“Sir, if I may be candid, I sense there’s something else you want to tell me.”
Hollingshead nodded. Still he didn’t speak for a while. “It’s just a bit of information. I don’t want you to read too much into this. After all, prison is a violent place.”
Chapel looked down at the floor. “Favorov?”
“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Hollingshead said. “We had nothing to do with that, of course. Just some fool with a sharpened bed spring, in the lockup.”
“Sir,” Chapel said. “May I ask about Fiona?”
“The wife?” Hollingshead frowned as if he hadn’t expected such a question. “Why, I’ve heard nothing about her. I couldn’t even tell you where she is now, her or her boys. It’s like someone helped her just… vanish.”
Chapel said nothing to that. Instead he stood up and came to attention, expecting to be dismissed.
Hollingshead had never stood on ceremony. He nodded and waved one hand to tell Chapel he was free to go.
Before he went, though, he had to ask one last question. “Sir,” he said. “We’re taking a lot on faith, here.”
“I’m sorry, son?”
“We’re assuming Favorov told me the truth. Now we’ll never know if he just told me what we wanted to hear.”
Hollingshead took off his glasses and polished them with a silk handkerchief as he considered that. “If he was lying, it’s war,” he said. “I think perhaps, just this one time, a little faith might do us good.”
“Sir,” Chapel said, and headed out the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Wellington was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where George Romero shot his classic zombie films. The acclaimed author is most famous for his online serialized zombie novels, the “Monster Island” trilogy, then published by Thunder’s Mouth Press. In 2006 he began serializing “Thirteen Bullets,” a vampire novel, at www.thirteenbullets.com. He lives in New York City. His first Jim Chapel novel, Chimera, will be out August 2013.