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St. Mark's Hospital was a four-story red-brick structure with no flourishes or pretensions whatsoever. It had windows, doors, ledges and corners and that was it. Presumably it also had indoor plumbing.

I found the back door, then the back stairs and proceeded to go up. Earlier I'd talked to the hospital operator, pretending I was calling long distance about my brother Karl, and she told me he was in Room 408, intensive care.

I moved as quickly and quietly as possible up the echoing concrete stairwell. At the fourth floor, I opened the heavy green fire door and peeked down the hall, expecting to see the flash of white uniforms and hear the squeak of rubber soles.

The hall was empty.

I eased the door closed and started my search of the corridor. A hand-lettered sign taped to the wall said:

I followed the arrow and ended up in another short hallway with four doors to it, two on either side.

The second left, a nurse with an ample bottom was backing out of the room. The first right, a young female doctor looking brisk and earnest was just saying a loud "good morning" to the patient inside.

The door I wanted was first left. I had to reach it before the nurse just leaving 410 saw me.

I took five giant steps, pushed the door open and lunged inside.

I was all cold sweat and ragged breathing for two long minutes.

Vic—or Karl—was in bed, unconscious, a pale corpselike man who had so many tubes running out of his nostrils, his mouth and his arms, he looked like a creepy-crawly alien from a science-fiction movie. His breath came in gasps. The room smelled oppressively of decay. There were no flowers or cute greeting cards or balloons in the shape of puppies.

I waited until my breathing was normal again and then I crossed over to the side of his bed and peered down.

He looked dead. There was no other way to say it. Waxen, still. Some part of his soul had already crossed over.

He was all clean bandages, their heaviest concentration being across his throat. Across his middle were more bandages. Neither the slashed throat nor the two bullets to the stomach had killed him. Not yet.

I touched his shoulder.

His eyes flew open instantly.

He stared straight up at the ceiling, completely unaware of me.

"Who did this to you, Karl?"

Not even a flicker of recognition in his gaze.

"Who did this to you, Karl?"

A faint glimmer of awareness.

"Karl. I'm trying to help you."

He seemed to hear me as if from a long way off, and then he turned his head no more than a quarter-inch and looked up at me.

He started crying. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, his entire body began to shake, and tears began rolling down his cheeks.

He raised a trembling hand—a drowning man reaching up frantically for the final time—and I took it and held it.

"I'm sorry, Karl. But you're going to a better place."

"Scared," he said. And for the first time, some recognition of me shone in his eyes.

"I know, Karl. But you won't be scared for long. I promise."

He fell to crying, then, soft, almost-silent crying, his lower lip twitching as he did so.

"Who did this to you?"

But he wasn't listening to my words, only to the sounds I made.

"Scared," he said again. "Scared."

"I want to make this right for you, Karl. I want you to tell me who did this to you."

"Conmarck," he said messily, dribble and some blood glistening on the corner of his mouth.

"What?" I said.

He was looking at me but not seeing me. Just staring, the way a dead man would. He was going. Fast.

"Conmarck."

I was about to ask him what that meant when the door opened behind me and a nurse said, "This man is not allowed any visitors."

Just as I started to turn away from Karl, he said it again, as if he had been programmed with only one word, "Conmarck."

I knew I had to do it quickly, and without giving her much of a look at me.

I put my head down, squared my shoulders, and plowed my way out of the room, the nurse chittering angry words at me as I did so.

I found the door, and the rear stairwell, and got out of the hospital.

Having no idea, of course, what "Conmarck" meant.

I thought of Karl back there, his ragged frightened tears, crossing over now, crossing over.

I really did hope it would be better for him on the other side. Because then it might be better for me, too, when my time came.

The town had two sections—an older one where the blue-collar workers lived, and the newer one where the suburbanites nestled into their expensive homes. In the middle of the town was an aloof, impressive, French Second Empire courthouse and a wide Main Street that ran to small businesses that were likely here back when Frank Capra made all his wonderful movies about small-town America. On the south and east edges of town, you see the official imposition of Progress, the strip malls and the franchise food places and the video stores with posters of half-naked ladies carrying Uzis. I stayed downtown. The older I get, the less I'm impressed with Progress.

For twenty minutes I forgot all about Nora and how she'd lied to me; and Vic, whose real name was Karl, and how he was nearby desperately clinging to life, and how disturbed Tolliver had sounded when I'd told him about the death of his "daughter."

I forgot it all. I bought myself a newspaper, just the way the businessmen did, and I strode around a little more, and then I bought myself a cup of coffee from the old-fashioned pharmacy with the big wooden fan in the ceiling and a chipped and cracked but still-honorable old soda fountain, and I sat down on a park bench where a pigeon perched, and I spent the next ten minutes engrossed in reading, while warm spring sunlight dappled the bandstand and the smell of apple blossoms floated on the breeze.

