Prayer

by Philip Kerr

  “Mister,” said the clerk, “you’re the only customer who’s been in this gas station for the last two hours. There are quiet Sundays and there are Sundays that make you think God’s trying to tell you something. You know what I mean?”

  I wished he might have expressed himself some other way. “You’re sure about that? That no one else went in there?”

  The clerk nodded at the CCTV monitor. “Take a look,” he said, pointing at a clear view of the men’s-room door. “Sure I’m sure. I always watch fellows who go in there in case they’re up to something.”

  I went outside and put the groceries in the trunk of my car. I looked up at the sky and met the full power of the sun on my face. The sky held no clouds, not a breath of wind nor the promise of any rain, just more unrelenting heat. Two or three hundred feet up, a large buzzard wheeled around immediately over my head as if it knew something about what had gone down in the men’s room.

  I am here to do his work. As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.

  That voice again. But was it inside my own head or somewhere else? I surveyed the parking lot and the gas station and the other buildings that were grouped next to it: a photocopy shop and a CVS pharmacy. The buzzard was still there above my head. Shielding my eyes against the sun, I watched it as it circled slowly in the cloudless sky, and I decided it looked less like a bird and more like something else. The wings seemed not to move at all.

  “What is that?” I muttered. “Couldn’t be another Switchblade, could it?”

  But when the wings seemed to move, I decided it was a buzzard after all, or perhaps an eagle. I don’t know why exactly, but the sight of that bird made me feel anxious. It reminded me that I was probably dehydrated so I went into the CVS to buy some cold vitaminwater. Inside the drugstore’s cool interior, I paused for a moment as I waited for the ghost image of the Texas sun to clear from my retinas.

  Except that it didn’t. Instead, the afterimage began to slowly grow in size. I closed my eyes and shook my head, but the ghost image continued to expand and unfold like a rolling green cloud. I hadn’t encountered this kind of visual disturbance as something that ever lasted for longer than a few seconds, and I reminded myself that this was only a well-understood optical illusion caused by the cone cells in the eyes as they tried to adapt from overstimulation to light. I must have been staring at the sun for longer than I had supposed. But when the ghost image not only continued to grow in size but took on a real shape, I began to grow more alarmed. I felt my breathing grow faster and a cold sweat start on my skin.

  Instinctively, I backed away, only it’s hard to back away from something that’s inside your own eyes and head. I rubbed my eyes furiously and blinked several times, but the illusion continued to become larger and more strongly defined; then I closed my eyes again, but to no avail.

  The green image seemed to be taking on a very definite oval shape.

  “Holy fuck,” I heard myself say out loud.

  My next curse sounded more like a cry of fear. I backed into a display of shampoo bottles, knocked it over, and then fell onto the hard floor. Still lying on the floor, I tried to crawl away backward as if my life depended on it.

  The shape became a man’s face, only this was not the kind of bullshit satanic face some people claim they saw in the smoke from the World Trade Center, this was something else, only I had little time to describe its features as the face quickly closed in on mine until all I could see was a huge eye hovering over me. The eye was the color of the night, with an iris that seemed to be made of a dark sky filled with thousands of stars, and the dilated pupil at its center was a great black hole that was the size of a planet that seemed to look right into the very innermost part of me.

  And then I was inside that pupil and looking into the depths of something infinite that filled me with horror. Darkness enveloped me as if a hood had been thrown over my head. At the same time I felt clammy hands pick me up and strap me down; the next second I felt the prick of something sharp in my flesh and then my veins filled with fire. My body let out a shriek and writhed like a snake, but the straps held me firm and in my bones I knew that only prayer could help me now.

  As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.

  “Are you all right?”

  I blinked and opened my eyes. The terrifying afterimage was gone. I sat up on the floor and looked at a young black woman wearing a lab coat. She was regarding me with understandable anxiety.

  “I think I must have fainted.”

  She nodded. “It’s a hundred and five out there,” she replied, as if that was all the explanation that was needed. “You should drink some water.”

  I stood up, took a deep breath, and nodded. “I’m all right.” I took a step. “Actually, I think I just had a panic attack.”

  “Have you had them before?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “You should go to a hospital. There’s one up the road from here in Webster.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll be okay. Although maybe you could recommend something for anxiety that I can buy over the counter? Like Xanax. But not, if you know what I mean.”

  “Have you been prescribed Xanax before?”

  “No, but I know plenty of people who have and I know how it works. I just need to calm my nerves, that’s all.”

  She shrugged. “You could try kava,” she said. “It’s an herbal sedative. I’ve heard that some people find it quite effective.” Pointing over my shoulder, she added, “You’ll find some in our vitamin and supplements aisle.”

  I bought a packet of two hundred pills and a cold drink to help me swallow a handful.

  “If I were you, I’d still go see a doctor.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  I went back to my car and tried to gather myself. Instinctively, I felt I needed to speak to someone—someone who knew me—and with my mind still on what had happened in the drugstore, the men’s room at the gas station, and back at the church, I completely forgot my previous stricture about not contacting Bishop Coogan because of the tap that DCS Net was running on his telephone and called him on my cell.

