the ‘dog collar’, as you put it.”

I lifted my cup to him.

“Anyone who can make coffee this good wins an extra ten minutes of storytelling. Rafferty’s Rule Twenty-Five: Coffee is the elixir of life. And beer. Depending on the time of day.”

Don jumped onboard the SS Raised Eyebrow.

“Don’t ask,” said Hilda.

He shook his head and looked like he was going to say something. He stopped and shook his head again. I grabbed a muffin.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Back then, when I was Father McIlhenny everyone knew me as a bit of a firebrand, I guess.”

“Uh huh,” I mouthed around the muffin.

It looked like we were back to glares from Hilda.

“Right from the beginning, when I started thinking about becoming a priest, I’d always thought that the church should be for everyone. I found the church to be a welcoming place; I’d felt at home there and I wanted everyone else to have the same feeling. I mean, Jesus himself supposedly said we were all created equal, right?”

“Be careful where you’re going with this, Don. It’s starting to sound like a backyard revival,” I said.

“Notice I said supposedly. Anyway, you saw what happened when I invited the …” He made quotation marks in the air. “The colored folk to worship with us. You’d’ve thought I was promoting virgin sacrifice.”

“But that’s changed a lot now, hasn’t it?” Hilda said, but she didn’t sound sure.

“There’s still a lot of racism around, Hil,” I said, reaching for another muffin. “It’s just more hidden than it was. These are great muffins, Don.”

“What? Oh, thanks. I’ll let Lucy know. You’re dead right. About the racism, I mean. It still exists everywhere. The church is mostly mute about it, though you do still have the odd fundamentalist who’ll get up on their soapbox and talk about the ‘less than human’ population. Thankfully, they’re in the minority.”

Don took a breath and continued.

“Anyway, after we’d succeeded in opening the church doors to all people, regardless of color, I wanted to do more. I saw an opportunity for the church to become a place open to everyone, no matter who you were.”

Hilda and I nodded. No way known to argue with that, no matter what your spiritual leanings.

“Isn’t that a church’s main business?” Hilda asked. “Feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, that kind of thing.”

“Sure it is. Everyone deserves to be treated as human beings, regardless of their circumstances. We made a real difference in people’s lives.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here,” I said.

“You’re right,” Don said. “Our little church became known for accepting anyone. It wasn’t uncommon to see old ladies and punk rockers standing side by side, singing together and sharing hair colors. Homeless drug addicts helping the elderly down the stairs after mass, that kind of thing.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It pissed the hell out of the hierarchy.”

Don laughed.

“Did it ever,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many communications I got telling me that the church’s higher levels were concerned we had become a ‘freak show’ and a ‘laughing stock’. But, I hadn’t got to where I was by listening much to other people, so I put my head down and kept going.”

“What happened?” Hilda asked.

“One August a beautiful couple, Sandra and Regina, came to me. Six months earlier, Sandra’s only sister and her husband had been killed in a car accident and left behind an infant daughter.”

Hilda sucked in a breath.

“Sandra and Regina cared for her like their own daughter. By a quirk of fate, the baby girl had not been baptized, and Sandra wanted her to be; it was what her sister would have wanted. I was delighted to be able to help and I told them so.”

“Uh oh,” I said.

“What?” Hilda asked.

“If the powers-that-be were annoyed about punk rockers hanging around, they would have been ready for spontaneous combustion over the idea of baptizing the child of a lesbian couple.”

“You have no idea,” Don said. “The deluge of communications from church high command quadrupled and I was threatened with all sorts of horrific things, in this world and the next, if I proceeded with the ceremony. But this was a fight worth having. Either we lived our beliefs and treated our neighbor as ourself, or not. And if not, then what the hell were we doing?

“The baptism was lovely. A beautiful spring day. Picture-book. And the feeling of unconditional love in the church that day was unbelievable. It was the closest I’ve ever felt, before or since, to any sort of higher presence.”

Don’s eyes misted for a minute and he drained his cup.

“And?” I asked.

“Three days later they came to Dallas and shut down the church.”

“Two senior ministers and four obsequious little pen pushers came down from St Louis. Sat me down in my own office like a naughty schoolboy and read me chapter and verse about how I strayed outside the church’s teachings, and that I had no right, as a representative of the church, to take matters into my own hands. I kept asking them to tell me why it was that an innocent baby girl didn’t deserve to be brought into the arms of the Lord because of who her adoptive parents loved.”

I laughed. “I bet they didn’t have an answer for that.”

“Nope,” he said. “Back to the standard bullshit they’d already told me.” His shoulders sank. “By the end of that day, they’d run me out of the church I built, canceled all service and outreach programs, chained the doors of the church shut and turned everyone away. In two hours they undid everything. All fourteen years of it.” He wiped his eyes. “It still hurts.”

“No wonder no-one at the church wanted to hear your name,” I said.

Hilda collected the cups and plates and bussed them to the kitchen. Don pulled out a red and white handkerchief and blew his nose.

“Sorry,” he said, waving his hands.

“Don’t be silly,” Hilda said as she sat down. “Anyone would be upset being treated like that.”

“It’s not that. It was the people I cared for, my congregation. I’d been saying for years that we were creating a safe place for them. Where they could be themselves and would always be loved. They believed me. And then, without warning, it was all gone. They had no place to go.

“I know of two people who were this close,” he held up a finger and thumb, “to being clean for twelve months. And within a week of the church closing, they were both back on the streets and using.” His voice dropped. “Both dead before the end of the year.”

“That wasn’t your fault, you know,” Hilda said.

He gave a wan smile. “It doesn’t make it hurt less.” He sucked in a big breath. “I was also out of a job. Not only was it going to be difficult to make my way into another church, the administration had made that clear enough, but the whole episode had made me question a few things. My religion, first, and then my faith.”

“What’d you do?” she asked.

“I found a few odd jobs working construction to pay the bills, and spent a lot of time thinking.” He smiled. “For the next year and a half I spent more time reflecting, researching, questioning and thinking than I had for the entire twenty plus years I was in the church.”

That seemed plausible and also a good idea. I kept this thought to myself.

Don continued.

“I won’t bore you with my internal process and the epiphanies along the way. Suffice to say, I came out the other side of that period understanding two things. One, organized religion is about controlling money, and in that vein it is a business and deserves to be considered as such. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And the other?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

Don grinned like the Cheshire cat and it stripped several years off his age.

“I’m an atheist.”

“Best remember you’re in the south, boy, and be careful with talk like that,” I said.

The grin kept coming.

I pointed a finger at him.

“Tell you what, though. Make another round of that kick-ass coffee and all is forgiven.”

He blinked and shook his head.

“Oh shit. I didn’t notice.”

We reconvened in the kitchen and Don quickly had the coffee machine bubbling and hissing away.

“You want to know the secret to the coffee and the muffins?” he said.

I nodded from my spot leaning against the stone bench.

“No preservatives. They’re all organic. That’s what makes them taste so good.” He saw my eyebrows. “No, it’s true.” He laughed.

I liked Don. More than that, I admired him for what he’d done when his revered religious world had shat all over him. He’d been trying to do the right thing to look after his fellow man. How anyone could take a negative view of that, no matter your personal beliefs, was, and still is, incomprehensible to me.

“Let me ask you something, Don,” I said. He nodded while he ground more coffee.

“When you started doing your navel gazing—”

Hilda dug me in the ribs. I ignored it. Don did too.

“You must have been pissed off and looking to come up with reasons to bad mouth the church.”

He grabbed the handle of a gizmo now filled with ground coffee and twisted it into another part of the shiny, gurgling machine. I’ll be honest, I had no idea what he was doing, but I didn’t care as long as that cup was headed my way. He put cups down and flipped a switch, then turned to me. Placing his hands palms down on the other side of the counter, he looked quizzical.

“You know, that’s the funny part,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking at all about walking away from religion. I rationalized the actions of the church as that of a few individuals, rather than the organization. I took time away because I wanted to know my own thoughts on the situation. I wanted to get back to basics, find a way to strengthen my faith.”

“That didn’t happen?” Hilda said from my side.

The machine finished burbling and oozing coffee. Don grabbed the cups and led the way back outside. When we were seated and sipping, he continued.

“No, it didn’t. I was shocked to find my beliefs and faith crumbling. It’s a bit like that scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz. Once you’ve seen behind the curtain, you can’t go back.”

“A reverse conversion,” I said.

“Exactly.” He laughed. “And the irony wasn’t lost on me.”

“I’m glad you’re back in the land of the right thinking people, Don. The story is a good one and, if you ever decide to open a coffee shop, let me know, but I’m still in the dark as to why I’m here.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said. “I needed you to hear how I went from devout priest to affirmed atheist. To know that my reason for asking you down here is to help and not a church vendetta.”

“And?”

“It’ll make more sense to you why I do what I do, and why I’m in a position to help you.”

“Why is that?” I was starting to tire of the dancing by this point. The coffee was keeping me engaged but the second half of the cup was looking thin.

“I now run the USA. The United States of Athiesm.”

I took a breath and he sped up.

“I’m committed to helping people understand what churches are, how they operate. To encourage people to think for themselves and make up their own mind about the existence of a God rather than just accepting what anyone in a fancy robe says.”

Great. A zealot in atheist clothing. Just what I needed.

I checked my watch. Still a good chunk of time left to explore Austin with Hilda. The day wouldn’t be a total waste. I downed the last of my coffee and stood up.

“Don. I enjoyed talking. Thanks for the great coffee and best of luck with the new club—”

“No. That’s not all. Part of doing what I do is keeping tabs on churches in the US, especially the fringe ones. Too many of these are no more than thinly-disguised cults and there’s some scary shit going on.”

I stayed standing.

“That makes my heart bleed, Don, but I can’t save the entire goddamned world. I don’t have the time or the energy. All I can do right now is find one missing girl, and if I can do that, it’ll be enough for me. I had hoped you could help me with that. You’ve got ten seconds until I’m out the door.”

He stood and looked up at me.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to get to. One of these cults—”

I held up two hands, fingers spread wide. I curled up three fingers. A fourth.

“Okay,” he said. “Dariell Thof. As I said on the phone, I know who he is and what he’s doing. And, based on what I know, your girl’s in danger.”

“How can you be sure?” I was glad we’d made it back to the main topic but not satisfied enough to sit down.

“Because I’ve been tracking Dariell for over three years. And until you rang me the other day, I hadn’t heard anything new about him for more than six months.”

“Why your interest?”

“’Cause he’s bad news. I think it’s just a matter of time until something bad happens around him, and I’m afraid a lot of people are going to get hurt when it does.”

“Don.” I sighed. “I hate to burst your bubble. I’ve run a nationwide search on your man. There’s no trace of him. He doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, he exists alright.”

When my face hadn’t changed, he blew out a breath.

“Sit down, Rafferty. I’ll tell you everything.”

“And more coffee?”

He nodded. “More coffee.”

I sat down.

CHAPTER 12

Two hours later I was still sitting, buzzing with coffee overload and looking at the table top covered with files and papers. Don might have been exaggerating when he said he kept track of all the churches in the US, but he did have info on a bunch of them. And although his filing system left a bit to be desired—not that I’m a paragon of virtue in that regard—I couldn’t fault his work.

As an ex-priest, he was one hell of an investigator.

He had files on all the major religions, most of the minor ones and a boatload of stuff on weird groups that I’ve never even heard of. The Seventh Day Adventists, they were almost mainstream, but who knew that they had a splinter group called the Davidians. And who knew that the splinter group had its own offshoot called the Branch Davidians, with a commune right here in the Lone Star state.

Don did, that’s who.

There was good ol’ L. Ron Hubbard who had turned a bunch of mediocre science fiction stories into a rather more financially successful moral and ethical code. Read: religion-cum-business.

The Order of the Solar Temple was an attempt to recycle the legend of the Knight’s Templar.

Not to mention the completely unhinged few like Do and Ti—no, I did not make that up—the leaders of a group called Human Individual Metamorphosis, who believed that the only way humans could escape the next great cleansing of the earth was to hitch a ride on a passing UFO.

Chrissake!

The saddest part about people like this was the unsuspecting dupes they convinced to join the cause. It would be several years before H. I. M., re-branded by then as Heaven’s Gate, would show the public how deep their delusions went, and how far they would go to live down to them.

“And don’t even get me started on the continued marginalization of minorities,” Don said. “Homosexuals, divorcees, women in general.”

I looked up from my reading as he continued.

“God, think about women. When was the last time you heard of a woman in a position of power within the Catholic Church? Never.”

“Nuns?” Hilda asked.

“As aides, staff, nurses, teachers, etcetera. Always in a supporting role. A female priest in the Catholic Church? It won’t happen in our lifetime. If ever.”

He took a breath.

“I’ll get off my high horse now. As much as I despise the major religions for their brainwashing and interference in our social and political arenas, they’re not my main concern. Because they’re so public, there’s almost no chance of a major incident that will end up hurting scores of people.”

“Like Jonestown,” I said.

“That thing in South America?” Hilda said.

“Guyana.” Don and I said together. I waved him to carry on.

“Nineteen seventy-eight. More than nine hundred men, women and children died because their leader told them to drink grape Kool-Aid mixed with all sorts of chemicals. Including cyanide. Some people say the church members knew it was poison, some say they didn’t. I know the babies whose mothers syringed the shit into their mouths didn’t have any idea what was happening.

My pulse started hammering and I don’t think it was the caffeine.

“Every single one of those people died because Jim Jones decided they would. They were so convinced by his words that, when push came to shove, they didn’t, or couldn’t, do what was necessary to save themselves. That scares the living hell out of me.”

“Why would people listen to him?” Hilda asked. “I bet he wasn’t the most rational of people.”

“You’re right about that,” Don said. “In the end, he was a raving lunatic, talking about how the CIA was sending in US troops to kill them all. But if you’ve been extensively weaned on messages that shift your beliefs in certain ways, then outrageous ramblings can be accepted as normal.”

“Like how Hitler got to the point of murdering Jews without anyone stopping him,” Hilda said.

Don and I looked at her.

“I was trying to secure a Jewish estate on behalf of a collector a couple of years ago and I picked up some research.” She tilted her head. “The first step he, Hitler, took was to convince the German people that the Jews were taking money, business, education and land away from them. Remember, this is during a time when the ordinary working family was worried whether they’d be able to eat tomorrow, or have a place to sleep next week. From there, it’s a small step for the German people to agree that Jews should be considered a different class. No harm in that, right?” She spread her arms. “Then, it’s more small steps to open segregation, closed segregation, relocation, work camps, and then finally to death camps.

“If he’d told Germany in the beginning that his plan was to murder six million Jews, not only would they have known he was mad, they’d have risen up against him.” Her eyes were bright and shining, her face defiant.

Don whistled.

“What does any of this have to do with Dariell?” I asked. “Jakob. Whatever the hell his name is.”

“It’s what I believe he’s doing right now,” Don said. “And why he could be the next Jim Jones.”

Don fixed sandwiches while we leaned against the bench and he told us about the life and times of a certain Jakob Simon Friesen.

He’d been born in the mid-forties to a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania, the youngest of four sons and the fifth of seven children. Growing up had been about what you’d expect for that kind of family, in that time and situation.

Religion, and a single-minded devotion to it, had been the primary force within young Jakob’s life. His family belonged to the Church of God in Christ Mennonites, not to be confused with any of the other eight or more different branches of the Mennonite religion.

The community lived quietly, simply—think Amish but not as uptight—and sacrificed themselves for the good of the larger group, much like young Jakob was forced to sacrifice himself for the larger family. A son, he worked outside with his father from the age of six, while the daughters helped Mother around the house. He was charged with looking after the animals, feeding, collecting eggs, that kind of thing. As he grew, like the other sons, he took on more manual work around the township, building works and farming.

His eldest brother assumed the position of spiritual leader of the community when their father died, and though we’d never know what Jakob thought of that, I didn’t think there’d ever been a younger brother who wasn’t jealous of the bond between a father and the first-born.

Jakob was probably a smart kid. It was hard to tell for sure since all the children were schooled within the community and there was a distinct lack of standardized testing for reference.

There was talk that he led groups of children in religious study, some even older than himself. All of this was hard for Don to prove; it was more of an impression gleaned during interviews with a couple of locals.

The first signs of trouble for Jakob appeared in sixty-one. He and three other Mennonite boys crept out of the village one night and hitched a ride to the nearest town. After getting liquored up they proceeded to vandalize a couple of local cars and let the cattle loose from a local farm. Typical teenage hi-jinks, I suppose, but what piqued my, and Don’s, interest was what the boys said afterwards.

Don had been able to get hold of notes from the local sheriff about the talking-to that the boys received that night. Don’t ask me how accurate they were, but they painted a disturbing picture of the teenaged Mr Friesen.

Each of the three boys said words to the effect that even though they were drunk—they called it “afflicted”—they knew what they were doing was wrong. They said that Jakob had made it seem that the owners of the cars and the cattle “deserved it, for being apostates.” One of the boys even went on to say, “It were like Jakob convinced m’self to do these things more’n I could convince m’self not to.”

I heard the Jonestown dead echoing through that line.

And Jakob?

He said nothing. Sat and looked at the floor, not acknowledging anyone else in the room.

That’s all the local cops got, because shortly after that Ma and Pa Friesen had arrived to take Jakob back for their own particular brand of trial and punishment.

After the rural Pennsylvania incident, cue a gap of several years to where he turned up in Kentucky as a street preacher, having left his family behind. He gained a small following until a local teenage runaway stumbled into the cop shop late one night to tell a deputy that Jakob tried to rape her.

Don had spoken with a county sheriff who remembered the night as a young deputy. The girl in question had a history of running away from home and toward a long line of unpleasant young men. She was drunk and raving when she arrived at the station and the deputy put her in a cell to dry out. Figuring this latest incident to be more of her usual routine, he asked her about it in the morning. The girl stuck to her story, but by the time a cruiser had rolled around to Jakob’s last known address, he had ghosted away and wasn’t seen again.

For ten months, where Don found evidence of him on the other side of the country, in a group living on a small orchard in Northern California, where the regular order of business was to pick apples during the day and get high at night.

Like a bunch of San Franciscan hippies this apple-gathering enclave embraced Timothy Leary’s words of “Turn on, tune in, drop out” with a fervor that they didn’t apply to much else.

Existentialism, Sartre, and the general shitcan state of the world were regular topics for conversation but, far from blissing out and spending their days making love not war, the group splintered after only a few months. Most of the members packed up and hit the road to continue their nomadic lifestyle, one ending up in Texas and confiding in a recently de-frocked Father McIlhenny.

“Where’d he go after that?” Hilda asked. “And do you mind if I smoke?”

Courteous and considerate, that’s Hilda.

Me? I was already applying the Zippo to another bowl full of Borkum Riff and doing my best impersonation of Mt. Etna.

Don waved a hand and moved a green glass ashtray from a side shelf to the table and answered her other question.

“I followed some rumors and found he’d landed in San Francisco a year or so later, leading prayer and community groups. I’m not sure what they did in private, but I tracked them to several downtown rallies: women’s rights, feed the homeless, that type of thing. I never did find personal details for him, which I assume was his attempt to make sure he couldn’t get traced back to Kentucky.

“But I did find one member of the community group. These days she runs a women’s shelter, and she painted a disturbing picture of our would-be Martin Luther. Yes, he did bring the group together and yes, he did preach about values and love for all mankind, but there was a darker side to him, too. She remembered seeing him at a group picnic offering alcohol to a girl who she says ‘couldn’t have been more than fourteen, fifteen tops.’ That girl and her family left the group soon after.”

“Creepy,” Hilda said.

“Yeah. And it wasn’t the last time. There were a series of families who left the group suddenly, just after Jakob took a personal interest in their daughters.”

I hadn’t started the day with a favorable impression of this nutcase and each time I thought he couldn’t slide lower in my estimation, it turned out I was wrong.

“He followed a similar story over the next few years,” Don said. “Drifting, turning up in various cities across the country. Starting, or getting involved with small groups with religious overtones. All of which failed.”

“Okay, Don,” I said. “I’m still missing a couple of things. I’m taking your word that this Jakob Friesen turns into Dariell Thof, and I still don’t see where this is headed.”

“I’m getting there but just look at the pattern. A boy grows up in a strict religious household, the last of a line of sons to a prominent leader. Despite showing a desire to lead, from an early age, he does not assume the spiritual responsibility of the community. He then knocks around the country for years trying, unsuccessfully, to establish himself as a moral and spiritual figurehead.”

Hilda blew a stream of smoke over her shoulder. “He’s searching for the love he never got from his father,” she said.

“Sounds like pop-psychology bullshit to me,” I said.

“Call it whatever you like, Rafferty, but I think Hilda’s right,” Don said. “And don’t forget the pattern of non-consensual sexual advances to young girls. People who couldn’t say no to giving him the love he needed.”

“I don’t know about the girls, Don,” I said. “You might be reaching on that.”

Hilda widened her eyes and ground her cigarette out with more force than it needed.

“If something weird was happening, why didn’t the other members of the group do anything about it? Call the police, Social Services, someone. Hell, just punch his lights out.”

“You’ve got to remember,” Don said, “that christianity, or any religion for that matter, is the biggest form of Stockholm Syndrome there is. Anything which threatens the leader, threatens the entirety of the group. It’s easier to understand if the threat is external, but just as relevant if the threat is from within the group itself.”

“Like Hitler at his worst,” Hilda said. “To stand up and announce that your leader is wrong you have to admit that you’re wrong too.”

“Exactly,” Don said. “And don’t forget that nobody knowingly joins a cult, or something that they think will hurt them. They join a religious, or political movement that stands for reasons important to them, with people that they like.”

“So when does young Jakob decide to grow up and become Dariell?” I asked.

“After a stint in New York, he moved back west, ending up in Los Angeles and it looks like he found what he was looking for. He met, and started living with, a woman named Anastasia Buver, the only daughter of a hotshot Hollywood studio guy.

“Not long after that the name Jakob Friesen disappears.”

CHAPTER 13

“Nineteen seventy-six, the war in Vietnam is over, and the country is reeling from the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation. In the middle of all of this, a small church is founded in a San Diego suburb. Anastasia Buver, now calling herself Ana, and Dariell Thof are the founders.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “But, I found fifty Jakob Friesens in the US. How can you be—”

“Keep in mind, Rafferty, while I’ve been telling this story forward, I’ve been researching it backwards. When I got to the point where Dariell disappeared and Jakob entered the stage, I could see that the link was Ana. Like you, I wanted to be sure. It took a while to track down, but I eventually found newspaper photos from before his name change, to compare with photos of founders of this new church.”

“I remain unconvinced.”

Hilda lay a hand on my arm. “There’s more.”

“Yep,” Don said. “I got hung up on that for a time too, then I decided it doesn’t matter. The concern I have is for Dariell and the people who are listening to him now. Not for who or what Jakob was back then. That helps explain a bit about where he came from and why he might be doing what he’s doing but, in the end it’s irrelevant.”

I had to give him that one.

“With the general state of feeling in the US at the time, The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple found a following.”

I shook my head. “You’re kidding about that name.”

Don shook his in response and gave a sad smile. “It made sense when I discovered that Ana had spent time in the original Peoples Temple in San Fran. Back when Jim Jones was just a lying fraudster with a big mouth. Before he went right off the deep end. I imagine they had a lot of fun with the name. Maybe even hoped to catch a few of Jim’s left-over congregation who hadn’t made the trip to Guyana.

“Within two years the congregation was a hundred or so strong. Not big enough to raise eyebrows on the other side of the country, but they were making an impact on their local community.”

“Nothing screwy going on?” I said.

“Nope,” he replied. “A return to good old-fashioned values and morals was their approach, and the locals loved it. They were frightened of their government and pissed off at what had happened in Vietnam. They were ready and hungry for someone, anyone, to make them feel safe again. We all were.”

“That’s the key,” Hilda said.

Don nodded. “At about the same time, they started buying land. I haven’t been able to follow the money trail, so I don’t know how they funded it.”

“Land?”

“Yeah,” Don said through clenched teeth, then let out a breath. “I’ve found references to Washington State, Texas and North Dakota, though I don’t have addresses.”

“Easy to get away from prying eyes in those states,” I said.

He nodded.

“In eighty-two they closed the San Diego church, which had grown to over three hundred members and relocated everyone to North Dakota,” Don said. “I’m not sure if they’re still there, at one, or more, of the other locations. Since they’ve been living remotely it’s harder to keep track of them.”

“Why do you think he’s another Jim Jones?” Hilda said.

“Good question,” I said. “Wanting your privacy isn’t a crime.”

“The isolation is a worrying sign for me, even though yes, it’s not a crime. But if they, both Jones and Dariell, had nothing to hide, then why retreat from view?”

I open my mouth to protest. Don held up a hand before I could speak.

“There’s more,” Don said, reached behind him for a US map and unrolled it on the table. Grabbing a pen, he circled areas in three states. “These represent possible locations for the compounds, assuming that they wanted to be away from population centers. If we also put a cross on San Diego, where the church started, what does that give us?”

I leaned forward. He had marked the approximate corners of a rough square, covering the western half of the US.

“It’s a square. So what?”

“It’s a square roughly fifteen hundred kilometers to a side,” he said.

“And?”

“Let me read something to you.” Don flipped open a battered black notebook and thumbed to a page. “The angel who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred lengths; its length and width and height are equal.” He closed the notebook and sighed. “You want to take a guess what that is?”

“Not a chance in hell I know, Don.”

“That’s Revelations, chapter twenty-one, verses fifteen and sixteen, describing the New Jerusalem that will be granted to the righteous at the—”

Hilda sucked in a breath.

“What?” I said, looking at her.

She shook her head.

“… at the end of the world,” Don said. “The new heaven on earth for god’s chosen people after the second coming of christ.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” I said.

Don shook his head. “Again, I wish I was. We know he’s capable of getting people to believe what he wants them to, and the location of the compounds is too coincidental to be random.”

Don slumped in his chair.

“I think Dariell has evolved The People’s Church into a doomsday cult, and has been working to convince his followers that the end of the world is imminent. Especially the way the church has changed direction over the years. He used to preach about values and morals, now the congregation is focussed on the congregation worshipping Dariell himself.”

“What?”

“Yep.” I wondered if Don was getting tired of shaking his head. “But you’re better off hearing that from a person who knows what it’s like inside one of the compounds.”

“That’d be handy,” I said. “Can directory assistance put us through to Church of the Everlasting Crazy?”

“No, but we don’t need them to. Lucy spent nearly ten years as part of the church.”

“How do we get in touch with her?” I asked.

Don blinked.

“She’ll be back from work any minute.”

“Lucy’s from San Diego and was in the church from when her Mom and Dad joined in the late seventies until five years ago. She left the North Dakota location and walked ten miles across the plains to Fort Yates. She was lucky as hell it was May, otherwise she would have frozen to death along the way.

“She was living with her grandparents in Scottsdale when she heard about the work I was doing and called m—”

The front door banged and quiet footfalls preceded a young woman into the family room area.

“Here she is.” Don turned his head. “Hey Lucy, come on out and meet Rafferty, the P.I. I told you about.”

“Hold on, Don.” She sighed. “We’ve talked about this.” She pulled a knitted bag with large purple flowers from her shoulder, placed it on the bench and turned on her heel.

“Oops,” Don said.

What’s that about? I looked at Hilda.

She gave a tiny shake of her head as if to say: You dummy. I’ll tell you later. If you haven’t worked it out by then.

We sat in uncomfortable silence. Don smile-grimaced at both of us and Hilda held my hand.

I heard a toilet flush in a distant corner of the house and the sounds of running water, then all was quiet again. A few minutes later Lucy walked out with a fixed smile.

“Mr Rafferty,” she said, as she shook my hand. “It’s good to meet you. Don told me last night about the girl you’re looking for. If she’s with Dariell, I feel for her and I know Don will do whatever he can to help you get her back to her family.”

I introduced Hilda and the two girls shook hands. Hilda gave her a first look of compassion, sorrow, oh hell, something like that, but by the time Lucy sat down between Don and Hilda that look had turned to admiration.

“Excuse me for earlier,” Lucy said. “Don’s excitement gets a little much for me. I know he doesn’t mean anything, but after ten years of being instructed by someone else on how to behave, I need to remind him …” She put a hand on Don’s shoulder. “… only sometimes, thank god, that I don’t answer to anyone.”

“I’m still learning,” he said and smiled at Lucy, then at Hilda.

I didn’t earn a smile. He probably thought I was already on board. Or that I had no idea what was going on.

“From what Don has told us about the church,” Hilda said, “your life must be different compared to a couple of years ago.”

My Hilda-radar went off and I recognised the opening volley of girl-talk, so I decided to stay quiet. I watched Lucy across the table and while she seemed to be well-adjusted for having recently exited a cult, it was her physical presence that struck me.

A few years older, sure, but otherwise, a dead ringer for Kimberly. Blonde hair, ringleted past her shoulders. Big blue eyes. Full lips, but not pouty.

As I watched longer though, I decided she wasn’t Kimberly’s doppelgänger after all.

Lucy’s tanned face was darker than the delicate dusting of freckles across Kimberly’s nose. The crooked front tooth didn’t spoil her smile, just a minor difference to Kimberly’s perfect, and dazzlingly white grin. They were both, in as far as I could judge, similarly built, but carried their curves differently. Lucy did a great job filling out the maroon sweater she wore, whereas Kimberly had appeared a bit more hippy. Body types aside, I bet myself that Kimberly in person would prove as outgoing and bubbly as Lucy was trying to be.

They weren’t identical, but they looked enough like sisters to the casual glance. Or to use an example from my line of work, if the DPD boys put together a lineup for Kimberly, Lucy would fit in perfectly as number three. Or vice-versa.

Don had disappeared back to the kitchen and I heard the coffee machine doing its thing. Lucy and Hilda were deep in conversation and, having lit cigarettes, both blowing smoke into the sky. There was nothing I could offer for the moment, indoors or out, so I stayed sitting and packed another pipe.

By the time I had my personal bonfire blazing, Don was returning to the table with drinks. Coffee for Lucy, wine for Hilda and Buds for the boys. I was disappointed to miss out on another cup—the smell wafted across the table—but with the sun now on a downward arc, if I wanted to sleep tonight, the beer would have to do.

The choices we have to make some days.

“No wine for you, Lucy?” I asked.

“I don’t drink alcohol.” She flicked her eyes downward, drew on her cigarette and exhaled a long plume. “When I got out of the church, I never wanted to again be in a situation where I wasn’t in control. You say my life must be different, Hilda, and that is true. Each day is a new step forward, and while I feel okay most of the time, the truth is that I have a hard time trusting other people.” She let loose a big breath. “While I’m working on that, the idea of getting drunk, or even tipsy, and needing to rely on another person to look after me is too scary.”

She drew again on her cigarette, more fiercely this time. Her fingers trembled.

Hilda jumped right in, while giving me a glare that Kathy-Lee Troupe would have been proud of. “Tell us about the work you’re doing.”

“It was Don’s idea,” she said. Don shrugged. “I spend most days down at the local VA clinic. There’s a few guys still there from Vietnam who don’t have family to visit them. Most of these guys feel lonely and forgotten.” She butted out her cigarette in the green glass ashtray and lit another.

“They can talk to me,” she said, huffing smoke. “Without being judged or disbelieved. The strange thing I’ve found, which I wasn’t expecting, is that it’s a big help for me too.” Don’s smile didn’t twitch but I knew from his eyes he’d been expecting exactly that. “Knowing that someone else knows what it’s like to be forgotten helps me to feel better. A lot.”

Lucy’s eyes were defiant, proud, but sadness and anger lurked too, held down with a net of self-control. She would be okay in time, I could sense that, but for the moment I wasn’t about to begrudge her the need to be in control.

“I’m sure those men, down at the VA, feel the same,” Hilda said.

“I hope so,” Lucy said. “I’d hate for anyone to go through life feeling the same way that I did for those years. Betrayed. Used. Forgotten.” She blew smoke out through her nostrils.

Hilda grabbed my hand. “Don and Lucy. Thank you for your time today. It’s been wonderful, but we need to be going.” She stood up, pulling my hand with her.

“But—” Don started.

A rookie mistake. I knew better.

Rafferty’s Rule Ten: When Hilda takes the lead, follow. There are no exceptions to this rule.

“It’s been a long day, Don.” Hilda smiled. “And we’ve got a long drive ahead. Thank you, again.”

Don followed us in to the living room and we shook hands. Lucy rested her cigarette in the ashtray and walked inside. She gave Hilda a hug and clasped my hand in both of hers.

“Stay in touch, Mr Rafferty,” she said. “I don’t pray anymore, I’ve seen too much for that, but I wish you luck in finding this girl.” She gave my hand a final squeeze then returned to the terrace.

Don showed us to the door.

“I’ll call you,” he whispered, as he shook my hand again.

We were back on the interstate, Hilda driving, when she spoke.

“What?”

I’d been smiling at her for the last five miles.

“I know what you did back there. Thank you.”

She smiled into the distance, then darted her eyes back.

“Hold on. Exactly what was it you think I did?”

“You made a graceful exit and included me.”

“Yes,” she said. A beat. “Do you know why?”

“Of course.”

A muscle twitched on her jawline. “Uh huh.”

I was quiet.

“Are you going to share it with me?” she asked.

“If you don’t know, I don’t think I shoul—”

“Of course I know, Rafferty.” More muscle twitching. “I want to see if you do.”

“Well, if you want me to be coarse …” I took a breath. “You wanted to get home so we can make the beast with two backs before it gets late and you’re too tired. That’s sweet honey, but I’m happy just to cuddle.”

Her knuckles stood white on the black leather steering wheel.

“What? You think that I …” she said, before snatching another glance at my face, and beginning her glorious laugh. She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I love you, Rafferty.”

The sun was setting and we followed the concrete ribbon home through the slanting orange light.

Kimberly was still lost, but I was closer to finding her.

The moment deepened around us and the tires hummed. I rubbed the back of Hilda’s hand with my thumb and responded.

“As you should, my sweet. As you should.”

CHAPTER 14

Sunday morning.

Too early for real light; too early to be able to tell whether the sky is gray or clear, to know what kind of day is bearing down.

Hilda snored next to me, the warm skin of her back pressed up against my side. I had one arm underneath her neck and she clasped my hand in her sleep. I stared at the ceiling and scratched my whiskers with my free hand.

How am I gonna track this bastard down?

I knew where he was. To be correct, I could narrow it down to one of three places, assuming of course that he didn’t spend much time outside the compounds, and that he remained relatively stationary. I figured that was a safe bet. From Don’s background, it seemed that Dariell would want—no, need—to be always seen as the big kahuna. Now that he’d found his calling, as it were, I couldn’t see him retreating to a life of solitude.

But that did raise an interesting question. Were they using only one, or all three compounds? Or some kind of rotation basis? Don had said that they left the Washington compound for North Dakota, but did that mean they didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go back?

And still, even if I had Dariell pegged to a particular compound, that wasn’t the real question. Where was Kimberly?

Something was telling me that Kimberly wasn’t just another member of this nut-job’s congregation. Whether it was Brian’s story of Dariell putting the missionary into the position, or Kimberly’s resemblance to Lucy, or another thing altogether that I couldn’t yet pin down, I wasn’t sure. But I knew I wouldn’t be surprised to find Kimberly playing a leading role in Dariell’s dark fantasy.

I’d ask Snowy to help me with the money trail for the property purchases. That would be right up his alley, and might even provide Max with an opportunity for redemption. I’d also get him to do a check on Ana and Jakob.

Not that I thought Don’s research was in question, but it never hurt to see what else was out there. Don had missed a tiny morsel of revealing information but my trained and discerning eye would pick it up immediately. Case closed. Sure.

For the moment, the Sunday horizon was growing lighter, I was warm in bed with Hilda and we had no plans for the day. I smiled, closed my eyes and slept.

Dreamed.

A hallway.

Peeling white walls. Scuffed green linoleum.

Bare lightbulbs cast circular light pools.

Stepping stones into the darkness.

Doors set into the hallway walls.

Serious, sturdy, closed doors.

Eye-level squares of reinforced glass.

Lightbulb flickers a staccato code.

I approach the sputtering light. Noise at my shoulder.

Turn around. Nothing.

Peer through the nearest door’s viewing port.

Don and Lucy.

Don wears gray cloth. Ripped from his shoulders.

Hangs in two pieces from his waist. Arms tied to a rough wooden crossbeam overhead.

Strips of flesh hang from his back. Blood runs.

Lucy holds the whip in her right hand.

A cigarette dangles from her lips. She looks me in the eye.

“I. Do. Not. Answer. To. Anyone!”

Screaming the final word, she brings the whip to life.

Don smiles. “I’m learning.”

Larger room on the opposite side of the hallway.

Dallas church burning in the background.

College boys and white hoods share beers and watch the macabre bonfire.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Nothing to see here. Recent thoughts compartmentalized into little rooms. Try getting anything from that, Freud.

I float along the hallway.

Linoleum morphs to the colour of fresh blood.

Door on the right. Kimberly lies on a plain cot.

Opens her eyes at me.

“Help me.” Her voice behind my eyes. “Help me.”

Kathy-Lee taps me on the shoulder. I manage not to scream.

“Help her, Mr Rafferty. You have to help her.”

Yank open a door labeled STOREROOM.

Room hot with light.

Twelve women in dazzling white robes.

Young. Gorgeous. All of them Kimberly.

“She needs your help.”

My brain buzzes with their sing-song voice.

“But you can’t help her now.”

To the other door.

End of Kimberly’s room opens. Larger room behind. Concrete floor. Rough brick walls. Dark.

Shower heads hang from ceiling.

Bang the wired glass with my fist.

“Kimberly. Don’t!”

Bang and yell. Raw throat. Glass smeared with my blood.

Kimberly gives a final look. “Help me.”

Steps into that brick-walled room. Wall slides shut.

She’s gone.

Sound.

Twelve Kimberlys glide.

Down the hallway in two lines.

Follow.

End of hallway. Dark space. Huge.

