Prayer

by Philip Kerr

  I got to my feet. It was time for me to leave. The cathedral was filling up. A priest quietly approached the altar and lit some candles, and upstairs in the organ loft someone started to play a Bach prelude.

  Leaving the transept, I walked back up the aisle to the south front, pausing only to collect the parish news bulletin from a pile by the door, and then I went out into the heat of a typical Houston summer evening.

  Home was a new-built stone-and-stucco house southeast of Memorial Park on Driscoll Street. From the tower bedroom that served as my study, I had a good view of a suburban Houston street of reassuring ordinariness: a sidewalk lined with several palm trees scorched by the relentless sun and neat lawns that were nearly always smaller than the shiny SUVs parked beside them.

  It was a nice house, but I couldn’t ever have afforded it on an FBI salary, which was why Ruth’s father, Bob Coleman, had bought it for us. In the beginning, Bob and I had got along pretty well; but that was before I was dumb enough—his words, not mine—to have turned down a well-paid position with a prestigious firm of New York attorneys to go to the academy at Quantico and train for the FBI. Bob said he would never have given his blessing to our being married if he had thought I was going to throw away a legal career out of a misguided sense of patriotism. Bob and I don’t see eye to eye on any number of issues, but my working for Big Government is just one more reason for him to dislike and distrust me. Then again, I feel the same way about Bob.

  I dumped my stuff on the breakfast bar and kissed Ruth for longer than either of us was expecting, after which she let out a breath and blinked as if she had just turned a cartwheel, and then she smiled warmly.

  “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said.

  “You have a strange effect on me.”

  “I’m glad. I’d hate to think I bored you.”

  “Never.”

  I went into the bathroom to wash up.

  “Did you have a good day?” she called after me.

  “It’s always a good day when I come home, honey.”

  “Don’t say that, baby. It reminds me of all the things that could go wrong when you’re out of the house.”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong. I’ve told you before. I’m blessed.” I sprayed some antiviral sanitizer on my hands; I must have thought the stuff was an antidote to the kind of lowlife scum I spent most of my time trying to catch. “Where’s Danny?”

  “Playing in the yard.”

  When I came back into the kitchen, Ruth had the Sacred Heart parish newsletter in her hand.

  “You were down at the cathedral?”

  “I was in the area so I decided to drop in and see if Bishop Coogan was there. You remember Eamon Coogan?”

  “Sure.”

  Currently the archbishop emeritus of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Eamon Coogan was an old friend of my mother’s from Boston, which is where my family had moved after we left Scotland.

  I went to the refrigerator to fetch a cold beer.

  “And was he?” she asked sweetly.

  “I don’t know.”

  She laughed. “You don’t know?” And then she guessed I was lying, because Ruth always knew when I was lying. After Harvard Law, Ruth had worked as an assistant DA in the New York District Attorney’s Office, where she had demonstrated a real talent for prosecution and cross-examination.

  “Oh,” she said, “I get it. You went there for confession, didn’t you?”

  “No.” I jerked the top of the beer bottle off and sucked the contents down.

  “To pray, then.” She grinned. “Why can’t you go to our own church to do that, Gil?”

  “Because it doesn’t feel like a church. You know, whenever I’m in there, I feel like looking for the commentary box and a hot dog salesman.”

  She laughed. “That’s not fair. It’s just a building. I don’t think God needs stained-glass windows to feel at home.”

  I shrugged.

  “Is anything wrong, honey?”

  “No, but I think maybe I just answered your first question about what kind of day I’ve had.”

  Danny appeared at the back door and, seeing me, launched himself in my direction like a human battering ram; I had time only to cover my balls with my hands before his large and surprisingly hard head connected with my groin.

  “Daddy,” he yelled, and wrapped his little arms around my legs.

  “Danny. How are you doing, big guy?”

  “I’m good,” he said. “I haven’t been bad at all. And I didn’t hit Robbie.”

