Costume Not Included (20 page)

  "This time, you'll be able to write your own ticket," the young man said. He turned to the demon. "Is Hardacre in his study?" he said.

  "Yep."

  "Then take us there."

  Their time in the grayness was shorter on the way back, and they didn't go by way of Hell. In a few moments, they were stepping out of nothingness into the preacher's study. Billy Lee looked up from where he was seated in an armchair, a lawyer's yellow pad on his lap and a pen in his hand. "What's this?" he said.

  "You wanted a prophet," Chesney said. "I've brought you one."

 

Captain Denby called it a day at six in the evening. The Taxidermist paperwork was under control; he'd shanghaied a civilian clerk to help him – just walked into the pool on the third floor, pointed at a middle-aged woman he'd worked with before and knew to be competent, and said, "Madge, come with me." An hour later, she'd set him up a cross-referenced file system and arranged to come up to his office – he had also commandeered a space that had formerly belonged to a lieutenant who did press liaison, one of J. Edgar Hoople's stable of goalong, get-aheads. Denby had tossed the soft-bellied lieutenant out partly because he wanted the space, and partly to see if he would get away with it. Now it was the end of the day, and nobody with more brass on his collar than Denby had arrived to restore the evicted sycophant.

  Denby turned off his desk lamp and closed the murder book – a three-ring binder in which he recorded all steps taken in the investigation of Wendell Throop's homicidal career. He looked at the phone one last time, hoping for coincidence, but its row of lights stayed dark. Still, he didn't rise and head for the door.

  Denby was a reflective man. One thing he'd learned in his years on the force was that motivation was usually the key to solving major crimes; once you knew
why
somebody had ended up dead in a pool of blood, you had a pretty good chance of finding out who had done the deed. Occasionally, he turned the spotlight on himself, and went looking for the why behind his own actions.

  What he'd done today – beating the chief and the commissioner at the power game, turfing out the PR lieutenant – didn't bother him. He was honest enough to admit that he enjoyed the ego-boost that came from being top dog, but he knew that the only thing he wanted out of the special-assignment captaincy and all that went with it was the chance to be a better cop. He was willing to cut himself a fair amount of slack if the end result was more bad guys off the streets and in the pen.

  But the business with the preacher's book bothered him. Yes, it had been a mystery and Denby couldn't have been a good cop if he didn't have that urge to get to the bottom of things. But he couldn't deny to himself that he'd stolen the damned thing, and not because he thought it was evidence of a crime – time travel was not illegal, at least not yet – but just because he'd had an itch he had to scratch. That wasn't the Denby he knew.

  What got into me he wondered? Whatever it was, he knew that he'd acted on impulse, without thinking. Up until now, he would have bet on his impulses being those of a good cop. But the book business showed him that he was as capable as anybody else of doing the wrong thing, and not for the right reason.

  I need to watch that, he told himself. Especially now that he was boldly going into regions where nobody had gone before. The nerd kid and his girlfriend were straight – his instincts would have rung a bell if they hadn't been. The guy in the costume, whatever weird futuristic concerns motivated him, also seemed to be trying to do some good. Now that Denby could bring him into the system, at least as far as making him a confidential informant, the captain wouldn't need to step too far over the line that divided solid police work from vigilantism.

  He nodded to himself. That just left Billy Lee Hardacre. The reverend wouldn't be filing any official complaints; he had no evidence that Denby had stolen his book, and he probably wouldn't want to make public the nature of the purloined item. So there would be no repercussions. But still…

  Denby consulted his notebook, found Hardacre's number and punched buttons on the phone. The preacher answered on the second ring. The captain identified himself and said, "It's about the book."

  "What book?" said Hardacre.

  Denby paused long enough to take in the implications of the man's response then said, "I just want you to know I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me."

  "I bet I do."

  "What?"

  But Hardacre didn't add to the cryptic comment. After the silence had lengthened, the policeman said, "Well, I just wanted to say–"

  "That you're sorry. I got that."

  "So where do we go from here?"

