PART THREE
Organized religion is a crutch for weak-minded people.
—JESSE VENTURA, GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA
ONE
1
It was too long a drive. Gregor knew that by the time he got to St. Anselm’s, the worst of the emergency would be over. The police would have the scene taped off. The witnesses would have been rounded up and shunted off to the sidelines somewhere to talk to uniformed officers whose only purpose would be to record whatever they said on steno pads. Of course, there was another possibility, and that was that Roy Phipps had taken to the streets again with his little band of followers—but nothing like that was coming over the radio on the sporadic news broadcasts they were able to pick up as they wound through the hills. It was funny how, living in Philadelphia, Gregor often forgot that Pennsylvania was a mountain state. They were real mountains, too, not as high or as intimidating as the Rockies, and not as new, but not “hills” the way any sane person thought of “hills.” Most of them were rounded at the top and had vegetation all the way up, but for roads people had found it easier to go straight through the middle of them rather than over and around them, and Gregor and Henry seemed to keep getting caught in tunnels. They couldn’t hear anything in tunnels. They couldn’t even hear each other.
Eventually, the mountains and the tunnels were behind them, and the exits on the turnpike were closer together than every fifty-six miles. Gregor began to relax. The worst of his subconscious fears—that they would never be able to find their way back at all—finally appeared on the surface of his mind and made him feel embarrassed. He played with the radio dial until he got what sounded like talking heads and found that he had hit on a talk show instead of a news broadcast. The talk show was called Feels Good.
“Today,” the talk show’s hostess said brightly, “we’re discussing role reversals. Can women reclaim their power by using prosthetic dildos to show the men in their lives what it really feels like to be a woman?”
“Jesus Christ,” Henry said.
“What’s a prosthetic dildo?” Gregor said.
Henry sighed. “It’s a dildo. You know, a plastic version of a man’s penis. It comes on a strap thing so that you can buckle it on and … and … oh, hell—”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“That’s the city,” Henry said.
What he really meant was that that was the suburbs. They had to go through several towns on the Main Line before they reached Philadelphia itself. The traffic was getting thicker by the mile. The drivers were getting angrier. Gregor picked up a real news station.
“There is no word at this time who is dead at St. Anselm’s Church, or what weapon was used in the killing,” the announcer said. It was another woman. She was just as sprightly as the woman who had been talking about dildos. “We do have word that the police have cordoned off the entire block, including the cross streets, to prevent a recurrence of the riot that occurred there earlier in the week—”
Gregor turned the sound down. “That isn’t very helpful.”
“It tells us that Roy isn’t burning down the barn.”
“I suppose.”
“That’s the exit,” Henry said.
Gregor looked up and saw that it was true. He’d lost a block of time, playing with the radio, thinking about nothing. Now he tried to pay attention as Henry shot off the turnpike and onto the complicated series of ramps and overpasses that would land them in city traffic. Gregor had actually learned to drive, once, when he was about thirty years old, because the Bureau had required it, but he had never gotten behind a wheel if he could avoid it, and most of the time he had been able to avoid it. The truth was, he was bad. Most people who had driven with him would just as soon do the driving themselves. Eventually, he had ended up behind a desk in the District of Columbia, and there had been no point at all in having a car. It had been years since he let his last driver’s license lapse. He was almost positive he couldn’t pass a driving test if he were given one.
Henry had actually made it onto a city street. Gregor saw small grocery stores, and butcher shops, and the kind of store that sold newspapers and candy. Gregor had never understood how those stores made enough money to stay in business. Henry turned a corner and then another corner and then another. Neighborhoods got good and bad in succession, without any pattern that Gregor could see. Then there were police cars and pulsing red-and-blue lights, and Henry pulled over.
“Go,” he said. “They won’t let me in in any case.”
“You’re a judge.”