"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.

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 hereRubber stamps made to order24 hour legal formsMaps 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 from 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.

He looked at me with eyes the color of a morning sky near the ocean. They gazed intently, yet not disturbingly so. His hair was a mass of ringlety waves that curled down to his shirt collar. To call the curls blond would be to call gold a "yellowish metal." They shone, even in the dimly lit room, like the "yellowish metal" glows in bright sunlight. His face looked as though its expression could change from sardonic to dead serious with just a turn of his lips. At the moment, he was sardonic.

He scanned me with a grin. "Welcome to the holiest of holies-the church of He Who Would Turn the Last Supper Into a Friar's Roast." The grin was a beautiful grin-it didn't belong in this dump.

The room in which he stood was nothing more than a fifteen-by-twenty office. One dingy window looked out on a brick wall. What light the room had came from a pair of flyspecked bulbs overhead that burned uncovered. It gave the place all the hominess of a prison cell. Or maybe a prison library.

Shelves constructed of bricks and boards strained under the weight of books against every wall. There might have been fewer books in this room than in the home of Theodore Golding, though only because the sloppy, warped shelves could not reach all the way to the ceiling without danger of toppling. They looked as if a well-fed flea could have knocked them down.