  "Nowhere," said Hardacre. "Just stay away from me and my home."

  "I can do that."

  "Then we're done." Denby heard a click and the line was dead.

 

The Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre had other troubles. After his wife's son had brought him a replacement prophet, it hadn't taken long to establish the newcomer's identity, even if Joshua didn't present an image the preacher might have expected. For one thing, the attire in which Joshua had arrived was different from what he'd been wearing when Chesney and Xaphan had found him. The demon had converted Chesney's jeans, short-sleeved shirt, and loafers into a robe and sandals to fit the look of first-century AD Judaea, then put him back in twenty-first century casuals for the return. It had also done the equivalent for Joshua, dressing him a lightweight summer suit, opennecked shirt, and suede lace-ups.

  The once-and-future prophet was intrigued by the garments. He kept running the zipper up and down until informed that it was necessary to keep it up in mixed company. He was also taken with the idea of pockets. "Very handy," he kept saying, as he investigated the jacket, pants and shirt for useful places to keep stuff. Then he pulled off one of the shoes to see if it had any hidden compartments.

  During the couple of minutes the prophet spent exploring his clothing, Hardacre and Chesney were preoccupied with reviving Letitia and moving her from the carpet on which she had fainted and getting her settled in an armchair. Her son went to the kitchen to fetch a cool cloth for her forehead, while her husband took the more practical approach of pouring an ounce and a half of brandy down her throat.

  She came to, spluttering, but when her eyes focused on the bearded man running his zipper up and down in front of her, she went away again. Another slug of liquor brought her back, and this time she took hold of the glass and drained it.

  By now, Chesney had got the prophet seated and the bearded man was looking about the room with evident interest. "Not Rome?" he said to the young man.

  "No. America. It hadn't been discovered when you were… active."

  "America," said Joshua, pronouncing the word carefully. "Sounds Roman, though."

  "It's a long story," Chesney said.

  "Oh, good." Joshua folded his arms and waited attentively.

  "Later," said Chesney. "Right now we need to settle a few things." He turned to the demon, which was sampling a single-malt Irish whiskey from Hardacre's cabinet. "Xaphan, would you bring Melda, please?"

  The fiend nodded, then shimmered out of sight. It was back again a moment later with Chesney's girlfriend, who came into view in the act of striking the demon with a long, pale object that turned out to be a loofah bath sponge. The young woman then noticed the presence of the others, screamed, and attempted to cover strategic parts of herself with the sponge, because she was otherwise clad in nor more than a few widely scattered patches of bubbles.

  "Xaphan!" said Chesney. "Fix this!"

  A moment later, Melda was clothed, dry and bubblefree. Xaphan had chosen one of her favorite outfits: a green cotton blouse and denim skirt combo that she liked to wear when they went to the park for picnics. She still held the loofah, however, which she disposed of by throwing it at Chesney's assistant. The demon moved a finger and the sponge disappeared in mid-flight.

  Joshua had had the good manners to avert his eyes and blush. When the embarrassment was over, he said to Chesney, "Are you sure you don't want me to rid you of that thing?"

  "How about it?" the young man said to Xaphan. "Want to see how an exorcism feels?"

  "Try it, and I'll just ankle on home."

  "Not if I order you to stay."

  "It was just a little joke," said the demon. "No need for all the brouhaha."

  "Go somewhere else until I call you."

  Letitia's eyes were the largest Chesney had ever seen them. His mother held out her glass, now empty, and said to Hardacre. "More."

  As the preacher was returning with another brandy, and a Scotch for himself, the phone rang. He answered it and held up his end of a short conversation. When he'd hung up, he said, "Denby."

  Chesney saw that Melda had gone from seething to a low simmer. "It was my fault," he told her, steering her toward a chair. "I should have thought of the possibilities." He watched her get a grip, and tried to help it by saying, "I've always liked you in those clothes."

  "Enough," she said. "What's been going on?"