Two lines of Kimberlys curve away.

Meet again in a single line. Kneel with heads bowed.

Large throne draped in black.

Hooded figure. “You can’t help her now.”

Women in white turn.

Twelve Lucys look at me.

“You can’t help her.”

Fingers reach. Hood falls.

Space floods with light.

Plain cots lined in rows. Kimberly on all of them.

“Help me.”

Look up at Dariell.

Not Dariell.

Kimberly.

I think I yelled myself awake.

The sun had decided to play in a clear, crisp sky.

I lay there blinking my eyes to focus and felt the cold sheen of sweat. Hilda rustled alongside and mumbled. It sounded like “wssshmmmmpp”.

It was just a dumb dream, and an obvious one at that.

Still.

I felt powerless and stupid.

Was it only a dream?

Oh fuck, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m not getting back into this vision thing again. I don’t believe that shit.

How do you know it wasn’t?

I don’t have time for this. I threw back the covers, slid my arm from underneath Hilda and jack-knifed my body upright. Soon, a strong shower, hotter than usual, was pounding on my head and shoulders. A few minutes later I felt a breeze slip around the shower door, followed by Hilda’s cool hands slipping around my middle.

“Everything okay, big guy?”

I shrugged.

“Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Normally when I join you in the shower, your response is not to stand with your back to me, your hands on the wall and head under the spray.”

“Still half asleep, I guess.”

“Let’s see if I can change that.”

Then she slipped her hands, no longer cool, around something else and I came fully awake.

By the time I was holding her off the floor, with her knees draped over the crook of my arms, back pressed against the tiles, and her nails digging into my shoulder, I could hardly remember it at all.

What dream?

“What do you want to do today, honey?” she asked later, as she forked a slice of melon.

“I think I might drive to Austin again for more of Don’s coffee. I can feel the shakes coming on. Three hours isn’t too far.”

“Not just for coffee though, is it? You know that Lucy needs space.” She arched an eyebrow. “Right?”

“Yeah, I know, but …”

The eyebrow curved higher.

“Something about Lucy’s bugging me, babe. Not just that she was in the church for a few years; it’s something else. I don’t know what it is. I need to talk to her again.”

“I know, Rafferty. But trust me; you need to be careful with her. She’s been through a lot. Push too hard, too soon, and you could do more damage. Knowing how seriously you’re taking this case, I don’t think you want that.”

“Seriously? Who, me?” I shrugged. “Just another case, hon. Nothing special.”

“Yeah, sure. That’s why you were screaming in your sleep. ‘Help her Rafferty. You have to help her.’”

I had no answer.

Hilda put her plate in the sink, walked over and draped an arm around me.

“I know this is starting to get to you, Ugly. And that’s sweet. Not that you’re hurting, but that you’re trying to be macho about it at the same time. It’s one of the reasons I love you.”

She kissed me.

“That’s another.” She grabbed my hand. “C’mon. I’ve got a busy week coming up so today’s the last chance we’ve got to have fun for a while. Let’s head to White Rock Lake. We can watch the dinghy races and you can talk to me with your made-up sailing words.”

“They’re not made up,” I said.

She looked at me. The eyebrow was back.

“Not all of them.”

She kissed me again.

“It doesn’t matter whether they are or not, Rafferty,” she said. “It’s part of what makes you, you. And I love it.”

We spent the rest of the day sitting in the sun at White Rock Lake, watching the sailing dinghies do their thing, and necking like teenagers. We ate ice cream, which Hilda did more neatly, but when she licked an errant drop from my chin, I decided I got the better deal. After the races had finished and the club motorboat had retrieved the last of the fat, orange buoys from the lake we walked over to watch the sailors de-rig.

Tanned men and women with wetsuits rolled down to their waists unclipped shackles, coiled lines, and flaked their sails. They drank beer and jeered at one another while rubbing the glistening hulls with soft sponges, before toweling them dry. Chores done, boats racked on trailers, they sat on the grass as the Texas sky blazed orange above them. The group swapped stories, laughs and more beers. Lots of flat hands replaying critical moments from the day’s racing. Equally as many rebuttals and retelling of the same stories from other perspectives. Disagreement and laughter continued as the sun set, laying down a shimmering golden path across the lake. Fireflies winked in the trees on the opposite shore.

“Pretty,” Hilda said nuzzling against me. “But it’s getting cold. Let’s go.”

I drove with her head on my shoulder. The Shirelles asked from the radio if we’d still love them tomorrow. A working stereo and great music made it bearable to use Hilda’s car; I was almost not missing the Mustang.

All in all, a terrific day.

I’d spent it with a wonderful woman who’s crazy about me. No-one had swung a punch or fired a gun at me. I’d learned a few new sailing words. And, juvenile though it may be, very little beats morning shower sex.

Why then, as I drove us back to my house, was the only thing in my mind a picture of a hooded Kimberly on a dark throne?

Fucking dreams.

CHAPTER 15

If I thought I would have free time on Monday morning to be able to ponder my dreams further, I was mistaken.

Hilda wanted to get an early start to the week so she had stayed at her house, after dropping me home. I never sleep well without Hilda in the bed—a repressed protective instinct she said—and I tossed and turned until the darkest hours of the night. That, plus having to catch a cab to the office, didn’t put me in the best frame of mind to start the day. Waking late and missing my usual heart starters of coffee and a pipe might have contributed, too.

When I came up the stairs and heard the phone jangling away, fumbled my key in the lock and then tripped over the unstacked phone books trying to get to it (fucking again!), I was almost ready to call it a day.

But Snowy was on the other end of the line so I decided to tough it out. Until lunch, at least.

“Rafferty!” he boomed.

Even on the phone. I told you. Everywhere.

“You still answer your own phone? You need to get yourself a receptionist. Make your self stand out a little.”

He was right, it would make me stand out. In the street, given that I only just cover my own rent in a good month.

He rolled on, already past my phone answering faux-pas. “I’ve got myself two P.A.s now. Personal Assistants.” He stressed the word personal and I imagined him sharing a conspiratorial wink. “I don’t know how I ever coped. They do everything for me.” He sighed. “Trump has three. Don’t feel bad for me, I’ll get another one, soon.”

I assured Snowy that I would keep a lid on my emotions regarding his Trump / PA troubles, but I was sure he hadn’t called to boast.

“Hah!” he said. “I have been thinking about that Thof character you asked me about.”

“And?”

“When Max did not find anything, I thought at first that Max might not be as good as I had expected. Then I realized that of course Max is the best, because Snowy only has the best!”

I had to smile at his logic.

“Why could this man not be found? Perhaps he doesn’t exist. Rafferty would not give me the name of someone who does not exist. He is better than that. So. I think to myself, maybe Rafferty has found more information that Snowy can check!”

That was Snowy all over. Beneath the flamboyant and excessive exterior lies a well of good intentions. But he still liked to hear the sound of his own voice.

And he kept letting me hear it, too.

“The truth is that I would have called you on Friday, but I took one of my assistants to lunch and, well …” An auditory shrug. Maybe there was something to the telephonic gesticulation thing. “When she left on Sunday morning I asked myself, ‘Would he want me to call on a weekend?’ Not Rafferty, I said to myself. So here I am now.”

I filled Snowy in with what I’d learned from Don. The name of Dariell’s quasi-church, girlfriend and fellow founder, Ana, and the possible compound locations. He promised to have any information he could find ready in the next few hours.

Snowy rang off, only after making me agree to join him on Lake Texoma when his new Bertram cruiser was delivered. “In a month or so,” he said.

I couldn’t help myself.

“I don’t think Trump has one that big.”

His laugh was still booming loud as he hung up. He may not have given me anything useful to work with yet, but a call from Snowy always brightened the day.

As did a cup of coffee and a pipe, so I bent to the task of providing myself with both. The coffee was hot, and a stream of blue smoke was trailing out the cracked window when the phone rang again.

Christ.

Snowy might be right about that receptionist.

“Shackleton Expeditions, Chief Navigator Rafferty speaking.”

“Rafferty. It’s Don. You’re a busy guy. I’ve been calling all morning trying to get you.”

Seemed to me like that didn’t need a response.

“I can call back later if it’s not a good—”

“It’s fine, Don.”

“You guys flew out of here the other day and didn’t get a chance to hear Lucy’s story. I really think she might be able to help you.”

“I think so too, but, and I’ll refer to my in-house psych analyst here, we need to … quote, ‘Take it easy, Lucy is still fragile.’”

“Hang on just a damned minute,” he yelled. “You had Lucy analyzed? When? How? That wasn’t part of the de—”

It took a while to get him calmed down enough to hear what I was saying.

“I’m talking about Hilda, Don. That’s all. She picks up nuance where I just see people that I want to squeeze for information.” I sighed. “It’s frustrating, but I’ve learned that she’s usually right about things like this.”

Then it clicked.

“What the fuck was that about?” I asked. “You took your indignation from zero to sixty in nothing flat. What’s the real story between you and Lucy?” I put a little growl into the question. Maybe more than necessary, but I was sick of half answers.

He back-pedaled. “What we told you yesterday.”

I stayed silent. Sipped more coffee. Wished that Don had made it for me.

“She came to help me with USA and since she doesn’t know anyone in Austin, I let her stay here.” More silence. More coffee. “Aw, hell. I want there to be more. I like her, Rafferty.”

Given how many years he’d spent in the declared grip of chastity, poverty and whatever the hell else, I couldn’t deny him his sophomoric yearnings. But, Lucy was the only direct link I had to Dariell, and Kimberly, and if he fucked that up …

“Don. Listen to me. I’m grateful for the time on the weekend, and I’m impressed with the amount of research you’ve collected over the years. And, I’m already missing your coffee. But,” I said, “and this is a big one, Lucy may be able to help me find Kimberly, and I don’t want that jeopardized. I don’t know what you want with Lucy, and what she may or may not want with you.”

He started up again and I talked right over the top of him. “The truth is that I don’t care, Don. You’re both adults and what you get up to is none of my business. If, however, you do anything that causes Lucy to not want to work with me, then it will become my business. And I take my business very seriously.”

I paused a beat and let that sink in.

“I also think you want to see me find Kimberly too. Not for her sake, but because you’re itching to know how much Dariell has morphed from his days as Jakob. And if he’s gone as far as we both think, my money is that you’ll want to see him kneecapped.”

He gasped.

“I meant that figuratively, Don. I’m not in the vendetta business. Though, if he was trying to stop or hurt me, I’d happily blow a hole through his knee. Course, that’s not just Dariell, I’d do that to anyone.”

Don was a lot quieter after that.

“So, are we clear about Lucy?”

“Umm, yeah. I got it.”

“I’ll do my best not to get in your way where she’s concerned, but you don’t get in mine, Don.”

“Yeah, yeah. No problems. Let me know when you want to come down and see us again. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

He seemed in a hurry to hang up the phone.

After I’d churned a third cup of caffeine into my bloodstream I hit the street.

Things to do. Places to go. People to see.

Peter McLeod had bad news for me.

“I’m sorry, Rafferty,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag as dirty as his overalls. And his hands.

“I thought it was gonna be the thermostat, not a big problem, but after we’d replaced that and it made no difference, I looked a bit deeper. Turns out the oil pump had shat itself, made the cylinders run hot, burnt out the rings and blew the head gasket. Lucky ya brought it in here when ya did, or the whole thing coulda been fucked.”

Did he mean it wasn’t? I couldn’t tell.

He carried on. “Lucky, we had the parts, so I could get it done right away for ya. She’s running as good as new.”

With a flourish, he wiped the greasy rag along the Mustang’s near fender. I’m not sure why.

“What’s the damage?”

He lifted his cap and ran fingers through his hair. “Umm, 457 plus tax.”

“Shit, Peter. That’s more than my rent. I’m gonna have to start living in the damned thing.” He raised his hands. “No, no. I get it,” I said before he got started. “On the tab?” I asked.

“As usual?” He sighed. “Yeah. You gotta start bringing that down soon, though. I’ve got damn near as much in this car as you do.”

“You know where I live; you could always come over in the dead of night and repo it.”

He shook his head. “Nah. I’d need to put two or three grand into it ‘fore I could sell it to get my money back. Not a lot of people lookin’ for duct tape upholstery.”

“Just you wait,” I said. “Ford were in last week asking what shade of gray it is. I expect it to be a big thing in next year’s releases.”

We shot the shit for a few more minutes then both realized we needed to be doing other things. Peter flicked me the keys, I thanked him again, kicked the Mustang in the guts and headed to Snowy’s office for my next round of reading material.

It was too early to have lunch and, though I didn’t want to admit it, too early for a beer.

I also didn’t want to head back to the office; too much chance of being attacked by the telephone again, so I headed to a favorite café not far from Snowy’s office, near the corner of Pacific.

The atmosphere in Rush Diner swirled and bustled.

Business yuppies in oh-so-serious conversation about markets and mergers. Early lunchers chewed sandwiches and slurped coffee while watching the clock. Steam hissed from the massive silver machine and the whirr of the coffee grinder spiraled between conversations and teased Bob Seger as he whined from the radio about how hard it was to run against the wind.

Orchestrating her magic behind the big shiny machine, Lisa, who had now been relegated to making the second best coffee I’d ever tasted, agreed with Don.

“Sure organic beans make the best coffee, Rafferty.” She flapped her arms; she was more passionate about coffee than I, but then she’d been running Rush since before I’d left the force, so she needed more than just caffeine to pull her through each day.

“I use organic beans at home and here. I didn’t make a fuss about it when I changed over a couple of years ago; I didn’t think anyone would believe that it made any difference. But it has. Even you think the coffee here is good, right?” I nodded. “You don’t think that’s because of my skill, do ya? How else you think I can get away with charging …” She swept a hand at the patrons. “Two-fifty for a cup of coffee?”

I snagged a booth and settled in with Snowy’s files.

He’d come through with what I’d asked for.

Sort of.

The package, handed to me by one of his Personal Assistants, along with a come-hither look that had no place in an office, or on a girl that young, included the locations of the three church properties Don had hinted at.

24th Avenue, Selfridge, North Dakota.

Private Road 5150, Lincoln, Texas

Sagebrush Lane, One Pine Butte, Washington

A fat lot of good that did me. A single line listing the road and the nearest podunk town meant nothing, but Snowy’s handwritten note at the bottom of the page helped somewhat.

Rafferty—property taxes on North Dakota and Washington plots not paid last 4 years. Lincoln taxes up to date.

Scott.

That made my decision easier, but I’d have to find wherever the hell Lincoln was before I could confirm by how much.

I flipped to the info Snowy had attached on Jakob / Dariell and Anastasia / Ana.

After reading the slim summaries, I was even more impressed with Don’s detective work. Snowy’s file on Jakob echoed the basics of Don’s verbal report.

Birth details and spots of his upbringing. Line items about his appearance before the sheriffs, both upstate and in Kentucky. Big time gaps between later records. One drunk and disorderly charge which Don had missed, and then nothing from around the time he changed his name.

Anastasia’s file was more interesting.

Unlike Jakob, Ana hadn’t undergone a name change, so Snowy’s report was able to keep up with her beyond ‘seventy-six, and it noted her position as founder of The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple.

Maybe I’d get used to that name by the time I cracked this case. I doubted it.

The report also started to plot the map of financial transactions. Ana had been the purchaser of the first compound, a sixty-acre spread in Washington state near a little town called Bickleton. It was bought with cash and Ana was listed as the sole owner.

Same pattern for the next two.

North Dakota. Texas. Cash. Ana as sole owner.

In nineteen-eighty, two years before the mass relocation, Ana sold all four of the properties. To the church. Who paid five times Ana’s outlay from less than four years earlier. A tidy little profit for Ana, and presumably Dariell, too. No prizes for guessing how the church’s property acquisition funds had been raised.

But why? It wasn’t like she needed the money.

Anastasia was the only child of Peter and Danika Buver, residents of the Hollywood Hills since their emigration from Hungary in the mid-thirties. The background didn’t detail Peter’s rise to his current position as head of DGO Studios (Danilowicz Goldberg Oskar) but Don’s assessment of Ana’s father as “some hotshot studio guy” was understated. This guy was connected, and seriously rich. Snowy’s report had the Buver family’s net worth pegged somewhere north of twenty million, five years earlier.

I’d be surprised if Snowy didn’t want to use him as a new benchmark. Also if that estimate was anywhere close to reality. Snowy’s intel was good, but not even he could find what wasn’t meant to be found. I figured that Ana was sitting on an inheritance of anywhere between thirty and fifty mil, depending on how paranoid her father was about his pennies.

It was probable that Peter was still working his way through the studio hierarchy when Ana was young but she’d still grown up in a rare environment. Hollywood had some class back then, not yet having become the rendezvous for kooks and the over-privileged that it is today, but ever since the movie business rolled into town it’s been the enclave of the rich and beautiful.

More research into her high school and college years could make sure, but I’d bet that they were both filled with students from similar homes and backgrounds. Not people I would have picked as religious zealots. Snowy’s document stated that the Buver family attended temple and publicly donated to a small clutch of organizations. Nothing more. No mention of youth group for Ana. No missions to Africa or building houses in Burma. No fundraising to provide food relief to Kampuchea.

Why the interest in founding a church? And what happened when she met Dariell to kick them off on this new path?

The coffee wasn’t answering, but I signaled Lisa for another one just in case.

You can’t be too careful.

CHAPTER 16

The next few days were quiet.

Not the premonitionary calm-before-the-storm, just the general tedium associated with performing necessary tasks.

Days that made me happy I didn’t pursue a career in accounting.

It wasn’t just me. Hilda was still deep in cataloging the Morgan estate. Not sexy work for her, either, but as she said over dinner one night, “It just needs to be done. I can bitch about it, but once I’ve finished complaining, the work is still there to be finished.”

That sounded like something she hoped I could learn from but I was distracted by the curve of her arm as she sipped her chardonnay. To be more specific, how the curve of her arm flowed into her shoulder, danced as a shadow across her clavicle and became a line which swooped down to trace the curve of her breast.

Did I forget to mention we were eating take-out on a rug in front of the fire at her house? Naked? I may have been distracted.

“You haven’t listened to anything I’ve said, have you, Rafferty?”

“Huh? Sure I have. Work, something yada yada, bitch, yada yada, still be done. Something like that.”

I was also trying to drink beer from the bottle without lifting my head. Or spilling.

It’s fair to say I was almost maxed out.

Hilda leaned over and while I watched the firelight do wonderful things to the light and shadows on her body, she punched me in the arm. I slopped beer onto my chest.

“Hell. My no-hitter ruined.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” I propped myself up on an elbow. “I know you can separate yourself from what you’re doing, and grind on through to get the work done.” I sighed. “It doesn’t work that way for me, hon. When I get frustrated, I need to get rid of that feeling. Yelling at, or better yet, punching someone works well. Chasing punks, on foot, or preferably in the car, also helps. But this case is as boring as batshit and I can feel myself getting ready to snap.”

I went back to sipping my beer.

“Are you worried about not being able to figure this one out?”

That hurt more than the punch in the arm.

I sipped again and Hilda smiled in the flickering glow. At that second, if I’d been forced to believe in a heaven, I was already there.

“Rafferty?” She sipped, eyes on me. The chardonnay swirled and sparkled in her glass and her eyes followed suit.

“Kimberly.” I blew out a breath. “I have to find her. Hell, I think I already have, but that doesn’t mean I know where she is.” I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. “Arghh.”

Hilda came in close, nestled against me and traced her fingers along the old knife scar high up on my chest.

“Have patience, my ugly beloved. It’s not over yet. Kimberly couldn’t have anyone better looking for her. And if there ever was a modern man destined to slay dragons and rescue maidens, it’s my Sir Rafferty.”

“If milady proclaims me as her humble knight why thence was she the one sitting astride the white stallion?”

“Hmm, why indeed?” She continued to trace those beautiful fingers.

It was a little later when I remembered.

“That’s why,” she breathed into my ear.

I called Snowy next morning while the coffeepot perked to thank him for the research.

“What are you getting yourself involved with this time, Rafferty?” he said. “I looked at the background Max prepared on those two people.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Snowy?”

“Me?” I imagined him with wide eyes, clasping his hand to his chest, as if I’d caught him with his fingers in the cash register. Or someone else’s wife.

“Don’t play coy with me, Snowy.” I dropped my voice a tone. “If there’s anything you know, I’d like to hear it.”

“And if I knew anything, you would be the first for me to tell, Rafferty. I promise you that. All I know is that this type of people, from that background and money, they do not play by the same rules that you and I play by.”

I didn’t correct him on including me in “his type of people.” It was a hell of a compliment.

“Thanks for the heads up, Snowy.”

“As usual, it is my pleasure.” Now it was his turn to drop his voice. “You be careful, Rafferty.” I promised him I would.

Thought about calling Austin to talk with Lucy. I didn’t want to leave it much longer, but was it still too soon?

The phone rang, almost as if in answer to my (no! stop that bullshit line of thinking right now!) …

I picked it up. “Lucy.”

A pause.

“Umm, yeah. Mr Rafferty?”

“This is he.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“I’m a detective, remember. It’s what I do.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I was glad that I’d fooled her. I wasn’t as certain as I hoped I sounded.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah?” Another pause and an intake of breath as she inhaled on a cigarette.

“You called me.”

“Oh yeah.” Another inhale. “Don and I have been talking.”

I had starting packing a pipe by that point, which helped distract me from thinking about ripping Don’s heart out through his chest.

“Uh huh.”

“Are you closer to finding Kimberly?”

I hadn’t spoken to Kathy-Lee in a couple of days. I expected she would call me if she heard anything new. That made me think I should call the Garrisons again, on the unlikely chance they’d heard from Kimberly, but for the moment I would sit on what I knew for sure.

“I’ve dug up a bit of extra information on Dariell and Ana’s background. That’s all.”

“Okay. Well, we, you and I, need to talk.” Inhale. Exhale. “Don thinks I can help you by telling you about my time in the … the church. I’m not sure if I can, Mr Rafferty and, to be honest, I’m scared to try. I haven’t even told Don everything about what went on and I’m just trying to put it all behind me …” Inhale. Exhale. Pause. The sound of a flicked lighter followed by a long exhale. “But … but if it helps this girl … if it helps any of the girls, I’ll do what I can.”

Silence filled the line so I ventured forth. I tried for understanding and I may have got it this time.

“That’s brave, Lucy, and I know Kimberly would think so, too. You name the time and place.”

“Umm.”

Inhale. Exhale.

Pause.

“Hilda can come too,” I said, “if it helps.”

“That would be great,” she said. A little shyly, I thought. “And I’d like to do this without Don there. Because … oh this is embarrassing …” Inhale. Exhale. “He’s a sweet guy, Rafferty and I don’t want him to hear this stuff, okay?”

I was certain that no matter what Don heard, he’d be alright, but that wasn’t my call to make.

“Sure,” I said.

“Can I drive up and see you and Hilda in the next few days?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll confirm with the VA which day, and then I’ll give you a call back to let you know.” Inhale. Exhale. “Okay?”

“Sure.” I’m a conversational wizard at times.

“Okay. I’ll see you then. Thanks, Mr Rafferty.”

“Sure.”

After Lucy hung up, I backtracked and talked to Kimberly’s and Brian’s mothers, both ensconced in their matching, opposite homes. Neither had heard from Kimberly in the last few days, and both took the opportunity to give me a roasting about my telephonic habits: Helen for calling at all, “Brian is trying to forget about that whoring girl,” and Kathy-Lee for not calling every day, “Is this extended silence the way you treat every client, Mr Rafferty? I hope not otherwise your business won’t be successful.”

I looked around the office, pictured the Mustang, and its appurtenant McLeod debts, leaning against the curb outside and thought Kathy-Lee had nailed that one dead center.

Soldiered on and gave her a summary on the new information I had to hand. Even talked about the upcoming meeting with, “a contact on the inside whose name I’m not at liberty to divulge yet.” She seemed mollified by the time we finished, and I did make a mental note about calling more often.

My outgoing call schedule notwithstanding, she didn’t know that I was thinking about her daughter night and day—to the point of having dreams, for fuck’s sake.

I wasn’t about to tell her, either.

I massaged my ear, packed another pipe, got it blazing away and stood up to open the window. The sun blazed clear but the temperature had started down and a wedge of clouds lined up on the horizon.

Performed my Fred Astaire routine around the phone book piles and thought again about putting them away. Later.

This time, at least I avoided the desk corner.

I blew smoke at the ceiling, watched it get dragged toward the window. Thought about the church’s property empire and how the rotation of visitors to Club Dariell might be managed.

If he was as controlling as Don thought, Dariell would probably want to keep his followers locked into a pre-determined environment, stop the chance of them thinking for themselves.

Which aligned nicely with the logical conclusion from Snowy’s note, that Dariell had been shepherding his flock around the country from compound to compound. I hoped this was the case.

The world outside, with all its messages and temptations, would represent a constant threat to whatever salvation he was preaching. He would want to minimize all time the congregation spent beyond the safety of closed doors and be the only person telling them what to think and do. To expose them to the ideas of anything else would be too much of a risk for Dariell.

I put the lighter to the pipe bowl again and sucked in a few lungfuls of fragrant smoke.

Now, I also had to hope that he hadn’t secured property that Don and Snowy hadn’t found. If that was the case, Kimberly could be anywhere.

Or she could already be dead.

I needed to be realistic, but I also could only work with what was in front of me. If she was dead, there was nothing I could do to change that. In the meantime, I needed to start somewhere.

It took ten minutes poring over a battered five-year old Rand-McNally Road Atlas of the USA to find the town of Lincoln TX, in Jones County, a few clicks north of Abilene.

Not surprising it took that long. With a nineteen-eighty census population of three hundred and seventy-eight, I could’ve been standing at the city limits sign and still had trouble seeing such a thriving metropolis.

Let’s face it, Lincoln was the one-horse town.

I dived back into the Road Atlas to check the other addresses and found references to similarly barren areas of Washington and North Dakota.

So I knew where the town of Lincoln was. The location of Private Road 5150 could still be anywhere within three or four hundred square miles around the town.

I closed the atlas, threw it onto one of the phone book stacks and bashed the dead pipe ashes into the artillery shell ashtray on my desk.

The phone rang again.

It was Lucy confirming tomorrow for her trip to Dallas. I told her that was fine and I looked forward to seeing her again.

With the amount of phone traffic I’d had that morning, I thought I’d better do something to cope with the workload.

I turned off the lights, locked the door and went to lunch.

CHAPTER 17

Hilda and I sat opposite each other in a booth at Rush. Lisa fussed behind the sparkling coffee machine and greeted everyone who opened the door. For years I’d thought that the diner had been named for the shiny railway carriage premises, but it could also be attributed to Lisa’s constant movement and verbal stream. Having noticed the volume of her coffee consumption in the twenty minutes since Hil and I sat down, I was more convinced it was the latter.

Hilda sipped coffee and placed her cigarette in the ashtray. She reached out and grabbed my hand with both of hers.

“I know you can help these girls, Rafferty.”

“Girls?”

“Kimberly and Lucy.” She exhaled. “Those girls. Letting Lucy tell her story will help her. Whether she’ll tell you that or not.” She saw my expression. “What did you think I meant?”

“Not sure. Lucy said the same thing on the phone. ‘The girls.’ But I don’t know what she meant.”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Either way, there are two girls you’re helping here. Don’t forget that.”

I sipped my coffee and scowled. “As long as I can help the one who asked for it.”

“Don’t scowl, hon. It ruins your rugged good looks.” She winked at me.

I heard a car door slam, looked into the gray light outside, and saw Lucy also scowling as she walked from a blue GM four-door up the steps to the diner. The bells on the door tinkled as she swung it open and waited, looking around.

“Hey there, darlin’,” shouted Lisa as she played the coffee machine orchestra. “Have y’self a seat and I’ll be right over.”

Lucy nodded, turned and saw us. Her face broke open in a grinning combination of relief and nerves. She hefted the flower bag back up to her shoulder, walked down the aisle, slid into the booth alongside Hilda and let go a breath.

“I’m glad you’re here. The whole drive I was thinking again about this, almost sure you were going to let me down.”

“Rafferty won’t let you down, Lucy,” Hilda said and shot me a look which said I’d be in big trouble if I ever did.

I nodded and sipped coffee. It seemed the best thing to do right then.

Lisa zipped to our table and took Lucy’s order. Confirmed repeats for Hilda and me.

While Lisa was shooming the coffee machine to life, Hilda and Lucy got the small talk out of the way: Don was great; he doesn’t know I’m here; yes, I’m still enjoying the work at the VA. That kind of thing.

Me?

I did one of the things I do best. I fired up a pipe. I also did what I sometimes don’t do well at all.

I shut up.

The coffee arrived. “Jes’ shout out if y’all need anythin’ else, y’hear,” Lisa said and rushed back behind the counter. After the caffeine was on its way into our systems and Lucy had lit a cigarette, I thought it was time to start.

“Lucy. You said you had more to tell me.” I tilted my head at Hilda. “To tell us.”

She nodded and the tip of her cigarette glowed.

“There’s so much to tell,” she said. “I’m not sure where to start.”

“At the beginning,” Hilda said. “How long were you in the church?”

Lucy nodded to herself—I can do that—and drew more smoke into her lungs.

“Three years in Washington and two at the North Dakota compound,” she said to the space over my head, “before I got free last year. But the whole thing started five years earlier that. We were living in San Diego, and Mom and Dad got involved in this new church. Back then, it was nice. Friendly and fun. Not like it became later.”

Lucy sipped her coffee, smoked and offered up a wistful smile.

“It wasn’t even really a church. Just a group of friends getting together a couple of times a week to share their faith and support each other. The moms would bring stews or pies and the dads would grill hotdogs and roast corn. The kids would run around, playing catch or chasing each other. I was thirteen.”

Another smile into the distance.

“After everyone had eaten and chatted we would all sit down together. One of the adults would read from their bible and people would talk about what the passage meant to them. Other times, one of the adults would talk about a problem they had.”

“Like what?” Hilda asked.

Lucy lit a fresh cigarette and gave a nod. That one that smokers give when they want to respond but happen to be busy inhaling and will be with you in a second.

“Umm … oh one night Rhonda was there without her husband. That wasn’t odd, since he didn’t come to all the groups. On this night she had been quiet since turning up, and that was odd, ‘cause she was one of the loudest women in the group.

“After the reading, she kept her head down and said in this real quiet voice, ‘Hank’s drinking every night and I don’t know what to do anymore.’ I don’t think she expected anyone to hear her. Almost like she was talking to herself. The room went quiet, and then everyone swung into action.

“One of the moms took the younger kids into another room to read them a story. The other moms and us older girls sat right up close to Rhonda and listened to her.

“She and Hank had been married nine years and been trying to have a kid. Hank had lost his job three months earlier, for being drunk at work again, and since then he’d just sat at home, drinking all day. Rhonda said that they were now two months behind in their rent, she didn’t have any money for groceries, and she was at the end of her rope. She didn’t know what to do.

“Rhonda sat there with tears flowing like a river. My mom was hugging her tight and most of the other mothers were reaching out to touch her, to let her know she was loved. I made sure she had a box of Kleenex to blow her nose.”

Lucy hit her body with nicotine again and swallowed the last of her coffee. I looked over my shoulder and gave the “another round” signal to Lisa. She nodded from behind the counter and started to work her caffeine magic.

Lucy continued.

“What happened that night was the most profound example of true love I’ve ever seen. Everyone was committed to doing whatever they could to help Rhonda. And Hank too. Even though he was causing the problem, we all knew he needed our help as much as she did.”

Hilda nodded—I believe you.

“In the next ten minutes, plans were made and people assigned to-dos for the following week. Mary said she and Frank would have Rhonda stay at their house. Us older kids would drop by to see Rhonda after school—we each had a rostered day—first at Mary and Frank’s and then later when she moved back home.

“Frank, Tony and one other dad, I don’t remember who, went to Rhonda’s house. I didn’t know at the time what they intended to do, but I recall them being positive, not angry. It turned out they went and stayed with him all night. One of them got rid of all the booze in the house while the others sat and listened to him. Like we had done with Rhonda.

“They got him to an AA meeting the next day and, until we moved to Washington, Hank had been sober five years.” Lucy shrugged. “He may still be. They didn’t come with us, so I haven’t seen him since.”

She butted out her cigarette as Lisa appeared tableside with coffee.

Lucy cradled the fresh brew with both hands and smiled. Nodded. “Tony gave Hank part-time work at the factory, which turned into full-time, and six months later, he and Rhonda were as happy as ever and she was pregnant.”

“It sounds like a close group,” Hilda said. She flashed her eyes at me—Don’t say anything yet. Let her keep going.

I nodded. To both of them. With this level of diplomacy, I’d be ready for politics in no time. Or a monastery.

“It was,” Lucy said. “Even as a teenager I could tell that. I went to school with some kids who had parents like Rhonda and Hank, but without anyone to help, so I knew our group was special.

“I wasn’t the only one. I think everyone felt it, and word began to spread. First, it was friends of friends who came along, in their ones and twos. A couple of years later there were people everywhere. Kids scattered on the floor and laps and beanbags. Parents standing against walls, holding their bibles as they followed along with the readings. It wasn’t long before we needed a larger space, just to fit everyone in.”

I thought it might be safe to contribute. I started slow.

“Don said the church had about a hundred members in the first couple years. This might have been around that time.”

Lucy sipped.

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” She narrowed her eyes. “This is good coffee, you know. Almost as good as Don’s.”

She sipped again and fished another Newport out of a half-full packet.

I like my pipes as much as any smoker, but this girl was well and truly addicted. She got it going, smoky tendrils trailing from her nose.

“We moved from meeting in homes to a run-down community hall, but that didn’t last long. It was dirty and cold and too hard to organize food. Not even a fridge or a coffee-pot. I guess we met there for two or three months but people, the moms mostly, made noises about going back to meeting at home.”

She took a long drag from her cigarette and sat, looking up at the ceiling.

“It was then that Dariell came to group for the first time.”

“I don’t remember who brought him and Ana along,” Lucy said, “but right away, it was obvious that he was different.”

“Different how?” Hilda asked.

Lucy screwed up her face.

“Well … he knew scripture better than anyone else in the group and, before the end of the night, other parents were asking him questions about the readings. I remember he gave long, complicated answers and the more people who listened to him, the more he seemed to like it. He was only a short, plain guy with a squeaky voice but when he talked in front of a few people, his eyes lit up and his voice got deeper and preachy.

“It wasn’t long after that first night he found a better place for us to meet.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another without breaking stride. Hilda joined her this time, compadres in keeping big tobacco’s profit margins buoyant.

“I was only fourteen, so I didn’t know all the details, but I remember hearing him say the parents needed to contribute to use the new place. That was odd, because it was the first time anyone in the group had asked for something in return, instead of giving freely.

“The adults didn’t see it like that, though. And when we met there the next week, no-one complained.”

“Nice digs?” I asked.

“It was perfect.” She blew smoke at the ceiling and smiled. “From the outside, it looked like just another warehouse on the edge of the industrial area, but inside … wow. It was warm, which was great. It also had something for everyone. A kitchenette, with a fridge and ovens for the moms. A reading room for the little kids with plush carpet, beanbags and shelves of bright books. The teenager’s room even had a pinball machine. There were a couple of quiet prayer rooms, and the main meeting hall had enough space for everyone, a piano and even a stereo system.”

“I’ll bet Ana owned the building,” I said. “The contributions were going straight to her and Dariell.”

Lucy nodded. “From what happened later, that makes sense, but then everything’s better in hindsight, right?”

My turn to nod.

Lucy ground out her cigarette and leant forward, elbows on the table. Picked at her nails. “I wish everyone could have seen what was going on.” Hilda reached out and touched her on the arm, like the group did for Rhonda years earlier.

Saying nothing. Saying everything.

“There were subtle changes, and I don’t think anyone saw them for what they were. The main hall had a stage, for one. When we’d met before, whoever did the reading stayed standing, or sitting on the floor where they were, the same as everyone else.” Her eyes narrowed.

“Now, the reader was elevated above the group. Like they were different, special. The children were taken away too, whenever we met. Ana would lead them into the reading room and they would stay there the whole night.

“Money became a bigger focus. Dariell and Ana started providing the food and drinks, again saying that they needed a contribution from the group. It was strange to see everyone accept this but, by this time the adults were already deferring to him.”

I had to admit, I was impressed with the game he’d played. It made me want to hurt him more.

“The adults, the teenagers, everyone, loved what he’d done. More people were coming to the church. He’d given a portion of the contributions to some members of the congregation who were struggling, and this made everyone love him more.”

I drained the last of my coffee. “When did the group suggest that Dariell become the official leader of the church?”

Lucy looked at me with sad eyes. “You could see it coming couldn’t you?”

A vision slammed me behind the eyes.

Lucy.

As Kimberly.

Dark hood.

Sitting on stage.

Looking over a kneeling crowd.

Bowing in unison.

I blinked.

It was gone, as quickly as it had arrived. Like a reverse Polaroid, it left a fading imprint, and a dull throb.

Blinked again and nodded.

“I figured that’s what he was after,” I said. Hilda kept her hand on Lucy’s arm. “Remember though, I expect people to lie, so I’m not surprised when they do. And, I’m hearing this story from outside; I don’t know if I would have seen it from inside. Dariell is very good at what he does. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

A squeeze from Hilda.

Lucy nodded. “I know, Rafferty. But … thanks. Everyone thought that he was wonderful, and had no idea what was to come. It just seemed natural for him to lead us. I guess it was probably around a year after we’d moved into the new building.”

She put her head in her hands.

I waited.

Here it comes.

She sniffed. Raised her head. I’d never seen such tired eyes.

“Right around the night he raped me.”

CHAPTER 18

Hilda sucked in a breath and Lucy put her head in her hands.

I had been expecting something like this, but the anger still surged. I sat back and packed a pipe, tamping furiously.

“I don’t know why I let it happen,” Lucy said to the table. “Maybe I wanted it to happen. I don’t know.” She looked up. “You can’t tell Don. Please, Mr Rafferty, he can’t find out. He can’t.”

