CHAPTER 8

Mac and Abdullah sat sullenly in David’s hospital room, whispering. “Thirty days?” Mac said over and over. “Hard to believe.”

“No way of staying around here,” Abdullah said. “Not that I’ll miss it. Well, in some ways I will.”

“I know I will,” David said, coming to full attention whenever he heard footsteps in the corridor. “So much we can do from the inside that we’ll never be able to pull off from the outside.”

Mac let out a sigh that made him sound old and tired. “David, this may sound like I’m kissin’ up to the boss, but you know I wouldn’t kiss up to you if you were the potentate. But we both know you can do anything technologically. Get yerself healthy and do whatever you got to do to keep tabs on this place from anywhere in the world. Isn’t that doable?”

“Theoretically,” David said. “But it won’t be easy.”

“Somehow you’ve got this place bugged, sliced, and diced. Why can’t you access computers here the way you did that buildin’ in Chicago where we’re all likely gonna wind up?”

David shrugged. “It’s possible. I can’t imagine psyching myself up to get it done. Not without Annie.” David caught the glance between Mac and Abdullah. “What?” he said. “You know something you’re not telling me?”

Mac shook his head. “We’re just as worried as you. Makes no sense. No way she wouldn’t let you know where she was, if she could.” He paused and a twinkle played at his eyes. “Unless she locked herself in that utility room again.”

David laughed in spite of himself. Annie was one of the most disciplined, buttoned-down employees he’d ever had, but one out-of-character stunt she pulled would hang over her head as long as she lived.

The way Hannah Palemoon knocked at the half-open door told David way more than he wanted to know. A sob rose in his throat. Mac stood and David nodded to him. “Come in,” Mac said.

David tried to ignore the small, corrugated box in Hannah’s hands and desperately searched her face for some trace of optimism. She approached slowly and set the box near David’s feet. “I am so sorry,” she said, and David collapsed inside.

His pain, his fatigue melted away, overwhelmed by grief and loss too great to bear. He groaned and drew his fists up under his chin, turning from his friends, rolling onto his side, drawing his knees up, and folding in on himself.

“Lightning?” The question forced its way past his constricted throat.

“Yes,” Hannah whispered. “There would have been no pain or suffering.”

Grateful for that, David thought. At least not for her.

“David,” Mac said huskily, “me and Smitty will be right outside—”

“I’d appreciate it if you could stay,” David managed, and he heard them sit again.

“I have a few of her personal effects,” Hannah said. David tried to sit up, feeling the cursed dizziness. “It’s just her purse and phone, jewelry, and shoes.”

David finally sat up and put the box between his knees. His breath caught at the charred smell. The phone had melted in spots. One shoe had scorched holes in the heel and toe.

“I have to see her,” he said.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Hannah said.

“David, no,” Mac urged.

“I have to! She’s not really gone and never will be unless I know for sure. This is her stuff, but did you see her, Hannah?”

The nurse nodded.

“But you didn’t know her. Had you ever seen her before?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of. But, David, I don’t know how to say this. If the woman in the morgue were my best friend, I wouldn’t recognize her.”

The sobs returned and David pushed the box toward the end of the bed, shaking his head, his fingers pressed lightly against his temples, tender and fiery to the touch. “You know she was my first love?”

No one responded.

“I had dated before, but—” he pressed a hand over his lips—“the love of my life.”

Mac stood and asked Abdullah to shut the door. He pulled the hanging curtain around the bed so the four of them were cocooned in the dim white light. Mac lay a hand gently on David’s shoulder. Abdullah reached for a knee. Hannah gripped David’s sheet-covered foot.

“God,” Mac whispered, “we’re long past asking why things happen. We know we’re on borrowed time and that we belong to you. We don’t understand this. We don’t like it. And it’s hard for us to accept. We thank you that Annie didn’t suffer,” and here his voice broke and became barely audible. “We envy her because she’s with you, but we miss her already, and a part of David that can never be replaced has been ripped away. We still trust you, still believe in you, and want to serve you for as long as you’ll let us. We just ask that you’ll come alongside David now, unlike you ever have before, and help him to heal, to carry on, to do your work.”

Mac could not continue. Abdullah said, “We pray in the name of Jesus.”

“Thank you,” David said, and he turned away from them again. “Please don’t go yet.” As he lay there, his friends still by the bed inside the curtain, he realized that there would be no formal funeral for Annie and that even if there was—because she was an employee—he would have to conduct himself as a somber superior, not as a grieving lover. When he was forced to separate himself from this place, he didn’t want it to reflect upon her and call into suspicion everyone she knew or spent time with.