  "I want to introduce you to Joshua," he said. He could hear, by the sound of his own voice, that he was speaking to her in ordinary American English so he worked at getting the pronunciation right. To the prophet, he said, hearing his voice take on the accent and cadence of Heaven, "This is Melda McCann, my girlfriend."

  "Your betrothed?" said Joshua.

  Chesney looked at the young woman and felt the heat of a blush creeping up his cheeks. "We haven't talked about…"

  "His betrothed," said Melda.

  Chesney's mother let out a noise somewhere between a squeak and a moan, then opened her mouth to say something more cogent. Hardacre stilled her by holding up both hands, as if placing a barrier between his wife and an unpleasant sight. "Later, Letty," he said. "Business first."

  Chesney had something to say, and now was the time to say it. "Melda, I know we agreed that you would make the decision on this prophet thing. But now something's happened and I've worked it out for myself."

  He did not know what to expect. He wouldn't have been surprised if she'd laid into him. He'd seen enough incidents at work of people having their responsibilities undercut by others – insurance was a competitive business, even for actuaries – and he knew it made people mad. Instead he saw forming between her brows the little line that meant she was thinking something through.

  "How?" she said.

  "I don't know," he said. "It wasn't clear, but then I followed it anyway and then I saw… well, anyway, I figured out what was best."

  The little line went away and she smiled. "That's fantastic!" she said. "I'm so proud of you."

  He felt a warm glow, but it was edged by a little chill. "But you might not like what I've decided," he said.

  "Try me."

  He turned and addressed the others. "I'm not going to be a prophet," he said. "I've seen what happens," he gestured to indicate the bearded man, "and it's not going to happen to me."

  Letitia cleared her throat. "Now, you listen to me, young man–" she began, but this time it was Chesney who cut her off.

  "No, Mother. I saw what happened to Joshua, here. He launched a new chapter of the book, just the way the reverend wants me to do. And then he got left behind in the old draft, living the same day over and over again." He said to Melda, "Just like
Groundhog Day
."

  "Really?" she said.

  "Yeah, but it didn't end. Didn't matter if he changed. He was just stuck forever."

  Melda gave the prophet a sympathetic look. "Poor guy."

  Joshua shrugged. "It's all right now," he said.

  Chesney turned back to Hardacre and his mother. "And that's what would happen to me. The Actionary would go on into the new draft. You'd write the book, Reverend, and the book would become the new reality. But me,
this
me, I'd be like him, sitting around, waiting for the story to finally end." He looked the preacher in the eye, then did the same with his mother. "Well, I'm not going to do it. I was going to say, 'Get yourself another prophet,' but you won't have to, because," he indicated the bearded man, "I already went and got one for you."

  What came next, of course, was an argument. It wasn't a very cohesive discussion; it tended to wander among a number of different subjects, because the individual disputants each had his or her own slant on what constituted the most important grounds for disagreement. But it was a heated argument, at times very hot.

  Chesney's basic line could be expressed in the words, "No," "No way," and, finally, "Case closed."

  Hardacre's stance was that the young man did not realize what was at stake. He used phrases like, "Unparalleled opportunity," and "Whole new world for the making."

  Letitia's themes were more personal, and revolved around past instances of her son's willful disobedience and her own selfless efforts to bring him up to be a "decent, upstanding Christian," which were negated by his obstinate nature, inherited from his father, along with his tendency to "go chasing after trollops."

  This last was said with the older woman's eye fixed meaningfully on the younger, but Melda ignored the invitation to debate her own character and instead kept the focus on where she believed it belonged: the Billy Lee/Letitia axis that was "just trying to use Chesney to further your own agendas, without a thought as to how it will hurt him."

  The altercation eventually became circular, with the disputants hurling their accusations at each other like weary prizefighters unable to score a knock-out. Throughout, the fifth person in the room sat and watched like a spectator with a front-row seat at the performance of a live drama. Finally, when the ebb and flow of accusation and vituperation had begun to lose energy while conversely gaining bitterness, Joshua stood and raised a hand as well as a voice that had once been accustomed to address multitudes without the benefit of microphones and loudspeakers.