  He wasn’t there, but by the time I had remembered the impropriety of my speaking to him at all while an FBI investigation was ongoing, I had left a long and garbled message on his answering service, apologizing for not having contacted him to thank him for the use of the diocesan house and explaining that I was on forced leave. A minute or two after hanging up, I saw my mistake.

  “Damn it all,” I said, angry with myself for having let the cat out of the bag regarding the house. Now I really would have to look for somewhere else to live.

  About the only good thing I could see ahead as I neared the end of the freeway was some thick gray cloud blowing in off the ocean, which meant that we were in for some cooler weather and possibly even some very welcome rain. There had been none for almost four months now. The sudden appearance of the cloud ought to have surprised me, but I was still too much on edge to find it unusual. I had to make an effort to calm myself or I was certain to have another car accident. I started breathing deeply through my nose until I felt the closeness in my chest start to clear.

  About a mile short of the Galveston bridge, the cell rang. Thinking it was Bishop Coogan, I didn’t answer it right away. Then I glanced down at the caller ID and saw that it wasn’t him but the mystery person who tried calling me earlier. I slowed the car a little and answered it.

  “This is Sara Espinosa.”

  “Hi there, Doctor. How are you doing?” My voice concealed all of the jangled nerves I was feeling; that was a courtesy to her; you called the FBI to get reassurance, not a dose of someone else’s paranoia and angst.

  “I’ve been trying to call you all day. You’re a hard man to get.”

  “I’ve been driving all over the place today.”

  “Working Sunda
y, huh?”

  “Yes, but it’s not normally like this.” That certainly felt like the understatement of my week. “Sundays usually last about a month for me. Sometimes I think God made Houston to encourage people to go to church.”

  “Then he probably made Galveston to encourage people to go to Houston. I’ve never seen a city look this deserted.”

  “You’re in Galveston?”

  “I called you earlier on to say I was going to be down here. And now here I am. This place—it’s like being in a disaster movie.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “I was down here to see an old friend so I thought I’d look you up, that’s all.”

  I slowed the car again as I neared the bridge. It felt good talking to her. The prospect of seeing her felt even better. Being with an attractive woman might be a better treatment for my own anxiety than what the doctor in Webster would have ordered.

  “Listen, Sara, I’m about to lose the signal on my cell. So come to an address I’ll give you. It’s where I’m living right now. Come over and we can have some coffee.”

  “Thanks. But I’m there already. Your colleague, Helen Monaco, gave me your address. Her cell phone number was on the back of your card.” She paused. “I’m afraid I lied to her. I hope you don’t mind, but I told her you’d asked me down there to see you but that I’d lost your address and you weren’t answering your cell phone.”

  “I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  As I put my foot down, I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was nine-fifteen p.m.—kind of late for anyone to be making a social call in Galveston, especially when they lived in Austin; Austin was a four-hour, two-hundred-mile drive. Even if Sara Espinosa stayed for an hour, she wouldn’t be home before at least two a.m. It seemed curious. Then again, by the standard of everything else I’d experienced in the last couple of hours, it hardly seemed curious at all.

  As I neared my own front door, I saw a beautiful sky-blue Bentley Continental Supersports convertible that was parked out front, with Sara Espinosa in the driver’s seat, and I reflected that maybe she just liked driving. If I owned a car like that, a four-hour drive at night might seem like a pleasure.

  I pulled up onto the short driveway. Sara got out and walked toward me, looking shapelier than I remembered. She was wearing a white trouser suit and matching sneakers with little gold stripes, not to mention several gold bangles and a gold watch. She looked like one of those Kremlin churches with the rounded gold and white towers—something involving worship anyway.

  “Nice car,” I said. “I guess there’s a lot more to human biology than I thought there was.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, turning to look at the car as if “that” were a pet cat or a birthmark and not a $300,000 car. “Yes, biology’s been good to me.”

  “I didn’t need to see the car to know that,” I said.

  She blushed a little, which surprised me, because even as I’d said it, I thought it was probably the kind of sexist remark that a woman like her would find disagreeable. Which told me something in itself; she was a little less combative than the first time we had met, a little less self-assured.

  I took my eyes off her and then the car, and fixed them on the horizon for a moment. As well as some significant-looking clouds, the wind was getting up, too; it stirred her blond hair as if she were still driving her car with the top down. Had there been a weather report I’d missed? Maybe that was the problem. Somehow a TV weather report was always more a description of what had happened instead of what was going to happen. But then, as a famous physicist once remarked, prediction is always difficult, especially when it’s about the future, although clearly Nelson Van Der Velden had no such qualms.

  “Could be a storm coming in,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, turning to follow my eye line. “Yes, you could be right.”

  I yawned. The kava seemed to be working now.

