Last, as always, the hat. He opened the box and lifted it out, a black 800x Seratelli with a Vaquero brim, one of the finest Western hats ever made. He lightly gripped the crown in three fingers and set it on his head.
That’s the ticket. He could feel the Vincent coming on now. Not a different identity, exactly, but a different way of thinking of himself. An alternate approach to the world. The knot of tension he carried in his chest—his worries for the herd, his agoraphobia, his certainty that he was an evil person—began to unwind and fall away.
His plane departed in ninety minutes. By the time it landed in Toronto, he would be at Full Vincent, ready and able to stalk and torture a Canadian.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hootan’s car was a tiny biodiesel Honda tricked out with fins and whitewall tires. The kid pressed the remote, and the engine roared like a fighter jet. “Real Engine Sound,” he shouted proudly. The recording was ridiculously mismatched for the car. “I can also do Mustang GT and a Ford 150!”
Dr. G and I crawled into the back, with Luke all knees and elbows in the passenger seat. Luke told Hootan the address, and the Afghan kid slipped on a pair of sunglasses and swung into traffic. The speakers under the floor settled into a highway thrum.
“Tell me about this holo church,” I said. “Pastor Whatsisface, everything.”
Luke twisted to face me, tilting his head to fit under the roof. “Is she really dead?” he asked.
“Francine?” I flashed on her body laid out sideways on the white tile, her arm and belly a coastline for a lake of blood. “I’m sorry. Yeah.”
Luke tried to take this in. “It doesn’t make sense. She was so much better.”
“She was despondent,” I said. “She said she had to pay for her sins.”
“But she told me she felt forgiven! God had forgiven her.”
“Well, evidently he changed his mind. She was calling for him to come back.” I leaned forward. “What did she feel so guilty about?”
“It’s private,” Luke said. “She confided in me.”
“But she was a teenager. It couldn’t have been that terrible.”
“You’re provoking him,” Dr. G said. “Why don’t you just double-dog dare him to tell you?”
I ignored her. “How bad could it be?” I asked.
“Pretty bad,” Luke said. “Not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. But … yeah.”
“You won’t shock me,” I said.
He said nothing for a few moments, then said, “It happened a couple years ago. She was shacking up with this guy, a real asshole. He just wanted someone to live with him and take care of his grandmother. She had some kind of disease where she was getting more and more paralyzed every month, from like the feet up?”
“ALS,” I said.
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”
“That one,” Luke said. Dr. G rolled her eyes. The boy said, “The old woman couldn’t walk anymore, and she could barely move her arms, and she had trouble swallowing? Frannie said that it was like feeding a baby—spitting up, choking, a real mess. And then the bathroom stuff! Frannie did all of it, wiped her ass, changed her diapers. She really took care of her.”
“What did she get out of it?”
“She got to sleep in a bed. And the old woman’s money paid for the drugs. The boyfriend, can’t remember his name, was a meth head. And Frannie liked to smoke, too, so it worked out.” He took a breath. “So one day the boyfriend has to go out to buy, says his friend has some new stuff, something from the States, and he’ll be right back. I’ll only be gone for an hour, he says.”
“Uh-oh,” Dr. Gloria said.
“So she’s there for an hour, two hours with the granny. Then it’s all afternoon. That night the boyfriend doesn’t come back. And by this time Frannie is pissed, because she knows what he’s doing; he’s getting high without her.”
A car horn blared, and Hootan jerked the car to the right. The side of a bus like a silver wall appeared six inches from my face, then swept past.
“Jesus Christ!” I yelled. “Are you blinking while driving? Take off those damn specs!”
Hootan said something in an unknown language that I translated as “Fuck you.” The sunglasses stayed on.
Luke said, “So now it’s morning, and the old woman is making noises like she has to go to the bathroom. Francine’s stuck in the house, and the asshole grandson is out there smoking. She thinks, this isn’t even my relative. I am not responsible for this person. So she leaves another message on the boyfriend’s phone and says, ‘Fuck you, I’m out of here.’ And she leaves.”
Hootan said, “She did what?”
“She grabbed her stuff and went back to her friends on the street,” Luke said. “And a couple days later she hears that the boyfriend got admitted to the hospital. He’d been there for days, an overdose maybe or some bad reaction.”
Hootan said, “What happened to the grandmother?”
Luke didn’t answer.
“She just left her here?” Hootan said. “She left an old woman to choke and die?”
“That’s what she told me,” Luke said.
“Well, your friend deserved to die.”
“What?” Luke said. “Fuck you!”
Hootan slammed on the brakes. Behind us tires squealed, horns blared. He yanked off his glasses. “Say that to me again! Say ‘fuck you’ to me!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Hootan lurched sideways, trying to get his arm behind him.
“Gun!” Dr. Gloria said.
Hootan’s arm came up with a fat black pistol. He pointed it at Luke’s head.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” I yelled. Not very helpfully.
“Your friend is evil,” Hootan said. “Say it. She is evil and deserved to die.”
Luke had pressed himself back against the passenger door, palms raised, but he didn’t seem as scared as I would be with a gun to my face. “Yes, she did evil,” the boy said. “But she isn’t—she’s not Sauron. She just made a bad decision.”
“Hootan, you can’t shoot him here,” I said. “You’ll get blood all over the car.”
“Yes, she deserved to die,” Luke said. “We all deserve to die. But God forgives.” He looked at me. “God didn’t abandon her. If she felt like He was gone, it’s because she turned away from Him.”
“Can we just get to the church?” I asked. “Fayza’s waiting for us to get back.”
Hootan said something in that unknown language. Then he slipped the gun into the front pouch of his sweatshirt. “God is not as forgiving as you think,” he said.
* * *
Pastor Rudy’s church was a former auto parts store, the plastic sign above the entrance long gone but the ghost letters still on duty, false shadows on the faded aluminum, their empty screw mounts bleeding rust. In the parking lot a few old vehicles hunkered before the nail salon, the only store in the strip mall that seemed to be open.
Luke unfolded from Hootan’s car and loped toward the church, eager as a puppy, which only annoyed Hootan more. The front door chimed as he pushed it open.
The interior was a wide-open space furnished in early AA Meeting: metal folding chairs, a coffee station, earnestness. Along the walls were long tables that held what looked like elementary school art displays.
Luke said, “Oh, let me show you mine!”
He hurried toward one of the tables. “All of us approach God from different angles. We also see a little piece of the whole. But the piece, the shard, is the same as all of God, right?”
“Hologram,” I said.
“Right! Pastor Rudy had this idea to get us all to share what we were seeing.” Luke proudly showed me a cardboard box. The side facing us was open. On top was a smaller box wrapped in tin foil. The walls inside were bright red and gold, Bollywood colors. A six-inch action figure lay facedown on the floor of the box beneath a much larger yellow umbrella. The edges of the umbrella were singed black.