He heard the drape being opened again. Hannah put the box under the head of the bed, and Mac and Abdullah returned to their chairs. “You need sleep,” Hannah said. “You want me to get you something?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Hannah, but I really have to see her. Can you unhook me and help me down there?”

She looked as if about to refuse him, but he saw the light of an idea come to her eyes. “You’re sure?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“It won’t be easy.”

“And this is?”

“I’ll get a wheelchair and I’ll pull the IV along with us.”

Zeke was wearing his trademark getup when Buck presented him to the Tribulation Force at the new safe house and introduced him to Tsion. “When the boss gets back, we’ll make you a full-fledged member,” Buck said. “But meanwhile, find yourself some privacy and appropriate whatever you need to settle in, make yourself at home, and become part of the family.”

“By all means,” Tsion said, embracing the fleshy young man. In thick-soled, square-toed, black motorcycle boots, black jeans, black T-shirt under black leather vest, Zeke was a stark contrast to the sweatered, corduroyed rabbi, standing there in his Hush Puppies. “Welcome and God bless you.”

Zeke was awkward and shy, and while he shook hands all around and lightly returned hugs, he stared at the ground and mumbled replies. Soon enough, however, he was exploring, unpacking, moving a bed, setting up his stuff. An hour later he returned to the central meeting place near the elevators. “This place is really uptown,” he said.

“Literally,” Leah said, clearly bemused by the man who had once changed her entire look and given her a new identity.

Zeke stared at her, and Buck got the impression he didn’t know what she meant but was afraid to admit it. As if to cover his embarrassment and change the subject, Zeke dug in both back pockets and one vest pocket for huge rolls of twenty-Nick bills, which he slapped noisily on the table. “I intend to earn my keep,” he said. “Put this here in the pot.”

“You might want to wait until it’s official,” Buck said. “Rayford will be here tomorrow night and—”

“Oh, it’s all right. Consider it a donation, even if I get voted out or blackballed or whatever.”

“I don’t see that happening,” Chloe said, burping the sleeping Kenny Bruce on her shoulder.

“Oh, man!” Zeke said quietly, noticing the baby. He approached slowly and reached carefully toward Kenny’s back. “Can I?”

“You may,” Chloe said. “Your hands clean?”

Zeke stopped and turned his hands before his eyes. “They have to be for my kinda work. Can’t smudge the new IDs, you know. They look dirty, ’cause I work on engines and stuff, but they’re just stained.”

He bent at the knees before Chloe and gently put his meaty hand on Kenny’s back. His fingers nearly stretched from shoulder to tiny shoulder. Zeke lightly touched the boy’s feathery hair.

“Sit and you can hold him,” Chloe said, as the others watched. Buck was especially amused by Chaim, whose eyes filled.

“Want a turn?” Buck whispered.

“It’s been so long,” Chaim whispered, trying to make himself understood. “It would be a privilege.”

Somehow Kenny slept through everyone’s turn, even Tsion’s. He was last and quickly passed Kenny back to Chloe, as he was overcome. “My children were teenagers when they . . . when they . . . but the memories . . .”

“We need to identify a body,” Hannah Palemoon said, pushing David’s wheelchair and pulling his IV to the desk just inside the morgue.

“Sign in,” a bored older woman said.

“Forget it,” Hannah said. “The system is behind by several days. Nobody’ll ever check anyway.”

The woman made a face. “Less work for me,” she said. “I’m just filling in.”

David’s heart raced as Hannah pushed him past rows and rows of bodies as far as the eye could see—on gurneys, in lateral refrigerators, and sheet-wrapped head to toe, shoulder to shoulder on the floor. “She’s not one of these, is she?”

“Next room, around the corner.”

Hannah steered him to the foot end of a covered body on a bed. He took a deep, quavery breath. Hannah lifted the sheet from one foot and peered at the toe tag to make sure she had the right corpse. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

He nodded, though now not so sure.

She showed him the tag thin-wired to the big toe. It bore Annie’s name and rank and serial number all right, plus date of birth and date of death. The foot was swollen and discolored, but no doubt hers. David reached to envelop it with both hands and was struck by the cold stiffness.

It was the other foot whose shoe had showed lightning damage. David began pulling the sheet from it, ignoring Hannah when she cleared her throat and said, “Uh, David . . .”

He recoiled at the damage. The heel was split wide and the big toe mangled. He covered her feet and dropped his head. “You’re sure she never felt that?”

“Positive.”

“Fortunato was given the power to call down fire from heaven on those who didn’t worship the image.”

“I know.”

“I could have easily been struck.”

“Me too.”