“That’s between you and Don,” I said. “I want to find Kimberly.”

“That’s Rafferty’s version of compassion,” Hilda said, her voice carrying less venom than the glare she shot at me. “He just can’t do it in a way that a normal human can understand.”

That was harsh. I hadn’t shrugged, for god’s sake. I tried again.

“Don’t misunderstand, Lucy. If finding Kimberly involves hurting this prick in the process, I won’t be sorry.” Now, I shrugged.

Lucy sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

“Neither will I, Mr Rafferty. Don’t you think twice. I think that was where I went wrong. Maybe.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

I opened my mouth, took a breath, and Hilda sent me a look which said I’d contributed my maximum at this juncture. I clenched the pipe between my teeth and kicked my lighter into life instead.

“No matter what happened,” Hilda said, “this wasn’t your fault. You were a young girl who was taken advantage of by this man. This monster.”

Lucy nodded and looked back at Hilda.

“Logically … in my head, I know that. Really, I do,” she said. “It’s just hard to accept, you know. I still feel like it was something I did. Or didn’t. I don’t know.” She fought her own trembling hands and got a new cigarette lit. Inhaled a couple of times and started to relax.

“I wanted to speak out after it happened the first time but I knew no-one would believe me. After all, this was Dariell, the leader of our church. And who was I? Just a young, naive, stupid girl,” she spat. “Who didn’t know anything about God. Or scripture. Or life.”

My nerves were jangling like an alarm clock. My normal reaction would have been to start firing questions at Lucy, but I didn’t need to look at Hilda to know that would be a bad idea. I shoved more pipe smoke at my nerves to shut them up.

“Being young and innocent isn’t a flaw, Lucy,” she said. “Whether anyone said so, it was the responsibility of the adults to protect the children. And don’t forget that Dariell had convinced them, all of them, that he was a great guy. How could you have known different?”

Lucy reached out with her free hand and grabbed Hilda’s. Clasped it tight.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

The diner had filled up with the lunchtime crowd and the clank of plates and cutlery and the hum of conversation filled our silence. Lucy looked at each of us several times with her red eyes. She seemed about to start speaking again and then lapsed inwards.

I smiled at her each time. This has not always been a successful action of mine in the past, but I don’t think it made things worse.

She crushed out her cigarette and sniffed. Took a deep breath and scratched the side of her nose. Blew out a big huff of air.

“Okay,” she said and tried out a smile. “No point stopping there.”

I nodded.

Hilda said, “You’ll be okay.”

“I know.” She sniffed again. Blinked.

“Promise me you’ll get him, Mr Rafferty. For what he did to me and my family and the others.”

Another vision sledgehammered my brain and I shut my eyes.

A dozen Kimberlys.

Naked underneath white robes

On their knees in a circle.

Dariell the center.

Standing upright.

Naked.

Erect penis. Wry smile.

Burdened by choice.

Darkness. Fading images. The throb intensified.

“Mr Rafferty?”

Kimberly?

I blinked my eyes open.

“Are you okay, Mr Rafferty?”

I waved a hand. “Fine. Just a headache.”

Lucy nodded. Hilda raised an eyebrow. I blinked again.

“Lucy,” I said and cleared my throat. “I’m not in the vendetta business. I can’t spend my life chasing everyone who’s done someone else wrong. There’s not enough of me to go around for that.”

Lucy deflated and Hilda scowled.

I stayed strong despite the onslaught.

“No matter how much I want to, I can’t promise that I will ‘get him’ for you.” Lucy opened her mouth and I lifted a hand off the table. “Also, I’m not a cop, so I can’t arrest him no matter how much of a scuzzball he is.” She sank further into her shoulders. “But …”

Her eyes flicked up.

It was my turn to blow out a breath.

“What I will promise is … when it comes to the crunch I will show him the same mercy he showed you.”

“I want him to feel as bad as I did for all those years,” Lucy said, “but I understand. I guess I’ll be okay with that.”

She stretched her arm across the table at me. I took her hand. Done deal.

“Still,” she said. “I hope he makes you have to hurt him, Mr Rafferty.”

“You know, Lucy,” I said, “I do too.”

She was beautiful when she smiled.

“In that case, you’d better know the rest.”

“The first time was in one of the prayer rooms after group had finished,” Lucy said.

Hilda nodded and I stayed silent. A bit more practice and I could maybe get good at this.

“I’d approached him after the reading to ask a question. The nature of the Holy Spirit or something I thought I believed in. He said it was a good question and it deserved a good answer, and if I could stay behind he’d be pleased to help me. He would tell my parents that he would drop me home afterwards.”

She shuddered.

“I remember looking across at my Mom as he was talking to them and she was thrilled. She had the biggest smile and was hugging herself in excitement. She gave me a little wave and then she and Dad were moving towards the door.”

Lucy squared her shoulders and lit another cigarette. A blue fug settled on our corner of the diner.

“It took a while for everyone to leave so I sat in the teenagers room and read a book. You know, for the life of me, I can’t remember what book. I’d give almost anything to remember the name of that book instead of everything else about that night. Isn’t that funny? Well, you know, not funny … odd.

“Dariell and Ana came in together a while later and they both looked even more excited than my Mom. Dariell was usually such a serious guy, but he was smiling and twitching his shoulders. And Ana …”

Lucy looked up. Smoke rose with her thoughts.

“Ana looked proud,” she said. “I’d never realized what it was before. She looked proud. The same look my Mom gave when I was named cheerleading captain.

“Dariell asked Ana to make tea for us. She bounced away and Dariell said we should move to one of the prayer rooms. We were sitting on floor cushions when Ana returned with two cups of hot tea on a silver tray. I remember thinking at the time it was weird, because I’d never seen the tray or the cups before.” Lucy shrugged.

“Dariell made a real point of saying that the tea on this night was special.”

I raised eyebrows at Hilda. Lucy didn’t catch the gesture.

“A special Indian blend used by yogis, or maybe it was swamis, to get to a higher state of enlightenment. I sipped the tea. It was hot and very sweet. He talked about opening my mind to receive true blessings of the lord and leaving my earthly body behind. He went on with stuff like that for a while. I remember thinking that he wasn’t answering my question, and also that my mind was getting foggy. Like I could see my thoughts drifting past but couldn’t grab hold of them. Do you know that feeling?”

I nodded. It took almost everything I had to keep it at that.

“The only thing I can think like it is watching a movie as a series of snapshots and only being able to see every fiftieth, or hundredth one. I would see clearly for a few seconds, then things would fade out again. This went on for the rest of the night.”

Lucy dragged fiercely on her cigarette, determined to stay in the moment.

“The details don’t really matter, but …”

Hilda brought a hand to her mouth.

I wanted to move. I knew I couldn’t.

I wanted to hit something more than I’d ever felt. Preferably Dariell’s smug countenance.

But I kept my butt on that seat and watched my loved one sob while Lucy grew stronger and brighter as she exorcised her demons.

“I woke up the next morning and lay in bed with my eyes closed for as long as I could stand, repeating over and over that it was just a dream. A really, really bad dream. I’d almost convinced myself too, but when I saw the blood in my panties, the illusion shattered.”

She ground out her cigarette.

“I was so ashamed that morning, looking at that blood. It was like the death of everything I knew. My trust, my belief, innocence and a whole bunch of promises that I’d made to myself. I vowed right then not to cry or ever tell anyone what happened that night.”

She poked at the corner of her eye with her finger. There were no tears there.

There would be, but for the moment she was in control.

“And, until now, I never have. Seeing the fat lot of good that did me over the next seven years, I’ve decided to try something else.” She shrugged. “I mean, it can’t hurt me any worse, can it?”

I shook my head. I had no words.

Hilda, her face wet and shiny, leaned over and enfolded Lucy in her arms. She didn’t resist the gesture but her body was locked and rigid.

As I watched, doing my best to ignore my nerves, I could see Lucy relax. She let go muscle by muscle, limb by limb, until she was nestled in Hilda’s arms.

Calm. Open. Empty.

The tears came.

All of them.

CHAPTER 19

Lucy didn’t care whether any of the Rush patrons saw her blubbering, while Hilda stroked her hair and held her tight. Given the story she’d told, I figured this wouldn’t even threaten her top ten most humiliating moments.

I needed to move so I left the girls in the booth and walked outside. The clouds were low, air cold and threatening rain. I stalked back and forth across the front of the diner parking lot hoping to be mugged.

I wanted to hit something, or better yet, someone. You can probably guess who.

Hard and repeatedly.

Hilda and Lucy were visible through the long windows of the diner. Lucy sat upright, face red and wet, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand and moving her lips soundlessly. I could only see the back of Hilda’s head so I assumed she was also doing her share of talking. Lucy nodded, twice, then her face crumpled into tears and she fell forward into Hilda’s arms again. More hair stroking followed.

I stopped my prowling, wrapped a cage around my anger, sat on the Mustang’s hood and smoked another pipe. A few more rounds of the diner “sit up … talk … pause … and hug” routine followed as I pondered my next move.

There was only one.

Get to Lincoln. I just hoped Dariell was there to greet me.

When I looked up there were two faces grinning through tears at me. That was a good sign. Hilda turned her head, gestured at me and said something.

Lucy laughed with raised eyebrows. Really?

Hilda nodded and Lucy laughed again.

I gave them my fiercest scowl, bashed the dead pipe ashes out against my boot and walked back inside. Lisa followed me to the table with a couple of menus.

“Y’all look ready for lunch, I reckon,” she said.

Lucy swallowed and nodded. “I’m starving.”

We ordered a mess of sandwiches and chips with a Bud for me and more coffee for the girls.

“What was that about?” I said.

“What?” Hilda said, innocence personified.

“The pointing and laughing. It’s enough to make a man feel self-conscious.”

“Oh that,” Lucy said, following Hilda’s lead. “Nothing.” She winked at Hilda who grinned in return.

“There are things a lady never tells, Rafferty,” Hilda said. “You should know that.” Lucy nodded and grinned too.

It was like lunching with the Cheshire Cat sisters.

“It’s like that?” They nodded.

I knew when I was beat, so I changed the topic.

“I don’t want to bring the mood down,” I said. Lucy gulped and reached for Hilda’s hand. “But you said something about ‘a lot of the girls’. I can draw a conclusion, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

I caught Hilda’s look. “If you can,” I added.

Lucy looked at me, then at Hilda. Hilda squeezed her hand. “It’s okay.”

“Okay,” Lucy said, as much to herself as to us. “I think I can.”

She looked to the ceiling and started again.

“You can guess that Dariell insisted on continuing our prayer sessions,” Lucy said.

She blew out a breath, continued to grip Hilda’s hand, and kept her voice firm.

“They were all the same as that first time. Dariell convinced my parents that we needed to meet every few weeks. Later, it would become more than that but, in the beginning, I didn’t have to put up with it too often.”

Hilda opened her mouth and it was my turn to flick her a glance—It’s okay. Don’t stop her now.

“At the same time, Dariell began to change too. I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but I know that everyone noticed it too. It was almost like he became … oh, less ordinary, if that makes any sense. It even appeared like he was taller.” She shrugged. “I have no idea how that’s possible, but that’s what it seemed like.”

I felt us being watched and I half turned my head. Lisa stood behind the counter with a tray of food in front of her, eyebrows raised.

Lucy seemed to be gathering her thoughts and words, so I nodded. Lisa did a quick job (what else?) of serving the baskets of sandwiches and drinks and we all dived into the food.

Around a mouthful of tuna fish, Lucy continued.

“The church grew with Dariell’s stature. More people joined the congregation each week, he announced that he had organized for us to be officially recognized as a church, The People’s Church, blah de blah de blah, and he continued to get money from everyone. I was horrified when Mom and Dad told me that they had changed their wills to leave everything to the church.

“As for me …” Lucy ate a handful of chips and sipped her coffee. “Dariell put me on a pedestal. He announced to the church one night, from his place on the stage, that I was the first Youth Leader. I was as surprised as anyone, ’cause he’d never said a thing to me. It was my mission to help him save the souls of the children and teens within our community. ‘A fight we must win,’ he told everyone. To symbolize how important this task was, he called me up onto the stage and draped a white scarf with the church’s new insignia around my shoulders, gave me a hug and whispered, ‘Congratulations. We’ll be good together.’”

Lucy body shuddered with memory and she rolled her shoulders, fighting to relax. She held her head high and said, “I still remember looking out to the group and seeing my Mom crying huge tears. Dad pumped a fist at me. He was so proud.

“Dariell went on about how the white scarf symbolized purity, honesty and openness, attributes that we should all strive for. He said a bunch of other things that I didn’t hear. I was busy trying not to throw up. There was another prayer session that night.”

Hilda realized she’d forgotten about lunch and started eating her turkey club with a look on her face like it was spoiled. I’d already finished my patty melt and was now concentrating on the beer.

“That’s the story of the next few months. Him growing the church, asking for money, being loved by more people and … and raping me. Firstly, every couple of weeks, then more often until it was two or three times a week. I shut myself off in my head and tried not to think about it. Mom and Dad were getting deeper into the church and forbade me from seeing my friends outside school. ‘They can’t relate to your path, and they’ll only distract you,’ my Mom said.” Lucy laughed. “What I would have given for that, but I couldn’t tell anyone what I was going through. No-one would have believed me.

“I didn’t know what the future would be. I did know the only way I could survive was to retreat inwards. And that’s what I did. I tried being the best leader I could to the young people in the church, but I felt like I was only ever giving half of myself.”

Lucy picked up her cup and held it in both hands, looked past Hilda and out to the parking lot. A garbage truck rumbled past trailing a cloud of flies, turned the corner and disappeared.

“It was six, seven, maybe eight months later when Dariell stood on the stage and announced that there would be another Youth Leader, a fifteen-year-old named Bethany. She had told me she’d not been feeling good for a few weeks and, at the time, I hadn’t thought anything of it. That night though, I knew she’d been lying. The same as I had.

“He called her on stage and went through the same charade. Everyone was smiling and clapping. From where I was sitting in the front all I could see was Bethany’s dead eyes and how much she wanted to throw up. Seeing that, my stomach lurched and I had to excuse myself to go the bathroom, where I did throw up.”

Her hands were shaking now, cold coffee rippling in her cup.

“I remember being on my knees, vomiting into the bowl, and identifying two powerful feelings. I was horrified that he would do this again, knowing the impact that it would have on Bethany’s life.”

She fell silent. Tears dripped.

“And you know the other feeling?”

She looked up.

“Jealousy!” she spat.

She slammed her cup down and coffee splashed across the Formica.

“I was jealous that I wasn’t special any more.”

She lanced me with her glare.

“How fucking sick is that?”

Lucy couldn’t be judged for her feelings.

She had been drugged—whether booze or a more potent concoction wasn’t clear yet—brainwashed and raped by a dominating psycho, ignored by her parents, and separated from her friends. It’s confusing enough being a teenager when the only worries are the zit that popped up overnight and wondering whether Johnny even knows you exist. Given all this I was surprised at how together Lucy seemed to be.

Telling her this didn’t seem to be making any difference.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Rafferty. Shut. Up,” Hilda hissed as Lucy sobbed away in her arms again.

I’m not kidding, she enunciated at me. I didn’t know you could get away with that in public.

Live and learn.

I knew I wouldn’t be doing much good sitting there and trying to mind my p’s and q’s, so I slid out of the bench and walked to the other end of the diner.

Lisa had worked hard over the years to keep the vintage feel of the whole place. The shiny aluminum exterior, the candy-apple-red leather stools at the long, chrome edged counter and black and white linoleum checkerboard flooring.

My favorite part, without a doubt, is the phone booth in the back corner.

Once you’ve closed the folding door and taken a seat on the wooden bench, you’re in your own little world. The dark wood, shimmery glass, yellowed dome light and ancient wall-mounted phone. The aroma of that booth is unique: a mixture of aged wood, old cigarette smoke, and the aura of a thousand conversations. Graffiti whispered from the walls. Kilroy had been here, Susie professed her “4ever” love for Robby, and anyone looking for a good time could call Jenny on 867-5309.

Sitting there took me back to a time when men wore hats and opened doors for women. When jazz music was edgy and a long distance phone call was new technology. Long before I knew that young, pretty cheerleaders were being raped by self-professed holy men.

I blew out a breath and wondered whether I could sit there for the rest of the day.

Or forever.

But I refocused, fished some change out of my pocket, dropped it into the slot and dialed.

“Howdy.”

The voice on the other end of the phone was deep and smooth.

“Hey, Cowboy.”

“Been a while, Rafferty.” He pronounced it bin. “How y’all doing?”

“Hilda and I are fine. Getting older. You and Mimi?” I asked.

“Just fine, thank ya kindly.” Jes’ fahn. “You not bein’ one for social calls, I ’spect you’re calling ’bout a work matter.”

“Yeah. Feel like a little tracking work?”

“I’m up for that, boss-man. City or country?” he asked.

“The boonies. A little town called Lincoln. You heard of it?”

“Maybe.” I pictured him tipping his enormous Stetson back and scratching his knobby fingers through his hair. “Out west?”

I told him where I’d found Lincoln and everything I knew about the town. It didn’t take long. Four or five seconds, max.

“Yup, thought so. What we lookin’ for?”

“A missing girl, but it’s not gonna be that easy.”

“It never is, Rafferty. Thas why she needs people like us.”

“When you care enough to send the very best.”

“Thas true, we be the best, whether they care or not. You want me to boost a car?”

“Nope. Just sniffing around for now. Later, if it comes to it, we might need wheels to pull the girl out.”

I gave him the run-down on Dariell and The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple.

Cowboy whistled down the line. “I knowed there were some nutty god-botherers out there, but this guy sounds like he’s the whole nine yards.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

“It might take us a while to find this place. You available for the next two days?”

“Two days is okay. It don’ sound like the town’s gonna be fat for places to stay, so I’ll throw a couple bedrolls in the truck.”

We agreed to make tracks for Lincoln at dawn, to give us a fair chance of finding what we were looking for before the end of the day.

“Say hi to Mimi, Cowboy. See you tomorrow.”

“Surely will do.” Shorely.

Finally, I was moving.

Dariell.

I’m coming.

I sat there for a while and watched Lucy and Hilda with their heads close together, talking and crying.

Everyone else in the diner was ignoring them, preferring instead to focus on the food, coffee or newspaper in front of them.

A room full of society’s flawed fabric. A patchwork quilt of different shapes, sizes, thicknesses and qualities. Separate pieces, invisibly intertwined.

I wanted to rip open the door and rage at these disconnected strangers.

These people who spent their existence going about their lives, ever careful to make certain they didn’t stray beyond the borders. Cocooned in their own little world, and blissfully unaware of the horrors in front of their smug little faces.

Oblivious to the difference they could make.

Lucy had needed someone to stand up for her.

To listen to her.

To let her know she wasn’t crazy.

It would have only taken one person to shatter the illusion that Dariell had taken great pains to construct. One voice of dissent leads to another, to the next and the house of cards soon tumbles. No-one, not one single person, had done that.

Why not?

Was it easier to say silent? Did all those people, who professed to love their neighbor, not have the balls to speak out when they saw something wrong? Or did they really believe the PR bullshit of their charismatic leader?

Whatever the reason, here I was again. Left to pick up the pieces; trying to find a life lost for little girls who didn’t deserve what happened to them at the hands of a person they should have been able to trust.

I punched Kilroy. Right in the nose. My knuckles hurt and when I looked up, a herd of faces were staring my way. I scowled, and the gazes dropped to their tables one by one, like a family of startled meerkats.

Fuck ’em.

I stayed sitting on the scratched, wooden bench in that time-transcending phone booth; I wasn’t ready to re-join the modern world outside.

I didn’t like the way it looked right then, so I closed my eyes to block it out.

Kimberly lying on her cot.

Looking up through a tiny window. Empty sky beyond.

A single star.

Rolls onto her side. Pulls a blanket around her shoulders. Tucks her knees. Creeps her bare feet under the thin cover.

“I want to come home, Mom.”

Small room. Prison. Bare walls. Concrete floor.

Metal door locked from outside. Steel pipe bed.

Small chest of drawers. Sink.

No light. No heat.

“Is Mr Rafferty coming, Mom?”

Tear rolls down Kimberly’s cheek.

“I don’t know how long I can hold on, Mom.

Tell him to hurry.”

She wipes her cheek.

“Please.” Barely audible.

Voice behind.

“You don’t belong here.”

Turn face to face with a man.

Short. Round face. Soft chin. Too-large nose.

Slumped shoulders.

Average. Ordinary.

Unremarkable.

Oswald-like. Small in all ways.

Believes he is bigger than reality.

Non-threatening man. Easily dismissed.

“You shouldn’t have come.” He smiles.

I think he means it to be a smile, but it looks like he’s projecting confidence and self-loathing onto his face at the same time, so it comes out more like a creepy grimace. Maybe he has gas.

“She can’t hear you. You can’t help her. You shouldn’t have come.” His face creeps again.

Why not?

“Because I am the Father.”

I don’t give a fuck who you think you are. To me you’re a slimy shit who needs to be taken down.

The third creepy smile. “I am the Way.”

So fucking wh—

He clicks his fingers and the world explodes in flames.

My body must have jerked.

It’s the only reason I can think of for why I banged my head against the back wall of the phone booth. The metal cornered signboard there—with posters for a New Romantic band playing a local club on Saturday—was poorly placed for my height and I thought I felt stickiness in my hair.

I blinked out of my cerebral exile when I saw Hilda waving to me, looking like she’d been doing so for a few minutes.

Lisa stood behind the coffee machine with a quizzical look and the diner was half empty.

How long had I been in here?

I couldn’t answer that one without leaving, so I got to my feet and rubbed the back of my head. My fingers came back with a small smear of blood.

Great. I’m getting beaten up by inanimate objects now.

I walked to the booth and slid back into my seat. The girls looked at me through red eyes and a pall of cigarette smoke.

“Everything okay, honey?” Hilda looked concerned. Not for any physical injury I may have had, more for the quite likely imbalance of my mental state.

“Yeah, fine,” I said. It came out more gruffly than I expected. I softened my tone. “Everything’s fine.” I reached out and grabbed her hand to show that it was too.

“Uh huh,” she nodded, unconvinced. “I think we’ve all had enough for today.” The look she gave left no doubt as to her true meaning—By all, I mean you.

“Lucy’s staying with me tonight. She’s tired and it’s a long drive back to Austin.” Lucy gave an exhausted smile. “We’re going to order take out and have a girls night,” Hilda giggled. “We might even put our hair up in curlers and prank call some boys.”

I nodded. Only Hilda could have convinced her to agree. Coming from me, it would have seemed either controlling or pitying, and these were two emotions she didn’t need right now. It was a great idea.

Lucy could get a good night’s rest, safe and sound from her demons. She and Hilda could talk about the girly stuff that couldn’t be spoken in my earshot.

And I needed to get ready.

It was time to go hunting.

CHAPTER 20

We rolled through Fort Worth the next morning and chased our shadow towards the western edge of the earth, and just a few miles closer, Lincoln.

Cowboy drove with both eyes on the road and one arm on the windowsill, the wind whipping at his shirtsleeve. Willie Nelson was telling us how good it felt to be on the road again from the eight track.

I had to agree with him.

After just poking around this case, collecting stacks of paper and a sore butt, it was good to be in motion again. I felt hopped up, ready for action, like a kid on Christmas morning.

“You jumpin’ ’round like a young bronc on the first day of rodeo. Y’all awright?”

“Itching to get started. I’ve spent too much time chasing paper and talking to people.”

“You shoulda called ’fore now. Let’s git amongst ’em.”

I smiled, I pulled out my smoking paraphernalia and got ready to set the nicotine chasing my blood around. Cowboy watched with a raised eyebrow. When the smoke started circling my head and Cowboy had cleared his throat for the fourth time, I cracked the window on my side of the cab to let it leak into the clear morning sky.

“I thought you gave up that awful habit, boss-man.”

“It wasn’t ready to give me up yet.”

“Don’ know how you stand it. Smelling like an oil fire and having to carry that pouch and all those other gizmos around. Plus your wallet and keys and whatnot. Ah’m just a simple man. Pocketknife and a good pair of boots and ah’m rarin’ to go.”

“Whatever you say, Cowboy. I know it’s easy to forget that hand cannon under your left armpit and the cable ties in your hat.”

He grinned. “You said we was jes’ lookin’. I’m travelin’ light today.”

I had seen his sports bag tucked behind the seat when I jumped into the cab. My bet was that it contained at least one shotgun and enough ammunition to make the Texas Rangers more than a little nervous.

By comparison, with just the Colt, a hunting knife and a cooler full of water bottles, sandwiches and fruit, I felt underprepared.

If we got into a firefight, maybe I could pepper them with a vicious barrage of Red Jonathons.

We left US30 at Hudson Oaks.

It split off southwards and continued moseying to Abilene. Cowboy’s truck gobbled up the miles as we followed 180 through Weatherford and parts beyond.

“Knew a feller from here a while back,” Cowboy said as we left Mineral Wells in the rearview mirror. “Dumbest guy I ever did meet.”

“You work with him?”

“In a way.”

“Why was he dumb?”

“I don’t rightly know what made him thataway, but I knowed he was dumb when he didn’t leave town.”

“Why did he need to leave town?”

“I told him to, a’course.”

“What happened?”

“Dropped him down a well shaft.” Cowboy raised a finger in greeting at a passing driver. “I ’magin he’s still there … ’course this was three or four year ago.”

He shrugged.

Willie seemed unperturbed.

We rolled on.

The sun was up for real and the sky shimmered blue and wide. Power poles flashed past and the connecting lines rose and fell in an easy rhythm. We weren’t far enough west to be in the oilfields so both sides of the interstate were dotted with stunted trees and brush. A radio mast spiked tall above the flat landscape and the occasional dilapidated farmhouse leaned heavily on the road edge. Now and then, a trailer compound angled away from the blacktop at the end of a dirt track, surrounded by rusting car bodies.

Other than these mediocre signs of life, it seemed that Cowboy and I were out here alone.

A small town called Palo Pinto came and went and we drove south for a short while, before turning back north on 16 at Metcalfe Gap. We passed a little junction and signpost for the town of Brad, pop 26.

I kid you not. There are more of those tiny hardscrabble towns dotted throughout the Southwest than you’d think.

The dash clock was nudging eight-thirty when Cowboy wheeled the Ford into the dirt parking lot in front of Tom’s Tas-Tee Diner on the far side of Breckenridge. The best coffee in town! a chalkboard screamed through the dust while also imploring us to Try our Pies!

We grabbed stools in front of the counter, high and long. A waitress embodying the inspiration for every movie version of a middle aged, overweight, small town diner waitress leaned against the counter and took our orders.

Biscuits with gravy for Cowboy. Eggs over easy and toast for me. She’d already filled two mugs with scalding black coffee. The plastic name tag said her name was Doris and she smiled like she had the best job in the world.

“Y’all fixin’ to have some pie?” Doris pronounced it pah.

“Maybe later, ma’am. Thankya kindly.”

I usually leave the talking to Cowboy in places like this. It’s been a system that works. For example, my answer would have been along the lines of “Pie? At eight thirty in the morning? Are you insane?”

After she had waddled back to the kitchen, Cowboy sipped his coffee, grimaced and turned to me.

“I figure we about thirty minutes, give or take, from rollin’ into yore lil town. What’s the play, boss-man?”

Good question.

I had thought we’d be able to avail ourselves of local knowledge to point us in the right direction for Dariell and his crew. I didn’t think it mattered much whether the god-botherers were loved or hated by the townsfolk; either way, I expected people would be happy to tell us what they knew.

You know those quaint parts of the country where you can roll into town and walk up to a couple of good ol’ boys sitting on a porch? They’ll look you up and down before saying, “You’re not from around here, are you?” And after a little back and forth conversation to convince said boys that you’re not a maniacal axe murderer, they’re happy to help out with directions and a kindly admonition to “y’all be careful.”

This wasn’t one of those parts of the country.

Having just driven down the main street of Breckenridge, a town ten times larger than Lincoln, I hadn’t seen a single person on the street,

Sure, Breckenridge had plenty of houses, numerous shuttered commercial buildings and a tired old gas station, but I hadn’t seen one of the town’s supposed five thousand inhabitants. Other than Doris, and whoever else might be in the back cooking up my eggs.

“I thought we’d be able to use our charm and easy-going nature on the local inhabitants to enjoin them in our quest for righting misdeeds.” I sipped my coffee. Cowboy’s grimace had oversold it, but it was hot. “The problem I now foresee with that is—”

“We ain’t seen any local in-habit-ants,” Cowboy said. “That ain’t gonna git any better the further we get inta the boondocks.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

I sensed movement in the kitchen, and when I looked up I got a quick glimpse of Doris and a walrus in a stained apron—I assumed Tom, he of the Tas-Tee Diner—as they pulled their heads back from the pass-through window.

Cowboy sipped again and said to the rim of his cup, “Been watchin’ a few minutes. Keep lookin’ at us through the openin’.”

“Now, don’t go getting skittish on me, Cowboy. If you can hold Doris off for a minute I’ll help out after I’ve subdued the cook.”

“Har de har har.”

Doris came out from the kitchen carrying our breakfast on two heavy plates. She laid them down and brought salt and pepper. She topped up our cups, slotted the pot back under the percolator, then stood leaning against the rear counter, grinning even wider.

“You boys ain’t from around here, are ya?”

“No ma’am, we’re surely not,” Cowboy said. He wouldn’t meet her eye while he slathered butter onto his biscuits. “Jes’ passin’ through, looking for sumpin a lil’ further up the road.”

“I knowed it,” Doris shrilled. “I told Tom back there who you was. He din’t believe me, but I knowed it soon as you walked in.”

Cowboy looked down and ate.

“You fellers are here in beautiful Breckenridge, heart of the Northwest, to make a movie, ain’t ya? Now don’t y’all lie to ol’ Doris.”

Cowboy said nothing; just kept eating. He may be the one who can charm the country folks, but I’m the guy who can recognize an opportunity for deceit and falsehood.

I leaned over the counter. Beckoned her in. A fellow conspirator. I looked over each of my shoulders at nothing. Doris’s gaze followed mine.

“I can trust you, can’t I?” A beat. “Doris.”

“Why shore you kin.” She dropped her voice even though the diner was empty. “Your secret’s safe with me, Mr …”

“Armbruster. George Armbruster. From The Studio.” I winked at her and almost lost it. Looked down to get myself back under control.

“You’re right, Doris.” I tilted my head at Cowboy. “Mr Coburn and I are driving around today looking for locations for his next movie.” Doris looked at the top of Cowboy’s hat and hopped from foot to foot. Actually, not so much hopped as just shifted her weight back and forth.

“I jes’ knowed it. I loved him in that cowboy movie. You know, the one with that bald feller.”

“The Magnificent Seven.”

“That’s it,” Doris trilled. “An’ he’s jes’ as quiet in real life, too.”

“He’s a private man, Doris. That’s why you can’t tell anyone, anyone at all, about this. If news got out, it could ruin the lead up to the movie and the studio could cancel the whole thing.” I shook my head.

Doris nodded. “I understand.” If there had been a Bible on the counter, I think she would’ve sworn on it.

I looked up like an idea had occurred to me.

“Actually, Doris. You might be able to help.”

It was her turn to look over her shoulders. She put her hand on her heart—Who me?

“The movie we’re looking to produce, it’s a remake of … well, I can’t say, but I think you can guess, can’t you?” She nodded like a schoolgirl. “Because of that, we’re looking for a location with a group of buildings, like an … an old Spanish mission. We could construct a set,” I said, “but we’d prefer to use an existing location for the realism.”

“Like the campground up at Hubbard Lake?” she asked.

I pretended to chew it over.

“Maybe,” I said. “We’re looking for a more desert setting than lakeside. And the studio would prefer buildings that have been used, lived in. It would be … beneficial … for these structures to have a fair to middling number of permanent residents. We’ll need plenty of extras.”

I paused.

“It goes without saying that I’ll be putting your name forward to the producers. For a small role. It’ll have to be a non-speaking part, but I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

I shook my head at the injustice. Cowboy shook his head too. I could tell he felt as bad as I did with Doris not getting a speaking part.

Doris screwed up her face and looked to the corner of the ceiling for a moment. I ate some eggs. They’d cooled too much but weren’t all bad. Cowboy was mopping up the last of his gravy, and I expected him to keep his head down and push that last piece of biscuit around for the next hour if he needed to.

Doris’s eyes widened, then a quizzical look settled itself on her plump face. She squared her shoulders.

“There might be a place,” she said. “I ain’t seen it with my own eyes, but I’ve heard tell. It’s some sort of commune outside Lincoln, ’bout thirty miles on up the interstate.”

I flicked a glance at Cowboy.

“Been there a few years now. Mary-Jo’s boys worked construction when it was first built, and a lot of folks talked ’bout how it was gonna be good for Lincoln.” It was her turn to shake her head. “It never happened that way. Mary Jo, I went to school with her, tol’ me they saw all the people come through town, go into the commune and never come out again. Her boys had to go to Abilene to find work, so now it’s her and Deke on their own again.” She looked hopeful. “That might work.”

“We’ll have to look at it to be sure. It sounds like the right kind of place, Doris. Tell me …” I looked her in the eye. “Did Mary-Jo tell you where this comp— uh, commune is. I don’t imagine it’s downtown, is it?”

“Oh heavens, no. Mary Jo said it’s in the hills outside Lincoln, but I don’t know exactly where. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve been mighty helpful, Doris. I’ll make sure that the studio knows just how helpful, especially if this commune turns out to be the right place.”

Cowboy rotated his head almost imperceptibly.

“Now …” I clapped my hands together and gave Doris my best winning smile. “I think we’re ready to try some of that pie.”

“I surely do hate it when you do that, boss-man.”

We were back in Cowboy’s truck and rolling northwest toward Lincoln.

“Don’t give me that. You love your fans. Besides, she was already convinced she knew who you were.” I shrugged. “I just didn’t do anything to correct her of that delightful but misguided notion.”

Cowboy does look like James Coburn.

Make that a lot like James Coburn. Especially in the role he played for The Magnificent Seven, where he only had about eight lines of dialogue for the entire movie. Cowboy is just as talkative, which doesn’t help him much in trying to dispel the confusion.

“It don’t matter none if she thinks we look the same.” He tilted his hat back an inch. “But you didn’t have to insist I give her a kiss and an autograph.”

I laughed.

“Relax, it made her day. Besides, you thought to ask where Private Road 5150 was. I believe you said you were looking up an old friend ‘from the business’.”

“Shucks. You spent so much time fillin’ her head with dreams of stardom you forgot we already got an address. I jes’ tried to fix that. Damage to my reputation was done, anyways.”

“Damage to your repu … what? You should be so lucky. James Coburn is one of the toughest men alive.”

Cowboy coughed something that sounded like “chickenshit pussy actor” but his window was down and he was turned away so I couldn’t be certain.

I love working with Cowboy.

CHAPTER 21

We crossed Five Mile River and stormed into Lincoln thirty minutes later. We stormed out the other side twenty-four seconds after that.

Without breaking the speed limit.

When I described Lincoln as a one-horse town, I’d thought the horse was still alive.

There was a single block of one story, stone faced buildings, including a grandiosely named City Hall. Half of these buildings were shuttered with a mixture of faded metal and peeling wood siding. A white water tower stood sentinel near a sign pointing down a dirt road to the elementary school.

The rest of the town looked like the results of a spectacular collision between tractor-trailers carrying ramshackle houses, broken down cars and the odd propane tank.

And, as expected, not a person to see anywhere.

“Gonna stand out like a chigger bite at a nudist camp,” Cowboy said as he pulled the truck onto the shoulder a few miles later.

“Just have to stay mobile,” I said. “Good thing we know the road is east of town.”

Cowboy wheeled back onto West Main Street and headed back. I made sure not to blink as we headed through town again, but it didn’t make a difference, there was nothing else to see.

Before crossing the river again, we turned left and started criss-crossing the landscape to the town’s north. In the first hundred yards we drove past the Lone Star Baptist Assembly, a decent-sized camper’s retreat.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Lincoln was a happening place after all.

I wasn’t.

Two hours later we’d found nothing other than more detritus from the tractor-trailer wreck.

With a flat topography, most of the roads in Texas back-blocks are straight, running at right angles to each other. I imagine it was a result of being easier to draw lines on maps and build fences in straight lines. This made it a little easier to maintain a sense of our search, but didn’t ease our frustrations.

“Like looking for a needle in a stack full of needles,” Cowboy said when we’d turned around outside the last farm gate at the end of another dusty road. Anderson was daubed in red paint on a milk churn, sitting sideways on a a stack of cinder blocks.

“We’re finding a whole lotta nothing,” I said. “She said it was in the hills outside the town.”

“I ain’t seen nothin’ would count as a hill.” I had to give him that.

All the landscape we’d driven around had this weird feel. It was flat. There was nothing on any horizon which counted as a high point but it was still impossible to see more than two or three hundred yards in any direction. Whether it was the scrub, the natural curve of the earth or what, it meant we were going to have to get damn close to our target before we’d see anything.

“Too busy on this edge of town,” Cowboy said. “All these lanes to pissant lil’ dirt farms every coupla hundred yards. Not private enough for your guy, I reckon.”

“I know. That’s bugging me, too.”

“He’s not makin’ it easy to get saved,” Cowboy said. “I hope he knows ’at”

We pulled over a mile later and ate lunch in the shade of the truck’s cabin. Doors swung wide open to catch the slight breeze and our feet resting on the windowsills.

“I say we try out past the river after lunch,” I said, around a mouthful of sandwich. “Beyond the quarry. It might be more deserted; I can’t figure many people wanting to live near a quarry.”

Cowboy took a swallow of water and looked out through the dusty windshield at a cloud bank looming in the southeast sky.

“I ain’t seen anyplace today I can figure people wantin’ to live.”

He shrugged.

“Folks surely be strange.”

