Strangers (25 page)

“Okay, but if you don’t call by Friday or Saturday, I’ll probably come back and bust my way in. Remember, you’re my best hope.”

“I am your best hope…only for want of anything better.”

“You underrate yourself, Pablo Jackson.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

“Au revoir.”

“Shalom.”

Outside, as she got into the cab, she remembered one of her father’s favorite aphorisms, and, like a lead weight, it counteracted her new buoyancy:
It’s always brightest just before the dark.

3

Chicago, Illinois

Winton Tolk—the tall, jovial, black patrolman riding shotgun—got out of the police cruiser to buy three hamburgers and Cokes at a corner sandwich shop, leaving his partner, Paul Armes, behind the wheel, and Father Brendan Cronin in the back seat. Brendan glanced at the shop, but he could not see inside, for the big front windows were painted with festive holiday images: Santa, reindeer, wreaths, angels. A light snow had just begun to fall, and the weather forecast called for eight inches by midnight, which meant tomorrow would be a white Christmas.

As Winton got out of the car, Brendan leaned forward and said to Paul Armes, “Yeah, well, nobody’s knocking
Going My Way,
but what about
It’s a Wonderful Life
? Now there was a terrific picture!”

“Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed,” Paul said.

“What a cast.” They had been talking about great Christmas films, and now Brendan was sure he had hit upon the best of the best, “Lionel Barrymore played the skinflint. Gloria Grahame was in that, too.”

“Thomas Mitchell,” Paul Armes said as, outside, Winton reached the door of the sandwich shop. “Ward Bond.
God,
what a cast!” Winton had gone into the sandwich shop. “But you’re forgetting another great one.
Miracle on 34th Street.
”

“That was terrific, sure, but I still think Capra’s better—”

It seemed that the gunshots and the startling cascade of shattering glass came at the same instant, with not a fraction of a second between. Even with the car doors shut, the heater fan making noise, and the police-band radio crackling and chirruping, the shots were loud enough to halt Brendan in midsentence. As the explosions blew away the Christmas peace of the Uptown street, the sandwich shop’s painted window tableau dissolved, erupted in a glittering spray. New shots overlaid the echo of old reports, and the blasts were accompanied by a brittle and atonal music of glass smashing on the roof, hood, and trunk of the cruiser.

“Oh, shit!” Paul Armes tore the dash-mounted riot gun free of its clasps, throwing open his door even as the glass was still raining. “Stay down,” he shouted back at Brendan, and then he was out, crouching, moving around the car, and using it as a shield.

Stunned, Brendan looked through the window at his side, back toward the sandwich-shop entrance. Abruptly, that door was flung wide open, and two young men appeared, one black, one white. The black man wore a knit cap and a long navy peacoat—and carried a semiautomatic sawed-off shotgun. The white man, in a plaid hunting jacket, was armed with a revolver. They came out fast, half-crouched, and the black man swung the shotgun toward the patrol car. Brendan was looking directly into the muzzle. There was a flash, and he was sure he had been shot, but the rear passenger-side window in front of his face remained intact. Instead, the front window exploded inward, fragments of glass and lead pellets showering across the seat, rattling off the dashboard. The near-miss shocked Brendan out of his daze, and he rolled off his seat, to the floor, his heart hammering almost as loud as the gunfire.

Winton Tolk had had the bad luck to walk unsuspecting into the middle of an armed robbery. He was probably dead.

As Brendan pressed himself to the floor of the squad car, he heard Paul Armes shouting outside:
“Drop it!”

Two shots cracked. Not a shotgun. Revolver fire. But who pulled the trigger? Paul Armes or the guy in the plaid hunting jacket?

Another shot. Someone screamed.

But who had been hit? Armes or one of the robbers?

Brendan wanted to look, but he did not dare show himself.