“Why her?”

Hannah did not answer. David tried to wheel himself between beds to the other end of the body. His IV stretched. “Let me,” Hannah said, and she pushed him slowly. When he reached for the sheet, Hannah reached over his shoulder and put a hand on his forearm. “You may want to look only at her face,” she said. “There was severe cranial trauma.”

He hesitated.

“And David? For some reason no one closed her eyes. I tried, but with time and rigor mortis . . . well, a mortician will have to do that.”

He nodded, panting. His head throbbed, and when he was able to control his breathing again, David lifted the sheet and brought it down to her neck, careful not to look. With another deep breath, his eyes traveled to hers.

For an instant it didn’t look like Annie. Her eyes were fixed on something a million miles away, her face bloated and purple. Burns on her ears and neck evidenced where her necklace and earrings had been.

He sat staring at her for so long that Hannah finally said, “OK?”

David shook his head. “I want to stand.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“Help me.”

She pushed the IV stand around the chair so it was next to him. “Use that to brace yourself. If the room starts to spin, sit again.”

“Starts?”

She locked the wheels and put a hand on his back, guiding as he rose. He pushed with his left hand on the arm of the chair and pulled with his right on the stand. Finally, up and wobbly, Hannah’s hand still on his back, David cupped Annie’s cheek with his free hand. Despite the cool rigidity, he imagined she could feel his caress. In spite of himself, he leaned over her until he could see past where a tuft of hair had been pushed up in front. Behind that was a silver dollar–sized hole that exposed her brain.

David shook his head and carefully sat again. He didn’t want to think what a lightning bolt through her body would have done to vital organs. He now believed Hannah that Annie never would have known what hit her.

Hannah pulled David’s chair and left him at the foot of the bed. He sat with his head in his hands, unable to produce more tears. He heard Hannah rearranging the sheet and carefully re-covering Annie, almost as if she were still alive, and it struck him as sweet and thoughtful.

As she wheeled him out, he whispered his thanks.

“I wish I had known her,” Hannah said.

Rayford had briefed Buck and Chloe and Tsion the night before, so when a phone woke him at dawn in Montana, he assumed it was one of them. As he reached to answer, however, it was not his cell but the room phone. He had not given out that number, so who would be calling? The desk? Was someone onto them? Should he identify himself as Rayford Steele or Marvin Berry?

Neither, he decided. “Hello?”

“Ray,” Hattie said, “it’s me. I’m awake, I’m up, I’m starved, and I want to get going. You?”

He groaned and glanced at the other bed. Albie was sound asleep. “You’re a little too chipper for me,” he said. “I’m asleep, I’m in bed, I’m not hungry, and there’s no sense leaving so early that we get to Kankakee before dark. We can’t go to the safe house until after that anyway.”

“Oh, Rayford! C’mon! I’m bored. And I’m dead, remember? I need a new identity, but I’m as free as I’ve been in years, thanks to you! How ’bout some breakfast?”

“We can’t be too obvious or public.”

“Are you going to go back to sleep, really?”

“Back? I never woke up.”

“Seriously.”

“No, I probably won’t. Someone in the next room is up banging around anyway.”

She knocked on the wall. “And I’ll keep banging until I get company for breakfast.”

“All right, dead girl. Give me twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be outside your door in fifteen.”

“Then you’ll be waiting five.”

Rayford was glad his showering and dressing hadn’t wakened Albie. He peeked out the window and saw nothing and no one. Out the peephole in the door he saw Hattie stretching in the sun, just beyond the shadow caused by the second-floor walkway. He peeked through the curtain. The place was otherwise deserted.

Rayford stepped out, and Hattie nearly lunged at him. “Let me see, let me see!” she said, staring at him. “I can see yours!” she said. “That means you can see mine! Can you?”

His eyes were still adjusting to the sun, but as she pulled him out of the shadow by the door, it hit him. His knees buckled and he almost fell. “Oh, Hattie!” he said, reaching for her. She leaped into his arms and squeezed him around the neck so hard he finally had to push her away so he could breathe.

“Does mine look like yours?” she said.

He laughed. “How would I know? We can’t see our own. But yours looks like every other one I’ve seen. This is worth waking Albie for.”

“Is he decent?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Let me.”

Rayford unlocked the door and Hattie burst in. “Albie, wake up, sleepyhead!”

He didn’t stir.

She sat on the bed next to him and bounced. He groaned.

“C’mon, Albie! The day is young!”

“What?” he said, sitting up. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing will ever be wrong again!” she said, taking his face in her hands and pointing his bleary eyes toward her. “I’m just showing off my mark!”