We rolled past the edge of town again, re-crossed Five Mile River and found the Lincoln Limestone Quarry. We worked our way up and down the network of roads surrounding and cutting through the quarry, and found something unexpected.

There were people in Lincoln, after all.

We got eyeballed by quarry workers and truck drivers a few times but a casual wave and big dose of confidence kept us moving. In a little over an hour, we had covered every road, lane and track we could find all the way north to the river, with no signs of the elusive Private Road 5150.

As we turned back to work further east of the quarry, the road network, such as it was, changed dramatically. There were larger swathes of land between each offshoot and intersection. Fewer farm gates and mailboxes. Everything was as flat as before and the visibility hadn’t improved, but the area felt more isolated.

We ran down one long road and found the highway again, so we turned around. Turning right onto Local 201 opposite the quarry’s back door we speared down the arrow straight road toward where it disappeared over the horizon through a gap in the low trees.

The first turn off this road was a dirt track, wriggling away into the scrub. Cowboy braked the truck to a stop in front of it. The clouds had thickened, the southern sky now dominated by a massive anvil-topped Texas thunderhead. The temperature had dropped and the first stirrings of a breeze had started to tease the dust and rattle the roadside shrubs.

“What d’ya think, boss-man?”

I looked into the turnout and then back down the road in front of us.

“Probably just used by four-wheelers for fun. Let’s keep going. We can always come back.”

Cowboy shrugged, popped the clutch and the truck lurched forward. We passed three more tracks on the right hand side, one on the left. They all looked disused and too small to be what we were looking for. Two miles further on, we crested another of those imperceptible rises and came to a T-junction. Dirt roads ran away in both directions.

“Hang on,” I said and jumped out of the truck.

It took a bit of wrenching to free the ancient signpost from the entwined grass and roots. It came out mostly intact, still with one road pointer attached. I had to root around a bit more to find a second one, half buried in the earth. The third pointer had long since rotted away, I guess.

I scraped the dirt and dust away with my pocketknife and made out the number 201 on one pointer. The second pointer broke in half when I tried the same thing, so I slowed my cleaning approach a touch. The paint was gone, but in the remaining shallow grooves I could see P…T … D … … 5 0.

“We might have it, Cowboy,” I said.

It was a three dimensional puzzle to reconstruct the original signpost orientation and it took me a few minutes to make sure that there was only one way it could have been standing before succumbing to years of weather.

I stepped back up into the truck.

“Left.”

The wind had picked up now, blowing ribbons of dust across the road in front of us, and throwing the truck’s rooster tail like a signal fire. The road twisted, turned and dropped beneath the hood. Cowboy’s hands turned into a blur several times as he fought to keep the rear end from fishtailing.

“Whoa there, Fangio,” I said. “This ain’t Indianapolis.”

Cowboy grimaced. Swung the wheel hard left and swore.

“Shit, Rafferty. Don’t you know nothin’? Fangio never drove Indy. You’re thinkin’ of Andretti.”

I shut up and hung on.

The sky started to spit rain.

Not heavy enough to dampen the dusty wind; just perfect for smearing the windshield into a poultice of half-moist road dust.

Cowboy squirted enough water onto the glass to be able to see the road ahead, but it was still a couple of near death experiences later when we squirted through a gap in the scrub with a screee sound as the brush scraped its tangled fingers down both flanks of the truck.

“Dang!” Cowboy said, as he glanced in the side mirror. “There goes the paint job.”

I wasn’t concerned about the truck’s bodywork. My attention had been distracted by the two pickups straddling a gated driveway twenty yards up on my side of the road.

Two pickups. In the country. Near a dirt driveway. Big deal, right?

It was the two guys standing between the trucks and cradling M16s which made it exciting.

“Cowboy,” I mouthed.

“I see em.”

He gave the customary farmer’s greeting. One finger up off the steering wheel and a slow tilt of the head. The two gatekeepers didn’t respond, just swiveled their heads to follow our progress. Soon they were lost in the dust cloud latched to our rear bumper.

“Don’t that beat all,” Cowboy said as he reached forward and mashed the odometer button with his thumb. “The only folks we done seen all day, and they carryin’ heavy artillery. Must be feeling distrustful of their fellow man.”

He started to slow the truck.

“Keep going,” I said. “I want them to see the dust trail so they don’t think we stopped around the next corner.”

“Ah yuh.” He squirted the throttle and we were off rocking and rolling. I reached again for the Jesus strap.

“I think we’ve found it,” I said.

“Whoever’s behind that gate is feeling a mite secretive, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, they don’t want anyone to get a look at whatever’s at the end of that driveway.”

“What to do, boss-man?”

“Keep going for a few more miles.”

“And then?”

“Then we wait for dark, sneak back and get a look at whatever’s at the end of that driveway.”

Cowboy grinned.

We made it three miles further before we ran out of road.

The river sliced across the landscape, and the road, in front of us. There was a stand of trees to the left, and we took the opportunity to get out of the truck and stretch our legs. The weather had continued to build, now with constant rain. Flashes of lightning lit up the clouds.

Cowboy pulled a thermos of coffee and two tin mugs out of the sports bag. Good idea.

We shuffled in the dirt, mostly out of the rain, and sipped the coffee.

“Good huntin’ weather,” Cowboy said.

“Yeah, the storm and darkness will help. You think they bought the idea that we’re just two guys out for a drive?”

“Maybe,” he said, “I’m more wonderin’ if they figurin’ to see us go back past. There’s a whole lotta nothin’ up this enda the road.”

“Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.”

He shrugged. “Not much we can do ’bout it now.”

“Maybe they’ll think we’re up here fishing.”

“In the rain? Plus, that look like a fishing hole to you?” He jerked his thumb behind us.

The river slugged its way between the two road ends, thick and murky white. Thanks to the Lincoln Limestone Company, I bet.

“Not really,” I said, “but then I know next to nothing about fishing.”

“Goddamn city boy.”

“I do know those boys won’t follow us off their turf.”

“Yep. They looked like yokels, but I ain’t never seen a farmer with a semi-auto. Prob’ly just tryin’ to keep people from wanderin’ in.”

“That’s my read, too. Guess we’ll find out if they’ve got anyone else on the perimeter.”

“Less’n you figure to be goin’ in through the front door.”

“This boy may be from the city, but he’s not stupid.”

We drank coffee and ate the rest of the sandwiches as the last remnants of daylight were snuffed out by the storm. We sat in the truck after the rain got too strong for the small trees to cope with. I tried napping and succeeded in putting a cramp in my neck and waking up with a taste in my mouth like I’d cleaned out Cowboy’s horse stalls with my tongue.

On the good side, I’d wasted ten minutes.

“I guess Mimi was disappointed to not be able to join in our rock and roll mystery tour today,” I said.

Cowboy spoke from underneath the hat tipped forward over his face.

“Hell, Rafferty, I told her we wasn’t even gonna get to shoot no-one. She said it sounded borin’. ’Sides, she had washin’ and what-not to do at home.”

Cowboy’s shoulders shook the tiniest little bit.

Screw him.

I packed a pipe, got it lit and adjusted my butt in the seat for the thousandth time.

What would we find out there? In the rain and the lightning. Images of Jonestown flashed into my vision.

People who looked normal but accepted the ravings of a madman. Huts and buildings. These images morphed into photos I’d seen of the WWII concentration camps.

More huts. More zombies. More madmen shrieking their words of conviction to throngs of sycophants.

I hoped we weren’t dealing with the same thing.

A new image burst from a darkened bubble behind my eyes.

Kimberly.

Robed in glowing white. Kneeling.

“I am the Way.”

Green eyes. Wide. Unblinking.

“Follow me home. I am the Way.”

Kimberly stands. Robe drops.

Naked.

Unashamed. Uncovered. Open.

“Follow me.”

She steps.

Flames explode in the air behind her.

Smell of burning wood and chemicals.

Something else.

Burning flesh.

Screams.

“Ow, fuck,” I yelled and snapped awake.

I looked down to the smoldering hole in my jeans. Slapped at it and brushed the ashes into the footwell. They winked and sparkled. I grabbed the pipe from where it had fallen between my legs.

“Damn, that smarts.”

“Told you it was a bad habit,” Cowboy drawled. He was trying not to laugh, but wasn’t wasting a lot of energy on it.

I wanted to rub my leg but I didn’t want to give the bastard any more satisfaction. Checked my watch. 9:17. It wasn’t gonna get any darker.

“What say we do this?” I said.

“I surely do enjoy settin’ around watchin’ you set yourself on fire, but if you’d rather walk through the rain looking for guys with guns …” He shrugged. “I guess we can do that instead.”

He chuckled and fired up the truck.

I glowered.

CHAPTER 22

Cowboy stalked back down the road at less than five miles an hour. It was the exact opposite of our earlier wild ride in Mr Toad’s F150, but he only had the parking lights on to find the road so I gave him that. Aside from a solitary jackrabbit which burst into and then out of our faint light spill, nothing else was moving out there.

It took about twenty minutes before Cowboy pulled the truck off the road into a patch of long grass and killed the engine. Rain drummed on the cab roof and the world outside the streaked windows was pitch black.

“I reckon we’re less than a mile from the gate. Best not go any further, less’n they’re still there and lookin’ for us.”

I nodded. “We’ll cut inland a few hundred yards and use whatever brush we can find for cover. The driveway might curve south though, so we could be up for a couple of mile walk.”

“Ain’t no hill for high steppers like us,” he said. “Let’s git it done, boss-man.”

Cowboy turned in his seat and opened the sports bag again. He extracted a dark ranchers coat and then the night’s choice of weapon. I was wrong about the shotgun. He produced a gleaming rifle, with a telescopic sight.

I whistled. “That’s a beauty.”

“Winchester Seventy. Birthday present from Mimi. She’s too sweet.” He smiled. “I was gonna be bringin’ the sight anyways, and a little firepower … I don’t have to use it.”

I shrugged into a Dallas Cowboys windbreaker and a camouflage-patterned baseball cap, slid the hunting knife into the scabbard around my right leg and secured the Colt in the new shoulder holster. I was still glad I’d spent the money on that. Tucking a pistol into the back of your pants only works on TV, and only then if you don’t move around too much.

Having your gun fall out and skitter across the ground can be embarrassing. While you’re running, let’s say. Chasing a bail runner, for example. Then being burdened with the choice of continuing the chase or retrieving the gun, which is unregistered so no problems there, but is a handy and reliable weapon, and that’s not something you find everyday, so …

Trust me on this. A shoulder holster is worth the investment.

We thunked the truck doors shut and walked into the scrub. Water cascaded past the windbreaker’s collar and plastered the shirt to my back. The ankle-length grass flicked and swiped at my legs and my socks and jeans were soon soaked through.

The rain swirled off Cowboy’s Stetson and darkened the shoulders of his rancher’s coat. He moved easily with no signs of discomfort. Other than the Springfield over his shoulder and the pouring rain, he could have been out for a relaxing night-time walk.

Lightning flashed every few minutes as we made our way through the scrub.

With the low cloud base the effect was the reverse of a ceiling light in a dark room trying to short out but not quite being committed to the decision. The upside: we could check our progress with the lightning’s after-image of the landscape.

On the other hand, each flash shot my night vision to hell, so it was even money on being a good thing.

We lurched and pitched over tussocks of saltbush. I kept having to tug my feet free as my sneaker laces tangled. Cowboy took the lead and I followed with him at the edge of my vision. I’d rather have kept more distance, to present less of a target, but it was so dark that any more than five steps apart and we’d lose track of each other.

“Dang! I knowed I shoulda brought the night vision scope,” Cowboy said.

I wondered if that was also a present from Mimi.

After what felt like an hour, but was probably only six or seven minutes, Cowboy turned us south, tracking parallel to the dirt road. We had agreed that with each lightning flash he would scan the quadrant to the front and left. I would take front and right. Together we’d piece together the whole 180 degrees in front of us.

We continued like this for the next month.

Or so it felt.

“Let me check sumpin,” Cowboy said. He brought the rifle up.

“What?”

“There.” He pointed. “’Bout six, six-fifty yards, I reckon.” I followed the direction of his finger. Didn’t see what he was pointing at but I could sense something.

“Hard to see through the rain,” he said. “There’s lights over there.”

“The interstate?”

“Naw. That’s further ’round to the right. Not headlights, anyways. More like spotlights.” He held out the gun. “Check it through the scope.”

I put the gun to my shoulder and the sight to my eye. Swiveled through an arc.

There.

It was just a less-dark island in the ocean of darkness. A meek reflection of lights, out of sight below the horizon, on the low cloud base. Like seeing the glow of a distant town on a cross country drive, long before any details are visible.

“We’re okay for a while,” he said, “but we best start bein’ careful less they got eyes out for us.”

Now with a specific target to focus on, the walking became easier. The terrain and weather hadn’t improved, but the simple fact of having a specific direction to go, and knowing we were making progress towards that target, made a difference.

Go figure.

Another interminable period picking our way through the soggy Texas desert and the loom was visible without Cowboy’s scope. Shortly after that I could see the ground in front of me lit by the glow beyond.

Cowboy took a knee beside me. “We gonna be visible from here on, partner.”

I nodded. “Yep. So are they.”

“’less they’ve dug foxholes,” he said.

True.

I checked my watch. Quarter to midnight.

“You make out specifics?” I said.

Cowboy squinted down the rifle barrel. “Nope,” he said, swinging the gun through a wide arc. “Nothin’. Just scrub and rocks. And the rain ’course.”

There was still barely any light to speak of, but after the previous two hours of pitch blackness it felt too damn bright. I was getting that itchy feeling between my shoulder blades and had to talk myself into walking forward. I found I was starting to tiptoe, too, then realized that I couldn’t even hear Cowboy’s footfalls and he was so close I could have reached out to touch him.

I told myself to calm down, we were safe.

So it was a hell of a surprise when I stepped over a fallen tree, looked up and saw the compound bathed in light spread out before me.

I stopped. Did a double take.

Realized how bright everything was and how exposed that made me. I turned back for the tree, slipped on the wet ground and half fell in the process.

I reached out to grab the rough bark of the downed trunk and tried to keep a low profile as I slithered over it. I shlooped to the ground, landing in a puddle.

“Smooth,” Cowboy whispered from his crouched position.

“Shut up.”

I gave him the finger. He didn’t care.

“I was gonna call out but you was already over the log. No harm done, anyways.”

I squiggled around to peer over the tree and get a better look at what I’d nearly walked into.

Twenty feet beyond our tree, the land pitched downward. Not a cliff, but steep enough that a nine-year old would’ve had great fun hurtling the seventy, seventy-five feet to the bottom on a bike. Or a sled.

The ridge slope curved away from us in both directions, the perimeter of a circular depression a football field and a half across, broken only by a landslide on the opposite side.

If you’ve seen pictures of the meteor crater outside Winslow AZ, you’ll have an idea of what we were looking at.

Except for a couple of minor differences.

The Arizona crater was much larger.

And although I hadn’t been there, I was confident it didn’t have an assortment of dirty-white buildings at its base. Nor the animal pens on the far side, peeking out from behind a building with a steeply-pitched roof that had to be a church. And I don’t think the Arizona version was cabled for the power needed for the scattered light poles to bleed their yellowish light through the rain.

Gravel walkways wandered between the various buildings. No landscaping to speak of, but almost a quarter of the depression was spotted with rows of bedraggled crops struggling to find purchase. A shallow depression in the ground traced the lower edge of the slope, collecting the water that ran down the bank and funneling it away somewhere.

It could have been a cute little township.

If it hadn’t been at the bottom of a big hole, in the middle of nowhere.

Couldn’t tell if the crater was man-made. It didn’t matter, it was a perfect protection for the township below. As I’d found out, you’d have to be right on top of the damn thing before you had a clue anything was there. In fact, we’d got lucky; without the storm’s low cloud cover, and the resultant light reflection, we’d have never found it.

Cowboy nudged me. “Check the motor pool.”

At the south-eastern side of the whole shebang the black mouth of a tunnel beckoned from the side of the crater. Water-filled tire tracks exited the tunnel and traced curved lines ending at the side of a long gray-green metal building. The sliding industrial doors would roll back to provide access inside.

I wondered if there were two pickups that I would recognize inside that shed.

“Any activity?” I asked.

“Naw. Not even our friends from the front gate. Who’d be out on a night like this, less’n they had to be.” If I came up with any theories on that, he’d be the first to know.

I turned around and sat down with my back to the log. I was confident we’d found the Texas spread of The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple, but I felt a bit like the dog chasing the car, once the car stops.

Okay, I’ve caught it. What do I do with it now?

We had no idea whether Kimberly was down there. For that matter, we had no idea who was down there. Or how many of them. Or what weapons they might have.

“Boss-man,” Cowboy said through the hiss of the rain. “We got motion.”

I turned and eased my head up over the top of the log. A door had opened from a building on the far side of the village, throwing a muddy yellow rectangle of light on the ground. Seven, no eight, men stepped out and the door swung closed. They walked with shoulders hunched and heads bent against the rain to the gray-green shed. The first one there grabbed the handle of the nearest sliding door.

“Cowboy,” I hissed.

“Got it.”

I felt him shift the gun and sight it as the door rolled back with a metallic scrape. The inside of the shed glowed bright, stacked high with olive-green boxes. I cursed myself for not bringing a camera and hoped that Cowboy was as quick as he said. The men filed into the shed and the door slid closed with another scrape and a boom which rolled to us through the night.

We both turned and leaned back against the log this time.

“What have you gone and got yourself into this time, boss-man?”

I pulled my cap off and ran my wet hands through my soaked hair. Ached for a pipe. Asked myself the same question.

“Are they …” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep,” Cowboy said again. “Now why would a nice ol’ god-botherer have a garage full of weapons crates?”

I didn’t have a chance to answer before a tinny voice crackled through the rain.

“Attention.”

I felt Cowboy slump further to the ground and I scrabbled for the Colt.

“Attention. O Holy Night. Father will speak. O Holy Night.”

“What the fuck?” I whispered, looking left and right for the imminent threat. Cowboy worked the action on the Winchester.

When I figured that an incoming assault force was unlikely to announce themselves, I turned and peered over the log. For the first time, I noticed the PA speakers mounted on the light poles. The voice continued.

“Attention. O Holy Night. Father will speak. O Holy Night.”

Like an ant colony being poked with a stick, the township below came alive. Figures trudged through the rain towards the church.

“Attention. O Holy Night. Father will speak. O Holy Night.”

A metallic squawk and feedback cut through the night, and then there was only the sound of the rain.

“You ever see anythin’ like this?” Cowboy asked. I shook my head.

I couldn’t see where they were all coming from. The stream of humanity; men, women, and children flowed to the front of the church, onto the porch and through the front doors.

Cowboy nudged me. “Boss-man.”

From a collection of huts near the soggy crops a line of figures filed, heads bowed, towards a square building behind the church. About fifteen in number, dressed in similar robes and all walking with the same, resigned motion.

“Cowboy?” I said.

He squinted through the rifle scope.

“Yeah. Yore not imaginin’ it. Looks like anyone of them could be your girl.”

They continued their chain-gang shuffle, bent around the corner of another building and one by one stepped onto the porch and disappeared inside. The few small windows flickered with candlelight.

The flow of people to the church slowed until the last person, an old man with a walking stick, levered himself onto the porch and then the door swung closed behind him.

Before I got into motion over the log and headed down the hill and toward where the girls were sheltering from the rain, a square of light broke through the darkness again, and a group of men stepped back into the night from the gray-green shed. They spread out and took up defensive positions around the church and the square building behind. They cradled their weapons, like the two guys we’d seen earlier at the driveway.

I started to wonder if I should have been able to hear any undertones of speech coming from the church, but something else scratched at my brain.

Like the drawing which shows both a young woman and an old woman, depending on how you perceive it, I couldn’t work out what was wrong with the picture in front of me. Okay, Dariell’s got a security force protecting the compound. They might be amateurs, but they were mobile, well-armed, and ringing the locations of his flock.

Then the picture flipped, and I heaved a breath out.

If they were protection from an unknown threat, why were they all facing inwards—towards the congregation?

The rain pissed down.

CHAPTER 23

Cowboy sped down the interstate.

We’d made fast work back to the truck, once we’d left Dariell’s retreat behind. Angling left as we stepped into the darkness soon put us back on the dirt road. I figured we’d be out of sight of the compound driveway, though with the rain it was hard to be certain.

No-one came out of the dark to ambush us as we squelched through the mud and tried to avoid the potholes, so maybe we were okay.

Two trucks still flanked the driveway as we cruised past an hour later. It was too dark to see if they were the same pickups as earlier, or to tell if there was anyone inside; I didn’t see anyone moving in the brief flash of our headlights.

“You got any paper and a pen?” I said.

“Glove compartment, mebbe.”

I rummaged around and found an old envelope and a battered pencil. That’ll do. I flattened the envelope down on my leg and started drawing.

“Whatcha doin?”

“Drawing what I remember about the compound, before it gets foggy.” I drew a rough circle and marked our viewing position with a crude X. “I figure we’ll be coming back and it’ll be handy to put together a plan next time.”

“You didn’t have one this time?” Cowboy chuckled.

I ignored him.

I plotted positions as best as I could remember for the buildings, starting with the church in the centre. Two lines (one with a hiccup from a sudden swerve of Cowboy’s to miss another pothole) showed the tunnel entrance. I drew locations for the motor pool-cum-arsenal and three long low sheds, one from where the eight men stepped into the night. I guessed that to be a sort of barracks.

If this was a religious retreat, why was I thinking in military terms?

At the nearest side of the crater, backed in against the dismal agriculture project, I pencilled in the series of smaller buildings, where the girls had emerged.

“How many small huts?” I asked.

“Eight. Two rows of four.”

I looked up and closed my eyes, swaying with the movement of the truck. Counted the huts I could see in the darkness. Two. Four. Eight. Yep. There were two other larger buildings, behind the church and between the huts and the barracks.

I opened my eyes and sketched these on the envelope. Also put down the square building further behind. This was more or less aligned with the church, seemed to be centered on an invisible axis running through the centre of the town.

Cowboy leaned over and glanced at the paper, lit by the reflection of the headlights in the sheeting rain.

“Looks ’bout right to me,” he said. “There was sumpin here, too. Beside the church.” He stubbed a thick finger at the paper.

“Any ideas?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Smaller structures. Stores, tanks. I didn’t see no windows.”

I looked down again, tried to locate some of the light and speaker towers. I was sure there were more than I could remember. Drew a couple of big squiggles in the southwest corner. Can you have a corner in a circular space? There was something down there where all the people came from, but I didn’t get a clear view past the log. I waggled the pencil and brought it down onto the paper again.

Nothing else. Had as much as I was gonna get.

I popped open the glove box and threw the pencil back in. Tossed the envelope onto the dash. Put my head back and closed my eyes.

As Cowboy drove through the darkness, I found myself returning to his question.

I knew it was rhetorical, but that didn’t stop my brain running around to find an answer. Without success.

Why did Dariell have firepower?

I had thought this case was screwy enough when it was only about religion. To find out that this whack job had transcended from zealot to god-incarnate—in his own mind, at any rate—was one more step into the abyss. And those crates stacked in the shed took all of us passengers on this tour off the exit from the True Path Highway and straight into Crazyville.

“You see writing on those crates?” I asked without opening my eyes.

“Nope. They had stenciled letterin’ on the sides, but that door slid shut before I could read anythin’. I’d give my left nut if they ain’t weapons crates.”

“Problem is, they could hold anything from more M16s and ammo to fifty cals and RPGs. It’d be nice to know just how crazy this guy is.”

Cowboy said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say.

The night rushed by.

We made good time retracing our steps to Dallas.

It was glowing light in the east as Cowboy turned the truck off Mockingbird, made the corner into Palm Lane and pulled into the driveway. We’d been almost twenty four hours on the move and I was looking forward to a shower and a few hours of shut eye.

I grabbed my crude urban planning diagram from the dash, checked my pockets for pipe and tobacco and said “Fuck it” to the rest of the stuff in the truck. Cowboy grabbed one of the bedrolls from behind his seat, locked the cab and followed me inside.

By the time I finished a shower and walked out to the living room to tell Cowboy it was his turn, he was flat on his back on his blanket, boots off, and hat over his face, snoring.

I let him sleep, wandered back to the bedroom and followed his lead.

The sun was all the way up when I woke. I blinked a few times getting my bearings and smelled coffee perking down the hall. I slipped on a pair of shorts with a hole in one pocket and an old Mavericks t-shirt and followed my rumbling stomach into the kitchen.

Cowboy sat on one of the bar stools with a mug of coffee in one hand.

“Mornin, sleepyhead.”

“Hhmmrgghhh,” I replied.

Or something like that.

I poured a cup of coffee, leaned against the counter and slurped. The world started to look better. I packed a pipe, fired it up, poured more coffee and decided I could cope with staying awake a while longer.

I whipped up eggs while Cowboy worked the toaster. I topped off the cups again for both of us, and we sat on opposite sides of the kitchen bench to eat.

“What you gonna do ’bout this jumped-up born again?” he asked as he forked another mouthful.

I spun the envelope sketch under my finger.

“Don’t need to do anything about him. He can have his visions, deluded followers, and his ultimate reward in paradise. Or wherever. All I want is to get Kimberly out.”

“Yep.” Cowboy nodded. “Seems to me he can make it a mite difficult for her to leave. If he’s a mind to a’course.”

“There is that,” I said.

We finished our food in silence, lost in thought. Cowboy folded his blanket and stuffed it under one arm. He stood in the doorway and looked at me.

“Now don’t you go wanderin’ in there by yourself, y’hear. ’Specially if this Dariell dude is liable to play rough, okay?”

I waved him acknowledgement.

“Cos I would hate to miss out on that kinda fun.”

I wandered around the house after Cowboy left.

I started and didn’t finish a few chores. Rinsed the dishes but didn’t wash them, put the wet clothes from the night before into the washing machine but didn’t turn it on, that kind of thing.

Felt like I had an itch that I couldn’t scratch.

I called Hilda at home but got her machine.

“Hi hon. I’m back from communing with the natives of Northwest Texas. Boy howdy, do they know how to show a guy a good time. Talk soon.”

I considered more coffee, but grabbed a Corona from the fridge instead. Sat at the counter fiddling with the envelope again. I found myself slipping into a strategizing role, mapping approach routes and killing zones in a mythical assault on Camp Thof.

Assuming, of course, that I knew what we were dealing with down there.

Which, of course, I didn’t.

Behind the speculative planning I found myself wondering why I kept circling back to the idea that this would only be resolved through force.

After all, I just wanted to get Kimberly back to her mother. And despite my earliest words to Kathy-Lee, from what I’d seen, I’d be surprised if Kimberly didn’t want that, too.

Maybe it was my background and experience that kept bringing me back to the warfare analogies. After all, I’m a soldier, of sorts, not a bleeding-heart social worker. So, it made sense that I would gravitate to violent methods of resolution, rather than expecting the combatants to join hands and sing a few choruses of Kum-ba-yah.

But dammit, it felt like more than that.

It felt like I wasn’t in control of this, or maybe I never had been. There was an air of … inevitability, that this whole thing was going to end in flames.

I drained my bottle and told myself to stop being stupid. Nothing had even hinted at a violent end to the search for Kimberly.

Nothing except the weapons crates, that is.

I was good at getting things done. I told myself it would all work out in the end.

Meantime, there was a relaxing nap waiting to be had.

How wrong I was.

Kimberly on fire.

Burning up.

Smiling.

Push her to the ground. Roll her over to smother flames.

Press on her bubbling skin. Burning hands.

Kimberly still standing. Not yet on fire.

On the ground. Burning to death.

Look back. Standing. Bursting into flame.

To the newly-conflagrated Kimberly. Push her down.

Another Kimberly behind her.

I can’t save them all.

Drop and roll the next Kimberly.

Smolders under blistered hands.

Smiles at me.

Far away a fire alarm.

Both Kimberlys on the ground. Bodies smoking.

Next in line explodes in flame. Grab her. Push her away.

Reach for the fourth.

Move along the unending line of Kimberlys.

Each one bursts into flame as I reach them.

Flashpoint moves away from me.

Faster.

It still moves away.

Stop.

The row of Kimberlys ignite, one by one, into the darkness. A macabre Vegas water fountain.

Fire alarm blares.

Through burning and charring faces, Kimberlys smile at me.

“Help me.”

I can’t help you all.

I can’t help you.

I can’t.

With a sucking breath I erupted from the darkness. In my chair, the western afternoon sky ablaze outside the window.

Why can I still hear the damn fire alarm?

I blinked, trying to orient myself for the second time that day, and reached out to answer the phone.

Dropped the receiver.

Blinked twice and hauled it up by the cord.

“Helmmgh.”

“Oh swoon, my great ugly one. You know exactly what to say to a girl.”

“…”

“I missed you last night,” she whispered.

That was music to my ears. And the best thing I’d heard in the last week.

Maybe ever.

“Hey, Hil.” I righted my voice. “Surfacing after a nap.” Ran my tongue around my teeth and yearned for a toothbrush.

“Did you find anything in Lincoln?”

Only that this guy has enough firepower to start a private war.

“Nothing out of the ordinary.” There was no point getting her more worried than I already was. “Maybe that’s the problem. Everything looks ordinary on the surface, but a girl is still missing.”

“You want me to come over tonight?”

“I’d love you to, hon, but I’m still zonked. I’d be terrible company, unless falling asleep is the new sexy.”

“Not the new nor the old. Take it from me, falling asleep while in flagrante delicto will never be sexy. Stick with that, and the rest is easy.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ve been looking at so many catalogs and manifests that I’m seeing words on the inside of my eyelids. I’ll get an early night, too. Sleep tight.” Sigh. “Even if it will be without me.”

“You too.”

“I love you, Rafferty.”

“You too.”

I cradled the receiver and sat staring at the wall as the last light of the day leaked away.

Tried to think about how to get to Kimberly. Didn’t come up with anything new.

I wanted to sleep.

I didn’t want to dream again.

Fuck’s sake, Rafferty. Grow a pair. What kind of a man is scared of his dreams? Tired? Stop your whining and go to bed.

Yeah.

I was hungry but couldn’t be bothered making anything. I padded down the hall, fell face down on the bed and told myself to sleep.

Nothing to worry about; I always listened to myself.

No nonsense, that’s me.

I’m not sure why I saw two a.m. go by.

CHAPTER 24

First order of the day: talk to Lucy.

Check that, first order of the day was to wrap my lips around a cup of coffee and a pipe, then I called Lucy.

“Hey, Mr Rafferty.” The flick of a lighter. “Lucky you caught me. I was about to leave for the VA.”

“Lucy, I need to know how things changed when the church moved to Washington.”

Inhale. Exhale.

“I told you the other day about how Dariell was acting. I’m not sure what else I can say.”

“Lucy.” I hesitated. Hilda’s words came back to me.

You need to be careful with her.

Careful be damned. If I was going to find Kimberly before it was too late, I needed to know exactly what Cowboy and I had seen in the dark and the rain outside Lincoln.

“Lucy. I found the compound. I saw people. I saw a group of girls. But I still don’t know what I saw. What’s going on out there?”

Inhale. Exhale.

“Lucy, I know this is hard, but—”

“Mr Rafferty, you don’t have the faintest idea how hard this is.” Inhale. Exhale. “I haven’t slept a minute since we talked. For the last year and a half …” Long breath out. The rustle of a cigarette packet, lighter flick and a deep inhale. “For the last year and a half I’ve done everything I can to forget what happened out there. I was getting better. I was.”

“Lucy—”

“And then I get this misguided notion that I can help you, and I’m spun back to a world I wish I’d never seen the inside of.”

“Kimberly needs you, Lucy. She—”

“No, Mr Rafferty. She needs you. Not me. I can’t help anymore.”

“Lucy—“

“I’m sorry. I really am. No-one can feel for those girls more than I do, but I can’t do this. I’ve gotta go. Bye, Mr Rafferty.”

Fuck.

I called Kathy-Lee and brought her up to speed. There wasn’t much to say, but I described the on-the-outskirts-of-Lincoln township.

No, I had not seen Kimberly in person.

No, I had not seen anyone at all.

And, no, there didn’t seem to be anything dangerous.

I had said I would call more often. I hadn’t said anything about telling the truth.

Kathy-Lee sounded tired. Resigned. Maybe even to the point where she might not have the energy to twist her wedding ring. I wanted to give her good news; I just had none to give.

I promised to call again soon, with more definite and positive news.

Two shitty phone calls left me feeling unsettled.

But I let the feeling pass; I had other things to do.

I wanted to get eyes on this guy and his gaggle during daylight hours.

I drank more coffee while I packed a nylon sports bag with the essentials. My battered Minolta with the three hundred mill zoom lens and a couple rolls of fast film. A pair of binoculars, smaller than the camera and more powerful. The Ithaca 12-gauge, wrapped in an old sheet, went in along with a box of birdshot.

Rafferty’s Rule Thirty-Two: It’s better to have it and not use it, than need it and not have it.

I threw in the .38 too, but left the ankle holster behind. Despite Rule Thirty-Two, it’s still possible to overdo things.

Besides, the .45 was already in the car. I finished the bag off with a pair of battered hiking boots, a dry baseball cap and an old outdoorsman coat. I wanted to be in and out before nightfall, but you never know.

I humped everything out to the Mustang and returned to grab a cooler with water and a couple of sandwiches. I unzipped and went through the bag again, satisfied that I’d packed everything I’d need.

I thought about calling Cowboy, decided against it. I knew where the place was now, and I was planning on sneaking a look, not launching World War III today. Besides, if I got caught, I’m just a regular guy taking a walk in the desert.

No law against that right? What could go wrong?

CHAPTER 25

My shoulders and neck were aching by the time I reached Mineral Wells and I could’ve almost killed for a cup of coffee, but a pipe and a bottle of water carried me on.

Driving through Breckenridge, the signs outside Tom’s Tas-Tee-Diner insisted I should stop, but I didn’t think Doris needed to see me again. She might ask awkward questions, like when she would be contacted for a costume fitting, or why a studio exec drives such a crappy car, that type of thing.

So I blasted straight through Breckenridge and headed on towards Lincoln.

The Mustang hadn’t missed a beat all morning. Although I hated paying Peter, I couldn’t argue with his work.

I saw the sign for the turn I wanted too late. I threw out the anchors and heaved the car onto the shoulder. A sweeping u-turn used up the shoulder on the other side of the road, and the dust behind me spun up into a mini-tornado. I took the left off the interstate and slowed.

About a half mile before the junction with Private Road 5150, two white Chevy Suburbans blasted past me, nose to tail, headed toward the interstate. I got a brief glimpse of two serious-looking, aviator sunglass-wearing men in the lead car, but the tinted windows and dust cloud blocked out everything else.

I eased to a stop to let the dust clear.

Dariell? It looked like a protective convoy. Follow, or keep going?

As the dust settled, I decided to keep going. I was after Kimberly, not Dariell, so if it was him headed the other way I didn’t care where he was going. Also, maybe security would be down a notch or two if he wasn’t on site.

I pulled up about a hundred yards past the intersection that marked the start of Private Road 5150. The driveway to the compound was less than a mile up the road from here.

I wasn’t planning on heading that way.

Locked my wallet in the glove compartment, changed my sneakers for the boots, slipped the .45 into my jacket, and threw a fresh bottle of water into the sports bag. I jammed the cap on my head, slung the bag over my shoulder, then stepped across the road and into the scrub.

I weaved between the scrabbly, knee high bushes for about an hour, trying to stay perpendicular to the road as much as possible, when a distant whump-whump pushed over the eastern horizon.

There were no tall trees in sight, and a larger clump of scrub a little way ahead looked like my best, and only, chance for cover.

I ran toward the sound, my shadow leading the way, while a hard block in the bag thumped the hell out of my right kidney. Gun or ammo I couldn’t tell. I suppose it didn’t matter.

The whump-whump sound was loud and closer now as I reached the scrub clump and knelt down. The branches were too dense for me to burrow inside, so I leaned into it as hard as I could, ducked my head, and shoved the bright blue sports bag underneath my legs.

I had the Colt out, too.

The noise reached a peak and the helicopter blew right over me about sixty feet off the deck. The downwash blasted everything and I had to grab my cap to stop it being blown away. The chopper was a small two seater, with a big glass bubble at the front and a trestle-work of steel behind to hold the tail rotor. If you’ve ever seen an episode of M*A*S*H, you’ll know the type.

I couldn’t make out any markings, which made it most likely a private job, used by a rancher to get to the far flung reaches of his spread. But, I wasn’t taking any chances, so I stayed pinned against the scrub.

It continued westward for a ways, before carving a graceful arc to the south, dropping below the horizon. I could hear it whumping around but it didn’t sound like it was coming back and when I stood up a couple minutes later, I couldn’t see the mechanical mosquito anywhere.

It felt like I must be getting close to the village but, I knew I wouldn’t see it until it was right underneath me, so I slowed down as much as possible while still moving forward. I did not need to stumble and announce myself by rolling down the embankment into the drainage ditch.

I kept an eye out for the fallen tree that Cowboy and I had hidden behind, but couldn’t see anything in the distance that looked right. Another thirty minutes of slow walking and I was getting concerned that I wouldn’t be able to find it, when I realized there was a clear area to my left. I walked a few steps in that direction and stopped. I could see scrub for the next couple of hundred yards, and the dots of bushes a mile beyond. Nothing in between.

It could be an area where there’s no scrub.

Uh huh.

I crouch-walked now, holding the sports bag by the handles, in a weird raised-arm grip, to keep it from dragging in the dirt. I stopped and, taking a chance, stood up to take the pressure of my back. The far edge of the compound’s bowl curved in the distance. Still no indication of the near edge, but it had to be close. I got down on my hands and knees, looped the bag straps over my shoulder, and crawled forward.

I wasn’t game to stand up again. Not this close.

Stopped a few minutes later and lay in the dirt. Brushed my hands on my jacket and grabbed the bottle of water from the bag. I took a swig and recapped the bottle ready to throw it back in, when I heard the scuff of gravel behind me.

