Sacred

Once we were reasonably sure no one had followed us, Angie pulled over behind a bar in Southie.

“So, honey,” she said, turning on the seat, “how was your day?”

“Well—”

“Ask me about mine,” she said. “Come on. Ask.”

“Okay,” I said. “How was your day? Sweetie?”

“Man,” she said, “they were there in five minutes.”

“Who? The police?”

“The police.” She snorted. “No. Those freakazoids with the glandular problems. The ones who were standing around you and the cop and the guy with the busted face.”

“Ah,” I said. “Them.”

“No shit, Patrick, I thought I was dead. I’m in the back office clipping some computer discs, and then, bang, the doors are flying open all over the place, alarms are going sonic on me, and…well, it wasn’t pretty, partner, lemmee tell ya.”

“Computer discs?” I said.

She held up a handful of 3.5 diskettes, bound by a red elastic.

“So,” she said, “besides busting some guy’s face and almost getting arrested, have you accomplished anything?”

Angie had made her way into the back office just before Manny arrived to take me over to the Therapeutic Center. She waited there as Ginny shut off the lights, turned off the coffeemaker, pushed chairs neatly into their desks, all the while singing “Foxy Lady.”

“By Hendrix?” I said.

“At the top of her lungs,” Angie said, “complete with air guitar.”

I shuddered at the image. “You should get combat pay.”

“Tell me about it.”

After Ginny left, Angie went to step out of the rear office and noticed the thin beams of light shafting across the main office. They crisscrossed one another like wires, and rose from the wall at several points, some as low as six inches off the ground, some as high as seven feet.

“Hell of a security system,” I said.

“State-of-the-art. So now I’m stuck in the back office.”

She started by picking the locks of the file cabinets but found mostly tax forms, job description forms, workmen’s comp forms. She tried the computer on the desk, but couldn’t get past the password prompt. She was rifling through the desk when she heard a commotion at the front door. Sensing the jig was up, she used the pry bar she’d used on the window to bust the lock on the file drawer built into the lower right side of the desk. She ripped a gash in the wood, tore the drawer off its rockers, and wrenched it from the desk frame to find the diskettes waiting for her.

“Finesse being the operative word here,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, “they were coming through the front door like a plane crash. I grabbed what I could and went out the window.”

There was a guy waiting out there for her but she popped his head with the pry bar a couple of times and he decided he preferred to sleep in the bushes for a while.

She came out onto Beacon through a small yard in front of a nondescript brownstone, found herself in a stream of Emerson College students heading to a night class. She walked with them as far as Berkeley Street and then retrieved our company car from its illegal parking spot on Marlborough Street.

“Oh, yeah,” she told me, “we got a parking ticket.”

“Of course, we did,” I said. “Of course, we did.”

Richie Colgan was so happy to see us he almost broke my foot trying to slam his front door on it.

“Go away,” he said.

“Nice bathrobe,” I said. “Can we come in?”

“No.”

“Please?” Angie said.

Behind him, I could see candles in his living room, a flute glass half-filled with champagne.

“Are you playing some Barry White?” I said.

“Patrick.” His teeth were gritted and something akin to a growl rumbled in his throat.

“It is,” I said. “That’s ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love’ coming from your speakers, Rich.”

“Leave my doorstep,” Richie said.

“Don’t sugarcoat it, Rich,” Angie said. “If you’d rather we came back…”

“Open the door, Richard,” his wife, Sherilynn, said.

“Hi, Sheri.” Angie waved through the crack in the door.

“Richard,” Sherilynn said.

Richie stepped back and we came into his house.

“Richard,” I said.

“Blow me,” he said.

“I don’t think it’d fit, Rich.”

He looked down, realized his robe had opened. He closed it and punched me in the kidneys as I passed.

“You prick,” I whispered and winced.

Angie and Sherilynn hugged by the kitchen counter.

“Sorry,” Angie said.

“Oh, well,” Sherilynn said. “Hey, Patrick. How are you?”

“Don’t encourage them, Sheri,” Richie said.

“I’m good. You look great.”

She gave me a little curtsy in her red kimono, and I was, as always, a little taken aback, flustered like a schoolboy. Richie Colgan, arguably the top newspaper columnist in the city, was chunky, his face perpetually hidden behind five o’clock shadow, his ebony skin splotched with too many late nights and caffeine and antiseptic air. But Sherilynn—with her toffee skin and milky gray eyes, the sculpted muscle tone of her slim limbs and the sweet musical lilt of her voice, a remnant of the sandy Jamaican sunsets she’d seen every day until she was ten years old—was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever encountered.

She kissed my cheek and I could smell a lilac fragrance on her skin.

“So,” she said, “make it quick.”

“Gosh,” I said, “am I hungry. You guys have anything in the fridge?”

As I reached for the refrigerator, Richie hit me like a snowplow and carried me down the hall into the dining room.

“What?” I said.

“Just tell me it’s important.” His hand was an inch from my face. “Just tell me, Patrick.”

“Well…”

I told him about my night, about Grief Release and Manny and his Pods, about the encounter with Officer Largeant and Angie’s B and E of the corporate offices.

“And you say you saw Messengers out front?” he said.

“Yeah. At least six of them.”

“Hmm.”

“Rich?” I said.

“Give me the diskettes.”

“What?”