The Jehovah Contract

11

Priest

Father Joey Moreno sat on the couch staring off into space. The bullet hole rested right between his eyes, just above the bridge of his nose. He looked surprised by it. They always do.

Some blood had trickled down the end of his nose to drip on the crotch of his black pants. It had dried. His face matched the color of his preacher's collar.

I didn't say anything, just looked around the room for clues. Joey hadn't left a dying clue-that's for the movies. This kill had been clean, quick, and professional. The torpedo had picked up the cartridge, or perhaps used a revolver.

Joey didn't care. He just stared in my general direction-two glazed eyes and a third dark, bloody one. The entire run of events had obviously alarmed him immensely.

Something smelled in the air, beyond the scent of cordite. I tried to identify it while I searched Joey's corpse. His bearish body resisted me no more than if it had been a couple of sacks of cement.

A bulge in his left rear pocket yielded a swollen wallet. I retrieved it and let Joey slump back while I perused it.

The cheap brown cowhide contained the usual accumulation of ID, credit cards-in the Church's name-and business cards of practically every other church in the area. Cla

Everything in the wallet suffered from varying degrees of wear. Most of the cards had smears of ink on them from the other cards.

All except one.

I pulled it out. Its edges were sharp enough to slice a porterhouse steak and the paper was as white as a dream about nurses. It hadn't even been filed with the rest of the cards but had been slipped into the money slot. The slot held a few hundred bucks' worth of last week's folding paper. It wouldn't have bought a meal then-it couldn't buy a gumball today. Not that it mattered much to Joey now.

I fingered the card, turned it over. On the printed side-in small, dignified letters-was engraved

St. Judas Church of Holy Tribulationand Tax Evasion"To Find Love, One Must First Kill God."Phone: 666-HWHY

"Was it the archdiocese that had you scared, Joey? Or was it this?"

Having delivered this a

I cased my i

I had a feeling I wouldn't be coming back for a while. The place didn't seem as secure against the riffraff anymore.

While pulling on some dry clothes, I made one phone call to a number I knew well. It was a number a lot of people knew, though you'd never find it in any phone book.

The line rang once, a receiver lifted somewhere in Los Angeles, and no voice answered.

"Disposal," I said to the silent other end. "Arco Tower North, room twelve hundred. Bury this one-he's a friend."

The party on the other end hung up without a word.

You can get anything you want in L.A.

I snapped the briefcase shut and locked my office up. On the way out, I stopped to look back at the bearish figure of Joey Moreno.

"So long, Father," I muttered. "Tell the head honcho I'm on His trail."

"Here." I tossed A

"It smells like fish," she said graciously. She swam around inside until her head and arms poked out of the appropriate holes.

"Was he up there?" A

"Mostly." I cadged a dry cigarette from La Vecque and lit up. The smoke cleared away some of the fuzziness upstairs. "I may have come across another lead. Let's go."

I handed our physician a wad of orange paper. "We weren't here."

"No one ever is, Dell." He paused. "How's your condition?"

"Aside from being sapped and doped and jumped on by little things that scratch, I've been fine. No more internal pains that haven't been externally caused."

"I'd like to schedule another body scan…"

I blew out a cloud of smoke. "Some other time, Doc. I'm taking a business trip."

"Where to now?" Blondie asked. Dressed in my old clothes that were baggy to begin with, she looked sufficiently out of vogue to beg on a Beverly Hills street corner as a fallen socialite.

The elevator creaked like a rattan chair. "Going back to my office is completely out," I said, ru

The elevator stopped, and the doors considered opening. Then they started working at it in earnest. They jammed partway, permitting us to squeeze our way out.

"Aside from an unpleasant experience at a dive called the Hope and Anchor, Auberge is a pretty safe place to hole up." I glared mildly at Isadora.

"Wasn't my fault," she said.

A couple of ordinary men with fat briefcases maneuvered past us toward the elevator. They looked as if they could be a couple of downand-out businessmen out to collect on a debtor. I knew better. They had that edge to them.

I wondered how they would get the body out of the building. That was their problem.

"What do we do about Isadora?" A

I hadn't given much thought to that. She walked beside us through the lobby, shirttails brushing at her knees. The old geezers had fallen back into their torpor-only a few watched her with empty, tired eyes.

The kid spoke without looking up. "Don't let any latent mothering urges overwhelm you. I've got my own place. I'll be heading back there to change into something that doesn't scratch. I'll sleep for a week, then get ready for more business." She acted as if she'd just escaped from an ice cream social. Maybe she'd seen so much hell in the minds of others that she found the real thing as easy to deal with.

We headed toward Bunker Hill and the entrance to Auberge. A

"Just stay away from strange men," she counseled.

"Lady," the kid sighed, "all the men I deal with are strange. This last one was just a bit stranger." She looked up at me. "You called him your client. What do you do? Pimp for him?" She suddenly got that nearsighted look a kid gets when she's suspicious.

"Nothing so simple," I said. "Besides, how did he get ahold of you?"

She shrugged. "He talked to me in Auberge, we went off to his house. By the time I'd discovered that I couldn't open his mind up to my suggestions, he'd hit me with a rag full of something that smelled awful. I woke up down there." She gri

"Someone should adopt you," I said. "You'd brighten up any household."

"It's best to forget about him," A

"He seemed to think so. He grabbed me just a few hours after those other guys got you two."

"Just an unfortunate coincidence," I said, not liking the false sound it made coming out.

"Everything is coincident," A

We walked along the darkened street. I wasn't in the mood for deep philosophy at the moment. My senses were as sharp as a bowling ball.

A

"How coincidental were all those creatures in the Plaza?"