Sacred

“What do you want me to say here?” he said. “I don’t know what’s waiting out there. I’m the one who’ll catch the first bullet anyway.”

I tapped his chin with my gun. “And the second, John. Remember that.”

“Who the hell are you, man?”

“I’m the really scared guy with the fifteen-bullet clip. That’s who. What’s the deal with this place? Is it a cult?”

“No way,” he said. “You can shoot me, but I’m not telling you shit.”

“Desiree Stone,” I said. “You know her, John?”

“Pull the trigger, man. I ain’t talking.”

I leaned in close, looked at his profile, at his left eye skittering in the socket.

“Where is she?” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I didn’t have time to question him or beat the answer out of him now. All I had was his wallet, and that would have to be good enough for a second round with John at a future date.

“Let’s hope this isn’t the last minute of our lives, John,” I said and pushed him into the foyer ahead of me.

7

The front door of Grief Release, Inc., was black birch without so much as an eyehole glass in its center. To the right of the door was brick, but to the left were two small rectangles of green glass, thick and fogged over by a combination of icy wind outside and warm air inside.

I pushed John Byrne to his knees by the glass and wiped the glass with my sleeve. It didn’t help much; it was like looking out from a sauna through ten sheets of plastic wrap. Beacon Street lay before me like an impressionist painting, foggy forms I took for people moving past in the liquid haze, the white streetlights and yellow gas lamps making everything worse somehow, as if I were staring at a picture that had been overexposed. Across the street, the trees in the Public Garden rose in clumps, indistinguishable from one another. I couldn’t be sure if I was seeing things or not, but it seemed that several smaller blue lights flashed repeatedly through the trees. There was no way to know what was out there. But I couldn’t stay here any longer. I could hear voices growing louder in the ballroom, and any minute someone would risk opening the door onto the staircase.

Beacon Street, in the early evening just after rush hour, had to be semicrowded. Even if armed clones of Manny waited out front, it wasn’t like they’d shoot me in front of witnesses. Then again, I didn’t know that for sure. Maybe they were Shiite Muslims, and shooting me was the quickest route to Allah.

“The hell with it,” I said and pulled John to his feet. “Let’s go.”

“Shit,” he said.

I took a few deep breaths through my mouth. “Open the door, John.”

His hand hovered over the doorknob. Then he dropped it and wiped it on his pant leg.

“Take the other hand off your head, John. Just don’t try anything stupid.”

He did, then looked at the doorknob again.

Upstairs, something heavy fell to the floor.

“Any time you’re ready, John.”

“Yeah.”

“Tonight, for instance,” I said.

“Yeah.” He wiped his hand on his pants again.

I sighed and reached around him and yanked open the door myself, dug my gun into his lower back as we came out on the staircase.

And came face-to-face with a cop.

He’d been running past the building when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He stopped, pivoted, and looked up at us.

His right hand went to his hip, just over his gun, and he peered up at John Byrne’s bloody face.

Up the block at the corner of Arlington, several patrol cars had pulled up in front of the corporate offices of Grief Release, their blue and white lights streaking through the trees in the Garden, bouncing off the red brick buildings just past the Cheers bar.

The cop glanced up the block quickly, then back at us. He was a beefy kid, rusty haired and pug-nosed, with the studied glare of a cop or a punk from one of the neighborhoods. The kind of kid some people would take for slow just because he moved that way, and never figure out how wrong they’d been until this kid proved it to them. Painfully.

“Ahm, you two gentlemen have a problem?”

With John’s body blocking my own from the cop’s view, I slipped my gun into my waistband, closed the suit jacket over it. “No problem, Officer. Just trying to bring my friend to the hospital.”

“Yeah, about that,” the kid said and took another step toward the stairs. “What happened to your face, sir?”

“I fell down the stairs,” John said.

Interesting move, John. All you had to do to get rid of me was tell the truth. But you didn’t.

“And broke the fall with your face, sir?”

John chuckled as I buttoned my topcoat over my suit jacket. “Unfortunately,” he said.

“Could you step out from behind your friend, sir?”

“Me?” I said.

The kid nodded.

I stepped to John’s right.

“And would you both mind coming down to the sidewalk?”

“Uh, sure,” we both said in unison.

The kid’s name was Officer Largeant, I saw as we got close enough to read his name tag. Someday he’d make sergeant. Sergeant Largeant. I had the feeling that somehow nobody would give him a hard time about it. I bet nobody would give this kid a hard time about much of anything.

He pulled his flashlight from his hip, shined it on the door of Grief Release, read the gold plate.

“You gentlemen work here?”

“I do,” John said.

“And you, sir?” Largeant pivoted in my direction and the flashlight shone in my eyes just long enough to hurt.

“I’m an old friend of John’s,” I said.

“You’d be John?” The flashlight found John’s eyes.

“Yes, Officer.”

“John…?”

“Byrne.”

Largeant nodded.

“I’m kind of in some pain here, Officer. We were going to walk up to Mass General to get my face looked at.” Largeant nodded again, looked down at his shoes. I took the moment to pull John Byrne’s wallet from my coat pocket.

“Could I see some ID, gentlemen?” Largeant said.

“ID?” John said.

“Officer,” I said and put my arm on John’s back as if to steady him. “My friend might have a concussion.”

“I’d like to see some ID,” Largeant said and he smiled to underscore the edge in his voice. “If you’d step away from your friend. Now, sir.”