The Jehovah Contract

by Victor Koman

  La Vecque's office door opened. A young, muscular man in a white tunic stepped out carrying a portable cryogenic container that hummed quietly. His gaze flicked toward us-suspiciously at first. Then his look grew mystified. He probably wondered why anyone would come to La Vecque with a medical problem.

  I knew why

  he

  dealt with La Vecque.

  "Just back from Disneyland," I said merrily.

  He frowned and lugged the freeze unit quickly toward the stairs.

  I pounded on the office door. Behind it clattered the sounds of frantic tidying. After a few moments, La Vecque piped frantically, "Who's there? I've got a shotgun!"

  "Relax, Doc. It's me. Ammo."

  The door creaked open, hesitated for an instant, then swung wider.

  "Who're they?" the old bird asked, letting us in.

  "Casualties, Doc. That's as deep as the inquiries get. I was hoping you'd fix us up."

  "Sure, Dell, sure."

  He had us shower one by one in the broom closet he had for a washroom. We put on paper gowns, and he checked each of us in turn.

  The kid passed with not much more than a few questions and a quick glance-over. Ann had a nasty-looking rip on her arm plus scratches on her face and shoulders as if she'd been thrown head first through a plate glass window. He tinkered with her while I rested.

  By the time he got to me, I'd stopped bleeding. The first thing he did was to clean the wounds, which started the blood oozing again. He examined my scalp with an irritating lassitude.

  "I'm going to have to shave some hair off."

  "Go ahead," I said. "I was getting tired of the two-tone effect anyway. Take it all off."

  "I'm not a barber." He rummaged in a drawer to find a razor. "Your preacher friend was looking for you a while ago. Moreno. He looked awful."

  "Awful drunk?"

  "Worse," he said. "Sober as a judge on election day."

  I snorted. He'd copped that line from me.

  "I told him you might be around somewhere, so he went up to wait for you."

  That gave me a little bit of the chill I've been feeling only too often lately. Joey had been worried enough on the phone when he said he'd wait for me at the church. Could all this psychic pyrotechnics have reached him, too? Why else would he walk all the way over to my office at night?

  Something

  must have him scared.

  I waited patiently for La Vecque to disinfect the wounds and lay down a bunch of tape sutures. He reached for a roll of gauze.

  "That's good enough," I said, standing up. "I'm going to check in on the padre." I turned to Ann. "I'll rustle up something for the kid to wear. Wait for me here."

  I picked up my gun and-paper robe fluttering-rushed out of the good doctor's office and hit the stairs like an aging greyhound after the iron rabbit. The concrete steps stung my bare feet with each bound. A few gasping strides brought me to my floor. I had energy that seemed to come strictly from panic. Events were closing in around me. Too much was happening at once.

  I eased the stairway door open to listen.

  Silence. As complete as snowflakes on cotton.

  I held the automatic up and crept toward the office. My feet appreciated the carpeting.

  The door stood slightly ajar, permitting a wedge of light to spread across the hall and climb up the side of the far wall.

  I stood beside the doorway to hear the kind of total silence that an inhabited room cannot maintain. The room smelled of burnt gunpowder.

  I kicked the door inward and dropped to one knee, scanning the room with eye and gat. Nothing moved.

  Not even the body on my waiting-room couch.

  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. Clannish sorts, I thought. I hardly ever kept tabs on my own colleagues.

  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 Tribulation

  and 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 annoyingly intriguing item, Joey continued to sit there, looking amazed. I reached over to close his eyelids. They resisted at first, then stickily slid shut. He looked less surprised, as though he'd overheard something interesting while dozing but thought it deserved nothing more than raised eyebrows.

  I cased my inner office. Carefully. I picked up more cartridges for my automatic and scooped out what money the safe held. The stuff wound up in a briefcase, followed by a few personal items and a change of clothes. I thought a moment and added two extra shirts, a pair of slacks, and a belt.

  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 Ann a dark blue pair of pants and a white shirt. "You too." The kid got a red-checked Pendleton.

  "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?" Ann asked, stepping behind the office door to change.

  "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, running a few fingers over my lumpy scalp. "And since you're connected with me now, your place is probably under surveillance."

  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?" Ann asked.

  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. Ann put an arm around Isadora.

  "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 grinned. "I puked all over his altar. He got really pissed having to clean it up." She giggled like a drunken hyena.

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

  "It's best to forget about him," Ann said. "You're not involved in any of this."

  "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," Ann said. "It's the meaningful coincidences that are important."

  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.

  Ann continued to talk the way one talks into a deep well.

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

  "Well, Zacharias wouldn't send them after

  me

  , would he? I told him I'd fulfill our contract."

  Ann frowned for an instant. "Maybe he didn't like the way you interrupted his ritual. It may have altered his plans enough that he doesn't want you to proceed. Perhaps he's discovered something in the contract. Or something about you. Maybe he's scared. Whatever the reason, he wants you to stop."

  "Look, Angel." I tossed my expired cig into the gutter. "If Zack wants to cancel, I say fine. He doesn't have to kill me to get me off this goose chase. But I'm not backing out."

  "Maybe you know too much now just to cancel it and let it lie. Maybe you're a threat."