  I caught a look in Ruth’s eye that seemed to contradict this spontaneous denial.

  “Robbie?”

  “The Murphy boy,” she said. “From across the street.” She shook her head. “They had a small disagreement.”

  “I told you. I didn’t hit Robbie. He fell over.”

  “Danny,” said Ruth. “We talked about this. Don’t lie to your dad.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I grinned. “You stick to your story, kid,” I said. “Don’t ever fold under questioning.”

  I turned the boy around, stroked his fine yellow hair, and gently pushed him further into the kitchen.

  Danny went to the sink and washed his hands. Ruth was already serving dinner and this was my cue to remove the Glock on my hip. Ruth had nothing against guns—she was from Texas, after all—but she always preferred me to take it off before I sat down for dinner and said grace.

  I said a prayer before every meal in our house, but on this occasion my heart wasn’t in it. Instead of our usual grace—“Great God, the giver of all good, accept our praise and bless our food”—I found myself uttering something less worshipful: “For well-filled plate and brimming cup and freedom from the washing up, we thank you, Lord. Amen.”

  Ruth tried to control a smile. “Well, that’s a new one,” she said.

  After we’d eaten, I put Danny to bed and read him a story and then went into my study in the tower, which is where Ruth came and found me later on.

  “Can I fetch you another beer, baby?”

  Ruth didn’t drink, but she didn’t seem to mind that I did. Not yet.

  “No, thanks, honey.”

  She stood behind me and massaged my neck and shoulders for a while.

  “You seem kind of distant tonight.”

  Suddenly I wanted to tell her everything—I had to tell someone—but I could hardly have done that without risking an argument. The church was an important part of Ruth’s life.

  “You remember I told you about that motorcycle gang of white supremacists who call themselves the Texas Storm Troopers?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “We’ve been running a wire on a bar the gang uses in Eastwood. Well, today I heard three of them discussing some murders that were committed back in 2007. Two black women were raped and murdered on the Southside.”

  “How horrible.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you. But it was clear from their conversation that it was the Storm Troopers who carried out these murders.”

  Ruth shrugged. “So, that’s good, isn’t it? Now you can arrest them.”

  “We already sent someone up for those murders. A guy named José Samarancho. I worked Violent Crimes for a while when we first moved to Houston, remember? It was our task force that helped to convict him.”

  “Then this evidence should help to clear him, shouldn’t it?”

  She still didn’t get it, and I could hardly blame her for that.

  “It would have cleared him if José Samarancho was still alive. They executed him last month up at Huntsville.”

  Ruth sat down at my desk and pursed her lips. “That’s awful. But you mustn’t blame yourself, sweetheart. It’s not your fault at all.”

  “Of course I blame myself. I’ve thought about nothing else all day.” I
shook my head. “I was there when he got the juice. I was there, Ruth.”

  She frowned. “But if he was convicted in 2007, you might have expected that he’d still be alive. I mean the appeal process can take years, even in Texas.”

  “José Samarancho was a car thief. He was unlucky enough to steal a car that belonged to one of the two dead women, so his forensics were all over it. The car had been left in the parking lot where the Storm Troopers kidnapped the women. Samarancho stole cars to feed a drug habit that caused him to have blackouts; and when we presented him with the evidence that he’d been in the murdered woman’s car, he agreed he might have committed the murders and confessed to something he hadn’t done because I put it in his mind. His fucked-up brain even managed to dredge some drug-fantasy memory of his murdering the women and by some fluke he got the details right. He didn’t appeal the death sentence because he thought he’d done it and therefore deserved to die.” I shook my head bitterly. “Even while he was strapped to the gurney with the juice plugged into his veins, he was praying to the Lord to forgive him. The poor dumb idiot died still believing he’d committed two horrible murders and expecting that he might be going to hell.”

  “So, what’s your point?”

