Brimstone

Pendergast quickly fixed his silvery eyes again on the doctor. He said nothing: the skeptical look said it all.

The doctor returned the look steadily. Then he continued, voice calm. "The primary was a tumor in his left lung the size of a grapefruit. There were gross secondary metastatic tumors in the kidneys, liver, and brain. The only surprising thing about this man's death is that he hadn't showed up in the emergency room earlier. He must have been in tremendous pain, barely able to function."

"Go on," Pendergast said in a low voice.

"Aside from the cancer, the patient showed advanced cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, and a suite of other chronic, but not yet acute, symptoms associated with alcoholism and poor nutrition."

"And?"

"That's all. No toxins or drugs present in the blood or tissues. No unusual wounds or pathologies, at least none detectable after embalming and almost ten years in the ground."

"No sign of heat?"

"Heat? What do you mean?"

"No indication that the body had experienced the perimortem application of heat?"

"Absolutely not. Heat would have caused a host of obvious cell changes. I've looked at forty, maybe fifty sections of tissue from this cadaver, and not one showed changes associated with heat. What an extraordinary question, Mr. Pendergast."

Pendergast spoke again, his voice still low. "Small-cell lung cancer is caused almost exclusively by smoking. Am I correct, Doctor?"

"You are correct."

"That he died of cancer is beyond a reasonable doubt, then, Doctor?" Pendergast allowed a skeptical tone to tinge his voice.

Exasperated, the pathologist reached down, grabbed two halves of a shriveled brown lump, and shoved them in Pendergast's face. "There it is, Mr. Pendergast. If you don't believe me, believe this . Take it. Feel the malignancy of this tumor. As sure as I'm standing here, that’s what killed Beckma

It was a long, silent walk back to the car. Pendergast slipped behind the wheel-today he'd driven himself to Yonkers-and they exited the parking lot. As they left the gray huddle of downtown behind, Pendergast spoke at last.

"Beckma

"Yeah. And he stank, too."

"What he said, however, was-I must confess-something of a surprise. I shall have to write the good doctor a letter of thanks." He swung the wheel sharply, and the Rolls turned onto Executive Boulevard, passing the on-ramp for the Saw Mill River Parkway.

D'Agosta looked over in surprise. "Aren't we heading back to New York City?"

Pendergast shook his head. "Jeremy Grove died exactly two weeks ago. Cutforth, one week ago. We came to Yonkers to get some answers. I'm not leaving until we have them."

{ 45 }

The bus inched through a long, white-tiled tu

New York City, thought the Reverend Wayne P. Buck.

Beyond the web of steel, he could see limpid sunlight, sooty tenements, a brief glimpse of skyscrapers. The bus lurched back into darkness, the brakes chuffing as the line of traffic stopped again.

Buck felt an indescribable mix of emotions: excitement, fear, destiny, a sense of confronting the unknown. It was the same thing he had felt a couple of years ago, the day he'd been released from prison after serving nine years for murder two. It had been a long, slow slide for Buck: delinquency, failed jobs, booze, stealing cars, bank robbery-and then the fateful day when everything went wrong and he'd ended up shooting a convenience store clerk. Killing a poor, i

And then, conversion. Born again in prison. Just as Jesus raised up the whore, Mary Magdalene, He raised up the alcoholic, the murderer, the man who had been cast away by all others, even his own family.

After his salvation, Buck began reading the Bible: again and again, cover-to-cover, Old Testament and New. He started preaching a little, a few words here, a helping hand there. He formed a study group. Gradually, he'd built up the respect and trust of the prisoners who had ears for the Good Word. He was soon spending most of his time assisting in the salvation of others. That, and playing chess. There wasn't much else to do: magazines were showcases of materialism, television was worse, and books other than the Bible seemed full of profanity, violence, and sex.

As parole grew near, Buck began to feel that his ministry in prison was preparation for something else; that God had a greater purpose for him which would be revealed in time. After he got out, he drifted from one small town to another, mostly along the border between California and Arizona, preaching the Word, letting God clothe and feed him. His reading began to expand: first Bunyan, then St. Augustine, then Dante in translation. And always,         he waited for the call.

And now, when he least expected it, the call had come. God's purpose for him stood revealed. Who would have thought that his call would take him to New York City, the greatest concentration of spiritual bankruptcy and evil in all America? Vegas, L.A.,  and other such places were merely sideshows to New York. But that was the beauty of doing God's will. Just as God had sent St. Paul to Rome-into the black heart of paganism-so had He sent Wayne P. Buck to New York.

The bus stopped, lurched again, everyone's heads swaying in unison with the movements. They were now on some kind of concrete ramp, climbing a rising spiral between crisscrossed girders. It put Buck in mind of Dante's circles of hell. In a moment, the bus plunged back into darkness and the stench of diesel, the sound of air brakes hissing demonically. It seemed they were at the depot-but a depot such as Buck had never seen or imagined in all his born days.

The bus ground to a halt. The driver said something unintelligible over the public address system,  and there was a great sigh of air as the door opened. Buck exited. The others all had to wait for their baggage, but he was a free man, without possessions or money, just as it had been six years ago when he walked out into the bright sunlight of Joliet.

Without knowing where he was going  he followed a crush of people down a series of escalators and through an immense terminal. Moments later he found himself outdoors, on the pavement of a great street. He stopped and looked around, feeling a rush of dread mingling with the spiritual vigor.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world .    Jesus had spent forty days and nights in the desert tempted by the devil,  and verily this was the desert of the twenty-first century: this wasteland of human souls.

He began walking  letting Jesus take him where He would. Despite the crowded sidewalks, nobody seemed to notice him: the streams of humanity parted around him, then flowed together again behind him, like a river embracing a rock. He crossed a broad thoroughfare, walked down a canyon like street thrown into deep shadow by buildings that rose on both sides. Within a few minutes  he arrived at another intersection, even wider than before, with roads coming in from all sides. Huge billboards  and garish forty-foot neon marquees a