Thanks to an arrangement Father Wycazik had made with the local precinct captain, Brendan had been riding as an observer with Winton and Paul for five days. In an ordinary suit, tie, and topcoat, he was supposed to be a lay consultant employed by the Church to study the need for Catholic charity outreach programs, a cover story which everyone seemed to accept. Winton’s and Paul’s beat was Uptown, an area bordered
by Foster Avenue on the North, Lake Shore Drive high-rises on the east, Irving Park Road on the south, and North Ashland Avenue on the west. It was Chicago’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhood, home to blacks and Indians, but mostly to Appalachians and Hispanics. After five days with Winton and Paul, Brendan developed a strong liking for both men and a deep sympathy for all the honest souls who lived and worked in those decaying buildings and filthy streets—and who were prey to the packs of human jackals among them. He had learned to expect anything riding with these guys, but the sandwich-shop shootout was the worst incident yet.

Another shotgun blast slammed into the car, rocking it.

Brendan curled fetally on the floor and tried to pray, but no words came. God was still lost to him, and he cowered in terrible solitude.

Outside, Paul Armes shouted, “Give it up!”

The gunman said, “Fuck you!”

When he’d reported to Father Wycazik after a week at St. Joseph’s, Brendan had been sent to another hospital, where he’d been given work on the terminal ward, a dreadful place with no children at all. There, as at St. Joseph’s, Brendan quickly discovered the lesson that Stefan Wycazik expected him to learn. To most who were at the end of life, death was not to be feared but welcomed, a blessing for which they thanked God rather than cursed Him. And in dying, many who had never been believers became believers at last, and those who had fallen away from faith came back. There was frequently something noble and deeply moving in the suffering that accompanied a person’s exit from this world, as if each shared, for a while, the mystical burden of the cross.

Yet, that lesson learned, Brendan remained unable to believe. Now, the fierce beating of his heart hammered the words of the prayer to dust before he could speak them, and his mouth was as dry as powder.

Outside, there was shouting, but he could not make sense of the words anymore, maybe because the people shouting were incoherent and maybe because he was partially deaf from the gunfire.

He did not yet fully understand the lesson that Father Wycazik had hoped he would learn from this Uptown portion of his unconventional therapy. And now as he listened to the chaos outside, he knew that the lesson, regardless of its nature, would be insufficient to convince him that God was as real as bullets. Death was a bloody, stinking, foul reality, and in the face of it, the promise of a reward in the afterlife was not the least persuasive.

The shotgun discharged again, followed by the roar of the riot gun, then by shouting and the
slap-slap-slap
of running feet. It sounded like a war out there. Another blast from the riot gun. More shattering glass.
Another scream, more horrible than the one that had rent the air before it. Yet another shot. Silence. Silence perfect and profound.

The driver’s door was jerked open.

Brendan cried out in surprise and terror.

“Stay down!” Paul Armes said from the front seat, keeping a low profile himself. “Two dead, but there might be other shitheads inside.”

“Where’s Winton?” Brendan asked.

Paul did not answer. Instead, he grabbed the radio microphone up front and called Central. “Officer down. Officer down!” Armes gave his position, the address of the sandwich shop, and requested backup.

Lying on his side on the floor of the squad car, Brendan closed his eyes and saw, with heartbreaking clarity, the pictures that Winton Tolk carried in his wallet and that he proudly displayed when queried about his family—pictures of his wife, Raynella, and his three children.

“Those rotten fucking bastards,” Paul Armes said, his voice shaking.

Brendan heard soft clicking and scraping sounds that puzzled him until he realized Armes was reloading. He said, “Winton’s been shot?”

“Bet on it,” Armes said.

“He might need help.”

“It’s on the way.”

“But he may need help
now,
” Brendan said.

“Can’t go in there. Might be another one. Two more. Who knows? We gotta wait for backup.”

“Winton might need a tourniquet…other first aid. He might be dead by the time help gets here.”

“Don’t you think I
know
that?” Paul Armes said bitterly, furiously. He finished reloading and slid out of the car to take up a position from which he could watch the shop.

The more Brendan thought about Winton Tolk sprawled on the floor in there, the angrier he became. If he had still believed in God, he might have quenched his anger in prayer. But now it fed on itself and grew into a hot rage. His heart pounded even harder than when the shotgun blasts were crashing into the car inches from him. The injustice of Winton’s fate—the unfairness, the
wrongness
—was like an acid eating at Brendan.

He got out of the car and started across the sidewalk, through the falling snow, toward the entrance to the sandwich shop.

