“So, tell me. Which dream do you choose?” Luther asks. “To live many more years as a blind man, or to die in this terrible place?”
Luther smells the sharp tang of urine as the man fouls himself. In the chill of this unheated room, steam begins to rise from the thief’s lap.
“If … if I do this, you won’t kill me?” the thief asks.
“I will not,” Luther says. “You have my word.” He glances at his watch. “But you must do this in the next thirty seconds. Beyond that, I cannot make any promises.”
The thief takes a deep breath, releases it in four or five small gusts. He slowly turns the knife toward himself.
“I can’t do it!”
“Twenty-five seconds.”
The thief begins to sob. The knife shakes in his hand as he brings it closer to his face. He raises his other hand to steady himself, and stares at the blade as a man might consider a burning rosary, the abacus of his sins.
“Twenty seconds.”
The thief begins to pray.
“Dios te salve, Maria.”
“Fifteen seconds.”
“Llena eres de gracia.”
“Ten seconds.”
“El Señor es contigo.”
“Five seconds.”
At the moment the tip of the blade descends, the 11:05 train on the Frankford line carrying eighty-one passengers roars to a stop overhead. The thief’s screams are swallowed by the whet of steel on steel, plumed inside the release of hydraulic steam.
Twenty seconds later, when the knife falls from the thief’s hand, there is only silence.
The thief — whose name was Ezequiel “Cheque” Rivera Marquez — had always thought that when death came it would be accompanied by a bright white light, or the sound of angels singing. When his mother died at the age of thirty-one in an osteopathic hospital in Camden, New Jersey, it was what he wanted to believe. It was possible that all eight-year-olds wanted to believe this.
For Cheque Marquez it wasn’t anything like that. Death wasn’t an angel in a long flowing gown.
Death was a man in a tattered brown suit.
One hour later, Luther stands across the street from the old woman’s row house. He watches the woman sweep the leaves off her small porch, marveling at how small she is, how big she had at one time seemed to him.
He knows that the next time he sees her it will be in her bedroom, her ruched and cloying boudoir with its peeling wallpaper and brown mice and generic powders, a visit during which he will replace her credit card in her wallet.
Nothing can be out of place over the course of the coming days. Everything must be as it has always been.
He’d already visited her home, three times sitting at the foot of her bed as she fitfully slept, chased by what demons he could only imagine. Perhaps he was one of those demons. Perhaps the woman knows that when her time comes, it will be him.
In the end, someone always comes.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Also by Richard Montanari
One The Children of Disobedience
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Two In Nomine Patris
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Three The Last Saint
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Revelation
I
II
Acknowledgements
The Killing Room Page 33