I turned around to look back past my feet.

I didn’t get that far.

Down on one knee within touching distance of my left side was a figure in camouflage, a bandana wrapped around his face.

The first shock was that he was there at all.

The second was his outfit.

I barely had time to register the third thing wrong with the picture, the butt end of a black weapon, before I registered the closing speed between it and my face.

The itch in my brain crescendoed and fireworks sparkled behind my eyes.

I blinked, trying to get my senses back in order. All this succeeding in doing was to give me a stop-motion movie of the camouflaged man raising his gun again and slamming it back on my face. That time I felt my nose explode.

As the black seeped in from the edges of my consciousness, it felt like I was being dragged by my feet.

Maybe it was another dream.

CHAPTER 26

I wasn’t sure whether it was the ache in my shoulders or the throbbing in my face that sliced through the darkness first.

Probably a tie.

I kept my eyes closed; I wasn’t ready to go visual just yet, and started to run through an internal inventory.

Seated on a hard chair with hands down and behind me.

So far, so good.

My shoulders and neck felt like granite, so I tried rolling my arms upright to stretch them out. A metallic clank signaled the full range of movement for my wrists.

Handcuffs. Okay. I tensed and relaxed my fingers, one by one. Good. Nothing broken. Not that I expected them to remain that way after I’d had a close and personal conversation with the prick who’d hit me.

I rolled my head around and mentally focused downward. The feet, knees and legs felt mobile enough, but my right ankle, the one where that prick Turk had shot me a few years ago, roared fire.

The chest and stomach felt sticky and raw, like an open wound. A burn, not a cut or gunshot. I decided I could live with that.

My thoughts seemed okay—would I be able to tell if they weren’t?—but my head buzzed like a bottle full of houseflies.

It felt like my face took most of the damage. I could feel a coating on my lips and chin, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. Not surprising; it felt like it had been pounded down like gold foil over the right side of my face. It didn’t do wonders for my ability to pick up on any nearby smells, either.

I ran my tongue around the cesspool of my mouth. Somewhere, a dentist was looking at the final Mercedes payment with the amount of work needed before I’d eat steak again.

At least Hilda would be happy that I stopped the gun with a part of my body I could afford to sacrifice.

Enough of the personal inventory. Time to expand this research project.

Set myself to listening.

Inside a smallish space. The deadened and hollow sound told me that much. Couldn’t tell whether the light beyond my eyelids was daylight or man-made.

Where?

A better question. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I could be yards, or miles, away from where Rambo had impact-tested my skull. I concentrated and listened harder.

A quiet howl. Wind?

Maybe.

I’d gone about as far as I could without eyesight by now. At the same time, part of me didn’t want to know what was out there. But a faint heart never filled a flush.

I cracked my right eye open.

Bright light stabbed me in the eye and I let my lid drop shut again.

Blessed darkness.

I sucked in a couple of breaths and levered my eyelid upwards, against its better judgement. White fog.

I huffed breaths to keep my eye open and the surroundings swam into focus. A smooth, gray door materialized in the centre of a gray wall, about eight feet in front of me.

Something wrong with the door.

I registered the thought, but I was fully occupied keeping my eye open so I couldn’t work out what it was.

I sat and breathed and cajoled my eyelid to relax further.

It took me ten minutes—or maybe it was six hours—to open my right eye fully and for it to agree to stay that way. My head throbbed. I willed my left eye to match its counterpart but couldn’t lever it past half way.

The room I was in was ten foot square, I guessed. I could only guess, I couldn’t turn my head far enough to see the wall behind me, but it didn’t sound much bigger than that. Gray walls, no windows, the one door. A bare lightbulb, unbelievably bright for such a small room, burned overhead on a low ceiling. If I’d been standing on flat feet I could have touched it.

My neck screamed a protest but in the end relented enough to let me look down.

My t-shirt was dirty and shredded, with blood streaks worthy of a Jackson Pollock painting. I guessed there’d be a big drag mark in the dirt where I’d been laying.

The chair underneath me was metal and appeared to be fixed to the floor. I tried rocking it and got nowhere. I spread my knees and found that my feet were also shackled in irons, with the chain running through a heavy-duty ring bolt on the floor.

Seeing that ring bolt made me think of the other thing that should have been in the room.

I slowly racked my head on my grumbling neck.

The door had no handle.

And that concluded proceedings. I was alive and functional, though a bit foggy. I was bound hand and feet to a chair, in a locked room, god-only-knew-where.

I had two options.

Let myself pass out again, or use what I had: my dusty brain and not much else, to come up with a plan.

This was the point where Magnum would work out who he was dealing with from the precise shade of gray wall paint, and MacGyver would macrame the handcuff chain into a self-breaking knot, leaving enough latent heat in the broken links to cut his way through the door to freedom.

Me?

I really wanted to pass out.

But, I reasoned—okay, maybe I chided—that I couldn’t help Kimberly if I couldn’t help myself. So I went to work.

Handcuffs and shackles.

Not cable-ties. Not rope.

Formal authority, probably government. Maybe cops, though the leg shackles and solitary confinement was overkill for anyone local. Result: unlikely to be private army.

Chalk that one up as good.

I’d been hit and dragged away, that was obvious. Without being able to feel my face, or look in a mirror, I couldn’t tell how much damage there was, but I didn’t think I’d taken any beatings after I was out. That’s another check for an organization with a set of rules and requirements to answer to a higher up. Again, read government.

Two and ough.

The hollow sound of the small room made me think that it wasn’t as secure as it appeared. A cell, made with concrete and bricks, and especially one without a window, had a different sound about it. Or rather it had no sound at all. It’s called dead quiet for a reason.

No, this room, though it looked solid, wasn’t. I could hear the shadows of other sounds beyond the walls. That I couldn’t hear anything specific—voices, traffic, sirens, the hum of society—made me think we were still in the middle of nowhere.

If I could somehow get out of here and back to my car, good. If I couldn’t find the car, bad. Let’s call that a tie.

Three and one.

And that’s where the game ended.

For two reasons.

The first? I couldn’t think of anything else.

And the second?

The door opened.

An officious snick preceded the door swinging open.

I got a quick glimpse of a blank gray space beyond and the profile of a man in camouflage with an MP5 slung across his chest.

Same guy that hit me? Fucked if I knew.

I couldn’t dwell on that for long before the doorway was filled by a man carrying a metal chair.

He entered the room and flung the door shut behind him. It latched closed with another snick.

He wasn’t much to look at, maybe five-eight with a round face, deep brown eyes and a close-shaved head. He wore a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, a red-and-blue club tie, navy blue pants with blade-straight creases, black socks and black shoes coated in dust. Just like the cuffs of his natty pants. I would bet he had a blue suit jacket slung over a chair outside.

And I would win.

A silver watch on his left wrist was his only jewelery and a lanyard around his neck carried an ID card, but he’d tucked this in his shirt pocket so I couldn’t read it.

The sneaky bastard.

He could have been wearing a sandwich board with bright yellow, eight-inch high letters proclaiming FBI, CIA, NSA, or any other three-letter-acronym of the federal government and it wouldn’t have been any more obvious.

He spun the chair around and placed it hard on the floor, facing away from me. The floor boomed and shuddered.

Not concrete. Interesting.

He lifted a leg and straddled the chair, sat down on it backwards and folded his arms across the back.

He probably thought it looked tough. Maybe he’d seen it in an Eastwood movie.

He stared at me with a neutral expression and the vaguest hint of a smile on his thin lips.

We sat like that for a few minutes.

There’s an unwritten rule in negotiations: he who speaks first, loses. Normally, I’m all in favor of that. Both for the advantage and because there’s not many people I feel like talking to.

But it had been a long day.

A very long day.

I was tired and sore and I wanted a pipe and coffee. And Hilda.

I dragged a dry tongue over my cracked lips, looked at this weenie through my one and a half eyes and attempted to engage him in robust and worthwhile conversation.

“You don’t know how pleased I am to see my tax dollars hard at work.”

Surprisingly, he didn’t find it as funny as I did.

The not-quite-a-smile flickered, before the G-man sheltering behind a piece of cheap office furniture—from a cuffed and shackled man—got his game face back on.

He lifted one hand and pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger while he kept eyeballing me. Finally he put both elbows on the back of the chair and interlaced his fingers in front of his chin.

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re concerned with the government’s distribution of tax money,” he said. “But you don’t pay any tax, do you? Hiding behind the false front of your so-called church.”

“That’s harsh,” I said. “I know it’s been a shitty few years, but I pay my share. Too fucking much, given the way you assholes waste it.”

The rest of his comment finished percolating through my cerebral fog.

“Huh? Church?” I tried shaking my head. It cleared some cobwebs but spurred the flies to a new level of action. “What the fuck?”

I tried to squint at him, then realized I didn’t have to try. He pursed his lips and focused on looking like he was in charge.

We sat in that gray room waiting for our respective pennies to drop and the situation to make some sense.

I had been beaten unconscious, isolated from my surroundings, and chained to the floor like one of America’s Most Wanted.

On the other chair sat a man, free to come and go at will, with the resources of the mighty US government at his fingertips.

Taking all that into account, I’d have put good money on me being the first one to piece it together.

And I’d win that one, too.

“You dickheads,” I said, after the fog rolled out far enough for me to realize what was going on. “You’ve got the wrong guy.” While technically accurate, it wasn’t the best line I could have used. Before I could coerce enough brain cells into coming up with an improved version, the man from UNCLE took his turn.

“That’s the best you’ve got?” He chuckled. “I was hoping for something I hadn’t heard before.”

I opened my mouth and tried to respond. I wasn’t sure what I would say, but he headed me off before I could get started.

“You’re not Jakob Friesen, or as he’s now calling himself, Dariell Thof. I know that much. You’re just one of the brothers helping to build his private army.”

He shrugged.

“That don’t matter to me.” He let the half smile drop and crossed his arms again. “You’re in my house now and the only question is how far I’ll have to go before you give me what I need to take him down.”

I’d started to laugh by this time, but my chest hurt when I did, so it came out more like a croaky hack. It didn’t matter; G-man knew what I was doing and it flipped a switch somewhere under the composed exterior.

He stood up and flung the chair against the near wall. A starburst of shattered sheetrock appeared as the chair rebounded.

Interesting. I could maybe punch my way out of here if I need to.

I didn’t have time to go further with that thought, because he was standing in front of me then, filling my vision. His face was red, flushed enough that I could see it beneath his dark complexion. He leaned down and yelled in my face, spattering me with spit.

“You think it’s funny? Helping Thof to steal more than six thousand military-grade weapons to protect his made-up empire?”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed harder.

The fist came then.

If it had been on my right side I might have been able to flinch. The swelling in my left eye made sure I had no warning at all.

My head rocked back and a new well of pain sprouted under my left cheekbone. I tasted blood.

I blinked a few times to orient myself. When my vision had stopped spinning, I could see G-man pacing in front of the door, sucking on his knuckles. He would see that loss of control as a weakness and, no matter his mission or jurisdiction, beating a chained prisoner would not be looked on kindly by his superiors.

That kind of stuff never bothered Cowboy.

I spat out a glob of blood and tried to get my lips to work.

“Listen here, hotshot,” I said. “We can do this all day. It won’t make any difference. I’m after the same …” I spat more blood toward the corner. He stepped away. “Call DPD. Lieutenant Ed Durkee. Tell him you’ve captured the elusive Rafferty. He’ll get a good laugh out of it.”

My vision started to swim again.

“Got that? DPD. Durkee. Rafferty.”

I tried to laugh again. The room was darkening.

From far away, I heard two hollow knocks and the door swung open. I thought I heard it shut.

I went under.

CHAPTER 27

I heard feet shuffling and low voices, then a light boomed on the outside of my eyelids.

I shuddered and sought the darkness again.

I kept my eyes closed as I came to again.

Took a chance and opened one eye, in case there was anything worth seeing.

G-man was back.

He’d righted the chair and sat down, having now been schooled on the correct way to use common pieces of furniture. Standing behind him, an older version cut from the same cookie cutter. This one wore aviators, had his shirtsleeves rolled down, flaunted more hair, and didn’t look like he was going to get involved no matter what was about to transpire.

G-man hooked a finger at his throat and loosened his tie. Let out a big breath and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, fingers together and arrowed towards me.

“Seems like we got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

I swirled my tongue around and found my words.

“If I can get a glass of water, my pipe and a cup of coffee, I’ll consider accepting your apology.”

“Listen here, you fucking …” He stopped and looked down at his shoes. Reached down to rub a thumb through the dust. Looked back up at me.

“Okay, Rafferty. I’ll agree that you are who you say you are. I’ll even stretch to believing we might be on the same side of this thing. That don’t mean your shit don’t stink. There’s a lot here that still don’t sit right with me.

“You might be able to blow smoke up Durkee’s ass and have him vouch for you in the bright lights of Dallas, but you’re a long way from the city now. I’m gonna need to get a lot more comfortable with the how and why of you strolling into the middle of a two-year federal investigation before I even begin to think about letting you off the hook.

“So, why don’t you tell me and Special Agent Smith all about it.” He jerked a thumb at the figure standing behind his right shoulder.

“The playing field’s a little uneven,” I croaked. “You know who I am. Who the hell are you?”

He smiled.

“For the moment, I’m also Special Agent Smith. If I like what I hear next, then maybe we’ll get acquainted on a first-name basis. And you might even get that coffee.” The smile evolved into a shit-eating grin.

“Why the hell not?” I said. “But for the love of god can I get these cuffs off and a glass of water? I’m sick of tasting my own blood.”

Seated Smith looked up at Standing Smith and nodded. He, the standing one, knocked twice on the door and slipped out when it opened, reaching back to pull it shut.

Smith stood up and showed me he was still in control by taking his own sweet time to stretch and pop his shoulders. He fished a small key out of his pocket and walked around behind me. My hands and wrists jerked painfully and then I could spread my arms like wings and blessedly roll my shoulders. I checked my watch. Nine-thirty.

“Thanks,” I offered. I rolled my wrists, trying to get the sludgy blood in my arms moving again.

“Don’t mention it,” Smith said as he sat down again.

I decided against saying anything since it seemed like we were poised at the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

“How did Durkee verify me?”

Smith cracked a big smile at that.

“We took a Polaroid and faxed it to DPD.”

The flash.

“Gave it a bit of time, ’cause we didn’t want to rush this, you know.” He raised an eyebrow and dared me to make something of it. When I didn’t, he continued.

“I got him, Durkee, on the horn and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got the picture. That’s the dumb fuck, alright. What’s he done now?’ I told him you’d wandered into the middle of an active federal investigation and he said that sounded like you. And when I mentioned that we had been forced to subdue you to avoid blowing the investigation, I thought he was having a seizure. It was maybe three minutes before I could hear his voice clearly again. I asked if everything was alright. Turns out he was laughing. Hard.”

Agent Smith beamed me another big shit-eating grin. I bet it was the one he reserved for convincing Oversight Committees to let him continue his ongoing misuse of taxpayer dollars.

“Durkee said it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.”

Over the next thirty minutes I imparted my knowledge of Dariell and The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple to Special Agent Smith.

Some of it.

The search for Kimberly and how that had led me to the three church compounds and eventually to Lincoln.

I didn’t mention Lucy, by name or story. The last thing she needed right now was to be shuffled into a dark room for a heart to heart with a couple of sensitive FBI agents. Around that point, Standing Smith came back in with a white coffee mug filled with lukewarm water.

It tasted metallic. And wonderful.

I continued, mentioning Don, not by name, and paraphrasing his research. I touched on his belief that Dariell had turned the church into a doomsday cult with a hair trigger, but left out the stuff that I didn’t believe or couldn’t verify.

My dreams, for example.

The more I talked, the further downwards the smug look on Seated Smith’s face slipped. It was clear that I was filling in a few blanks. Strike another blow for government effectiveness. Both the Smiths got tight-lipped when I described the rain-drenched, night-time reconnaissance Cowboy and I had undertaken forty-eight hours earlier.

The seated version sat up and leaned backwards on his chair.

“Course I’m gonna need names to verify all this, Rafferty.”

“Fuck off,” I replied. Which was cocky, given that I was still ankle-chained to the floor. “You already know enough about this mess to either believe me or not. If you do, then cut me loose, get me that coffee and tell me what you know—” He bristled. “Okay, tell me what you can that will help me get Kimberly back to her family.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“And if I don’t? Believe you, that is.”

I held out my hands, wrists together.

“Cuff me again and give it your best. I’ve been beaten up by better men than you.”

The room went still and silent for a few minutes.

I gulped the rest of the water, cracked my knuckles and rubbed my legs, stiff from sitting.

I raised my eyebrows and sucked my lips in.

Standing Smith shifted his weight and stayed neutral behind his sunglasses. Seated Smith looked hard at me, and when I didn’t explode in flame, seemed to reach a decision. He stood up.

“Let me give Durkee another call. If he confirms you spoke to him about this missing chick, then it’ll be good enough for me. You sit tight.”

I was thankful that I hadn’t mentioned Ricco. It would be just his sense of humor to have me thrown in a cell requiring piped-in daylight. Before the door swung closed I cleared my throat. Smith stuck his head back in. I held up the cup in both hands.

“Please sir, can I have some more?”

Standing Smith watched me impassively from the corner.

He’d brought me a refill on the water, so I was happy to settle for uncomfortable silence rather than trying to fuck with him.

Seated Smith came back a few minutes later. He didn’t shut the door behind him.

A good sign.

“This is your lucky day,” he said. “Durkee confirmed your story about cheerleader girl. I told him I was gonna cut you loose and he spent a few minutes questioning me on whether that was a good idea.” He shook his head. “Jesus, Rafferty, if that’s one of your friends, I’d think about getting some new ones.”

He fished the keys out of his pocket again, walked over and bent down to unlock the shackles between my ankles. I considered returning the favor by sucker-punching him.

I waited. The thought passed.

I stood up and stretched my whole body for the first time in hours. After I’d finished I realized he was standing in front of me with his hand outstretched.

“No hard feelings I hope, Rafferty. Just doing my job.”

I got that. Shrugged and shook his hand.

“No problems, uh …”

“Wesson. Special Agent Steve Wesson. ATF.”

The acronym for the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco. I nodded.

“And the tall, dark and silent type in the back is?”

“You’re not gonna believe this. His name really is Smith.”

I laughed, properly this time.

“You’re telling me you guys are Smith and—”

Steve stopped me with another shake of his head.

“You have no idea how sick we are of hearing that.”

CHAPTER 28

I could see only darkness through the plexiglas windows on both sides of the office that Steve and his crew had set up inside the trailer which housed the interrogation room.

That’s why it didn’t feel like a real building.

“Steve,” I said. “You got a john around here?”

“Outside, second trailer on the left,” Wesson said.

I unlatched the trailer door and stepped down into the Texas night. It felt good to use my legs again and I walked forward twenty yards. Did a couple of deep knee bends. Stretched and looked up. A carpet of stars glittered on a background of deepest black. It was cool and I shivered in my shredded t-shirt. The desert rose slowly to a couple of small, dark hills.

I took a few steps further into the darkness and looked behind me.

Despite their inefficiency, or maybe as a direct contributing cause to it, the ATF had better resources than I did. The trailer that I had stepped out of was one of six, including two motorhomes, organized in a rough quarter-circle. Spindly antennae sprouted above three and lights glowed behind curtains. At the far end of the line of trailers, I could see the outline of a truck looking a lot like a Chevy Suburban. Beyond that, it was hard to see in the dark, but I could make out the drooping blades of a two-seater chopper, settled in for the night.

I thought I caught the wink of a cigarette near the chopper. My eyesight still wasn’t a hundred percent so I couldn’t be sure.

I walked to the dark shape that Steve had identified. A trailer fitted out to be a bathroom-on-the-move. Toilet stalls and shower cubicles. I did what I needed to do and spent some time with a full sink and paper hand towels trying to rid my body of most of the crusted blood.

The chest was okay, just gravel rash.

The face was another story.

The mirror confirmed that my left eye was swollen mostly closed and would bruise up delightfully in the next few days, but what vision there was seemed okay. My nose was busted, but didn’t look as bad as it felt. I reached up and started to push it back towards centre. Sparks exploded on the fringes of my vision and my stomach churned. I stopped pushing and my body agreed to co-operate.

I rinsed my mouth out until blood stopped spattering the sink. I lifted my head and pulled my lips back. Blood oozed around three front teeth as I wobbled them.

All in all, I’d heal up alright, but it was a good thing that my male modeling days were behind me.

I stepped out of the bathroom trailer and walked around behind the convoy.

Other than the ATF caravan, there were no lights in any direction of the darkened desert. I could use the stars to work out which direction North was, but a fat lot of good that would do me, since I didn’t know where I was starting from.

I shivered again realizing how effective a location like this was to keep people contained. I could disappear into the darkness but, unless I got very lucky, I’d be dead inside three days. There’s a lot of open space between towns and roads in this part of Texas and with no landmarks to navigate by, it would be almost impossible not to get lost.

No wonder Steve had been relaxed about letting me loose.

I tried peeking into a couple of the other trailers on my way back from the head, but didn’t see anything useful.

The truck was a white Suburban and there were two of them. They were both locked. The chopper was the same type that had roared over me earlier in the day. It wasn’t locked, but I didn’t want to give Steve the satisfaction of watching me burn to death in a crash so I left it behind.

I pulled on the door latch and stepped back into the trailer where I’d spent most of the day chained up.

Steve was seated on one side of a desk covered with papers, reports and photographs. I was more interested in the mug of steaming black coffee on the desk in front of an empty chair. I lowered myself into the chair, grabbed the cup and sipped. It was bitter and ordinary by Don or Lisa’s standards, but I wasn’t about to complain.

“Thanks,” I said.

Steve raised his own cup and sipped.

“You have a good look around out there? Decide it’s not such a good idea to take off?” He asked these as if he was querying about a child or a family pet. No animosity, just a examination of the facts.

He might be a G-man but he wasn’t stupid.

“I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d tried to take one of the Chevys or even had a go at the chopper.” He shrugged. “Tony wasn’t gonna let you get further than getting one of them started.”

I sipped. Not much else to do.

“What happens now?”

“Unless you want to take your chances in the desert tonight, Rafferty, I’ll make sure you get fed and give you a bunk for the night. In the morning, Tony will drive you back to your car. And you will piss off back to Dallas and not show your face here again.”

I nodded—I understand the words you’re saying.

I wondered if Steve might have interpreted it as Okay, I agree.

Silly me, for not making myself clearer.

“You’ve told me about your girl, and I’ll get in touch with you if we find her. But …” He leaned forward and pointed a slim finger at me. “I’m here to nail Thof, not get bogged down with rescuing a dewy-eyed, religious teenager because Momma thinks she’s no longer having fun at camp. And I will not have you getting in the middle of this and fucking up the last year and a half of my work. You feel me?”

I sipped. He seemed to accept this as a suitable response. My stomach growled.

“You offered food. It’s going to need to be soft. While we eat, since I’m not going to be here tomorrow, I’ll listen to whatever you can tell me. And where’s my stuff? I’m dying for a pipe.”

Steve reached over, opened a locker in the corner of the room, and pulled out my sports bag, picked up a walkie-talkie and asked someone called Shane to bring food over.

While I rummaged through my bag to find the outdoorsman jacket, I couldn’t help notice my three guns.

More accurately, their absence. And that of the ammo I’d packed earlier that morning.

“Umm …” I started.

Without looking up from his reports, he said, “Your weapons and ammunition will be handed back to you when Tony dumps you at your car.” He looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t even think it, Rafferty. I’d be willing to bet that more than one of those pieces is hot, and don’t try to pretend that sawn-off is even close to legal. Only reason I’m gonna give them back is because the last thing I need right now is more of your shit distracting me from the reason I’m sleeping in a trailer in the middle of fucking nowhere, instead of home in my own bed in DC.”

I zipped the sports bag closed, shucked my jacket on, grabbed my pipe and tobacco pouch and stepped back out into the night.

There are memorable smokes.

With a good beer or a great meal, for example. After sex goes without saying.

The smoke I had that night, standing alone in the dark Texas desert after being beaten up, held prisoner, and then released by the US government, ranked right up there with the best ever.

I watched a figure step down from one of the motorhomes and carry a tray towards Steve’s trailer. He knocked, waited for a response, and when the door opened he stepped in. As he came back out, I saw Steve stand in the doorway looking out towards me.

I was starving but there was no way in hell I was gonna cut that pipe short.

I stayed out until I’d extracted every bit of smoke I could from that bowl, bashed the dead ashes out against the sole of my boot and walked back to the trailer.

A big bowl of soup and three pieces of white bread on a plate had been served up on my side of Steve’s desk, and he had added another mug of coffee. I nodded thanks and began to eat. I chewed the bread with the right side of my mouth to stay away from the loose teeth and the soup (chicken noodle and not too bad) slipped down easily.

Steve sipped from a white mug with an FBI logo.

He looked at me over the rim. I decided I’d try to get the conversation moving.

“You’ve been following this nut-job for the last year and a half?” I asked around a mouthful of bread.

He hesitated, then decided he couldn’t do any harm by confirming what I already knew.

“Yeah. ’bout that.”

“Why’d he first pop on to the radar? If you can say.”

I groveled. I hated doing it, but he might give me something I could use. He looked up to the corner of the ceiling, then let loose a little breath.

“The IRS has been tracking him for a while. The land purchases made with cash from a non-specific origin was the first trigger. Then they saw large donations coming in to this obscure church and decided to keep a closer eye on him.”

“Why’d ATF come in?” I asked. “What’d he do, boost a couple of cigarette deliveries?”

Steve started to relax. He leaned back in his chair.

“Nothing that small time. I was brought in to look at the church donations about the time the Army found a whole bunch of weapons missing. They worked their side, I worked the IRS angle and we met in the middle.”

I whistled.

“You’d need to be Houdini to whisk stuff out from underneath the Army’s nose. How’d they get away with it?”

He looked at me like I was an impertinent child. Narrowed his eyes and appeared to be thinking it over. I finished the last of my soup, pushed the bowl away and reached for the coffee cup.

“I guess it can’t hurt to tell you. The Army’s plugged the leak.” He sighed. “It was too simple. An old buddy of Dariell’s from the seventies ended up as an Army supply sergeant. Whenever his CO gave him orders to supply armaments, he changed the order to include a few extra. When all the shit got delivered, he kept the extra aside, didn’t log them into inventory and shuffled them off to Dariell when he could. The CO got his shipment, Dariell got his, and no-one’s the wiser. Soon Dariell’s sitting on more than six thousand guns.”

There’s no way that the shed Cowboy and I saw in the rain-soaked darkness held that many weapons. Not even a quarter of what Steve thought, but I wasn’t going to disagree with him. Surely, if the government had a specific estimate, it had to be accurate, right?

And I wanted to keep him talking.

“How did no-one pick up the discrepancy between the base-request numbers and the supply numbers. Wouldn’t they have to match up?”

Steve shook his head.

“You can blame governmental thinking for that little fuck up.” He sipped again and pulled his lips back. “Armament supply is centralized. Army HQ tenders for suppliers and issues the approved contract, leaving each base responsible for its own inventory, so the payment side of it never gets reconciled back at base level.”

I must have looked confused, because he shook his head and slowed his voice.

“Say HQ contracts Colt for up to four hundred thousand M16s to be supplied over three years. Each base orders what they need direct from Colt and receives their shipment. Colt sends the bill to the pencil pushers at HQ and as long as all the bills, from all the bases, don’t exceed the original contracted amount, the bills get paid and everything looks fine. HQ knows they’re not paying for more weapons than they thought they would use, and each base knows they’re getting what they asked for. Any discrepancies slip through the cracks.”

It was my turn to shake my head. Every time I thought I was being too critical of the public service’s capacity for ineptitude, they came up with another way to reaffirm my initial beliefs.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Huh?”

“Why don’t you go grab him?”

Steve sat up straighter. “If I had my way, he’d already be in a cell. The higher-ups want to walk softly on this one. They believe all that end-of-the-world shit and don’t want to end up with a mass suicide, so they’re prepared to wait him out. Personally, I’d be happy to storm the place right now.” He shrugged. “Some of us have people to answer to, Rafferty.”

I took a final sip of coffee.

“When do you think—” I started.

“You know what?” Steve smiled. “I think that’s enough bedtime stories. You need to be up at sparrow fart to get back to your car, so it’s rack time. You know how much I care about your welfare.”

“You’re a real prince, Steve,” I said. “I hope you know that.”

He ignored me, stood up and walked back to the door to the gray room. It was open and a military-style cot, a pillow and a couple of blankets had been humped in.

“I’m not gonna lock the door, Rafferty. But, I will be outside for most of the night. And when I’m not, Tony will be.” He sighed. “Don’t do anything stupid. I’ve got enough shit to clean up and I don’t want to add your blood or brains to the list.”

I’d already decided that sleep was the only thing I was going to do for the rest of the night.

Didn’t tell him that. Looked at the cot.

“I’ve got to make my own bed?” I said. “Shitty customer service, Steve. What ever happened to turn-down and a mint?”

“Fuck off, Rafferty.”

CHAPTER 29

I may have stayed awake after my head hit the pillow that night.

I doubt it.

Slept the sleep of the dead, and the recently beaten, and woke up feeling every inch of it, with Steve kicking the cot leg.

“Up and at ’em, Rafferty. If you want coffee before Tony hauls ass, your feet better hit the floor in the next sixty seconds.”

My head spun a little as I sat up, and even more as I bent over to lace up the boots. Things improved when Steve handed me a cup of coffee, steam rising in the morning chill. I stepped outside to stretch. The sun was just cresting the horizon behind the trailer line, throwing long, blocky shadows on the dirt.

Involuntarily, I classified east and started to categorize my surroundings. Small hills on the western horizon, no tall scrub in any direction, trailer antennas facing back towards Dallas, that type of thing.

What difference did any of that make; who gave a shit?

I was overcome with the desire to get the fuck out of there.

Drained the rest of my coffee and stalked back to the trailer. I was going through the sports bag again (in case Steve had rooted through it during the night) when I heard an engine rumble outside. By the time the Chevy had pulled to a stop in front of Steve’s trailer I was outside and waiting.

I jumped in.

Before I swung the door shut I said to Steve, standing in the trailer door, “See ya round, Steve.”

“Fuck I hope not, Rafferty. And I mean that.”

It felt good to be back in the Mustang and eating up the interstate as I headed home.

I stopped at a phone booth in Breckenridge and called Hilda.

“Rafferty?” Her voice was thick with sleep. “Where have you been? I got your message yesterday saying you’d call me later. By midnight I was getting worried. I called your house and got your machine, so I was up all night waiting for you to call. Where are you?”

“It’s a long story. I called as soon as I could.”

“As soon as you could? What does that mean? Why couldn’t you call?”

“Hil. Hon. It’s been a long night. I didn’t sleep much and I’ve still got a long drive to get home. Can we play twenty questions later? I’m okay and I’ll be home in a few hours. See you at your place?”

“Oh Rafferty, I’ve got to be at the store before then.” The flick of a lighter and a sharp inhale. “You can always come by.”

I had a vision of an old, rich person trying to purchase me in my newly configured state. “Ms Gardner, I didn’t know you had The Elephant Man for sale,” they would trill.

“Probably best if I don’t. I’ll head home for a shower and a nap.”

“Okay. I’ll get Ramon to close up so I can finish early. And Rafferty …”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“I’m glad you’re okay. I was really worried.”

“Me too, hon.”

It was after I’d hung up that I realized my response covered both of her statements.

The drive home was a little hairy.

Outside Mineral Wells I snapped to with the nearside wheels in the dirt and a curve about two hundred yards away, closing fast. That woke me right up, but I still pulled over and walked up and down the shoulder for ten minutes.

On my fourth wake-up lap a couple of yokels in a faded blue-and-rust Dodge pickup slowed down, yelled something unintelligible and threw an empty Lone Star bottle at me.

They never throw full ones.

I stopped in Mineral Wells too, to load up on coffee at a no-name diner. I pulled the collar of my coat up and the baseball cap down. I knew it made me look shady, but I preferred that than a do-gooder calling the police on my behalf and spending the day in a county sheriff’s office having to explain myself.

The stomach felt okay, so I tried the ham and eggs. Unusually for me, I quit before I was done. I wanted to get home before I threw up.

Rush hour traffic had come and gone by the time I hit the outskirts of Fort Worth so I kept a cool head on the last leg into Dallas.

I wheeled into my driveway at ten-thirty, feeling like I’d already done a month’s worth of work this morning. I peeled off my t-shirt, wincing as it pulled away from the larger grazes, and threw it in the trash as I walked through the garage. I dumped the sports bag in the hallway and left all the curtains closed. Coffee perked while I took a long, long, hot shower. I threw on a pair of sweatpants and a Rangers tee-shirt, chugged a scalding hot coffee, lay down on the couch and closed my eyes.

My last conscious thought; at least I wouldn’t wake up chained to the floor.

Kimberly came to me again in that darkness.

Or I went to her.

I’m still not sure which it was.

Kimberly’s cell.

“Tell him to hurry, Mom.”

Oswald. Wesson.

Weapons cache.

Open crates. Rifles. Bullets. Grenades.

Stacked to the ceiling.

Steve nods.

“I told you not to come back, Rafferty.”

Oswald raves.

“I am the Father, and the Way …”

“What can you do?”

“I am the Father, and the Way …”

“I have all your guns.”

“I am the Father, and the Way …”

“This is my fight, not yours.”

“I am the Father, and the Way …”

“Just doing my job.”

Kimberly pleads.

“I can’t hold on much longer. I can’t.”

Other voices.

A dozen more Kimberlys.

Semi-circle behind me.

Chanting. Kimberly on the bed.

“I can’t hold on much longer. I can’t. I won’t.”

Pleading. Chanting. Men in silence.

“I can’t. I won’t. I am the Way.”

Oswald. Furrowed brow.

Wesson. Same.

Kimberly grunts.

“I am the Way. I am the Truth.

I will show them the Light.”

Kimberlys voices morph. Stretch.

A single keening sound. The edge of pain.

Kimberly rigid. Hands and arms by her side.

Body shakes with exhortation.

“I am the Way. I will show you the Light.”

Kimberly begins to glow.

“I am the Way. I will show you the Light.”

Weapons cache explodes.

I shuddered awake. My legs had started to run.

In the dream and on the couch.

I lay for a while with my eyes closed. I was dog tired, and the upper half of my body ached beyond belief. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep.

Deeply. Without visions.

I lay still and willed dreamless sleep to overtake me. This time it worked.

Maybe the Stones were right.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you might find you get what you need.

CHAPTER 30

I felt a cool touch on my face and drifted up from a deep blackness. When I opened my eyes, it was dark outside the living room window. A table lamp glowed in the corner and Hilda sat on the couch sat next to me, dabbing my face with a wet cloth.

“Oh Rafferty,” she said. “Who did this?”

I licked my thickened lips.

“The federal government.” When I saw her face, I nodded. “I know. I was so busy waiting for them to fuck me up the ass like usual that I didn’t see it coming.”

She dabbed again with the cloth and I winced. Lurched into the process of sitting up.

“I’m okay, Hil. It looks worse than it is.”

“You’re just putting on your macho face, but okay. I’ll stop playing Florence Nightingale.”

“If you’d really like to help, I’d kill for a cup of coffee.”

“Now you want my help?”

I tried to narrow my eyes at her. The left one was still mostly closed, which I imagine somewhat ruined the effect.

“Shut up and make me coffee, woman.”

She tossed the cloth at me as she stood up and I bet she thought I couldn’t see her smile as she walked to the kitchen.

One of Hilda’s fears is that I’ll get hurt one day. I mean, hurt badly.

Something that I won’t recover from. Or worse.

She doesn’t say much, and I’ve always been honest with her about what it is that I do, so it won’t be a surprise, but I know she worries like hell.

I heard the coffeepot burbling to life. Good.

“What was her name?” she called from the kitchen. “The girl who gave you that shiner.”

I said my line of work worried her; not that it earned me any respect. I tried to change the topic.

“Speaking of girls, what happened with Lucy?”

“We had a late-ish breakfast in town and then she headed back to Austin. She’s a sweet girl, Rafferty, trying to put her life together after the nightmare of the last few years.”

“I’m surprised how strong she is, given what happened. Raped by Dariell. Dismissed by her parents. Forced to leave her life behind and being locked up for Dariell’s personal use.”

When Hilda didn’t respond, I turned my head (slower, please!) to look to the kitchen. Hilda stood upright, one hand on the bench top, the other over her mouth, and she goggled in my direction.

“What’s wrong?” I cranked my head around (too fast, again!) to look out the nearest window—no threat there—and then made to swing off the couch to go to Hilda. Nothing happened as fast as I wanted it to.

“How could you …” she said. “You couldn’t have … but you did … did you see …”

Now that she had her words back I relaxed a little. I wasn’t going to have to deal with an intruder. Or a mouse. Which suited me fine. Right then, even a moderately competent intruder would have the advantage.

The mouse, too.

I settled back into the couch.

“If you pick one of those nifty half sentences, and finish it, maybe I can respond, and then we’ll both know what we’re talking about.”

Hilda stared at me and spoke, low and slow. “How could you have known Lucy was locked up? She only told me that part of her story the other night. At my place.”

Whoops.

Maybe I was more tired than I thought. How else to explain forgetting that the cells I’d seen were in my dreams, and contained Kimberly and others, not Lucy?

“What did you see out there?” Hilda asked.

“Nothing. I didn’t get within a hundred yards of the compound before Tony cleaned his rifle butt on my face.”

“How could you have known that Dariell kept Lucy locked up?” Her voice rose a notch. “What aren’t you telling me, Rafferty?” She raised an eyebrow.

Hmmph. Easy to do when your face doesn’t feel like hamburger.

“Pour the coffee hon, and come sit with me. I don’t know if it’ll make more sense to you, but I’ll tell you what I know.”