“Brendan!” Paul Armes shouted from the far side of the police cruiser. “Stop! For God’s sake, don’t!”

Brendan kept going, driven by his rage and by the thought that Winton Tolk might need immediate first aid to survive.

A dead man in a plaid hunting jacket was lying on his back on the sidewalk. A round from Armes’s revolver had taken him in the chest, a second round in the throat. There was a stink of loosed bowels. In the snow beside the corpse lay a handgun, perhaps the very one with which Winton Tolk had been shot.

“Cronin!” Paul Armes yelled. “Get your ass back here, you idiot!”

Moving past the broken windows, Brendan could see into the shop, which was surprisingly dark. The lights had been shot out or a switch thrown, and the gray daylight penetrated only a couple of feet inside. He could not see anyone, but that did not mean it was safe to enter.

“Cronin!” Paul Armes shouted.

Brendan went to the entrance, where he found the black man in the peacoat. This one had been hit by a shotgun blast that also demolished the glass door; he was crumpled in a thousand bright fragments.

Stepping over the body, Brendan entered the sandwich shop. He did not have his Roman collar, which might have been something of a shield if he had been wearing it. On the other hand, degenerates like these would probably kill a priest as reflexively and as happily as they blew away police officers. In his suit and tie and topcoat, he was as ordinary and vulnerable as any man, but he did not care. He was
that
furious. Furious that God did not exist or, existing, did not care.

At the back of the small shop was a service counter. Behind the counter was a grill, other equipment. On this side were five very small tables and ten chairs, most of which had been toppled. On the floor were a couple of napkin dispensers, ketchup and mustard bottles, scattered one-and five-dollar bills, a lot of blood, and Winton Tolk.

Not bothering to study the overturned tables to see if a gunman was sheltering behind them, Brendan went to the officer, knelt beside him. Winton had been hit twice in the chest. Not with the shotgun. Probably the other thug’s revolver. The wounds were sickening, far too traumatic to respond dramatically to a mere tourniquet or first-aid procedures. His breast was mantled with blood, and blood trickled from his mouth. The pool of blood in which he lay was so deep that he appeared to be floating on it. He was still, eyes closed, either unconscious or dead.

“Winton?” Brendan said.

The cop did not respond. His eyelids did not even flutter.

Filled with a rage akin to that which had caused him to heave the holy chalice against the wall during Mass, Brendan Cronin gently put both hands on Winton Tolk’s neck, one on each side, feeling for the throbbing carotid arteries. He detected no life, and in his mind he saw the photographs of Raynella and the Tolk children again, and now he was
seething
with resentment at the indifference of the universe. “He can’t die,”
Brendan said angrily. “He can’t.” Suddenly he thought he felt a thready pulse, so faint it was virtually nonexistent. He moved his hands, seeking confirmation that Tolk lived. He found it: a less feeble beat than that first phantom drumming, though no less irregular.

“Is he dead?”

Brendan looked up and saw a man coming around the side of the service counter, a Hispanic in a white apron, the owner or an employee. A woman, also in a white apron, had risen from behind the counter.

Outside, distant sirens were growing nearer.

Under Brendan’s hands, the throbbing in Winton Tolk’s neck seemed to be getting stronger and more regular, which was surely not the case. Winton had lost too much blood to stage even a limited spontaneous recovery. Until the paramedics arrived with life-support machines, his vital signs would deteriorate unavoidably, and even expert medical care might not stabilize his condition.

The sirens were no more than two blocks away.

Puffs of snow blew in through the shattered windows.

The sandwich-shop employees edged closer.

Numb with shock, in a haze of anger at fate’s capricious brutality, Brendan trailed his hands from Winton’s neck to the wounds in his chest. When he saw the blood oozing up between his fingers, his rage gave way to overwhelming helplessness and uselessness, and he began to cry.

Winton Tolk choked. Coughed. Opened his eyes. Breath rattled thinly and wetly in his throat, and a soft groan escaped him.

Amazed, Brendan felt for a pulse in the man’s throat again. It was weak but definitely not as weak as before, and hardly irregular at all.

Raising his voice over the shrieking sirens, which were now so near that the air trembled, Brendan said, “Winton? Winton, do you hear me?”