  “I don’t know.” This was cowardly of me, of course, but I thought it was best to defuse the situation, for all our sakes.

  “Everyone has doubts now and then,” she said, squeezing my hand fondly. “It’s what makes faith what it is.”

  She knelt down beside my chair so that she could put her head on my lap and let me stroke her hair.

  “You’re tired and you’ve had a bad day, that’s all. Come to bed and let me make it right.”

  “A bad day. Is that how you describe it when someone gets put to death on my call?”

  “It wasn’t your call. You talk like nobody else was involved here. There were attorneys and—”

  “I can’t excuse the part I played in that man’s death. God knows I’d like to.”

  “But God can. That’s the whole point.”

  “Maybe there is no God. Maybe that’s the whole point.”

  “You don’t believe that, honey. You know you don’t.”

  “Don’t I?” I sighed. “Actually, that’s something I think I do believe.”

  TWO

  The Houston FBI building was just outside the Loop—which was what locals called I-610—in the northwest part of the city. Close proximity to our only near neighbor, a Wells Fargo bank, might have made the people there feel a little more secure until you remembered that it was the FBI HQ in Oklahoma City that Timothy McVeigh was targeting when, in 1995, he detonated the bomb that killed 168 people and injured more than six hundred in revenge for what happened at Waco. I can’t answer for Wells Fargo, but our own security was tight. The seven-story FBI building was made from green-tinted quartzite and was clad in a special heat-reducing glass that was also bulletproof. And that’s a comforting thought in a state where people own more than fifty million firearms.

  If mentioning this gun-owning statistic seems like my bitching about it, that’s because, like almost everyone in this hard-baked but quick-witted city, I’m from somewhere else. Houston is somewhere you go to, not somewhere you come from, and this is particularly true of people at the FBI. After graduating from the FBI Academy, most of us go where the Bureau tells us, and not where we would necessarily choose. Consequently, Houston is not a city that I or many of my colleagues know well. Not that there’s very much to know. The city of Houston is just a lot of overheated freeways, underground parking lots, roadside churches, air-conditioned shopping malls, isolated and bone-dry parks, country clubs for rich folks, and boxy high-rise buildings. Galveston is less than an hour south by car, but after the last hurricane, it’s hardly better than a ghost town. The Gulf Coast has little to recommend it but the road north back to Houston.

  Approaching the shiny downtown skyline, you would shield your eyes against the reflected sun and, while comparing the cityscape to New York’s and Chicago’s, you might just consider that the need for control of city planning is even more urgent than the need for gun control. It was these tall buildings and not anything involving drugs and firearms that were the biggest crimes in Texas; and our own field office was no exception.

  Inside, the FBI building has the cool, unhurried air of a museum. There’s even some indifferent modern art, a few behind-glass exhibits, and a gift shop where you can buy everything from an FBI pen or a set of gold FBI cuff links to a coffee mug. Elsewhere there is more or less all that an agent requires to make life more convenient: a barbershop, a hairdresser, a doctor, a dentist, a bank, and, of course, a well-equipped gymnasium. Thanks to Ruth’s father, she and I enjoyed a membership to the Houstonian Club and the use of a gym that was as big as a car factory, but they didn’t like you bringing guns in there. I never much like leaving my gun in the car, even when I’m playing tennis, so I preferred to begin my day with a workout in the office gym and then breakfast in the Bureau canteen. I was usually at my desk before eight-thirty a.m.

  We’re a smart-looking lot in the Bureau. Unless we’re in the field, most men wear white shirts and quiet ties, and we polish our shoes and mind our manners, and to that extent we’re still Hoover’s children. The biggest difference from Hoover’s day is the number of women in the Bureau. We call them split-tails on account of the kind of skirts they usually wear. There are more than two thousand women in the FBI, including my own boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gisela Delillo.