Hilda didn’t interrupt while I told her about my flashes, dreams, whatever the hell you want to call them.

I was happy about that. I already felt like a fool for seeing these … these things, and recalling them out loud somehow made them more real than I wanted.

Like I couldn’t kid myself any longer.

“What do you think they mean?” Hilda asked with wide eyes, when I got to the end.

“Mean? Hell if I know. It might mean I’m losing my mind. That could be it.” I swallowed the last of my coffee. Felt caged. I stood up, stretched gingerly and pushed out a breath. “I know it’s all just thoughts about the cases rambling around in my head.” As I paced around the room, Hilda fished a cigarette out of her pack and snapped her lighter.

“You don’t believe in any of that psychic stuff, do you?” she asked, exhaling smoke.

“I think it’s a bunch of bullshit.”

“No truth in it?”

“Nope. All designed to play on people’s insecurities and encourage them to behave in a specific way, usually to the benefit of the so-called psychic.”

“Sounds like Dariell.”

“Yeah.”

I paced a bit more.

“Forget about it then, hon.” She drew on her cigarette. The smoke trailed upwards and swirled like my thoughts. A thinning skein which got increasingly difficult to see, but never quite disappeared. “Tell me instead about what happened up there.”

I poured more coffee and told Hilda the whole story about my trip to Lincoln. Hiking in towards the compound, seeing the helicopter and then finding the concealed landscape bowl. Seeing the soldier, getting knocked out, dragged away. Steve Wesson’s attempted interrogation and his backflip to less-than-gracious host. Finally dragging my ass back home twenty-four hours and a busted nose later.

Hilda sat quietly, sipping her coffee and smoking. It was one of the things I loved most about her. She listened, not because she had to, or because I expected it, only because she knew it would make me feel better.

It did.

By the time storybook Rafferty was lying on the couch about to fall asleep, real-life Rafferty had sat down again and Hilda had leaned over to nestle against my chest. She trailed her hand up and down my arm. I ran my fingers through her hair and we both closed our eyes. We sat that way for not nearly long enough.

“What are you going to do?” she finally asked.

“I was thinking takeout and then heading to bed.”

“I meant with the case, dummy.” She ground a knuckle into my side. Good thing Tony hadn’t hit me there.

“Oh. I’d almost forgotten about it.” I pretended to think. “When I was growing up, Mom always said that if I was ever in trouble I should go to the police. That seems like a good idea.”

“Ed’s going to laugh at you, isn’t he?”

“I expect so, and that’s no mean feat given that I’ve never, ever seen him laugh. I’m glad I can be the one who breaks the dam.”

“And you’ll ask for their help to find Kimberly since you’re not going back to Lincoln.”

I pulled back a bit and looked down at her.

“Where the hell did you get that idea? No, I’m going to see what info I can get out of Ed to make sure Steve and the ATF don’t get in my way when Cowboy and I go back up there to kick Dariell’s ass and bring Kimberly home.”

CHAPTER 31

It’s good to know that I’m right every now and then.

Ed did laugh.

Well, he didn’t so much laugh as completely lose his shit. I’d walked into the office on hearing his growled “Come in” and had been sitting in his visitor’s chair for a couple of minutes before he looked up from his paperwork and damn near had a coronary.

He laughed for long enough, interspersed with coughing and hacking, I could see why Wesson thought he was having a seizure. Personally, I didn’t see what was so goddamned funny, but I let him get on with it. I packed a pipe, fired it up and tried to look bored. It was hard to pull that look off with a swollen left eye, but I gave it my best shot.

“Hell, Rafferty,” he said when he got himself under control. He wiped tears from his eyes and pulled an enormous handkerchief from his suit pocket.

Brown, what else?

He blew his nose with an enormous honk. “That’s some job they did on you. How many of them did you say there were?”

“Laughing at the misfortune of your fellow man. I’d’ve thought that was beneath you, Ed.”

“My fellow man? Yeah, you’re right, but since it’s you, Rafferty, I …”

And off he went again.

I let him wind down for the second time and asked him for a cup of coffee. I didn’t really want one, but I did want him up from behind his desk. He shrugged and decided it sounded like a good idea.

A few minutes later, we were drinking standard police issue coffee—hot and bitter—from standard police issue mugs—dimestore and chipped.

“You ought to talk to Steve, Ed. He’s got a line on some nifty FBI-branded coffee mugs. Get one of those on your desk. It’ll send the right message: You’re a man not to be trifled with.”

“Fuck are you talking about, Rafferty?”

“Never mind. So, aside from the obvious mirth that my recent interaction with the ATF brings you—” His lips came up and I thought I’d started him off again, but he held it together this time.

A true professional, our Lieutenant Durkee.

“What do you know about this Wesson hotshot and his investigation?”

“You think he copies me in on his correspondence? Fuck it, I’ve got enough troubles keeping a handle on this section of Texas, I don’t need to add to it by ambulance-chasing Fed cases from the boondocks.”

“C’mon Ed. You’re telling me that Steve didn’t tell you anything when he called? You get a photo of my face from a stranger—complete with my nose walking out of frame—and you confirm my identity to him, without ever asking who he was or why he wanted to know?” I blew smoke to the ceiling. “No wonder they’ve got you driving a desk. Your instincts aren’t what they used to be.”

He glared at me. I stood up under the pressure. Sometimes I can be so strong it amazes me.

“Fuck off, Rafferty.”

“You know, Wesson said the same thing. It’s enough to make a feller believe the law might be conspiring against him.”

Ed looked down at his desk and then back up to me with the hint of a smile. He sighed.

“Okay. I did call in a favor from a friend in DC while I was waiting for Steve to phone.”

“And?”

“And, he is who he says he is. Special Agent Steve Wesson. ATF for the last seven years. Rising through the ranks from what my guy says.”

“What’s he doing in Texas keeping an eye on a church that no-one else knows about?”

Ed drained his cold coffee and blew out a breath.

“Wesson is heading the ATF’s Cult Taskforce.” He continued before I could interrupt. “No, I did not make that up. It is a real thing and we here in the Lone Star State have more than our share of disenfranchised loners keen to sell their brand of snake-oil to unsuspecting folks. This guy, uh …”

“Dariell. Thof.”

He nodded. “Right. Dariell happens to be the top of their list, particularly with the suspected arms theft. I suppose Wesson told you about that.”

“You suppose right, Ed. He made it sound like it was a lock and they had Dariell dead to rights.”

Now it was his turn.

“C’mon Rafferty. You think if the ATF had enough evidence, Wesson would be cooling his expensive leather heels in the middle of the Texas desert?”

“So, Steve and his gun-toting minions,” I said, “are playing the waiting game hoping Dariell will show his hand, face, or even better, his weapons stash, at which point they will swoop in and save the day. No doubt, the media will be close behind to capture the heroic efforts of our brave and fearless lawmen.”

Ed grinned. “Doesn’t that sound more like the fine work of our beloved government?”

“And, I’m going to take a stab in the dark here … Dariell already knows that Steve and his band of merry men are hiding behind the saltbush and is planning to wait them out.”

“What do you think? Steve hasn’t been out there for the last two months for the climate.”

“And the compound’s on private land so they can’t go busting in without cause. The ACLU, not to mention the press, would have a field day.”

“Right.”

“Sounds like it’s a waiting game to see who blinks and makes the first move.”

“Could be.”

“So it could go on for some time.”

“Uh huh.”

“Who do you think will break first?”

Ed sighed. “I don’t know. If anyone lets me in on their plans, I’ll put everything else aside and be sure to call you,” he said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a desk full of paperwork to get through.”

“I don’t mind at all, Ed. Knock yourself out.”

Ed’s look was priceless.

“Oh, you wanted me to leave? Why didn’t you say so?”

“Fuck off, Rafferty,” he said.

I let myself out.

The sky was clear with a strong breeze blowing as I left the DPD. Leaves and litter swirled through the street and flags snapped atop their poles. I found a phone box a few blocks west and checked in with my service. Message from Kathy-Lee wanting updates again.

I considered putting on a PR Manager to handle that type of thing.

The thought passed.

I called Don instead, looking for Lucy. To avoid the bonds of sisterhood strangling my investigation, I hadn’t told Hilda that I had already spoken to her, nor that I was going to push harder this time and damn the consequences.

Kimberly needed someone to fight for her.

“She doesn’t want to speak to you, Rafferty,” Don said. “She’s had a hell of a time since you met. She doesn’t sleep and she’s more nervous than I’ve ever seen her. It’s everything she can do to get out of her room in the morning.”

“Tell her she’s not the only one with problems.” I told Don about recent developments, including the rearrangement of Hilda’s favorite face. I stopped short at recounting my dreams. “There’s something serious going on out there; the ATF share your thoughts about a doomsday scenario. I don’t know how likely that is, but I want to be in and out of there before any of us get to find out. To do that safely, I need to know what the hell is going on inside. Lucy’s the only one who’s seen the inner workings of his world and I need to know what she knows if there’s a chance of stopping this guy.”

Silence.

I took a breath.

“Don. You’ve been chasing Dariell for how many years?”

“Three.”

“You want it to be another three? Or more? Help me take this guy out of circulation so he doesn’t hurt any more Lucys.”

A breath whistled back down the line.

“I’ll talk to her, Rafferty.”

“She can call me at the office in an hour.”

“No promises. I’ll do what I can.”

I hung up and called Cowboy.

Told him about heading up to Lincoln again and gave him more detail of what I’d found. I didn’t tell him about the unfortunate treatment to my smiling countenance.

He would have laughed too, and I’d had enough of that for the day.

“What’s the play, boss-man?”

“Looks like we’re gonna have to go in and drag Kimberly out by ourselves.”

“Uh huh.”

“Unless you feel like pretending be a god-botherer and joining up to get an inside view,” I said.

“No siree. I went inside a church once and came out married. No telling what might happen if’n I was to do it again.”

“Alright then.”

“When you want to git this done?”

“I need to talk with Lucy before we go. A couple of days, week at the most. How are you fixed for time?”

“A-OK. We got us some fencing to fix, and a new round yard to put up. That can wait a few days if needs be. You want Mimi too? I ’spect she be itchin’ to come along this time. ’Specially if there’s gonna be shootin’.”

“Yep. Get yourselves ready and I’ll give you a call when I know more.”

“Alrighty then. What should I bring?”

“Everything, Cowboy. Bring all of it.”

CHAPTER 32

I walked back to the office and mulled over how to approach Dariell’s compound. The real trouble was the number of unknowns. I knew there were buildings, but I didn’t know what the hell was inside them. They could contain blankets and prayer books or an antsy born-again with a flamethrower. I didn’t think either of those two options were likely, but I didn’t care about the first and wasn’t ready to rule out the second.

No matter how much firepower Cowboy, Mimi and I were packing when we went in, we were still only three strong. We’d be up against an unknown number, in unknown locations, with unknown weapons and capabilities.

I didn’t like those odds.

The key was Dariell. If we could get to him, then perhaps we could take control of the group by corralling their leader.

I didn’t even know if he was there.

My brain was winding in ever-tightening circles and the phone was jangling as I headed up the stairs.

Hoping it was Lucy, I bulldozed through the phone book stacks and strangled the wise-ass salutation rising in my throat.

“Mr Rafferty?” Exhale.

“Hi, Lucy.”

“Don told me you really need my help.”

Despite my growing desire to get this thing over and done with, and against Hilda’s assumptions, I wasn’t unfeeling to Lucy’s past.

“I really do, Lucy.”

Then I did something that I don’t do often.

I told the truth. The whole truth.

About the dreams. Kimberly and other young girls in cells. Dariell and his home-grown pulpit rhetoric. The common ending of my dreams with everything, and everyone, on fire.

About what I’d seen in the rain and about Steve and the guns he was chasing and his lack of concern over the possibility of mass suicide.

“Something is wrong out there Lucy, and you’re the only one who knows how bad. With the ATF involved I might not have much time before the whole situation turns to shit and who knows how many good people suffer for it.

“Help me before that happens.”

Silence.

It took everything I had to shut up and let Lucy do what she needed to do.

A deep breath.

“You’re right, Mr Rafferty. If it’s like where I was, and it sounds the same, things are worse than you could imagine.”

The snap of a lighter.

“Help me fix it, Lucy.”

Breath. In. Out.

“It’s been terrible reliving it all. It feels like I’m in the middle of it all over again.”

“I know.” Inhale down the line. “No … I don’t know, I can’t know, what it was like … what it is like. All I do know is that I might be able to help Kimberly and whoever else is there.”

“What can I tell you?”

“I don’t know which specific thing will help, Lucy. Can you tell me what happened while you were there?”

“I don’t know …”

“I know you’re scared, Lucy. Hell, I’m scared, and I don’t say that to many people.” I took my own deep breath. “I bet the girls I saw are scared, too. And the old man and the mothers, and the kids. I bet they’re all scared.”

“They are. But they can’t do anything about it.”

“Let’s help them together, Lucy.”

Pause.

Another lighter snap, the crackling burn of a fresh cigarette and a deep exhale.

“Okay, Mr Rafferty. I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, the first thing you need to know is those gir—” A breath. “Those girls that you saw … I was one of them.”

I grabbed everything within me again, shut up, and listened to the story in her own words.

We arrived in North Dakota and the changes started straight away, but they weren’t subtle this time.

It was like Dariell had been waiting for people to leave families, friends, and possessions behind … to get to a point where they had only the church in their lives, before … well, before he showed everyone who he really was.

We were still stepping off the bus when the congregation was called to the main hall. An announcement to assemble for O Holy Night came out of these speakers. Whatever that was. I’d never heard of it before. But, a few people started walking towards the biggest building and soon, like a line of ants, everyone was following.

I never found out what happened in the hall during the O Holy Night because the rest of the Youth Leaders and I were met by Ana as soon as we got off the bus and told that we weren’t going with the others. There was a special place for us and a unique way we would help Father be closer to God so he could be the best leader of our church.

“Do you mean Dariell?” I asked.

“We are all children of God here, Lucy,” Ana said, “and he is our Father on Earth. We will refer to him as Father from now on.” She was scared. I could see it in her eyes.

Anyway, she led us across the dirt to a smaller building.

“This is The Temple,” she said, as she opened the door.

It looked more like a summer camp dormitory to me. It was plain inside, with a row of metal cots lined up against the wall. Seven cots. One for each girl, and on each one was a white robe.

“You will change out of your clothes and into your robe,” Ana told us. “After you are done you will put all your other clothes and belongings into the trash bags. Getting rid of your earthly skins symbolizes the shedding of sin and darkness, and being born anew ready for communion with God.”

One of the other girls found her voice. “When do we go back to our parents?”

“Did Jesus beg to return to his parents when he was chosen?” Ana said. “No. He knew God had called him for greater things and that human emotions no longer befit him.” Her eyes shone. “You’ve been called to be part of God’s Glory and ordinary things like families are not your concern.”

Ana left us alone and we did as she said. We dressed in the robes and put our clothes and other belongings into the big plastic trash bags and the bags bulged like grinning, fat men.

Later that night, we were allowed to have dinner with everyone else, in the main hall. That would be our last time, but we didn’t know it then.

No-one was sitting with their family. The men were at one side of the room, women on the other, with the children mixed together in the middle. I leaned closer to the young girl sitting next to me. She was staring down into her lap and crying.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Father has said that we are one family now. No marriages, no moms, no dads, no families. Only one Father and we are all his children.”

Dariell, Father, was sitting at a table up on the stage with Ana and smiling fit to burst.

“I don’t want to lose my family,” the girl said through a curtain of tears.

I looked around the room at the separated parents and broken families. The adults were all smiling and laughing, clasping their chest or making prayer hands when Father looked at them.

Even my mother and father.

I wanted to stand up on the bench and scream at them. Make them know what a monster he was and what he was doing to us girls.

I was too scared.

I didn’t do it that night.

Or the next.

Or any other night.

All the other girls were the same. None of us did anything other than what we were told to do.

And O Holy Nights became a regular thing.

They would often happen late at night and go for several hours. We would all be woken up by the announcement—I realized later that Ana was the voice crackling through the speakers—and the Youth Leaders would have to help Father prepare before he went to the hall to preach.

The only praying I ever did was that I wouldn’t be chosen to help Father prepare on these nights. He was always more aggressive and I’d rub my bruises for weeks afterwards.

But even that wasn’t much relief.

You could see the tears of the girls when they came out of the prayer room after Father had finished and we’d all hear them sobbing themselves to sleep. The seven of us only had each other, but I know we each hoped we would be spared on those nights, no matter how much pain the others carried for us.

As time went on the temple evolved.

Men—even my own Dad—brought timber and sheetrock and built new walls. The space where we slept got smaller and the cots got crammed in like sardines. More prayer rooms were created so Father could go from one to the next, leaving us girls to clean up after he was done.

With the new prayer rooms, and the cots squashed to the corner near the bathroom, the space in the middle became where Ana would instruct us.

She told us that our calling was to serve Father and help him become the Leader of God’s Chosen People. That our reward would be in the next life where we would sit by his side in New Jerusalem: Heaven on Earth.

She taught us to make the tea that Father drank with his Youth Leaders.

Two spoonfuls of leaves for the silver pot. Boiling water. Let the tea stand for three minutes and twenty seconds. A dropper full of clear liquid sweetener for the girl’s cup. No sweetener for Father—he suffered for God by having his tea bitter. Turn the pot twice clockwise and fill the two silver cups before carrying the tray into the prayer room and setting it on the table near the bed.

When it was my first turn to prepare the tea, I accidentally bumped the tray, and spilled both cups. Ana slapped me across the face. After I cleaned up the tea, and my tears, and prepared again, she held me and stroked my hair, telling me I must try harder. Father would not be as forgiving as she was.

She showed us how we were to fetch a clean robe and sponge the night’s chosen Leaders, cleaning them of dirt and sin before their communion with Father. They always sat in silence while we washed them and most times I wiped away tears. I know when it was my turn, I went as far inside as I could, and often didn’t notice what the other girls were doing until they were sitting me down on the bed in the prayer room.

Ana forbade us from speaking when anyone returned from the prayer rooms, telling us that it would stain their spiritual connection. They had just touched the face of God, she said, and for us sinners to speak with them would put their souls in danger.

It was hard to believe that no-one else saw what was going on, what he was doing, but all the adults bought into the whole holy image thing. Some of the things I heard them say made me sick.

“Father is a physical manifestation of the one true God on Earth. He is my God.”

“I believe in what God says to me and I will obey Father’s instructions. They are instructions straight from God.”

“I know that wonderful things will happen for all of us because my view is the view Father has given me.”

I tried to understand who were the rational, wise adults and who were the stupid, gullible children. I never did work it out.

For several months things stayed the same. We spent almost all our time in that horrible building—the doors were locked whenever Ana wasn’t with us—and we could go weeks without seeing the sky or breathing fresh air. The adults counted themselves as blessed. Ana taught us and we played our roles within the temple.

The thing that finally changed was me.

One morning I woke up without fear.

Only acceptance.

And that scared the hell out of me.

I knew I was right on the edge of giving up. Losing myself in the nightmare and worse, being okay with that. I knew if I had any hope of a real life, I had to get out before that happened. I knew I would be turning my back on my fellow Leaders, my family, and everyone else, and that hurt. But it was a choice between that or disappearing forever in that North Dakotan hell-hole.

That night, when O Holy Night was called and in a moment that Ana wasn’t watching, I emptied the jar of tea leaves under one of the floor cushions. She told me to get more from the kitchen, and be quick. Not to inconvenience Father. I stepped out of the temple with my heart pounding out of my chest. Halfway to the kitchen, I saw that the men holding the guns were all looking away.

I turned and ran.

I ran through the dark, not caring that rocks and grasses were cutting my feet and bashing my toes. I ran until my lungs burned and my heart felt like it would burst out of my chest. I had to sit down after a while, but couldn’t stay still. I was too frightened. After I caught my breath a little, I started running again.

As the sky began to lighten, I made sure to keep going towards the brightest part, concentrating only on taking the next step further from the church and further from him.

When the sun got above the horizon I was standing on a small hill, and there was nothing to see but rocks and grass in every direction.

No people. No buildings. No rules. No pain. No tears.

I closed my eyes, felt the sun on my face and the light breeze through the thin robe.

It was the most spiritual feeling ever, and I let myself stand there a few minutes trying to enjoy it. I was scared and had no idea where I was going, but I know that I smiled for the first time that I could remember.

Then I opened my eyes and kept running.

“Does any of that help?”

I thought about everything Lucy had said.

If we got to Lincoln during the main event, I was likely to find the congregation in the biggest building with Dariell doing his dog and pony show. The girls, and Kimberly, would probably be together in a different location. Maybe the structure Cowboy and I had seen?

I didn’t know anything more about Dariell, or how he would react when push came to shove. Would he run? Fight? What would his security force do?

I knew a little more. Not enough.

“It helps a lot, Lucy.”

“I hope you find her, Mr Rafferty.”

“Me too, Lucy.”

As soon as the handset hit the cradle, the phone burst into bells again.

It was my favorite DPD lieutenant.

“Hell, Rafferty. I’ve been calling for the last forty-five minutes. You fall asleep?”

“Unlike you public servants Ed, we of the working class are trying to run businesses. Perhaps if you spoke to my appointments secretary, she could pencil in a suitable time for us to converse.”

He sighed on the other end of the line.

I cut him a break. “I’m here now. What’s the deal?”

“The deal is that my DC guy called and the whole thing in Lincoln is going down. Soon.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. He was in the room when Wesson phone-conferenced in and requested a green light. Seems you might have even had something to do with Steve’s decision to go.”

“What?”

“Steve’s pissed that you got within spitting distance of the compound. Twice. And he’s not going to let anyone else with a missing family member get close enough to fuck up his investigation. Congratulations, Rafferty. Single-handedly, you’ve changed the course of a Federal investigation. It’s no wonder you fuck things up so often here in Dallas.”

“When’s he going? What’s the plan?”

“No idea. The head honcho in the phone conference gave Steve operational control. It could be going down now.”

“I gotta go, Ed. Thanks for the heads up.”

I called Cowboy and Hilda.

In that order.

Cowboy said he and Mimi would be rolling inside half an hour and be at my place an hour later. With the drive to Lincoln, that left a possible five hours, give or take, until we were at Dariell’s front gate. I hoped Steve would take longer to get his shit together.

I caught Hilda leaving the store. She wasn’t happy.

“Leave it to that Steve guy. If Kimberly is there, they’ll get her out.”

“It might not be that simple, Hil. Remember what we talked about in Austin? Jim Jones?”

All the air was sucked out of the phone line.

“He wouldn’t do that?” she breathed. “Would he?”

“I don’t know. And that’s the problem. There’s no telling what he might do. I might be Kimberly’s only chance, if she’s there.”

Hilda’s voice got thin. “And if she’s not?”

“If she’s not, I might be able to get to Dariell and make me tell him where she is. And I might be able to help the others if everything turns to shit.”

I didn’t believe myself either.

“Rafferty, this isn’t your fight,” she said.

“I have to try, hon.”

A pause.

“I know. And I love you for it. At the same time, I hate knowing that you have to. Does that make sense?”

“Yes and no. Nothing makes much sense right now, but I know what I have to do and I’ll call you once it’s over.”

“Don’t you get yourself killed, Rafferty. I’ll never forgive you. You know, I’ll kill you if you die.”

We were both laughing as she hung up, but I could imagine her sitting in her office chair with tears streaming down her face. I had no time to sit and think through what my life would be like if something happened to my beloved.

I needed to focus and make sure we were prepared when we crashed Steve and Dariell’s party.

I needed to think through the possibilities of how things might go down so I could reduce our risk.

And I needed to pack every weapon I owned.

CHAPTER 33

I was sitting on the front porch, puffing blue smoke in front of the sun hanging blood-red in the west, when a mud-splattered, maroon GMC Sierra ghosted down the street and pulled into the driveway. The driver killed the engine and the ticking countdown of cooling metal filled the silence.

Sounded like a countdown.

From the driver’s seat, Cowboy raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment on my face, while the passenger door opened by itself. It closed again and I watched the crown of a Stetson over the hood. The hat moved toward the garage, turned to me and then Mimi was crossing the driveway. If she hadn’t had her hat on when she got out of the truck, I wouldn’t have been able to see her for the hunk of Michigan’s finest in the way.

“Rafferty, you grouchy ol’ tomcat. It’s been too long since I’ve seen ya.”

I bent down—jack-knifed at the waist would be a better description—to give Mimi a hug.

Mimi was short. Real short.

That had fooled a lot of people over the years who didn’t realise that tough wasn’t in any way proportional to size. Anyone who had made, or would make, that mistake would only do it once.

A few of them never got a second chance.

“Mimi,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

“Been quiet, Rafferty. Ain’t had no reason to shoot at nothin’ ’cept an old coyote here and there. Looks like you been gettin’ yourself into a mite of trouble, tho.”

She winked and I tried to ignore it.

“You’re sure this isn’t gonna be too boring? A little birdie told me that household chores were looking more exciting than a Rafferty case. I’ve got a couple of loads of washing that need doing if you’d rather stay here.”

Her eyes twinkled. “And miss out on all the fun while you boys get caught between a religious cult and a bunch of gung-ho government types? No-siree.”

“You ready to roll, boss-man?” Cowboy drawled.

I nodded, reached down and hefted both sports bags.

“Throw those in the back tray,” Cowboy said. “If’n you can find room.”

As I walked around to the back, Mimi climbed up into the truck, like Jack finding a way to the top of the beanstalk.

I popped open the cabin over the rear tray and saw that Cowboy hadn’t been kidding. It was filled with canvas bags, gun cases, ammo boxes, and backpacks.

I looked up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror.

He raised an eyebrow.

“You did say to bring it all.”

The sun shimmered fire on the horizon as the Sierra gobbled up the miles to Lincoln. I wanted to get there faster, but Cowboy kept our speed under fifty-five.

“Ain’t no point getting pulled over for speeding, boss-man. Once they’d checked out the truck we’d all be spending the night in a county jail. Thas no help to your girl.”

“Where’d you boost it?” I asked.

“A lil’ farm outside Oak Ridge. Friend of mine told me the owner’s away for a few weeks, over in Palm Springs. Won’t be missed.”

Interstate 180 disappeared in the distance, arrowing straight into the heart of the blazing sun.

I leaned my head back on the headrest.

I didn’t want to sleep; I was too keyed up, but I wasn’t doing any of us any good by talking.

Also I didn’t want to look nervous in front of Cowboy and Mimi. Other than having a truck tray full of weapons, they acted like we were out for a picnic.

The road churned underneath us and the trucked swayed in time with the undulations.

Up front, Mimi reached over and took Cowboy’s hand.

I closed my eyes.

Darkness retreats.

Hall full of white-robes. Kneeling.

Facing the raised throne.

Fires burn on the perimeter.

Hooded figure on throne. Shadowed face.

Faint crackle of flames. Otherwise, quiet.

As death.

Closer to the throne.

It rises above the sea of white robes.

Black ship borne on a virgin ocean.

The hood turns.

“I am the Way.”

White-robed response.

“You are our Way.”

Words burn into my brain.

I’ve had enough of this bullshit. Move forward.

Center of the hall. Base of throne revealed.

Face down on the lowest step. Two figures.

Gray cloth wrapping. Blood seeps.

Drips on stone floor.

Roll off the step. Hoods askew.

Steve Wesson. Oswald. Mouths leaking blood.

Hooded figure stands.

Folds back the hood.

Kimberly.

And not Kimberly.

Close. Not the same.

Changing.

Morphing.

Becoming.

Lucy.

And not Lucy.

Changing. Morphing. Becoming.

Not Kimberly. Not Lucy.

“I am …” Not-Lucy.

“… the Truth.” Not-Kimberly.

White-robes. “You are the Truth.”

Not-Kimberly. Not-Lucy. “I am the Way.”

“You are the Way.”

“Follow the Way.”

“Amen.”

Not-Kimberly. Not-Lucy.

Raised hands.

A clap.

Fires burn brighter than the sun.

Everything disappears.

I opened my eyes.

The truck had stopped.

Cowboy and Mimi were twisted in the front seats and looking back at me.

“We’re here boss-man. Let’s git it on.”

CHAPTER 34

We roared along Private Road 5150, the rack of spotlights above the truck’s cab carving a bright tunnel through the dusty night.

The .45 was a comforting weight under my armpit and I cradled the Ithaca on my lap. Mimi was kneeling on her seat, ready to bring her Uzi up from below the window sill. Cowboy drove one-handed as he tapped his giant Ruger Blackhawk against his leg in time with a song only he could hear. The Sierra shimmied and wobbled with the road’s corrugations but was otherwise sure-footed on the loose surface.

We swung around a long left hand curve and I saw the road disappear between a narrow gap in the brush about fifty yards ahead.

“Just past that gap,” I yelled over the gravel spatter on the underside of the truck.

“Yep. I’m gonna bring it in fast, so’s we got the element of surprise.”

I cranked down my window and brought the shotgun up, registering that Mimi was doing the same, then we were through the gap and Cowboy was bringing us sliding to a stop in front of the gated driveway.

I was sighting down the barrel, had already taken up the trigger slack, and was ready to put down the first guy I saw with a weapon, when the truck lurched to a final halt and the trailing dust cloud swirled past us.

The dark desert was silent.

No trucks flanking the driveway.

No men with guns.

Nothing.

I let out a breath.

“Don’t that beat all,” Cowboy said. “They done gone and left their front gate open.”

“If that’s not an invitation,” I said, “I don’t know what is. The only question is: walk, or drive.”

“I say drive,” Cowboy said. “I sure would hate to leave this firepower behind, and I knows Mimi can’t carry it all.”

Mimi chuckled.

“This road goes into a tunnel,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of being trapped in there.”

“Gonna be trapped anyways. ’Sides, if’n we gots to get out in a hurry, I’d ruther be drivin’ than walkin’.”

“Good enough for me,” I said. “Lay on, Macduff.”

Cowboy nosed the truck between the gate posts and killed the lights. We opened all the windows as he idled down the dirt driveway. Mimi held her Uzi out the passenger window and I slid across the rear seat to cover the driver’s side of the road.

“Awful quiet out there,” Cowboy said.

I had to agree with him.

The driveway meandered through low bush, no different to the road we’d turned off of. After ten minutes of bumping along and a tight hairpin turn, the road dropped away, headed into the earth. The road-side brush was quickly up to window level and getting higher. Ahead the sky lightened.

Mimi saw it too.

“We’re getting close,” she said. “Stop here and let’s take a look-see.”

Cowboy braked to a stop. Mimi reached up, clicked the overhead light switch into the off position, slipped out of the truck and disappeared like a wraith into the night. I stepped out of the cab and hopped into the front seat, scanning the darkness for any sign of movement.

Cowboy looked bored.

“Now we’re gonna be bustin’ in through the front door,” he said, “how you wanna play it once we’re on the inside?”

“I figured we’d have to shoot our way in.” I shrugged. “I thought that if Dariell could see Steve getting ready to make a move, he’d have his boys hunkered down on the perimeter.”

“Thas the way we’d do it,” he said.

I nodded in the dark. “I know. Which means I’m at a loss to guess what he might do next. Let’s stay focused on finding Kimberly first, and worry about him later. Oh, and staying alive.”

“Never thought about doin’ nothin else.”

We sat in silence for a few more minutes.

The first thing I knew about Mimi getting back in the truck was when the rear door thunked shut.

Damn, the girl was quiet.

She spoke low. “This road goes straight ahead for a couple of hundred yards, and disappears into a tunnel.” She glanced at me. “There aren’t any lights in the tunnel and, based on the light in the sky, it looks to me like the other end might still be another few hundred yards away.”

“You see anyone?” Cowboy asked.

“Nope. It’s dead out there.”

I hoped that wasn’t the case.

Despite the lack of movement in the night, Cowboy rolled the truck forward even more slowly. The road-side walls rose higher until all we could see out the side windows was dirt and rocks. A narrow strip of starry blackness streaked overhead and the walls closed in leaving just enough room for a single vehicle.

The end of the canyon approached and the mouth of the tunnel opened hungrily.

“I don’t like it,” Cowboy said.

“Any particular part?” I said. “I’m not too excited about the whole goddamned thing.”

“The tunnel,” he said. “Those walls get any closer, we end up trapped in the car like sittin’ ducks.” I heard Mimi scrabbling in the back seat. “Rafferty, you drive. I’ll walk ahead with the night scope, jes’ to make sure we’re not gettin’ ourselves wedged ’tween a rock and a hard place.”

The butt of a rifle appeared between the seats. Cowboy reached around and pulled the Winchester to his lap. His previous sight had been replaced with a night vision scope which would make the tunnel look like midday to him.

Which made me think.

“Okay, hotshot. You walking ahead is all fine and dandy. You’ll be able to see everything. How am I gonna be able to see enough to stop from running you down?”

Mimi clapped me on the shoulder and handed me what looked like an optometrist’s mobile assessment centre.

“Put these on.”

I’d never worn night vision goggles before and for all the extra sight they gave me, I felt more restricted than before.

They were heavier than I’d expected and kept pulling my head forward. It was an effort to keep my head up and I knew my neck would pay for it later. All the straps needed to keep them in place and allow my hands to be free doing other things bit into my skin whenever I turned.

Beyond all this discomfort, I also knew I had to be ready to tear the goggles away from my eyes immediately if the outside world became brighter.

The goggles worked on the basis of taking the available light, however little there was, concentrating and multiplying it, to enable me to “see” in the darkness. This was all great while it was pitch black out there, but the goggles didn’t care what the outside conditions were. They would do exactly the same thing in broad daylight: concentrate and multiply all available light. If anyone shone a flashlight in my direction, it would be like looking at the sun. Any night vision I had would be shot to hell and my head would throb for hours.

If we got lit up with a spotlight rack, or more, it would be like a nuclear flash in my eyes and would do permanent damage.

It was with these comforting thoughts that I eased the Sierra into the dark hole behind Cowboy. The tunnel shimmered green in my vision and I watched as he stalked forward, with a slight sideways stance, close to the left hand wall. He held the rifle against his shoulder, his eye to the sight, and his upper body remained rock steady while his boots crept forward.

I looked in the rear view mirror and saw Mimi, crouched in a nest she’d created, peering into the darkness behind us, Uzi at the ready, covering our ass.

Mimi sitting there, surrounded by more high powered weaponry than you could poke a stick at, she looked like a kid on Christmas morning.

I almost laughed.

Forced my eyes forward.

Cowboy continued creeping down the tunnel and I kept the truck about twenty yards behind him. I didn’t want to restrict his room if he needed to move, but I also wanted to be close enough to get to him quickly if everything went downhill.

We continued that way for a long time.

Slow and careful.

The truck’s odometer showed it had been less than a hundred yards since we’d entered the tunnel. It felt like ten thousand. A wonky green glow started to shimmy and pulse in the distance, while I still saw Cowboy left and in the foreground.

A light? Isn’t that an oncoming train?

I had no idea where these thoughts come from. Most people think that I deliberately act like a wise-ass. It’s not true. The things I say and the shit I do, it just happens. I don’t know where it comes from and right then I knew it like never before, because the last thing I wanted to be thinking about was being trapped in a black hole under the earth with catastrophe bearing down.

I would have thought more about that, except a more pressing matter came to hand.

Cowboy disappeared.

CHAPTER 35

I jerked the truck to a halt.

“What?” Mimi hissed.

“Not sure,” I whispered. “Hang on.”

I peered forward, squinting in the goggles, willing them to make things clearer. I dropped a hand to the .45 in my lap and flicked the thumb safety off.

My mind replayed the last twenty seconds, trying to assess the level of shit we were in. We were in it, no doubt, depth being the only variable.

Cowboy had been doing his thing, creeping along the left hand wall of the tunnel, his mottled green shape clear and steady. And then it had winked out.

No warning, no sudden movements.

Like he’d been swallowed by the dark.

“You see anything out the back, Mimi?”

“Nothing. Why?”

My mouth went dry and I could hear the sound of blood raging in my ears.

It sounded like Niagara Falls.

“Wait here,” I said. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

“Will do.”

I eased my way out of the truck, hypersensitive to every noise. The squeak of the seat as I took my weight off it. The metallic groan of the truck’s door. A scuff of my boot on the tunnel’s dirt floor. I had the Colt in both hands now, pointed down and right, cocked and ready, as I prepared to mimic Cowboy’s walk up the tunnel.

Left side, or right side?

I stayed left and covered the distance to where I’d last seen Cowboy. I only wished I could do it more quietly. I was sure anyone still awake in Lincoln could hear my heart whanging away.

Probably Dallas, too.

I crept forward.

Three steps more to where I’d last seen Cowboy.

I brought the gun up in front of me, its ghostly green outline pointed straight down the tunnel towards the distant green glow. There was nothing else.

Two steps now.

Where the fuck was he?

One step.

A deep breath.

I took the step.

And nearly had a heart attack when a green shape flashed out of the darkness, pushing both my arms down and my gun away. I twisted, trying to give myself space and bring the gun to bear, but a strong grip held my arm.

“Careful with that,” Cowboy said quietly. “Yore liable to shoot someone.”

“What the—”

He didn’t let me get started. “You better see this, boss-man.”

I turned towards Cowboy and saw the tunnel wall had disappeared.

Not so much disappeared as moved back about ten feet, making the tunnel double width at this point. This alcove looked to be a hundred, hundred and fifty feet long, with squarish ends, like it had been excavated from the tunnel’s original shape.

This had created the illusion of Cowboy’s disappearance. As he’d reached the nearest edge of the tunnel widening, he stepped sideways, keeping his body close to the wall of the tunnel.

Good tradecraft.

From my perspective, I couldn’t see the alcove. When he’d stepped into it, and out of the tunnel’s main section, it looked like he’d been swallowed up by the blackness.

I could see tire tracks sweeping into, and out of, this alcove, which made sense. Having a place in the tunnel where cars could pass would save the headache of having to reverse a long way if two cars ever met in the middle.

That wasn’t what Cowboy wanted to show me.

