"Oh, don't bother with that," she said as Becker started to remove the film from the machine. "I'll take care of that."
When he was safely out the door, June sat down at the microfilm machine and read the page that had caused Becker to blanch and stare as though at an apparition. For a moment, as she had watched him from across the room, he had become so inert, so preternaturally absorbed, that she wondered if something might have happened to him.
When he finally came out of it she had the fleeting impression of a man bursting to the surface of the water, gasping for breath.
There was no trouble finding the story, Becker had turned the focus onto it until it filled most of the screen.
It caused no reaction in her. Just another dreadful story in a world that had become replete with mayhem. And West Virginia seemed so far away from the suburban comforts of Fairfield County, Connecticut. She wondered what it could have to do with Becker. From all she had heard, he was retired. it's none of my business, Becker told himself angrily.
I didn't want-it, didn't ask for it. I am no more responsible for it than the woman who picks up a phone and hears a heavy breather panting in her ear. I am the victim, he thought. I am being defiled by this obscenity sent through the mail. And forwarded to me by the Bureau. They don't want to protect my privacy, of course. What they want is to get me involved. They would like nothing better than for me to get stiffed up by some random lunatic and come back to work to solve a case that would lead to another case and another and another until he was back in their clutches again, their leash around his neck, their special ferret to be sent down into every vile-smelling hole could find in a nation burgeoning with homicidal madmen.
To hell with it, Becker said, to hell with the Bureau, to hell with his correspondent. He put everything back in the manila envelope and tossed it into the pile of old tax returns Karen kept in the closet of the family room. Out of sight, out of mind, he told himself, knowing it wasn't true.
As the Apostolic Choir of the Holy Ghost whipped itself into its nightly frenzy of syncopated devotion, the Reverend Tommy R. Walker peered through the curtain to view his congregation to see how well they were responding to the Apostolic's enthusiasm. To his dismay, they appeared to be the usual collection of deadheads, whiners, and malcontents come to witness a miracle or two and not about to be diverted by a mixed dozen of black-and-maroon-robed overweight men and women singing their tonsils out. They could get that sort of thing at regular church. What they had come for tonight was something out of your ordinary run-of-the-mill preaching and spiritualizing. They had come to see the wonders of the Lord as performed personally and with that special panache that was the trademark of the good reverend himself. They wanted curing, they wanted laying on of hands, they damned well expected to witness the laine walking and the blind seeing again, not to mention the cleansing of souls and soothing of troubled spirits and the odd elimination of tumorous growths and palsied afflictions. They had come to Bald Nob on this particular night anticipating just about every miracle and living proof of the Holy Spirit that man could conjure up from a cooperative divinity, short of finding them all permanent employment.
All of which Reverend Tommy would deliver, of course, because that's what he was good at. Still, it wouldn't hurt his efforts if they got off their hands and enthused a bit ahead of time instead of sitting there, staring at the Apostolics as if all that melodic yelling was nothing more than a collective reaction to seeing a mouse.
Expecting Reverend Tommy to do all the work. As per usual.
Having sized them up in general as the normal bunch of small-town, farm-country, tight-assed pinchpennies, Tommy turned his attention to his congregations in particular, seeking out the diseased and dim-witted whom he would heal that night. Down front, where he had positioned her in one of Tommy's three wheelchairs-he needed more but they were surprisingly expensive-was the lady with the bad shoulder whom he would cause to leap from her wheelchair and walk again. Next to her, looking as if he really needed the wheelchair, sat an elderly man with a portable oxygen tank and tubes feeding into his nose. Tommy figured the man could get along without the oxygen long enough for him to remove the tubes and praise the Lord for a moment or two. They almost always could unless they were in a hospital bed under an oxygen tent. But then the Reverend Tommy R. Walker didn't heal in hospitals.
What Tommy was looking for more specifically were the members of the audience whom he could not cure, that is to say, in whom he could not reliably muster a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. He had pointed out the mean-faced farmer with the fiery rash running down his face and under his shirt. He was the kind of man who would clutch at the Reverend Tommy, strong enough not to be pushed off with Tommy's patented forehead just, angry enough to demand proof of his cure, loud enough to protest when the rash didn't vanish. And an affliction like that was so damnably visible that there was no way to fake its removal. At least Tommy had not yet devised a way to fake it. The farmer would continue to glow strawberry red clear to the back of the tent unless Rae pulled the switch and killed the lights entirely. It was much easier to avoid the man in the first place. Let him be dealt with in the general heal-off when Tommy went down the line, thrusting Satan from foreheads with the speed and impersonality of an athlete administering high fives following a winning play.
The Apostolic Choir groaned their final notes to an unenthusiastic round of applause, the deacon/director taking too many bows, as usual, so that he was still bobbing his head in false modesty several seconds after the crowd had slumped back again into silence. Rae took the stage and began her warm-up, extolling the virtues of Jesus and the Reverend Tommy R.
Walker in more or less equal parts and doing her damndest to lather the people up a bit in anticipation. The problem was, Rae's damndest was no damned good. She was no public speaker, and that was a fact. The Reverend Tommy did not wish to be unchristian about it, but Rae had no more charisma than a dead sheep.
She was good working the audience as they came inher simple country manner put them at ease and her naturally sympathetic response allowed them to confide in her like a friend-but a friend was not what you wanted up onstage. What you wanted up onstage was somebody who could tie a knot in their tails and make them like it, and tail-knotting was not something people took to from a woman who usually reminded them of their plainlooking cousin who was such a good listener. Rae was a hard worker, sincere, loyal as a tick hound but not much smarter and consequently not too demanding in a variety of ways. In a not totally unrelated matter, her breasts had begun to droop unappetizingly. That was a deficit that could be corrected easily enough onstage when she had the benefit of undergarments, but not in the Reverend Tommy's bed, where he liked his women naked and sweating and loud and young. Rae was never very loud, either, come to that.
When Rae reached the part about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and implying-though never claiming outright-that the Reverend Walker was very nearly up to such a feat himself, a latecomer slipped into the back of the tent. She was wearing faded denims and a man's workshirt and sporting a face that Tommy thought looked like an angel. Or, if there were such things as angels, that's what Tommy thought they ought to look like. At least that's how they should look if they wanted to recruit any male souls.
He would have liked to study her more, but Rae had come to the conclusion of her introduction, straining up on her toes-the only way she knew to indicate total enthusiasm-and the choir was bursting into ecstatic noises and the electric piano was playing and the tambourines were nnging and Tommy checked to be sure his fly was zipped and clutched his golden Bible in his hand and hurled himself through the curtain and onto the stage, shouting praises to the Lord.