I probably wouldn't have noticed him, except somebody honked at him. When I looked up, he was waving and about to get into a new station wagon.

There were some questions I wanted to ask him so I hurried across the street just as he was starting the engine.

"Morning, Kenny."

He looked up, boyish in his black cowboy shirt with white piping. His gaze was anything but Christian or charitable. He rolled down the window. "The reverend told me not to talk to you."

"Why's that, I wonder?"

"Said I'd just get us all in trouble."

"Not if you don't have anything to hide."

He shook his blond Irish head. "We argue enough as it is, the reverend and me. No reason to make it any worse."

He started to put the station wagon into gear.

"You want a cup of coffee?"

"No, thanks. I just need to get going."

"Is Mindy having an affair with the reverend?"

Kenny just looked at me. "I gotta go."

I reached in the window and put a hand on his shoulder. "When you travel with the reverend to different towns, does he ever go off on his own?"

"The reverend was right."

"Oh?"

"You're no magazine writer."

"What's he afraid I'll find out?"

Kenny sighed. "I haven't hit anybody in a long time, mister. I used to have this real bad temper and hit people pretty much when I felt like it. I don't want to have to hit you."

"Does he go off by himself when you travel?"

Kenny sighed. "Yes. Now, is that going to shut you up? Yes, the reverend goes off by himself."

"You have any idea where he goes or what he does?"

"I don't follow him, if that's what you mean. So how would I know what he does?"

"I guess that's fair enough."

He watched my face carefully. "Who are you?"

"A lot of people seem real curious about that."

"Does your reporter bit usually work a little better than it has in New Hope?"

I smiled. "Yes—a little better, anyway."

"You don't want to get the reverend mad at you."

"No?"

"He's got this mean lawyer in Cedar Rapids. The guy sues anybody the reverend tells him to. And the reverend tells him to sue a lot of people."

I stood back from the station wagon and looked it over. Chrysler. This year's model. White walls. Leather seats. Big tape deck. I thought of the two matching white Lincolns. "He sure must make a lot of money."

"Our radio shows hit a lot of towns."

"Enough to support everything the reverend owns?" I looked at him directly. "Where's the reverend get all his money?"

"I told you. His radio shows."

"Afraid you can't sell me on that. Lincolns don't come cheap. Especially not those models. And neither does a big boat like this one."

"What're you saying?"

"I'm saying that the good reverend must have some other source of income."

"I'm going to tell him all this, you know. Everything you said."

"I want you to."

"You do?"

"Sure. Because then he'll get nervous, and when people get nervous, they make mistakes."

"Why're you so interested in him?"

I laughed. "Because I'm a reporter, remember? And reporters are always interested in people."

Kenny Deihl stared out the windshield a moment, then sighed. "He isn't so bad, really."

"He isn't, huh?"

"He's a hypocrite. I mean, if he believes all that religious stuff he says, you sure couldn't prove it by me. But he's been good to me. And good to Mindy. Neither one of us are exactly what you'd call a prize."

"Oh?"

He shrugged. "I was in a halfway house when he found me. I'm a drunk—alcoholic, I guess you'd say. And Mindy—"

He shrugged.

"What about Mindy?"

"She'd gotten all beat up by this bar owner where she sang. The reverend found her wandering around on the street. She's a cokehead. At least with the reverend we have some kind of life. We've each got rooms in the basement of the church, and he pays us enough to live on."

"When you're traveling, you ever see anything strange happen?"

"Strange? Like what?"

"Nothing special. Just anything strange."

"Not really."

"He comes in real late, I suppose?"

"Sometimes."

"You ever notice any kind of blood or anything on his clothes?"

"Blood? Hell, no. What the hell kind of man do you think he is?"

"That's what I want you to tell me."

"Well, like I say, he's a hypocrite and that's for sure—but hey, we're all hypocrites in some way. And you wouldn't believe the hope the reverend gives to people. You should see the mail he gets from people who're sick and dying. They love that man. They put him right next to Jesus Christ. They really do."

This time he did put the car in gear.

"I've said enough." He squinted up into the sunlight. I really am going to tell the reverend everything I said. Otherwise I'd feel guilty."

I nodded and stood back from the car so he could pull out of the parking place.

Just as he was ready to swing out into the street, he stopped the station wagon and said, "You've got him wrong. You really do. He isn't perfect, maybe, but he's basically a decent guy. He really is."

And with that, he pulled away from the curb, finding his place in the lazy morning traffic.

I stood there watching him fade down the street.

A little old lady in a little old Ford gently tapped her little old horn to remind me that I was blocking her way.

I gave her my best boyish grin and stepped out of her way.