“Over here,” he called softly and I looked up to see him standing against the long wall, next to a smooth rectangular shape. An industrial shaped handle and sturdy security lock bulged from the metal door. I could see another door ghosting in the darkness further down the alcove.

“You gone in?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Wanted to wait for you. Feel better with you watchin’ my back.”

I nodded and moved to the right of the first door. He flattened his back against the left hand side, reached out and grabbed the handle.

“Locked.”

“I saw another one further up,” I whispered.

We took up the same positions around the next door. He stroked the handle and nodded at me.

I brought the gun and my other hand up. Three fingers. Counted them down.

Three.

Two.

One.

Cowboy slammed the door handle down, pushed and stepped back.

I crashed through the doorway, gun up. Shoved my shoulder against a wall running away from the door and swept my vision, and gun, through an arc in front of me. I was vaguely aware of Cowboy hitting the doorway behind me and leading right to mirror, and cover, my position on the left.

A concrete hallway stretched out in front of us, silent and dark. Both sides were dotted with doorways six, eight feet apart.

I moved to the near edge of the closest door. It was open, resting against a cross wall.

I turned and nodded to Cowboy. He strode past me, flanked the doorway and aimed the rifle inside. I stepped across to the opposite side of the hallway to cover him.

“Nothin’ there boss-man,” he said with a low breath. I joined him at the doorway and peered through the opening to look inside. The room was small, containing two metal framed beds and a set of small steel shelves. The beds were neatly made and small, ordered piles of clothes rested on the shelves.

“Next one?” I whispered.

He nodded in my green glare.

He covered me as I jumped into the next room, swinging to cover the space on the near wall in case anyone was hiding there. Identical to the first room, from the standard furniture down to the lack of occupants.

We leap-frogged down the hallway, checking each room. They were all the same and all empty with no indication of who had been there or where they were now.

The last two doorways at the end of the long hallway led to simple bathrooms. Three shower heads sprouted from one long wall, with a sink and two lidless toilets on the opposite side. Rusty water dripped from one of the single faucets and stained the sink beneath.

“What d’ya reckon this place is?” Cowboy said, his voice a little louder. We were alone.

“Living quarters, I’d say. For the faithful, I guess. Why here and not in the huts, I don’t know. Let’s check the other door.”

“I got tools in the truck at’ll bust that lock open. Coupla flashlights, too.”

“Sounds good.”

As we shuffled back to the truck, I hoped that Mimi could tell who we were and wouldn’t let loose with a burst from the Uzi.

“Where’d you boys get to?” she stage-whispered as we got closer, and my heart started beating again.

“Found ourselves a buncha mysterious empty rooms,” Cowboy said.

He opened the rear tray and Mimi jumped down. Cowboy threw me a flashlight and handed one to Mimi. He hefted a pry-bar in one hand and followed me back to the alcove and the other door.

I put an ear to the cold metal.

Nothing.

Cowboy eased the pry bar between the door and frame and pulled. Metal screeched and groaned, absurdly loud in the enclosed space. It took him three more hefty pulls before the frame distorted enough to release the door catch.

This time, Mimi was first through the door staying low and right. I went left and high into an identical hallway. We stood and listened.

Still nothing.

Where’d everyone go?

Mimi walked to the first door, stuck her head around the door frame and jerked it back. She looked back at me, sighed and lowered her Uzi.

“Aw shit, Rafferty. This ain’t right.”

Mimi’s light sliced across the dirty linoleum floor of the small room.

Same size and construction as the ones we’d already seen.

Quiet, dark and still.

Same small shelving units with piles of clothes.

Same metal frame beds.

When it came to the bodies lying on the blankets, with blood crusting their lips and noses however, this room was terribly different.

“What’s going on, Rafferty?” Mimi whispered, despite the absence of anyone alive to hear us. Cowboy and I were squatting in the hallway near the first room. Mimi was standing so we could all talk, eye to eye.

I shook my head.

“Damned if I know,” I said. If you’d asked me what we were going to find behind those doors, the scenes that greeted us would not have been anywhere in my guesses.

We’d swept the length of the second hallway and checked each room along the way.

Twenty-eight rooms.

Thirteen bodies.

A mix of men, women, children.

All wearing simple, cloth robes.

All dead.

In some rooms, only a single body. In others, groups lay together, still and silent.

All were lying on their backs, hands on their chests, as though they’d lain down for a long night’s slumber. Two of the larger men had been shot in the back of the head. I guessed that was the reason for their faces looking like strawberry pulp and the gory spray patterns on the wall. We couldn’t know for certain because they were lying peacefully like all the others and I wasn’t about to mess with them.

The saddest sight of all was the cot with a young woman, bloody around the mouth and nose like the others, with a young child, still as marble, tucked under each arm. They had turned and nestled into her chest, almost like they were looking to breastfeed, with their mother clutching them as their just-begun lives had left them.

I’d reached down and checked for pulses on the kids. I knew it was hopeless, but I couldn’t not check. Their small frames were as devoid of movement as the rest.

The only upside, and I felt sick thinking this, was Kimberly was nowhere to be seen.

“I seen some fucked up things, boss-man,” Cowboy said, “but in all my born-put-togethers I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this.”

“What now?” Mimi asked.

“We find Kimberly, before she joins her fellow church members,” I said.

“And get the hell out of Dodge?”

“Not before I have a chance to send Dariell to meet his God face to face.”

Cowboy smiled thinly on the edge of the light.

CHAPTER 36

We picked our way down the tunnel in the idling Sierra once again.

Cowboy steered the truck wearing the night vision goggles and I took over duty on the night-scoped Winchester. We came to a second alcove about fifty yards later and replayed our search squad moves.

The sights that met the stabbing beams of our flashlights were eerily repetitive.

Twin hallways and dormitories, built and furnished the same. Empty rooms, but many, too many, rooms containing an assortment of bodies. A couple of men with missing faces, and everyone else with blood-crusted mouths and noses. Needle-less syringes discarded on the floor beside the cots.

Hands folded on chests. Resting in peace.

Still.

Silent.

Dead.

I didn’t, couldn’t, count the bodies.

Still no Kimberly.

“Let’s go and—”

“Shh,” hissed Mimi.

I settled my grip tighter on the rifle and took a knee, aiming past Mimi and back down the hallway.

What had we missed?

Mimi’s flashlight must have been illuminating my face. She looked my way, saw my arched eyebrow and leaned close to whisper, “I heard … Cover me.”

Without waiting for a response, she raised her Uzi and tiptoed down the hallway. She stopped outside a doorway about halfway down and bent her head, listening hard. I snatched a glance at Cowboy and he shrugged.

Mimi skipped past the doorway and stopped again two further down, bending her head again. As I was about to take step towards her, she wheeled back towards us and disappeared into the darkness of the doorway. I was into motion then and pounding towards the doorway, Cowboy on my heels, almost there when her voice wound around the door frame.

“Hey,” Mimi cooed from inside the room.

I reached the doorway about then, striding past and slamming my back into the wall alongside, Cowboy taking up the same position on the other side of the doorway.

“Everythin’ alright, honey?” he called.

“Hang on,” Mimi said from the darkness. “It’s okay. You’re safe. Come on.”

I waited there with Cowboy for about ten years before we heard Mimi’s voice again.

“Come on in, boys. Best if you take it slow, and lower your guns. This feller’s been through a nightmare already.”

I stepped into the room, with a casualness that I did not feel, found Mimi sitting on the floor.

I hadn’t expected to see that, but neither had I been ready to see her holding a blond-haired boy, face smeared with blood and vomit, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, and very much alive.

He couldn’t have been more than four or five years old and unlike the three people lying on the cot behind him, he was going to see his next birthday.

I’d make sure of that.

Mimi kept him on her lap and facing away from the death scene behind him. She rocked him and clucked soothing sounds in his ear.

“The little guy was hidin’ underneath his Momma,” she said. “Smart kid. Not sure how he pulled it off. Lookin’ at his face and T-shirt, I guess he, or whoever, made himself throw up whatever it was they gave to him.” I could only nod. “And everyone else,” she said and then bent her head to whisper in the young boy’s ear again.

“This changes things a mite,” Cowboy said.

I nodded.

We could rabbit now, taking the boy with us, and make sure that one person survived the night, but that wasn’t enough for me. Not only did I want to find Kimberly and get as many people as I could out of this shit-hole, more than ever I wanted to see someone pay for the devastation we’d seen.

What to do with the kid?

“Can he stay here?” I said to the top of Mimi’s head, “while we go get this done?”

“Hell, Rafferty,” Cowboy said. “That’s cold.”

I nodded. “I know, but we can’t drag him into the middle of whatever it is we’re walking into. No point him surviving now, to get shot later.”

“Meems could stay with him, while we take care of the rest of it.”

“That might work. You got backpacks in the truck?” Cowboy nodded. “I can throw a bunch of ammo, the Colt and the Ithaca in that to make up for just being the two of us.”

“Yep. You could have the semi-auto too, and I’ll take the Winchester, the Ruger and a buncha speed-loaders and—”

“Shhhh.”

Cowboy and I looked up.

“He’s asleep,” Mimi said. “Let him stay that way for a while.” Mimi face shone with tears. “And if you two think you’re gonna leave me baby-sitting while you go save the world, you’ve got another thing comin’.”

She stood up, cradling the boy to her chest, leaving her Uzi on the floor. He whimpered and snuggled tighter.

“After seein’ this, Rafferty, there ain’t no way I’m gonna sit by and let this monster get away.”

She walked to the door.

“Let’s send him to the hell he deserves.”

Cowboy popped the clutch and started the truck moving down the tunnel again.

We had waited in the hallway lost in our own thoughts while Mimi built a blanket nest for the boy in the empty dormitory. She’d left some beef jerky and candy for him in case he woke up, made sure he wouldn’t be seen by a casual glance from the doorway and closed the door, as lovingly as if she’d been putting her own child to bed after a big day of playing Cowboys and Indians in the backyard.

Back in the truck, she fussed in the rear tray, unzipping bags and assembling weapons. I could feel her cold fury wafting into the front seat.

“Got a powerful feeling of wantin’ to put the hurt on someone, boss-man,” Cowboy said.

I nodded and we rolled down the tunnel in deathly silence.

About the same time I woke up that the glow in the distance had become a distinct light, Cowboy cleared his throat.

“We may have an impediment to our progress,” he said.

“Huh?” Mimi said from the back seat.

He braked the truck to a halt, tore off the night-vision goggles and flicked on the parking lights. They lit up a solid timber gate spanning the width and height of the tunnel, just ten feet in front of the truck’s nose.

“They done gone and closed the front door after all.”

“You know, Cowboy,” I said. “I’m getting sick and tired of this creeping around bullshit down here in the catacombs.” I saw his face break into a grin in the reflected light. “What say we raise a little hell and see who complains about the noise?”

“’bout time. Was beginnin’ to think you’d gone soft.”

He backed the truck up, turned on the headlights and stabbed a switch on the dashboard. The spotlight rack above the cab burst into life and scorched the interior of the tunnel with light. I swapped out the night vision scope on the Winchester for a standard one. Cowboy grabbed first gear and revved the engine. Four hundred and fifty four cubic inches bellowed through the tunnel, like a demon roaring from the pit of hell.

“Hang on,” he said. “This might hurt a bit.”

As he popped the clutch and the truck leaped forward I thought I heard him say something else.

“But it shore is gonna be fun.”

CHAPTER 37

The Sierra slammed into the timber with an angry growl and an ear-splitting crash.

Wooden boards exploded outward.

As my head was thrown forward I saw the sheet metal of the hood crumple and twist. Cowboy kept his boot on the gas as the truck bucked and swayed and muscled its way over the remains of the gate.

The rear end gave a final lurch, the truck shot forward and the mouth of the tunnel disappeared behind us. Cowboy braked and the truck slid to a stop, dust rising into the night.

I had the Winchester poked out my window looking for movement. Cowboy mirrored my actions with his Blackhawk. Mimi snapped her head left and right in the back seat vigilant for threats from both directions.

The truck growled like a wounded animal, low and insistent over the stillness.

Yellow lights glowed from their positions atop the scattered poles. On our right the large industrial shed sat with the sliding door half open. No lights inside.

I looked over Cowboy’s shoulder to check out the opposite side of the bowl. Four dung-coloured concrete buildings marched straight into the collapsed side of the crater.

The other end of the dormitory blocks.

A couple of smaller sheds and two rusty steel tanks on blocks squatted here, too. Pipes ran between the tanks, sheds and half-underground dormitories.

I couldn’t see the square hut, which I expected was the temple that Lucy described. It was hidden behind the church, the largest building in the bowl. Lights glowed in the windows, and I thought I could hear faint singing over the whining engine.

To the left, and behind the church, the small dirty-white huts sat silent and still. To the right, a series of tumble-down fences bracketed the animal pens.

I twisted in the seat and trained the rifle on the barrack huts beyond the pens, figuring someone to be interested in our dramatic entrance. I swung the sights back and forth between the two hut doors I could see and focused on my peripheral vision.

Everything froze for several seconds.

Silent and surreal.

My heart pounded.

“Nobody thought to put out the welcome-wagon?” Cowboy said.

He sounded disappointed.

Then the night turned to shit.

The first shots came from behind one corner of the industrial shed.

I saw movement in the shadows, a muzzle flash and was halfway through yelling “We got action,” when one of the windows above the rear tray exploded. Another bullet pinged off the bodywork somewhere low and in front of me.

“That’s not very neighborly,” Cowboy growled and stomped on the gas, swinging the truck to the left and away from the fire.

As the truck lurched into motion, the chug of automatic weapons rolled across the compound from the far side of the church.

Crossfire.

“Three right,” Cowboy called.

Mimi called back, “I see ’em,” as calmly as ordering coffee, and then the Uzi started to rattle as she fired through the rear opening.

I leaned out my window and drew a bead on a rifle-carrying man breaking from the corner of an animal pen. My first shot went high and right. I dialed the next one in better and saw a puff of red mist explode from his chest before he fell backwards.

Bullets spattered against both sides of the truck’s bodywork with metallic pings. Two of the windows on Cowboy’s side exploded.

An enormous roar shook the inside of the truck, hurting my ears, and the windscreen spiderwebbed in front of me. Cowboy fired the Ruger again and the windscreen erupted, showering us in tiny glass cubes.

“’At’s better,” he said.

I poked the rifle out over the hood and let off two shots at the figures lurking behind a corner of the nearest dormitory building. Both shots missed, but it stopped them from firing and sent them both into motion.

Mimi kept firing her tight, controlled bursts while shell casings pattered on the gun bags like summer rain.

Cowboy’s Blackhawk boomed again and one of the running men crumpled on his left side. I lined up the other and shot him in the neck as he lunged for cover behind a nearby pickup truck.

“How you doin’ back there, honey?” Cowboy said as he kept the throttle down and speared the truck towards the gap between the shed and the rusty tank.

“Two up, two down,” she replied. “I can see more of ’em out there, though. Comin’ out from behind the buildings.”

“Keep ’em honest,” Cowboy said.

“On it.”

I reached down into the footwell and pulled up the Ithaca. Swapped it for the rifle.

Cowboy squirted the truck into the shadows alongside the tank, slewing it sideways at the last moment. I was out and running before he got it stopped.

I hurdled the ground level pipes and jumped behind the shed, as a fist-sized piece of concrete exploded near my head.

I heard Cowboy fire three shots behind me.

I’d worked my way around the corner and was about half way along the boardwalk linking the dormitory buildings when a man came around the corner of the nearest one at a full run. I stopped, my feet skidding on the dusty wood. He was about ten feet away and closing. He had an M16 in his hands and, unfortunately for him, it was pointed down.

I shot him in the chest. He spun to the left and went down, falling on his gun.

I ran forward and pulled the rifle from under his body. I liked the old Ithaca, don’t get me wrong, and at close range I wouldn’t want anything else, but the compound was spread out, automatic fire was going to be handy in the next little while and, let’s face it, the guy leaking blood into the Texas desert didn’t need it anymore.

I threw the sling over my shoulder and jammed my back up against the nearest wall. The sound of footsteps from my left made me look back to where I’d come from. I brought the shotgun up as Cowboy came running around the corner. He slid against the wall, next to me.

“I need to get to those huts,” I said, as I checked the M16. I re-inserted the full magazine (the previous owner hadn’t even bothered to cock the damn thing), chambered a round, cycled the charging handle and flicked the selector switch to burst. “Cover me.”

“You got it, boss-man.”

We edged our way to the end of the dormitory (was this the one where the boy was sleeping? would he still be asleep with all the gunfire?) then scampered across an open section of gravel to take cover behind a rusting water tank. In the distance a couple of automatic weapons rattled and rounds ricocheted. Closer, a deep, resounding crack rolled and echoed through the night.

It sounded like thunder of the gods.

I turned back towards Cowboy. He flashed me a grin.

“Don’t you worry none, thas jes’ Mimi with her new toy.”

“What the hell is it?”

“Barrett em-eighty-two sniper rifle. Damn gun’s bigger’n she is, but she shore is a sweet shot with it. Now you git goin’.”

He stepped back and fired his Ruger around the corner of the tank stand. I swung the M16 to hang behind my back, tightened my grip on the Ithaca and bolted from behind the concrete and metal protection.

The distance to the nearest hut wasn’t more than seventy-five yards.

It felt like a million.

I ran as hard as I could, hearing the Ruger boom behind me, hoping like hell it was enough to keep the bad guy’s heads down. I pushed harder, running parallel to the long wall of the church and trying to ignore the pain in my right ankle.

I dived for cover at the corner of the hut as I saw puffs of dust appear at my feet and the chugging sounds of the automatic fire reached me. I hit the dirt, rolled and slammed up behind the hut as Mimi’s toy cracked again and the chugging stopped.

I took a couple of deep breaths and stood up. The small square windows on the hut wall were too high to see inside.

Poked my head around the far end of the hut and then retreated. No windows or doors on the end wall either. I’d have to expose myself by going to the far side of the hut, the one nearest to the shooters, to find the door.

I hoped there was one.

Worked my way around the end of the building, grabbed the M16 one-handed, took a deep breath and stepped out from the shadows. I fired a burst in the direction of the barracks, then turned and ran along the front of the hut.

There.

I spotted the doorway, loosed another burst across my body and crashed my shoulder into the door. The frame and door splintered and I fell inside, scrabbling to get away from the open doorway. I felt awkward there, pushing my heels against the floor and sliding my butt further into the shadows, while trying to not drop the shotgun, whip the M16 from side to side, and search for threats all at the same time.

I’d fallen into an alcove, a vestibule I guess, with two doors opening from it. I leaned the shotgun in a corner, and stood, drawing the .45 from the holster, nestling the grip safety into my fist.

A plaintive, “Hello? Who is it?” wafted from under one of the padlocked doors.

It didn’t sound like the sort of voice who would be standing on the other side of the door with a machete, but you never know.

In the end I knew I couldn’t wait there all night. I grabbed the Colt a little tighter and put my shoulder through the left hand door.

CHAPTER 38

I crashed through the door, stumbled a little with the impact. I got my feet back under me and had the Colt sweeping the room before I registered the source of the voice I’d heard.

She was young—late teens or early twenties—pretty and blonde, in a downcast kind of way.

Lying on the only piece of furniture in the room, a metal cot, leaning on one elbow and dressed in what had once been a white robe. The visions of my dream flooded back and a chill clambered up my spine.

“Kimberly?” I said.

My voice trembled and I hoped that she couldn’t tell.

She shook her head. “I’m Bethany.”

“Do you know Kimberly? Do you know where she is?”

“Everybody knows Kimberly,” the girl said as she lay down again, on her back, stared up at the grubby ceiling. I breathed a sigh of relief.

She’s here.

“She’s the new girl. She’s his favorite now.” Flat voice. Monotone. “I used to be his favorite.” She turned her head to look me in the eye. “I did.”

Automatic fire rolled across the compound again before Mimi’s Barrett cracked the night open and all was silent again.

That won’t last forever.

“Where is she? Where is Kimberly?”

“If she’s not in her room, she’ll be in The Temple. Where I should be.”

“The temple?”

I stepped closer to the cot.

A tear squeezed from the corner of her eye.

“Is that the building behind the church?” I asked.

She shook her head and rolled over to face the wall.

“Where is she?”

The room was silent.

“Goddamn it, help me out here!”

The figure on the cot shuddered and twisted her head to look back over her shoulder at me.

“You shouldn’t blaspheme. Father doesn’t allow it.” She looked back at the wall again.

I shook my head and stepped back into the alcove.

I fired a shot into the night, to keep whoever was out there honest, then shouldered my way through the other closed door.

I was starting to overdose on deja vu as I stepped through the doorway.

Same room.

Same girl. Almost.

Same story.

“If she’s not in her room, then she’ll be in The Temple.”

I stepped out of the room and heard Mimi split the night apart with her rifle.

And again.

And again.

Laying down cover fire.

I grabbed the Ithaca—no way I was leaving it behind—and burst from the alcove with the M16 spewing cartridges as I fired a couple of three round bursts. I cut left and back to the shadows at the end of the hut.

I held my back against the wall, took a deep breath, then sprinted through the uncovered gap between huts, taking a knee in the shadows behind the corner of the nearest one. Cowboy crashed out of the night and landed next to me.

“Thought you might want some back up. Meem’s gonna keep everyone’s heads down so’s we can move about a mite easier.”

“Okay,” I said. “There are two girls in that first hut. Neither of them are Kimberly.”

He nodded in the darkness.

“Any word on where she is?”

“She’s here. In her hut or the temple. That’s probably the square building at the back, behind the church.”

“Let’s git goin’.”

I nodded and squeezed out from behind the hut to lay down more fire. Far away, the Barrett cracked again, echoing over the gunfire from the other side of the compound.

Cowboy ran around the end wall and I heard the familiar crunch of a door being shouldered in. Another, duller, thump, followed by a few minutes of silence.

Another thump, silence, then a shout.

“Comin’ out.”

I let loose another burst and felt Cowboy slam against the wall near my shoulder.

“No good,” he said. “Dianne and an empty room. Said the same thing you heard. ‘In her room or the temple.’”

“She ask to come with you?”

“Nope. Just lay on her lil’ metal bed and stared at the ceiling. Kinda sad.”

I didn’t have the time to think about it right then but, looking back, that night was all different kinds of sad.

We worked our way through the next row of huts with no better results. More broken doors, another blonde girl and no help.

Four of the huts were empty.

We found ourselves at the opposite corner of the collection of huts from where we had started, looking across twenty yards of unprotected gravel to the building we’d seen the girls walk to.

The temple.

The sound of automatic fire near the tunnel intensified and I thought I heard the roar of a car engine. Whatever it was, it was drowned out by another deep, echoing crack from the Barrett.

We would be shielded from Dariell’s would-be soldiers by the bulk of the church, so Cowboy and I were a little more relaxed as we shuffled across the gap and crept along the side of the building, looking for a way in.

When the shots rang out from behind us, they surprised me almost enough to stop and stare.

Almost.

We hoofed it to the corner of the building and dived into a corner between the front of the building and the low, unpainted, wooden porch.

“Who was that?” Cowboy asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t seen anyone following us. You?”

“Nope.”

I snuck a quick look back around the corner, keeping my head down at ground level, hoping it would throw off whoever was now shooting at us. Maybe they’d snuck around behind the temple building and we’d missed them.

Nothing.

No-one moved out there.

The singing was louder now.

I drew back and stood up. Peered out again, squinting hard to see anything moving in the shadows.

A spot in the sky flashed and a chunk of wood siding above my head went spinning away.

Huh?

“You get him pegged that time?” Cowboy whispered.

“It looked like it came from up in the … Oh, fuck.”

“Boss-man?”

“It was from the rim of the bowl. It’s one of Steve’s guys. They might be getting up their collective courage to come down and join the party.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“I know. We’ve got to find Kimberly before Steve turns this whole thing into a shit-storm.”

“Aw, it ain’t that.”

“What is it?”

“Those guys.” I followed the nod of his head and saw three men with automatic weapons stalk around the far corner of another building. They saw us at the same time and one shouted.

We were up and scaling the steps to the porch as they raked it with fire. I pressed the trigger on the M16, holding it one-handed and hoping like hell I could hit one of them. Or at least keep them nervous.

Then it chugged one last time and ran dry.

Shit!

I let it fall and lunged for the set of double doors in the center of the building’s front, which looked like the main method of entry and, at that point, our only option.

Cowboy and I hit the doors together as more bullets tore up the porch behind our feet. We sprawled full length on the floor inside and rolled to kick the doors shut again. The shooting outside stopped.

Everything went quiet.

I lay on my back on the dark wooden floor, with my heels pressed against the door, looking up at the ceiling of a small foyer.

A glass chandelier over my head cast miniature rainbows on the white painted walls. A small wooden table along one wall was draped in bright purple fabric and supported an armada of flickering candles.

The smell of scented wax coated my throat.

The front doors didn’t look strong enough for my liking, so I wriggled to one side to get out of the line of fire, in case the two remaining guys decided to try shooting through them. I was set and breathing hard before I realized that Cowboy had done the same.

“You keep on goin’ boss-man,” he said as he jammed a speed loader into the Ruger. “Find your girl. I’ll stay here and slow these good ol’ boys down a mite.” I handed him the shotgun and all the shells I had in my pockets. Took a moment to refill the .45’s clip. I duck-walked across the foyer to a second set of double doors opposite the first.

I gripped the Colt in my fist and reached up, grabbed the doorknob.

I nodded at Cowboy.

He nodded back.

I wrenched the door handle, pushed it away from me and sprang into the room beyond in a roll, came up in a kneeling crouch, and looked down the Colt’s sights as I scanned for threats.

It was the largest of all the rooms I’d seen, and the most opulent.

The space was maybe forty feet to a side, painted white and decked out around its perimeter with religious statues and murals on the walls. The floor was tiled with marble. Candles guttered on wall shelves, in niches and even on the floor. There must have been hundreds of the damned things.

Doorways on each side of the room led to places unseen. I hadn’t noticed other doors on the outside walls, so I assumed there were rooms behind those doors. Two more doorways lurked on the back wall, opposite where I’d come in.

Deep, rich red rugs led from each of the doorways toward the center of the hall, where a circle of columns flanked a raised platform. A big beam, detailed with curlicues and writing, connected the columns up at the ceiling line, creating a sort of circular room within the hall.

The writing I could see proclaimed OU MUST GIVE YOURSELF COMPLETELY TO YO

Bright coloured fabric draped between the columns and the ceiling within was domed upwards, painted with a twilight sky scene.

The platform inside the columns was raised above the floor below with three wide, marbled steps circling the whole shebang. Plush cushions littered the platform with mountains of fabric and pillows scattered on top.

The whole thing looked like some weird-ass hybrid of a Greek temple and Turkish sitting room, put together by an Italian decorator in the middle of a Texas desert.

Jolting me from my amateur architectural critique was the sight of girls sitting amongst the fabrics. Five of them sitting in a group, like a group of high-schoolers gossiping and laughing their way through a spring lunchtime. But these girls weren’t gossiping. Or laughing. Or talking.

Or smiling.

What they appeared to be doing was working hard to ignore the sixth girl, lying on the other side of the platform, her legs drawn up to her stomach. She sobbed and keened and sniffed, and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees. I took a step towards the knot of girls and they looked up as one.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by now, but I was. They all looked like Kimberly. And Lucy. And each other.

What is it with this psycho and young blonde girls?

“Kimberly?” I asked.

One of the girls looked at my gun, raised her arm and extended a trembling finger towards the back wall of the room. The others shot her sideways glances and one reached up and forced her arm down into her lap. The sixth girl moaned softly in the background.

The shotgun boomed behind me, kicking me back into gear.

I stood up and walked around the central columned space to the doors on the rear wall.

The first room was much smaller and decked out like the main room. Marble, bright fabrics, a mess of flickering, candles with a large bed in one corner covered in pillows and soft fabrics. Another Kimberly-look-alike lay naked on the bed, with legs spread wide and a blank look on her face.

I stepped into the room.

“Father. I’m ready for communion,” she said in almost no voice.

“Communion’s cancelled,” I said.

She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t resist as I tore a piece of purple fabric off the wall and draped it over her. Her hand was cold and dry in mine as I helped her up and we walked back out to the other girls.

“All of you,” I said, “go hide in one of the other rooms. Keep the door closed and stay quiet.”

“Ana will want to know why we aren’t here to serve Father,” said the girl who pushed the traitor’s arm down.

A thousand things to say ran through my mind. I decided that none of them would make any sense right then.

“This is how you need to serve Father,” I said. “Go. Now.” Weak, but it got them moving towards the far corner of the hall.

As I settled myself in front of the second door on the back wall, I could read the rest of the writing above the columns from this vantage point.

The entire slogan read, YOU MUST GIVE YOURSELF COMPLETELY TO YOUR FATHER TO REACH THE WAY AND THE TRUTH.

I wondered if Dariell would be ready to give himself when I reached for him.

Then I put my boot through the door.

CHAPTER 39

I followed through on my kick to the door and ended up a couple of steps into the room, with the Colt up.

One of the two people on the bed scuttled sideways like a crab while he tried to cover himself, get off the bed, think about getting out the door, realize he was trapped, and assert his power all at the same time.

He didn’t do any of them well, though he tried hard on the power thing.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” he bellow-squeaked. “You’ve violated the Inner Sanctum of The Temple.”

I’ll give him this; the words sounded powerful.

That they were being squeaked by a short, skinny, naked man with a shrinking erection kind of ruined the effect I think he was aiming for.

I blinked twice, trying to reconcile the pathetic sight in front of me with the death and destruction outside, but it didn’t match up. He started up again.

“You shouldn’t be in here …”

My trigger finger itched.

“… Inner Sanctum of …”

I kept it together for about half a second more, then I pistol-whipped him across the face.

The gun-sight must have caught him over the eye because a nasty-looking cut appeared and a line of blood headed downwards. His knees started to go. I grabbed him under the armpit with my left hand and hauled him upright.

I pointed the Colt at his left eye.

“I swear Dariell, give me a fucking reason. And, in case you’re wondering, yes, passing out is a fucking reason. So is saying or doing anything I don’t tell you to.”

He declined to respond.

While I’d been helping Dariell understand the rules of the game, Kimberly hadn’t moved from her position on the bed. She was naked, on elbows and knees, with her butt in the air and her legs spread but, based on her reaction, I might have walked in on her reading her bible.

A silver tray on a small table near the head of the bed held two cups, the faint dregs of a black liquid staining the bottom. Candles flickered and incense burned.

I gave Dariell another look that said I would shoot him if he so much as farted, reached out to grab a blanket and draped it over Kimberly.

“It’s okay. It’s over now. Put that around you, we’re going home.”

She oozed to the edge of the bed and sat looking at the floor. Tugged at the blanket around her shoulders.

“Did Mom send you?” Her voice was so soft I barely heard it. “I prayed hard that she would send someone.”

Movement in my peripheral vision.

I swung back to wrap both hands around the gun and used my thumb to cock it. When Dariell looked up I had the sight centered between his eyes.

He froze, one arm stretched toward the bed, eyes focused on the black hole of the muzzle.

“How badly do you want to meet your God? ’Cause I can organize that, no problem.”

“… sheet …”

I flicked the gun. “Slowly,” I said. “One-handed.”

He pulled a sheet from the top of the bed and wound it awkwardly around himself.

“Okay,” I said. “This is how it works. You …” I nodded at him. “… are going to walk in front of me, hands out from under the sheet so I can see them. We’re going to the front door to meet a friend of mine. If I tell you to stop or slow down, you do it. If you don’t, I’ll do it for you.

“Kimberly,” I said. She raised her eyebrows but didn’t lift her gaze from the floor. “Can you walk?”

She nodded.

Slowly. Submissively.

“You walk beside me. Go at your own pace. We’ll stop if you need to.”

She nodded again. Blinked a few times.

“Let’s go.” Dariell took a step forward. “Not yet hotshot. Kimberly first.”

I backed out of the door while keeping the gun trained on his chest. Kimberly stood up, swayed a little. I thought she was going to hit the floor but she tucked her chin in, blinked again and stood still. She shuffled through the doorway, blocking Dariell for a second—and nearly giving me heart failure—then she was clear and he was still standing in the room. I swept her around behind me with an arm and motioned at him.

“Alright then, big man. Lead the way.”

Our awkward caravan shuffled across the rug and around the circle of columns. Kimberly swayed again and put one hand on a column for support. I was about to shout to Dariell to stop, but she shook her head and stepped forward again.

We reached the double doors.

Dariell pushed open the left hand door and found himself staring at the wrong end of a loaded shotgun.

“This lil’ runt?” Cowboy said. “Thas what all this fuss is about?” He tipped his hat up on his head. “Sheeit, we shoulda let Mimi handle the whole thang by herself.”

Cowboy pushed Dariell to the floor and ground a knee into his back. The sheet fell open to expose his pasty white backside.

“Dang! You ain’t payin’ me enough to see the shit I seen tonight, boss-man. We gonna have to renegotiate my pay.”

“Take it up with my rep at the Federated Thugs and Gumshoes Guild,” I said. “They’re always looking for feedback.”

Cowboy reached into his hat and pulled out two cable ties. He wound them around Dariell’s wrists and drew them tight. They clamped his hands together with a quick zipping sound. Cowboy pulled him to his feet and tied the sheet around his waist.

“I don’ care if yore nekkid, but I don’t want to have to look atcha,” Cowboy said.

“What’s going on out there?” I nodded towards the front door.

“I dropped one of those guys when he came prowlin’ up on the porch. That sent the other two a-runnin’,” Cowboy said, sneaking a glance towards the door. “There’s still heroes down by the tunnel playing with their dicks and their machine guns. Each time they start up, Mimi lets a coupla rounds go and they shush down right quick.”

“Alright. Let’s head back to the truck and see if we can’t get the fuck out of here,” I said.

“Sounds like a plan to me.” He grabbed the shotgun in one hand and Dariell’s bound wrists in the other.

I reached out to guide Kimberly towards the door and she shrank away.

I let my arm drop.

“It’s okay. We’re going home now.”

She stared at the floor and nodded slowly.

One step at a time.

CHAPTER 40

We were outside and stepping off the porch when the shots came screaming out of the night.

The first whistled past me from the right and disappeared across the compound.

The sound of gunfire rolled over us a split second later, in case we needed any more incentive to get our collective asses in gear.

I was into motion, grabbing Kimberly by the arm and dragging her with me, turning us both away from the direction of the shots. She tugged against my grip but it was no time for social niceties.

I twisted my right arm as far as it would go behind me and pulled off three shots from the Colt. I knew there was no chance of hitting anything but it might give us an extra second or so.

I saw Cowboy push Dariell forward and turn around to aim the shotgun past my right shoulder. It boomed as I ran past and the hearing in my right ear faded. I cut left to seek shelter from the edge of the porch we’d stepped off. A bullet slammed into the porch post near my head tearing away chunks of paint and wood and I knew we couldn’t stay there.

“The church,” Cowboy yelled from far away.

I pushed Dariell in the right direction then grabbed Kimberly around the waist and picked her up with my left arm. I fired two more shots right and behind and took off at a run towards the back wall of the church, where I could see a small porch and door.

Dariell was about three steps in front of me when he got shot.

He was running, well enough for a guy with his hands cuffed behind him and a sheet wrapped around his waist. Then his mid-section shuddered and blood spurted from his abdomen. He staggered and started to go down.

I kept my speed up and thrust my arm forward, gun and all, driving it between his left elbow and rib cage. He howled.

The shotgun boomed behind me again and I heard Cowboy say, with a rising voice, “Get that door open Rafferty or we’re gonna need someone to give us all last rites.”

Carrying the weight of two people slowed me down, but there’s not a lot like being shot at for motivation. I closed the distance to the back wall of the church in another five steps, while the shotgun boomed and bullets sizzled through the air. Dariell grunted and sagged as I reached the back wall of the church.

I didn’t break stride.

Threw the combined weight of all three of us against the door and, mercifully, it gave way. I kept going, careful to leave enough space for Cowboy to get in and shut the door. The room we burst into was dark, with the only light leaking in through the broken doorway.

That light dimmed behind us and the shotgun boomed again twice. Loud and close. I heard Cowboy slam the door but we weren’t safe yet. We needed to get further inside.

Cowboy pushed past me—I wasn’t going to drop Dariell or Kimberly yet—and his fingers scrabbled in the darkness for a door handle.

A soft click and rectangle of light cut through the gloom.

The echo of the shotgun faded and was replaced by a chorus of singing voices.

Nearer my God to Thee?

Cowboy grabbed Dariell from me and hustled him through the inside doorway. I stepped through and placed Kimberly back on her feet. She shrank away from me and sat on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees. She mumbled and murmured to herself.

We’d entered the kitchen.

Two fridges that had seen better days slumped against the end wall. Open shelving held a garage-sale assortment of cooking pots, pans and storage containers. Scuffed linoleum flowed underneath timber-framed, Formica-clad countertops. Cowboy swept his free arm across the nearest one, scattering an assortment of dirty buckets and a couple of empty, brown plastic bottles to the floor.

He dumped Dariell on top and Dariell screamed then, but found an even higher register when Cowboy produced a gleaming hunting knife from his boot.

“Hush now. I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.” He rolled Dariell up on his side and with a single flick of his wrist, sliced the cable ties away. “Now that yore shot, I figure you’re not much for runnin’. Put your hands over that and push hard, while I find sumpin to wrap you with.”

That was the bullet wound in Dariell’s left side. It was leaking blood but not enough to be life-threatening. Not inside the next hour anyway, and this thing was gonna be over long before that.

He should have been thankful that Steve’s guys weren’t loaded with hollow points.

Dariell lay on the bench, pale, slick with sweat, and put both his palms over the bloody groove, wincing as he laced his fingers together and pulled his hands into his body.

Gunfire rattled outside.

Cowboy had smashed open a nearby cupboard and was still talking.

“We don’t want you dyin’ on us. Not ’til Rafferty says.”

Dariell looked at me wide-eyed.