  Gisela was from North Beach, San Francisco, and another ex-lawyer, like I am. I’m not sure what Hoover would have made of her, but I liked Gisela. Kind of. She was destined for one of the top jobs. As soon as I had collected my files and notes, I went down to her office for an informal weekly case review. She was ten years older than I am, but I’m still young enough to like that in a woman.

  Gisela was sitting in the corner of a long leather sofa with her shoes off and her bare legs tucked under her shapely behind. She wasn’t particularly tall, but she had a very tall way of walking, like a ballet dancer with an attitude. Her hair was as black as crow feathers and heaped on top of her head. She looked like Audrey Hepburn’s dirty sister.

  She had a cup of coffee balanced on the palm of her hand—a proper little cup with a saucer and a spoon. She took a noisy sip of it and nodded at a neat red espresso machine on her bookshelf.

  “You want one?”

  I shook my head. “You heard about the Storm Troopers?”

  “I read the field report. You must feel terrible.”

  “I’ll get over it.”

  “That’s why we come to work, isn’t it? Because we’re optimists.”

  “Right now my optimism needs glasses. And I’m not just talking about José Samarancho. There’s a lot of hate going around this city. And not enough peace and love. Reminds me. Let’s talk about Deborah Ann Blundy.”

  “She’s the Black Liberation Army felon on the Most Wanted, right? Shot and killed a cop in D.C. back in 1975.”

  “Since then, she’s been living in Mexico. Only we had a tip-off from someone who used to be in the BLA that she’s living right here in Houston. The Shaft and Super Fly generation of black separatists don’t have much in common with today’s black activists. But it is possible she’ll try to make contact with them. If that happens, I’m confident my source will let me know.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “Did you read the E.C. I sent you about the HIDDEN group?”

  “Yes. But remind me what it means.”

  “Homeland Internal Defense Delivering Enforcement Now.”

  “I can’t see that catching on in a hurry.”

  “Okay, it’s not NATO or the IRA, but they’re just as serious. They’re all ex-military. They’ve got contacts and they’ve been trained to use the ordnance they’re trying to get ahold of. The Switchblade. Basical
ly, it’s a tactical drone armed with a three-pound warhead and launched from a two-inch-wide tube you carry around in a backpack. You guide it onto the target via a little camera on the drone’s nose. You just fold it out and fire. With a four-foot wingspan, it’s not much bigger than a toy plane. Yours for just ten grand.”

  “Who are they gunning for?”

  “Seems they’ve got a beef with the Jews. They believe that the Gulf wars were fought at the behest of the Israelis and that all their buddies who were killed in Iraq were the victims of a Jewish conspiracy. It’s anabolic Christianity. Jarheads for Jesus bulked up with anti-Semitism, Internet conspiracy theories, American exceptionalism, and too much protein.”

  Gisela sighed and drained her espresso cup. “Sure you won’t have one?”

  “I think I will now. Our information is that they’re planning to fire one of these Switchblades at Congregation Beth Israel on North Braeswood Boulevard.”

  “That’s a nice area.” Gisela placed a cup under the dispensing nozzle and pressed a button. The machine made a grinding noise and then vomited a stream of dark brown aromatic liquid.

  “It is right now.”

  “We got this case from RCFL, right?”

  Gisela handed me the coffee cup on a saucer with a little napkin and a spoon.

  “From Ken Paris?”

  The Bureau has more acronyms than Dow Jones. If it didn’t, we’d be there all day and the bad guys would escape while we were still saying Regional Computer Forensics Lab. Ken Paris was a Special Agent at the RCFL, a few blocks north of Justice Park Drive. He and his team of geeks spent nearly all of their time copying data from a variety of digital devices seized in the course of criminal investigations and then analyzing it for evidence.

  “Galveston police arrested some kids who were running an illegal service provider out of an old oil tanker moored in Trinity Bay.”

  I sipped my coffee and paused for a moment. “They should put that machine of yours on a crash cart at the DeBakey Heart Center. Gives quite a hit, doesn’t it?”