  “You’re tired,” she said. “You’ve had a busy day, I can tell. I should really go.”

  “No,” I said. “No. Come in. I insist. Before the neighbors start to talk.”

  She followed me up the steps to the front door.

  “Are they terribly nosy?”

  “That was a joke,” I said, ushering her into the hallway. “There aren’t any neighbors. Not really. Most people in this neighborhood upped and left a while ago. Or died for all I know. There’s just me and the grumpy old man up the street. You’re the first visitor I’ve had since I moved into this dump.”

  I frowned because it seemed to me that the musty smell that had always filled the diocesan house had been joined by something else. I’d come across a smell like that once before, at Driscoll Street, when we’d come back from vacation to find that the house had suffered a power outage and all the meat in the freezer had spoiled.

  “What’s that smell?” I said.

  “I can’t smell anything.”

  “You can’t?”

  “No.” She stepped into the sitting room and looked around politely. “It’s not a dump at all,” she said.

  “If I’d known I was going to have a visitor, I’d have cleaned up a bit before I left this morning.”

  “No, really, it’s nice. Comfortable. And very masculine. I even like the picture.”

  I shrugged. “The guy who lived here before me was a priest, so it’s his taste, not mine.”

  “It’s by Stanley Spencer, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what it says on the back of the frame.”

  “He married a lesbian who refused to consummate the marriage.”

  “It can happen to anyone,” I said.

  “How does an FBI agent come to be living in a priest’s house, anyway?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Have a seat. I’ll make some coffee.”

  “I’d prefer a drink. White wine if you have any.”

  “There’s plenty of wine. Good wine. The priest was a bit of a connoisseur. There’s a small wine cellar and a special chiller cabinet with what looks like some quality stuff that I haven’t dared touch. A bottle always seems a bit too much when it’s just for one.”

  That was a lie, of course; when you’re drinking on your own, wine just seems to take longer than scotch to work its anesthetizing effect.

  Still sniffing the unpleasant air, I threw open some windows and went into the kitchen, checked the garbage disposal and the trash. But finding nothing that seemed to explain the smell, I went downstairs to fetch the wine. I was half inclined to lecture Sara about drunk driving but that seemed less than honest, given the empty bottles of liquor in the trunk of my own car; besides, I hardly thought one glass of white wine was going to do her any harm, even at the wheel of a Bentley.

  I carried the bottle upstairs, opened it, and poured us each a large glass, burying my nose in the floral bouquet of the golden wine. I wondered how it would mix with kava, but mostly I didn’t care. I downed a glass and poured myself another. It wasn’t every day an attractive woman turned up on my doorstep. Especially in Galveston.

  She sipped the wine. “Delicious. White burgundy is my favorite. And this is the perfect temperature, too. Most people in Texas serve white wine much too cold. And too young. 1995. Well, that’s perfect.”

  “You know cars, you know art, and you know wine,” I said. “About the only thing you don’t seem to know is interior decoration. This place is a dump and you know it.”

  She took another look around the room and sighed. “Perhaps it’s a little monastic,” she observed. “But that’s what you’d expect with a priest. Even one who enjoys Puligny-Montrachet.”

  She swallowed some more of the wine. It did taste good; and I had to admit the wine looked like the Holy Grail, it was so golden in the glass.

  “That’s much better,” she said. “Gosh, I needed that more than I thought I did.”
r />   “Me, too.” The wine was mixing well with the kava. I felt good. Better than I’d felt in several hours.

  For a moment, neither of us said anything. I glanced awkwardly around the room, wondering what she really thought of the place and, by extension, me.

  “Would you like something to eat, perhaps?” I asked.

  “With this?” she asked, meaning the wine. “Oh, no. There’s nothing I could possibly eat with wine as good as this. But don’t let me stop you, Agent Martins.”

  “No,” I said. “I had lunch. And please, call me Gil.”

  “All right. I will. Your accent, I’ve been meaning to ask.”

  “I lived in Scotland until I was fourteen.”

  “Wow. What was that like?”

  “It always feels like a previous personality I left behind.”

  “And you like Galveston better?”

  I grinned. “No. But I liked Boston. That’s where my family went after Scotland. I’m thinking of moving back there. To Boston. Not to Scotland.”

  This was possibly the first moment when I realized that I was considering it. Surely Houston was finished for me. Ruth and Danny were no longer in my life; and probably I’d have to leave the office when Chuck found out that I’d called a suspect who was under surveillance. With any luck, I might persuade the Boston field office to take me on. Or perhaps the Massachusetts State Police.

  “I think I was happiest when I was living in Connecticut.”

  “Meaning you’re not happy now?”

  “Meaning it was where I grew up. I think the place where you grow up always has an extra importance in your life. Don’t you?”

  “I never really thought about it,” I lied.

  She shivered.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “A little,” she admitted. “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe the weather is changing,” I said, glancing out the window. To me it still felt really humid, but I wasn’t about to argue with her. “Here, let me fetch you a blanket or something.”