The choir continued in the background.

Cowboy pulled a long white cloth from a shelf and moved back to the bench. “Get those hands out of the w—”

That’s all I heard as I looked into the open cupboard.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to be stored in the kitchen of a religious organization. That being said, most of the items on the shelves were pretty standard fare. White cloths, candles, bibles. A whole section of stationery: pads, pencils and so on. A few big jugs of purified water from Safeway. Not-yet-holy water, I guessed. Some of the usual staples; cleaners, disinfectants, a few bottles of Drano. Even a couple of jars of coffee, tea bags, and a pyramid of cracked and stained mugs.

As I said, I wouldn’t know the first thing about what should have been there, but the stacks of cardboard trays with gleaming vials of clear liquid and labels reading Ketamine HCI looked out of place.

Cowboy had finished wrapping Dariell’s stomach and the makeshift white bandage was blossoming red. Dariell lay on his back, holding his hands, slick and shiny with his own blood, in front of his face.

He was pale and sweat beaded all over his body and he looked triumphant.

That can’t be right, I thought, but it’s what it looked like.

“It’ll help,” Cowboy said. “He gonna slow us down, but I assume you don’t wanna leave him behind.”

“You assume right. More to the point, do you have any assumptions on how we’re gonna get out of here,” I said. “I’m going to bet those guys have the backdoor covered.”

“Safe bet,” Cowboy said.

Kimberly keened in the corner, a poignant harmony to the muffled choir and counterpoint to the gun battle outside.

Steve’s guys must be down in the compound by now, I thought.

“I’ve only got the Colt and two clips. You’ve got the shotgun, some shells and that cannon you call a handgun.”

“Got a couple throwing knives, too.” Cowboy grinned wickedly. “Don’t forget those.”

“Oh gee, why didn’t you say so. I was hoping to stay a bit further away from the men with the big guns, but be my guest.”

“Har de har har, boss-man. Way I sees it, all we got to do is get to a space where Mimi can see the bad guys. Then her and Mother Mary can hep us out.”

“Mother Mary?”

“Yep.” He smiled. “Thas what she calls the Barrett.”

I shook my head.

Who names their gun?

But at that point I didn’t care if she called it Puff the Magic Dragon, if it helped get our asses out of there.

It became irrelevant though, because Dariell chose that moment to stand up and walk out of the room.

CHAPTER 41

The singing choir got louder and I registered movement behind me.

By the time I got turned around, flickering light and song were flooding the kitchen.

I hadn’t seen it before; another door concealed in the kitchen’s corner. Through the opening I could see Dariell shuffling to the centre of a raised stage where a crude wooden altar rested under a white sheet.

He held his head up, smiled and spread his arms, fingers pointed at the floor, palms out. I could see the corner of a row of seating off to the right.

The faithful, lined up to worship.

Like cattle to the slaughter.

I leaned forward to start out the door. Cowboy laid a hand on my arm.

“Slow down there a second, boss-man. We’re not shore where all the bad guys are. Let’s see how this thang plays out.”

I looked past Dariell and realized there was another person on the stage.

A woman. Blonde. Pretty. Wearing bright purple robes.

She sat in a chair on the opposite side of the stage to our concealed doorway, hands folded in her lap and a beatific smile on her face. Dariell’s movement caught her eye and she turned to him as she rose. She seemed to stop for a moment then, halfway out of her seat. Her smile faltered, as if she realized Dariell didn’t look quite right, to be replaced a split second later with a hungry grin.

Animalistic. Carnivorous.

It was like watching a person’s body split open and their true, terrible, inner being crawl out.

Dariell moved to center stage. I wasn’t sure he even knew where he was any more.

The singing died out as the congregation’s voices dropped away one by one, presumably at the sight of their beloved leader, injured by the opposing forces of the non-believing. Far away gunfire could still be heard.

“Father!” trilled the blonde woman, as she strode across the stage to meet Dariell in the middle. “Father has returned from The Temple!”

A chorus of “Amens” fluttered through the crowd.

“He has returned to You,” she continued, her voice edging higher and louder. “Returned after spending his time in the sanctuary of The Temple, taking communion with Our Lord.”

I wondered whether I would be accurate enough with the Colt over the twenty-five yards to take Dariell out.

The woman kept orating.

“And Father has been Chosen to show You the mark of the Risen Christ in bodily form.”

The woman was almost chanting by now, and I was struck with another bout of deja vu. The dreams. The blonde woman on the throne.

Get fucked, Rafferty. There’s no way you could have seen this woman in your dreams. That shit doesn’t happen.

“The Lord has anointed Father with the marks of the suffering of His own Son.” She guided Dariell to face the unseen audience. Another round of Amens followed and I imagined that many crosses were being made and breasts beaten.

The woman began to roar.

“The marks of the suffering His Son endured at the hands of the cursed.” She pronounced it curse-edd. “He has marked Father, as A Sign! A Sign of the End Times!”

I looked at Dariell. The woman had grabbed the back of his bandage and was using it to hold him upright. He winced with the movement and his eyelids fluttered, but I’d bet everything I had that no-one was looking at his face.

He was still standing in that pose of supplication. For how much longer, it was impossible to tell. The sweat was dripping off him as he stood, shirtless, with a dirty sheet wrapped around his waist, a ragged and oozing wound in his side, his palms and forehead shiny with blood.

“A Sign that You are the Chosen Ones, anointed by Our Lord. Just as he has anointed Father.

“A Sign that You are the True Faithful. The faithless have turned their backs. They abandoned You by remaining in their earth-bound domiciles. From where they will never find The New World.

“A Sign of His Knowing the persecution You face from the Evil Forces.”

She was raving now, spittle flying from her lips, spray sparkling in the candlelight.

“Hear their Weapons of Evil as They seek to destroy You. To destroy Your Peace and Communion with Our Lord!”

As if in answer to her twisted prayers, gunfire rattled through the walls of the church.

Mother Mary cracked again, making her own profound statement.

“The forces of Evil will not Stop. They will Never seek to Understand. As You have sought to Understand.”

Dariell started to sway. His eyes looked very white.

The woman grabbed him harder around the waist.

“You have been Chosen. Chosen to move to the Higher Place, where the faithless and evil are not welcome. Our Lord has Chosen with his bodily anointment of Father to show You the Way to the New Jerusalem! He has called and You must follow the Way and the Truth!”

Another low murmur of “Amen” rolled throughout the church.

The gunfire continued outside.

Something bumped my arm and I turned to see Kimberly trying to squeeze her way between Cowboy and I. We both reached for her, and she swung her arm at me.

“Ana says we must follow the way,” she said in a monotone.

That’s Ana?

I put my arm out to block her path to the doorway. She feebly hit my arm, but made no move to duck under or try to get around me.

I looked back to the church.

Ana had walked, with her hand still around Dariell’s waist, helping him to the altar in the middle of the stage.

“Put your hands up and let them see your palms, you useless bastard,” she hissed.

Dariell complied, leaning his good side against the altar.

Automatic fire chugged away outside. The Barrett barked again.

“You have been called to follow the Way and come home to the Lord. And You must follow the Way.”

A rustle swept through the congregation. “We will Follow the Way,” they said as one.

“We must follow the way,” Kimberly said and beat on my arm again.

Ana reached past Dariell to grab something from the altar.

“The Lord has called and …” she screeched.

“We will Follow the Way,” boomed the unseen congregation.

A burst of gunfire followed by a response from Mother Mary.

Ana placed the something in Dariell’s hand, and I saw the truth.

“No!”

I jumped forward and through the doorway.

Lifetimes too late.

Dariell was bringing the disposable paper cup down from his lips. He reached out to place it on the altar but lost his grip, it fell on its side and his knees buckled. His hands scrabbled like claws on the altar cloth, succeeding only in pulling it with him when he fell. It billowed over him like a shroud, and scattered the candles to the floor, burning still.

I stopped ten yards from the altar, realizing that I was out in the open, and turned to the right.

The church was full, and the whole congregation was standing.

Some had their heads bowed.

Some were looking at the ceiling.

Some were looking at me, like a vision.

Some were still holding the little, angelic-white cups. Others had already let them slip from their grasp.

In one of the back rows I heard a clatter and a crash.

They fell then, like a series of demented dominoes.

One here.

Three there.

A black man on my left.

An Asian woman in the front row.

Most collapsed vertically; a few just sat down in the pews. Others fell forward on their knees like they were getting one last prayer out, “Hey God. Open the door, I’m on my way.”

Within twenty or thirty seconds, there was no more movement.

The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple, Lincoln chapter, was still.

Cowboy’s voice beside me.

“Aw man, that is jes’ fucked up.”

I had no words.

At Cowboy’s side, Kimberly mumbled, “We must follow the way.”

I looked across the hall at the three hundred people who had followed the way and wondered if Kimberly would ever understand how lucky she was.

A grunt.

We turned.

Ana was slumped in the chair on the far-side of the altar, her upper body draped over her knees. She was gurgling and shaking. I lowered the Colt and took a step.

She bolted upright and roared.

“Hah!”

Her body shook and pulsed as she laughed.

The sheet over Dariell’s body caught fire and started to crackle underneath her words.

“Perfect! Perfect!” She clapped her hands together. “Even better than I expected.”

Her lips curled back and she cackled.

“Not an original thought in their useless heads. Not one that I didn’t put there. I wondered if maybe one of them might not go through with it, but not a single one resisted.”

She noticed me about then. Leaned back on her throne and placed her hands lightly on the chair arms.

I took another step forward, to which she tilted her head to the right and played the hint of a smile over her mouth.

“Dariell’s injuries … that was your doing, I assume.”

I boggled. She shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter. They were perfect. And those idiots saw exactly what I told them to.”

Her eyes widened in the flickering light from Dariell’s pyre.

“Kimberly,” she said.

I sensed Kimberly bowing her head between me and Cowboy.

Ana went on.

“You have served Father well. He has been called by Our Lord to the New World and left us behind. You are now called to serve me. Come here Kimberly.”

Cowboy moved sideways to halt Kimberly’s steps and I raised the Colt.

Dariell’s sheet-covered form crackled louder as the flames spread to the carpet and licked at the altar.

“Not a chance in hell, Ana,” I said. “Kimberly’s going home.”

Ana’s grin widened. Feral. Insatiable.

“You are home, Kimberly. You belong here. Serving me.”

I heard Kimberly’s hands shuffling on Cowboy’s jacket as she tried to step around him.

“It doesn’t matter.” Ana waved her hand. “I’ll always be in her head. She’s stupid, and weak. Just like the others. You saw what happened to them.”

She looked me in the eye and I could tell, despite the comforting weight of the Colt, I wasn’t the least scared person in the room.

“Look at them. Incapable of independent thought. Willing, desperate even, to accept what anyone else says, no matter how ridiculous. They didn’t deserve to live. None of them. Pointless, miserable excuses for life. Pathetic, sniveling little—”

I’d had enough of everything right then, so I did what anyone else would.

I shot her.

Turned to Cowboy.

“Let’s get the hell out of this godforsaken place.”

The three of us walked down the central aisle of the church as the altar burned behind us. In places we had to step over—and maneuver Kimberly around—the bodies of the devout that had fallen into the aisle.

I tried not to look at them.

Wondered if any of them were Lucy’s family.

Wondered how the fuck this had all happened.

Wondered if there was a way to scrub my brain clean.

Cowboy and I, with Kimberly between us, reached the front doors of the church and stiff-armed them open.

We crossed the small porch and walked down the wooden steps. Set foot on the gravel. Stopped to take a couple of breaths of the clean, clear night air.

I heard the fire starting to take hold of the church and turned back, expecting to see the flickering of flames in the front windows.

I did not expect to see seven men in black, with balaclavas and bullet-proof vests, pointing what I considered to be the wrong end of their MP5s at us.

CHAPTER 42

“Rafferty,” someone growled from the darkness.

I recognized the voice and my shoulders slumped.

Would this night never end?

Steve Wesson stepped into the light from the side of the church.

He was dressed the same. Business shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tie loosened at his throat. Suit pants and dusty leather shoes. And a nifty bullet-proof vest stenciled with big yellow letters. ATF.

Probably thought he was macho as hell.

“I thought I made it clear that you were to fuck off and not come back,” he said. The gang with the guns parted to let him walk through. “You didn’t listen to me and now you’ve stepped in serious shit.”

He jerked his chin at the guy furthest left, who swung his weapon down, letting it hang from its sling as he moved his hands to his utility belt and took a step forward.

I held up a hand.

The guy on the left stopped dead. The other six swayed backwards and four of them tensed their trigger fingers. Steve was caught with his mouth open.

“Let me give you three reasons,” I said, “why it’s a bad idea to pursue that line of thinking, Stevie-boy.” He grimaced.

Maybe that was what his mother called him.

I hoped so.

I turned my open hand into a single finger pointed up.

“Number one. Any moves by The Magnificent Seven here to take us into custody will be met with a swift and furious response.”

I dropped my finger.

The Barrett cracked in the distance at the same time as the .50 caliber slug screamed over Steve’s head with about four inches to spare and slammed into one of the church’s porch posts. Maybe I dreamed it, but I thought I saw Steve’s hair ruffle in the bullet’s wind wake.

The hotshots gripped their weapons tighter and looked into the night in different directions, none of them even close to where I knew Mimi had fired from. She’d be on the move anyway, so their attempts to locate her were pointless.

Steve turned to look at the front of the church. From eighteen inches above the decking, the post was gone. It had ceased to exist, and the porch roof wobbled and sagged.

“Not even your fancy bulletproof vest would stop one of those with your name on it, my friend.” I gave him a tired smile as he opened his mouth to protest. “Yeah, I admit it, your guys might even get their shots off.”

I pointed the finger at his chest.

“But I guarantee, even if they get lucky and took the three of us out, you will be the first one down and that the others will not survive the night.”

Fourteen eyeballs swiveled to look sideways at Steve through the balaclava slits.

“Number two. You are gonna be busy. Once the clean-up crew gets here and secures the site, you’ll learn how big your workload is about to become. Working out how and why the psychopathic leader of this church perpetrated kidnapping, extortion, drug abuse, and systematic rape during your watch is going to chew up so much of your time, you won’t have any left to deal with us.

“And a heads up, if you do want to find out the how and the why, you’d better get inside the church before it burns down. She’ll need medical attention for her leg, but I don’t think you’ll even have to hit her to get a confession. She really wants to talk.

“And finally …”

Once the adrenaline starts to wear off, it’s amazing how tired you get. My ankle started to throb and a pulse pounded behind my left eye.

“Finally,” I repeated. “None of this is my fault. And the last thing your career needs, Stevie-boy, is me telling the press, and anyone else who will listen, about how the ATF showed up a day late and a dollar short to prevent the mass murder of over three hundred innocent people.”

He closed his mouth and swallowed at that.

“And believe me, I can be very talkative when I want to.”

I started to flash him a winning smile, then thought, fuck it.

“So run along and play now, Stevie. We’re going home.”

Cowboy touched Kimberly’s arm and we turned and followed our wavering shadows in the direction of the Sierra.

He shouted as we reached the edge of the firelight.

“You’re one lucky fuck, you know that, Rafferty?”

I turned back and looked at him, silhouetted against the flaming church.

“Goes to show what can happen through the power of prayer, Wesson,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said. “Who the fuck would you pray to?”

“My Mother Mary.”

Cowboy chuckled and the three of us walked into the darkness.

CHAPTER 43

Cowboy eased the Sierra to the kerb in front of the Troupe house and killed the engine.

The sky was bursting into life, all crimson and gold.

I turned to the back seat, where Kimberly lay under a blanket with her head on a gun case rolled into a makeshift pillow. She stirred and her eyes flickered. Mimi, with her head propped against the windowsill, slept on, the boy nestled in her arms, both breathing softly.

“You’re home, Kimberly.”

“Huh hmmm.” She sat up and blinked at the morning light beyond the window.

“Home?” she said, and looked back at me. “Really?”

I nodded.

She frowned and looked at the floor of the truck. What she didn’t do was throw the door open and go running down the front path back to her parents.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned but that struck me as odd.

“Mom’ll be angry with me.”

“Why in hell would you think that?”

“She told me to trust the church leaders. I did and look what happened. I didn’t even keep my purity vow to Brian.”

I rubbed a dirty hand over my stubbled chin and sighed.

“I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know shi … ahh much about religion, Kimberly. And I know even less about children. But …”

She raised her head and looked at me.

“I used to have a Mom, a Dad and a sister.”

Her eyes widened like I’d told her I could fly.

“And what I do know is that, no matter what, my Mom and Dad never stopped loving my sister and me. Even when things got hard. Or bad.”

Cowboy nodded.

“Other people. Other beliefs. Other things. They’ll come and go. Most of them’ll be good and a few of them won’t. But family …” I paused. “Family will be there for you until the end.”

I blew out a breath.

“How about we go wake them up?”

She nodded and when she smiled, she looked like the girl in the photos.

I lifted an arm out the window as Cowboy started the engine.

I hoped I hadn’t over-estimated Kathy-Lee and Wayne in my impromptu speech about family.

Looking at them, in their matching bathrobes, standing on the porch with their daughter encircled in their arms again and smiling at me through a curtain of tears, I thought I had played it about right.

Thank you, Kathy Lee mouthed.

I nodded.

Wayne kissed the top of Kimberly’s head and squeezed her tighter.

Cowboy popped the clutch and the Sierra leapt away from the kerb.

“We left a lot of people dead back there, boss-man.”

“Uh huh. But we got one back alive, and right now that’s gonna be good enough for me.”

Mimi and the boy snored quietly from the back seat.

“Make that two, boss-man.”

CHAPTER 44

“They can’t bury a story like this, Rafferty. It’s not right.”

I shrugged.

Hilda and I were having dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant where I was making a helluva mess with my pho, but I didn’t care since it was so good.

“Right doesn’t come into it, hon. The government can’t be seen to have stood by while a couple of hundred citizens were murdered. They can, and they will, bury it,” I said, mopping at my chin. “It happened in the middle of the desert, to a bunch of people isolated from their families and friends, which is close as you can get to it never having happened. There’s no-one left to tell the story and Steve’ll swing the whole thing his way to get another rung higher on the government ladder.”

“What about Kimberly and the other girls?” She sipped her wine. The delicate way her fingers cradled the glass and the wonderful things her lips and throat did as she swallowed helped me to remember that there were still good things left in this world.

“I don’t think even Steve is enough of a prick to give the girls too much grief and, if I was them, I’d be working damn hard to forget it all.” I spooned up more broth. “Every last, little, disgusting piece of it.”

“You’re probably right,” she said.

“Often am,” I said to the table.

She left that one alone.

“And the boy?”

“Hmmm?”

“The boy you rescued,” she said. “What happens to him?”

“Well … there was no-one else left alive, and we sure as hell weren’t going to hand him over to Steve and his men in black, so …” I shrugged, knowing we’d done the right thing, but still working to get my head around it.

Hilda goggled. “You’re kidding!”

“They’ve wanted a kid for a long time, you know that. And then Mimi found out that she couldn’t … well, this seemed like the perfect solution.”

“But,” she spluttered, “but … I mean, I love them both, but they, well, with the stuff they do …”

I reached for her hand. “You think he’s worse off now than with the people who took him to Lincoln?”

She didn’t respond, but her hand softened in mine. Seemed like she thought we’d done the right thing, too.

“It was nice of Lucy to come up and see Kimberly last week,” Hilda finally said, spearing the last piece of spiced beef.

It had been more than nice, it had been necessary.

It had taken me a long while in the days following Kimberly’s return, to explain to Kathy-Lee and Wayne about Lucy, and why I thought it would be a good idea for Kimberly and she to talk.

They agreed to meet at a café downtown and were relieved when she turned out to be normal. Lucy jumped into the role of big sister and, when I left the four of them, there were cautious smiles around the table.

Not as many smiles twenty minutes later when I sat down with Don at a nearby bar and told him about our Lincoln version of Shootout at the OK Corral.

“Holy shit, Rafferty,” he said. “I know I said it was a possibility, but I didn’t think he’d go through with it. He’d never shown a tendency to violen—”

“It wasn’t him,” I said, taking a long pull on my beer.

“What?”

“It wasn’t Dariell. It was Ana.”

“But …”

“Dariell was the preacher, the figurehead, but Ana was pulling all the strings. It was her, right from the beginning. To create the church, con the faithful into handing over their money, shift his doctrine to preach about the end of the world. Hell, the whole damn mess was her idea.”

“Why did Dariell go along?”

“She gave him what he couldn’t get himself. The girls.”

“Huh?”

“I never showed you a picture of Kimberly, did I?”

Don shook his head.

“She’s a dead ringer for Lucy. And the other girls at the compound. And they all look a helluva lot like Ana.” I took another long swallow. “I imagine there’s something in Dariell’s background that gets him hot and bothered about young blonde girls and Ana played into that by making sure there was a supply to keep him on the leash.”

I felt like I might be sick.

I stopped talking and drank more beer. That helped.

“But …” Don goldfished.

“Try to understand it if you want. I’m done,” I said. I slid a manila envelope across the table.

“What’s this?”

“Transcripts of the FBI interviews with Ana. I made the mistake of reading them. They’re all yours now.”

“How did you …”

“Let’s just say they came down with the latest snow.”

Don ripped open the envelope and started reading. I saw his eyes widen about halfway down the first page.

Not bad.

My reaction at the same point had been to put a fist through my office wall.

I leaned back in my chair and finished my beer. Signaled the barman for another.

It would take a long time for those left behind, but they would get there.

Don would use Snowy’s intel to continue his crusade against charlatans and psychopaths and Lucy, Kimberly and the other girls would help each other find their way to lives beyond those of being ruled by false gods.

The barman slid the fresh beer over.

Don read on.

I drank.

“You did good.”

“…”

“Listen to me,” Hilda said, lighting a cigarette and leaning back. “You did good, Rafferty. You know that, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“So, what’s wrong?”

I concentrated on my beer. Tiger was no Samuel Adams, but a perfectly acceptable beer given our surroundings.

“Rafferty?”

“Hmm?”

“You couldn’t save them all.” She leaned forward. “You couldn’t have.”

“I know.”

She squinted.

“It’s not that.”

“What is it then?” Soft voice. Open. Just for me.

I sighed. “Something was telling me Ana was behind the whole thing … even before the shit hit the fan.”

She reached out and touched my arm.

“And, even though it was trying to tell me that, I didn’t hear it.”

I sighed again.

“I know things, Hil. My world revolves around it. I know when I’m being lied to. I know how to catch the bad guys. I know how to fight and shoot and, if necessary, kill. I know how to cope with all that. And it all makes sense.”

“But?”

“But … I can’t make sense of the things I knew about this case. Things I shouldn’t have known. And I can’t wrap my head around how things might have been different if I’d just understood what I knew.”

Hilda smiled. The electric candlelight danced around her jaw and sparkled fire in her eyes. For a moment, I almost pinned down the flecks of colour lurking there, but they spun away from me once more.

She grabbed my hand in both of hers.

“I know it’s hard for you to admit you don’t know everything about everything.” I bristled. She squeezed my hand and smiled. “Yes, it is true. And it’s okay. It’s part of why I love you. And no matter what else happened, you did what you needed to do. You found Kimberly and brought her home.”

“I did.”

“You did. And in time, you’ll be able to let go of worrying about those dreams.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You sound pretty sure.”

“Often am.” She grinned.

“Care to share your secret?”

“Finish your beer, take me home, and I’ll give you something to occupy your mind.” She grinned again and her stockinged foot slid up my leg. “I guarantee you’ll like it.”

I thought about that. I was beyond ready to start forgetting about this case and Hil’s suggestion sounded like the perfect first step.

And besides, our ladies always want the best for us, don’t they?

Started 24 June 2015

Completed 5 December 2017

Mittagong, Australia

Keep reading for an excerpt from the next Rafferty P.I. mystery,

WRIGHT & WRONG

WRIGHT & WRONG | CHAPTER 1

Typical Monday morning.

In the office, my feet on the desk, and into my second cup of hot black heart-starter. Warm breeze from the street on the back of my neck. Loafing with the newspaper and eyeballing the hell out of a pre-lunch nap.

Not everyone shared my sunny disposition and positive outlook on the day.

A tanker, the Exxon Valdez, had run aground a couple days earlier in Alaska, someplace called Prince William Sound, and the aerial photos of the resultant oil spill looked like a depraved Christo installation. Behold, Ladeez and Gentlemen, I give you “Ze Earth … in … Blackface”. Thunderous applause and don’t forget to visit the gift shop on your way out.

Hundreds of oil-skinned volunteers were already at the scene, doing their best to contain the spreading slick and limit damage to the surrounding wilderness. Only time would tell how successful those efforts would be.

I was sipping coffee and trying to visualize the paper’s reports of how much oil had made it outside the boat, when I heard the first shot.

My brain tried to downshift straight from barrels of crude to threat assessment, got caught somewhere in the middle, and lurched into a call and response routine—That was a gunshot | Don’t be stupid, it was a car backfire | No, I’m certain it was a gunshot—before I told the cerebral combatants to shut the hell up and got myself to the open window.

Looked up and down Jackson street.

Usual mid-morning traffic. People running late for work jockeying with those go-getters off to the second or third meeting for the day. Lots of cars. No obvious clunkers.

Strike the car backfire.

Another shot.

Two more. Three.

Now with a clear line of hearing, my brain gave up arguing with itself and started triangulating.

I could see slantwise through a gap between brick buildings and towards the open space on the other side of Young Street. Behind a tall fence—over beyond the Scottish Rite Cathedral—figures ran, wheeling in unison, like a flock of birds startled into flight.

Screams, shouts and a chorus of “Oh my God”s pleaded their way to me before another volley of shots cut them off.

Two teenagers at the right edge of the flock—a boy and girl—fell like puppets with slashed strings. The rest of the bodies kept wheeling to the left and out of sight.

An overcoated and backwards-baseball-capped figure strode into my view slot. He stood next to the two bodies, cradled his AR-15, and cocked his head. He brought the gun up to his left shoulder and fired at the figures on the ground. They twitched and sprouted crimson haloes.

Blood angels on the pavement.

The figure toed both bodies with a booted foot, then looked over his shoulder and jerked his head. A second boy shuffled into view. Bright orange t-shirt and jeans, no overcoat. My brain cut in again—Too hot for an overcoat today—before it caught the look I threw at it and retreated into silence.

T-Shirt had a black backpack slung over his shoulders, held a shortened shotgun, and pointed it nowhere in particular.

Overcoat shrugged and his mouth moved. T-Shirt didn’t react. Overcoat’s mouth moved again, wider this time, and he cuffed T-shirt on the side of the head. He pointed at something I couldn’t see and pushed T-Shirt in that direction. T-Shirt shuffled away.

Overcoat smiled, reached into the duffel bag hanging from his shoulder, extracted a flat black magazine. He ejected the one from the gun, like he was in the middle of his third tour, and slammed the new one home.

He raised the gun to his shoulder again, braced his feet and squeezed off a series of shots. The reverberations reached me a split second later.

More screams and shouts.

Overcoat stopped firing and turned towards me. He lifted his arm and for a second I thought he was going to wave, then another member of the Overcoat Club stepped into view, and they high-fived.

They said something to each other, grinned, lifted their guns and fired as they stalked out of sight behind a building.

The boom of a shotgun rolled through the clatter of rifle fire and bounced off buildings and streets. In the background, I could hear sirens cutting through the traffic, too slow.

Screaming collided with rattling gunfire as I bolted for the door.

WRIGHT & WRONG | CHAPTER 2

“It’s a fucking mess,” Lieutenant Ed Durkee said.

The cops had done a good job securing the site and keeping the media away from the school perimeter, allowing them only oblique views from the ends of the street to the killing fields in front of us. That wouldn’t be enough.

I’d have been surprised if there weren’t more than one eager reporter and camera crew knocking on doors in the apartment block on the opposite side of Canton Street, hoping to get an elevated view of the carnage and their network logo plastered coast-to-coast for the next news cycle.

Ed had been good enough to let me stay inside the police cordon. Probably too busy to throw me out. I repaid the favor by doing my best not to get in the way.

“What happened, Ed?”

His answer squeezed between the bars of the steel boundary fence, eight feet high if it was an inch.

“Looks like a couple of kids decided they were Rambo and the rest of the students were Charlies. Fucked if I know why.”

Ed’s description was accurate. The asphalt rec-area beyond the fence did look like an urban war movie.

Police and paramedics jockeyed with each other while, twenty feet to my right, a guy worked an oxy-acetylene torch to cut through the fence uprights. The metal sizzled and spat and the cut ends of the steel bars burned hot and bright.

Inside the schoolyard, bodies were scattered on the hard, dark bitumen like fallen leaves. The lucky were wrapped in blankets being tended to, and simultaneously questioned by, the uniforms, but there were too many silent, misshapen lumps under white sheets.

Two in a V-formation where I’d seen Overcoat One.

Three lined up like piano keys on the steps into the main school building. Which way they’d been facing in their last moment, I couldn’t tell.

One crumpled at the doorway at the top of the steps. Trying to barricade the door, maybe.

A few scattered single sheets behind steel-gray outdoor furniture.

Worst of all—though I had no idea how to judge any of this shit-storm as better or worse—was the collection of sheets in the far corner where the chain-link fences of the baseball diamond and the tennis courts met. I couldn’t, didn’t want to, count them.

It looked like a hotel’s dirty laundry pile.

I turned and got my bearings back to my office window. Figured that as I saw Overcoats One and Two stalk out of sight, they had driven the screaming, pleading students into that far corner of this outdoor area, like a turkey shoot.

And there, huddled together, pressed against each other and the fences meant to keep the bad guys out, they had all died. Like the turkeys do.

“I heard it happen, Ed. Lots of semi-auto rifle fire, plus a single big-bore shot.”

“That fits. We’ve found casings all over the place. These kids musta been armed to the teeth.”

“Two of them were carrying duffel bags with spare ammo. And there was a third. With a sawn-off shotgun.”

“You saw them?” Ed eyebrows reached for the sky. “When? Where?”

“After it all went down. But I didn’t get more than a glimpse between buildings.”

“Hmmm. We’ll get to you. At this rate, Sergeant Ricco’s gonna be taking statements for the next month.”

I looked over Ed’s shoulder to where Ricco squatted next to a dark-haired cheerleader type. Uncomfortable as the pose looked, Ricco could still have passed for a chorus member of Guys and Dolls in his natty pinstripe suit, wingtips and fedora. The girl streamed tears and whipped her head from side to side as she talked to Ricco. He nodded, looked like he was listening, and scribbled in a black notebook.

“How many, Ed?”

Ed mashed his face under both palms and let loose the biggest sigh I’d ever heard.

“Twenty-two dead. We figure two of those to be the shooters.” He sighed again. “Ten injured. The worst of those missing the lower half of his face from a shotgun blast up close. And a shitload of kids and teachers traumatized to hell and back.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Listen, Rafferty, I gotta talk to the principal and Mayor Strauss wants an update in …” Ed checked a watch under his brown suit sleeve. “Shit, less than thirty minutes. I gotta go.”

“No problems, Ed. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

Ed flapped an arm at me and weaved his way between the uniforms, between wailing kids and quiet sheets, and trudged up the stairs into the school.

I packed a pipe, shoved smoke in the direction of my nerves and walked back to the office.

Why?

I didn’t expect I’d ever get an answer to that question.

COMING SOON

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THE RAFFERTY P.I. SERIES

RAFFERTY’S RULES

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

15 years ago, Rafferty saved Vivian from a junkie who tried to blow her head off. So when he’s hired by Vivian’s parents to hunt down her kidnappers, it’s personal. Rafferty saved Vivian once. Can he do it again?

LAST SEEN ALIVE

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

Rafferty’s vacation goes to hell as he works his way through a small Texas town breaking the rules as fast as they can make them, searching for the vicious killer who butchered Cindy Lawson.

POOR DEAD CRICKET

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

He’s been around the block; this isn’t the first case he’s had involving a dead woman. But this time Cricket Dawes is dead, and no-one cares—except Rafferty. And that’s a bad scenario for everyone else.

WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

A double caseload means multiple mayhem for Rafferty. A trigger-happy octogenarian collides with a larger-than-life bounty hunter. One will win him an unexpected friend. The other could buy him a bullet.

CANNON’S MOUTH

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

Rafferty’s mistaken for a hitman. Before he knows it, the mark is dead and he’s left holding the bag. Full of cash. Now the real hitman wants his money and he’s prepared to burn down Rafferty’s world to get it.

FATAL SISTERS

(Shamus Award Winner)

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

Finding Sherm isn’t that hard, but telling his naïve wife that he was killed in a mob-connected whorehouse is. And with the witnesses now being murdered one by one, Rafferty must face the truth: sometimes it’s a simple matter of kill or be killed.

FALSE GODS

Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

Rafferty should wrap up this runaway case easily, but by the time he can find Kimberly in a remote desert compound, they’re trapped in the middle of a deadly game. Can Rafferty get Kimberly out before all hell breaks loose?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt and undying thanks to:

Leisa, Ned & the crew at the real Rush Cafe for providing endless cups of coffee, laughs, and my daily writing ‘office’.

Kylie Mason for her insightful editing & Jessica Bell for a wonderful cover design.

Beta readers, Stew and Alice, for toiling through rough first drafts and asking for more, and my awesome sister Kelly, for proofreading and tons of encouragement.

Dad for blazing the trail and creating a character that is so much damn fun to write about. Rafferty fans around the world, especially Paul Bishop, Kevin Burton Smith, Bill Crider and Cliff Fausset, without whom there definitely would not have been more Rafferty.

Jo Penn, Mark Dawson & Nick Stephenson for sharing their hard-earned lessons and commitment to indie publishing.

And finally, to plagiarise one of my author idols, Matthew Reilly: “To anyone who knows a writer, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.”

PRAISE FOR W. GLENN DUNCAN’S RAFFERTY P.I.

“At first sniff, it may smell a like Spenser with a cowboy hat, but take a good whiff: W. Glenn Duncan's Dallas, Texas private eye Rafferty was actually a blast of fresh air in what was becoming a glut of sensitive, soul-searching, overly politically-correct cookie cutter P.I.s … of course, it helps that Dallas ain't Boston.” | Kevin Burton Smith

“The thing about Rafferty is the fun with the noir aspect. Only a deft hand at word magic could accomplish the mix so smoothly.” | 5 star Amazon review.

“Duncan truly captured the essence of the definitive smart-ass P.I. in his character Rafferty. Take part Sam Spade with a little Mike Hammer, mix in some Spenser and you have an awesome character.” | Cliff Fausset

“I love this series. Rafferty returns with his regular cast of characters: his beloved, sexy and intelligent Hilda Gardner; rumpled and overworked Lt. Durkee and his sidekick Ricco; feisty and fun Mimi with her arsenal; and Mimi’s beloved, the down-to-earth Cowboy with his charming Texas drawl.” | Alice - 5 Star Amazon review

“I have all of the Rafferty titles in my collection. I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff over the years, but the Rafferty books are a mainstay. I think they're terrific!” | Paul Bishop

“Rafferty tends to play dirty, boasting at one point that he ‘hasn't fought fair in twenty years.’ No brainiac, his chief MO seems to be to stir things up, and then see what happens. And he tends to be pretty stubborn, as well. ‘I often ignore what people tell me to do,’ he says. Like, no kidding. And that's part of the fun.” | ThrillingDetective.com

“I don't know much about W. Glenn Duncan except that he wrote a dandy private eye series set in Dallas, Texas … and I think of them as throwbacks to the kind of P.I. books … in the '50s, except influenced as much by Robert B. Parker as by Spillane.” | Bill Crider

“If you love hardboiled P.I. mysteries, don’t hesitate to dig in to this series! I absolutely love the Rafferty PI novels! Fast-paced, exciting, and with twists that keep you guessing, the humorous, sarcastic, and likeable Rafferty is a character with the depth to carry the series and make fans of his readers. I love the relationship he and Hilda have ... it just adds even more depth to the books. I eagerly await the next book in this series ... that’s the hard part: the waiting.” | Suzanne - 5 Star Amazon review

“I love that Rafferty is straightforward about who he is and what he's good at. The dialogue is witty when warranted and the action moves well. As a woman, I also like his girlfriend, who isn't whiny about his work or odd hours, and that he talks to her about his work. So often in this genre, the girlfriend/wife are just for sex or to give the hero a soft side.” | Minnie - 5 Star Amazon review

“At first blush, the framework for Rafferty appears to be yet another Spenser clone (Cowboy, Rafferty’s semi-sociopathic partner channeling Hawk; Hilda, Rafferty’s significant other who is a less irritating version of Susan Silverman; an equal number of wisecracks, fists, and bullets), but it’s quickly apparent in the first few pages of the series, Rafferty and company are in a class of their own.” | Paul Bishop

“Rafferty: Fatal Sisters won a 1991 Shamus for Best Paperback Original. All in all, an entertaining, and very highly recommended series.” | ThrillingDetective.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born an hour north of Rafferty’s stomping ground, W. Glenn Duncan Jr. joined his family when they moved to Australia in the mid-1970’s. He didn’t have a lot of say in the matter, only being a seven-year-old at the time.

He studied Architecture at university and spent 20 odd years working in the design and construction industry before following his father’s path into writing.

False Gods is his first book.

Get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

RaffertyPI.com

bill@raffertypi.com

This is for

WGD

who gave me the love of words

+

SK

who gave me the belief that I knew how to

string a few of them together

False Gods

Copyright © W. Glenn Duncan Jr. 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

Published in 2018 by d squared publishing.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-6482234-2-9

P’back ISBN: 978-0-6482234-3-6

For enquiries regarding this book, please email: enquiry@raffertypi.com

Cover Design by Jessica Bell

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

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Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Ready for more Rafferty?

Wright & Wrong | Chapter 1

Wright & Wrong | Chapter 2

Coming Soon

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The Rafferty P.I. series

Acknowledgments

Praise for W. Glenn Duncan’s Rafferty P.I.

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright