Comeback

1

When the angel opened the door, Parker stepped first past the threshold into the darkness of the cinder block corridor beneath the stage. A hymn filtered discordantly through the rough walls; thousands of voices, raggedly together. The angel said, "I'm not sure about this ..."

"We are," Parker told him. Holding the door open with one splayed hand, he nodded back at Mackey and Liss, who slipped in quickly past him, carrying the duffel bags. Parker shut the metal fire door and pulled up on the bar to lock it again, while Liss stood his duffel on the floor with a muffled clank and loosened the loop of rope that closed the top. Mackey's duffel was full of other duffel bags, and for now stayed on his shoulder. Liss slid the rough canvas cloth of the bag down past the blunt metal barrels, then took out the three shotguns, giving one each to Parker and Mackey, then flipping the empty bag over his shoulder.

The angel blinked, watching. His heavy white robe and strapped-on feathery wings must have been hot, even in the air-conditioned arena; the white makeup on his face ran with perspiration, giving him the look of somebody who'd been dead a long time. Inside the costume and the makeup and the sweat, he was scared, with frightened pinpoint eyes. "There's too many guards," he said. His voice squeaked with the requirement that he keep it guarded and quiet. "Too much going on. We'll do it another time. A better time."

"We're set up now, Tom," Liss said. "You got nerves, that's all." He and Parker and Mackey had taken shells from their shirt pockets, broke open the shotguns, and were thumbing the shells into place.

"I don't want to do it now!" The angel's voice was more and more shrill, echoing around the echoes of the distant hymn. ''We'll get caught!"

This amateur, this inside man, was Liss's pigeon; let Liss smooth his feathers. Parker saw Liss's jaw muscles set on the left side, where they worked. Liss didn't like his pigeon acting up in

front of the string. He said, "Don't worry about it, okay? Lead the way."

But the angel wouldn't move. Blinking sweat out of his eyes, fidgeting his hands together as the limp wings moved on his back, he said, "We can't do it. I told somebody."

They all became very still. They looked at the angel, whose name was Tom Carmody. Liss said, "A woman?"

The angel looked ashamed. "Yes. I thought it was all right, but..."

"But what?"

"She's gone. She isn't at home. She isn't at work. Nobody knows where she is."

Parker said, "She's with this bunch? Your bunch?"

"No, she teaches at a special school for disturbed kids. They don't know where she is."

Mackey leaned his duffel bag against the wall. He said, "You live with her?"

"No. Not really. She has her own place." The angel was miserable, he was scared and embarrassed and unhappy. He was also an asshole. He said, "I don't know what she'll do."

Liss said, "Tom? You two have a fight? She mad at you? Maybe go to the cops?"

"No, no, nothing like that, she just disappeared. I don't know why."

Liss looked around at his partners. He'd

brought them into this, and now a decision had to be made. "What do you think?"

Parker said, "How much did he tell her? Everything—"

'Just a little!" the angel cried.

Parker looked at him. "Shut up." To the others he said, "Everything she wanted to know, that's how much. So she has the route in, she has a little idea what's going down inside, but not the route out. We're here, so if it's trouble, it's already trouble."

"That's right," Mackey said. "No point stopping."

Liss turned back to Carmody and gestured with the shotgun. "Lead the way."

"Please." Carmody spread his hands like a holy statue. "Please let's just call it off, it's just a mistake, it would be better to burn the rotten money than—"

Parker reached out and closed his left hand around Carmody's right thumb, bending the thumb in on itself, applying only the slightest pressure. Carmody's face turned almost as white as the makeup smeared on it, his knees bent, his mouth opened in a wide O. Parker said, "Shut up, now. You said your say. Now we walk to the money room."

Carmody tried to say something else, but Parker squeezed just a little bit harder, and no sound but a faint whimper came out of the angel's mouth. Obedient, wide-eyed, he turned, his sandals shuffling on the concrete, and they all walked together along the gently curving corridor, lit by widely spaced fluorescent tubes mounted on the ceiling. Parker and the angel looked like they were holding hands, flanked by the other two as they walked from light to light, the three big hard-boned men in dark clothing, carrying shotguns, all round the bedraggled angel, shoulders slumped beneath the useless wings.

The hymn-singing got louder as they progressed, more aggressive, ridding the world of evil by shouting at it. A side corridor went up to the left, and they paused there to look.

That corridor, tunnel-like, was dark and low-ceilinged, with a closed mesh gate at the end. Beyond the mesh were the bright field lights, washing the arena in a glare of white, so that from where Parker and the others stood it was impossible to make out exactly what was taking place on the artificial turf out there. A mass of people, their backs turned, all swaying so that the light glinted and shifted, harsh white bleaching out the colors, making the shadows blacker than black. Except for the rolling roar of the hymn, almost anything could have been going on out there; a political rally, a demolition derby, a football game. At one time or another, the arena had been used for all of those, but tonight the attraction that had brought twenty thousand souls to this domed arena in the American heartland was William Archibald and his Christian Crusade.

The hymn ended. The people shuffled and stirred, and the amplified fruity voice of Archibald himself sounded above and around and among them all as though speaking from a cloud: "Brothers! Sisters! Fellow mortals!"

"Come on," Parker said, and tugged gently on the thumb.

Tom Carmody's resistance was all used up. As the other two followed, he plodded along at Parker's side, shaking his head slowly. "I hate that bastard," he muttered, but in an exhausted way, without passion. "I hate his lying voice. I hate everything he does. I ought to burn the money, and him in it. Burn him in his own rotten piles of cash."

Parker tightened his grip on Carmody's bent thumb, just a little, just enough to bring him back to earth. "Where's the money room?"

"Ahead!" Pain and surprise were in Carmody's voice; lie hadn't known he deserved punishment. "Just up ahead."

"Keep your mind on what we're doing."

They walked a little farther, the corridor constantly curving, appearing ahead of them, disappearing behind their backs, and then they came to a brown metal door on the interior side of the curve, with white block letters reading NO ADMITTANCE. Parker released the angel's thumb, and Carmody immediately closed his other hand around it, like one small animal comforting another. "Do it," Parker said, and prodded him in the side with the shotgun barrel, the blued metal poking into the white folds of the robe.

As the three armed men stood against the shadowed wall, Carmody stumbled forward and stood in front of the door. His left hand reluctantly released the aching thumb and pressed the button beside the door. He stood there blinking, the sharp fluorescent light above his head making him look more like a clown than an angel, and then a harsh voice sounded from the grid below the button: "Yes?"

"Hi, Harry. It's Tom Carmody." The angel's voice sounded almost normal; it hardly quavered at all.

"Hi, Tom," said the voice from the grid. "Come on in." A raspy buzzing sound came from the door.

Carmody pressed his non-painful hand to the door and it clicked open. Holding it that way, opening inward toward the corridor to the money room beneath the stands, he looked at Parker and said, "All right?"

Mackey moved forward to take the door. "You did fine," Parker said, and hammered the angel with the shotgun butt.