  "Yeah. Dell Ammo. Fighting the forces of heaven and hell. One man apocalypse. The bodies are dropping already."

  "Has he flipped?" The kid looked me up and down.

  "Forget it, doll baby. You've managed to land in the midst of a cosmic power struggle, and the poor joker in the middle of it all wants to get drunk and sleep the aching memories away."

  When we reached Auberge and split up to go our separate ways, I did just that. In a nice, clean hotel room for a change.

  12

  St. Judas

  The nice clean sheets in the hotel room no longer looked nice or clean. Whatever I drank before falling into a stupor had sweated out again. I smelled as bad as I felt. Some memory from long ago slid away back where dreams come from, and I lay still, working at waking up.

  After lolling about like that for a few minutes, I rolled out of bed and navigated toward the bathroom. One hot and cold shower and a shave later, I felt ready to make a phone call.

  Pulling the business card out of my wallet, I set it next to the telephone and punched out the combination of numbers and letters. If the HWHY was some sort of mnemonic, I had no idea what it was for.

  A female voice as pert and crisp as sunrise over the mountains said, "Forty-nine forty-nine. May I held you?"

  "Is this the church?" I asked with a small degree of surprise. A church with an answering service?

  "Church, sir?"

  She must get darned few calls for them. "Uh... the St. Judas Church."

  "Oh," she said with a pleasant tone. "One moment." The phone went silent.

  I waited. A cigarette eventually found its way to my lips and got lit. Halfway through the smoke, a man's voice crackled onto the line. He had that sharp-edged bite that one would expect from a tough businessman, not from someone connected with a church. At least, not a with a nonevangelical church.

  "Who is this?" he demanded, as polite as a gunshot.

  "A fellow believer," I said in a simpery voice. "A traveler on the path to understanding. A humble seeker after-"

  "Cut the crap-I'm a busy man. Are you the guy that knows Joey Moreno?"

  I stumbled over a thought. He'd caught me off guard with that one. "

  Knew

  Joey," I said. "He got iced last night."

  It was his turn to pause. The silence on the other end was thick enough to lean against. After a moment, the voice spoke.

  "How'd it happen?"

  "Shot. In my office. I found him there."

  "Did you by chance have anything to do with it?"

  "Probably. He knew me too well."

  Another pause. "That's a good answer. A very good one. Honest. I like that. Look, pal, I think I know what you're up to from what Joey told me. And I suspect that there's big trouble brewing because of it. And not just for Joey or you. This may have serious repercussions. Serious. I think we could both benefit from a talk."

  He gave me an address on the eight hundred block of South Broadway. I told him I'd meet him in a couple of hours and rang off.

  I ground out the cigarette and thought hard. It might be a setup. Whoever killed Joey could have planted the card on him. I loaded up my Colt and shoved it into my waistband holster.

  The best way to find a trapper is to hang around His traps...

  In the middle of the east side of the block sat a squashed sort of building jammed between two other equally squashed buildings. A sign in the window hung at a careless angle.

  Checks cashed here

  Rubber stamps made to order

  24 hour legal forms

  Maps to the stars's homes

  A three-by-five card-browned with time-was stuck to the window beneath the larger sign. The cellophane tape was likewise brown, curling away fr
om the card and cracking in places. The card had two words and an arrow pointing upward at an angle.

  CHURCH UPSTAIRS

  I headed upstairs.

  The steps looked as though they would creak as loud as bullfrogs in heat. I ascended slowly, touching only the outermost edge of every other step. It took awhile, but I reached the top of the staircase making as much noise as a foggy night.

  The landing had been swept, at least, and the closed door had a small, engraved plastic sign.

  ST. JUDAS CHURCH OF HOLY TRIBULATION AND TAX EVASION

  I listened at the door. Voices beyond spoke casually. I liked that. I could hear every word. I liked that even more.

  "If God is dead," asked a pleasant male voice, "what have people been getting at Communion?"

  "A Guest Host." This voice was deep and gruff-the voice on the telephone. "Can we get back to work?"

  "Okay. How's this one-`Bored with the Lord? Feast with the Beast!'"

  "Catchy," the deeper voice replied, "but we need something that'll really inflame them. I want you to escape within three inches of your life."

  The other man laughed. It was a warm, exuberant laugh. "You'd be happier if I were torn apart and martyred.

  That

  would give you some publicity."

  "Don't think I might not prefer it. How about this-you could explain that all good Christians should actively support the Beast and the Antichrist because the Kingdom of God won't return until we've had a thousand years of tribulation. After all, if it's in the Bible, it's God's prophecy. And any good Christian can see the necessity of allowing God's prophecy to proceed. Hence, the most blessed Christians are the ones who put the Antichrist on the throne of the world."

  There was a long pause. "Nah," said the higher voice, "too subtle."

  I tickled my knuckles against the door. A couple of paint flakes stuck to my skin. I brushed them off as the door slid open.

  I stood eye to eye with a beautiful man.

  I couldn't call him handsome-his features weren't rugged enough. I couldn't call him pretty, because he looked in no way delicate. He was beautiful, that's all. And I'm not that kind of guy, either.