Free On the Fifth Day by A. J. Hartley Page A

even, something that his odd weapons seemed to reinforce. The guy at the zoo had been a professional, all his movements economical, and his strength prodigious. The guy had picked him up and thrown him as if he were no more than a child. Men like that carried automatic pistols, not swords.
    "Devlin?" he mused aloud.
    He got to his feet, restless, suddenly anxious to get out of this room and its oppressive silence. He wanted to find Jim and tell him about his afternoon with the senator, the lion, and 57
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    the man who had thrown him to her, but on descending saw no sign that he was home. The rest of the house was still dark, so he wandered down to the one part of the building he hadn't seen, away from the front door and kitchen, past stained wooden cabinets through a musty-smelling corridor lit by a bare, low-wattage bulb. There was one door on the left, which was locked, and another at the end of the corridor. He tried it, and as it opened he stepped into his past.
    It was a sacristy, where the priests dressed for mass, where they stored their vestments and the accoutrements of the liturgy. It smelled of incense and candle wax, and it was gloomy and wooden floored, like the sacristy where he had been an altar boy thirty years before. As a rule, Thomas didn't like dark, en
    closed places, but this was different: familiar. At the far end were a pair of double doors into the church, and through them came a faint murmuring: Jim, saying mass, doubtless to a huddle of lonely seniors who had nothing better to do on a cold March night.
    For the first time Thomas felt the loss of his brother wholly without rancor. This could have been where they horsed around in their cassocks before mass, messing about with the candles, arguing over who got to be the cross bearer and who had to be the acolyte. Ed always got the cross. He was two years older than Thomas, which made him taller, so Thomas would be paired with one of the shorter boys and together they would carry the heavy brass candlesticks on either side of Ed, who walked slightly ahead of the procession. The smell brought it all back to him, as if it were yesterday: the dead matches, the exotic fragrance of the incense so alien to the rest of their working-class world, and for a moment he thought he could turn and see his brother, ten or twelve years old, pulling the white surplice over his head and mimicking Father Wells's nasal singsong: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son . . ."
    Tears started to his eyes, not because his brother was dead, but because Ed and this place announced so clearly how very much he had lost since those days, that so much had gone of life and left him with so little. It wasn't just Ed that had gone, 58
    A. J. Hartley
    it was also his parents, several friends, and, of course, his exwife, and though she was very much alive, her absence from his life seemed to speak loudest of isolation and failure. Thomas stood still in the gathering darkness, only thinking to wipe the tears away when brought back to himself by the once-familiar rumble of the congregation saying in broken unison, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen . . ."
    The mass he had listened to through the closed doors had been over for two hours. He had shared a dinner of frozen chicken pot pies with oven fries and baked beans with Jim at the kitchen table and had watched the local news while Jim made a round of phone calls and tapped out e-mails on a droning, yellowed PC: "parish admin stuff," he said. Jim had listened aghast to Thomas's account of the incident at the zoo, specu
    lating that Devlin had arranged the whole thing.
    "Maybe," said Thomas, pleased by the priest's ambivalence about the senator, even by the way he seemed to be taking Thomas's side. "But Devlin didn't even try to warn me off."
    "He didn't need to! He had some goon ready to kill you!"
    "Not really," Thomas admitted, sipping his