Sacred

“That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”

“I—”

“You’re a computer illiterate. Angie, too.”

“I’m sorry. Is that bad?”

He held out his hand. “The discs.”

“If you could just—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He snapped the diskettes from my hand, tapped them against his knee for a moment. “So, I’m doing you another favor?”

“Well, sorta, yeah,” I said. I shifted my feet, looked up at the ceiling.

“Oh, please, Patrick, try the aw-shucks-bawse routine on someone who gives a shit.” He tapped my chest with the diskettes. “I help you, I want what’s on these.”

“How do you mean?”

He shook his head, smiled. “Now, see, you think I’m playing, don’t you?”

“No, Rich, I—”

“Just ’cause we went to college together, all that shit, you think I’m just going to say, ‘Patrick’s in trouble. Lawsy, I’ll do whatever I can.’”

“Rich, I…”

He stepped up close to me, hissed. “You know the last time I had a good old romantic, I’m-gonna-have-sex-with-my-wife-and-take-my-time sorta night?”

I stepped back. “No.”

“Well, I don’t either,” he said loudly. He closed his eyes, tightened the belt on his robe. “I don’t either,” he repeated in his hissed whisper.

“So, I’m leaving,” I said.

He stepped in front of me. “Not until we get this straight.”

“Okay.”

“I find something on these diskettes I can use, I’m using it.”

“Right,” I said. “As always. As soon as—”

“No,” he said. “No ‘as soon as.’ I’m up to here with that ‘as soon as’ shit. As soon as you’re okay with it? No. As soon as I can, Patrick. That’s the new rule. I find something on here, I use it as soon as I can. Okay?”

I looked at him and he stared back at me.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m sorry.” He held a hand to his ear. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Okay, Richie.”

He nodded. “Good. How soon you need it?”

“Tomorrow morning, the latest.”

He nodded. “Fine.”

I shook his hand. “You’re the best, Rich.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get out of my house so I can have sex with my wife.”

“Sure.”

“Now,” he said.

8

“So they know who you are,” Angie said as we entered my apartment.

“Yup.”

“Which means it’s just a matter of hours before they know who I am.”

“One would imagine.”

“Yet they didn’t want you to get arrested.”

“Something to gnaw on there, eh?”

She dropped her purse in the living room by the mattress on the floor. “What’d Richie seem to think?”

“He was pretty pissy, but he seemed to perk up when I mentioned the Messengers.”

She tossed her jacket on the living room couch, which these days doubled as a chest for her clothing. The jacket landed on a pile of freshly laundered, folded T-shirts and sweaters.

“You think Grief Release is connected to the Church of Truth and Revelation?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

She nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time a cult or what-have-you had front organizations.”

“And this is one powerful cult,” I said.

“And we may have angered them.”

“We seem to be good at that—angering people who shouldn’t be angered by people as wee and powerless as us.”

She smiled around her cigarette as she lit it. “Everyone needs a field of expertise.”

I stepped over her bed and pressed the blinking button on my answering machine:

“Hey,” Bubba said into the machine, “don’t forget tonight. Declan’s. Nine o’clock.” He hung up.

Angie rolled her eyes. “Bubba’s going-away party. I almost forgot.”

“Me, too. Think of the trouble we’d be in then.”

She shuddered and hugged herself.

Bubba Rogowski was our friend, unfortunately it seemed at times. Other times, it was quite fortunate, because he’d saved our lives more than once. Bubba was so big he’d cast a shadow on Manny, and he was about a hundred times scarier. We’d all grown up together—Angie, Bubba, Phil, and I—but Bubba had never been what you’d call, oh, sane. And whatever minute chance he’d had to become so ended in his late teens when he joined the Marines to escape a prison term and found himself assigned to the American embassy in Beirut the day a suicide bomber drove through the gates and wiped out most of his company.

It was in Lebanon that Bubba made the connections that would create his illegal arms business in the States. Over the last decade he’d begun to branch out into often more lucrative enterprises such as fake IDs and passports, counterfeit money and name-brand appliance replicas, flawlessly bogus credit cards, permits and professional licenses. Bubba could get you a degree from Harvard in four years’ less time than it took Harvard to confer it, and he himself proudly displayed his own doctoral certificate from Cornell on the wall of his warehouse loft. In physics, no less. Not bad for a guy who’d dropped out of St. Bartholomew’s Parochial in the third grade.

He’d been downsizing his weapons operation for years, but it was that (as well as the disappearance of a few wise guys over the years) for which he was best known. Late last year, he’d been rousted, and the cops found an unregistered Tokarev 9mm taped to his wheel well. There are very few certainties in this life, but in Massachusetts, if you’re found with an unregistered fire-arm on your person, it is certain that you’re going to spend a mandatory year in jail.

Bubba’s attorney had kept him out of jail as long as he could, but the waiting was over now. Tomorrow night, by nine, Bubba had to report to Plymouth Correctional to serve out his sentence.

He didn’t mind particularly; most of his friends were there. The few left on the outside were joining him tonight at Declan’s.

Declan’s in Upham’s Corner sits amid a block of boarded-up storefronts and condemned houses on Stoughton Street directly across from a cemetery. It’s a five-minute walk from my house, but it’s a walk through the epitome of slow but certain urban decay and rot. The streets around Declan’s rise steeply toward Meeting House Hill, but the homes there always seem ready to slide in the other direction, crumble into themselves, and cascade down the hilly streets into the cemetery below, as if death is the only promise with any currency around here anymore.