Free Sacred by Dennis Lehane Page A

I—”
    “Just ’cause we went to college together, all that shit, you think I’m just going to say, ‘Patrick’s in trouble. Lawsy, I’ll do whatever I can.’”
    “Rich, I…”
    He stepped up close to me, hissed. “You know the last time I had a good old romantic, I’m-gonna-have-sex-with-my-wife-and-take-my-time sorta night?”
    I stepped back. “No.”
    “Well, I don’t either,” he said loudly. He closed his eyes, tightened the belt on his robe. “I don’t either,” he repeated in his hissed whisper.
    “So, I’m leaving,” I said.
    He stepped in front of me. “Not until we get this straight.”
    “Okay.”
    “I find something on these diskettes I can use, I’m using it.”
    “Right,” I said. “As always. As soon as—”
    “No,” he said. “No ‘as soon as.’ I’m up to here with that ‘as soon as’ shit. As soon as you’re okay with it? No. As soon as I can, Patrick. That’s the new rule. I find something on here, I use it as soon as I can. Okay?”
    I looked at him and he stared back at me.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “I’m sorry.” He held a hand to his ear. “I didn’t hear you.”
    “Okay, Richie.”
    He nodded. “Good. How soon you need it?”
    “Tomorrow morning, the latest.”
    He nodded. “Fine.”
    I shook his hand. “You’re the best, Rich.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Get out of my house so I can have sex with my wife.”
    “Sure.”
    “Now,” he said.

8
    “So they know who you are,” Angie said as we entered my apartment.
    “Yup.”
    “Which means it’s just a matter of hours before they know who I am.”
    “One would imagine.”
    “Yet they didn’t want you to get arrested.”
    “Something to gnaw on there, eh?”
    She dropped her purse in the living room by the mattress on the floor. “What’d Richie seem to think?”
    “He was pretty pissy, but he seemed to perk up when I mentioned the Messengers.”
    She tossed her jacket on the living room couch, which these days doubled as a chest for her clothing. The jacket landed on a pile of freshly laundered, folded T-shirts and sweaters.
    “You think Grief Release is connected to the Church of Truth and Revelation?”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
    She nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time a cult or what-have-you had front organizations.”
    “And this is one powerful cult,” I said.
    “And we may have angered them.”
    “We seem to be good at that—angering peoplewho shouldn’t be angered by people as wee and powerless as us.”
    She smiled around her cigarette as she lit it. “Everyone needs a field of expertise.”
    I stepped over her bed and pressed the blinking button on my answering machine:
    “Hey,” Bubba said into the machine, “don’t forget tonight. Declan’s. Nine o’clock.” He hung up.
    Angie rolled her eyes. “Bubba’s going-away party. I almost forgot.”
    “Me, too. Think of the trouble we’d be in then.”
    She shuddered and hugged herself.
    Bubba Rogowski was our friend, unfortunately it seemed at times. Other times, it was quite fortunate, because he’d saved our lives more than once. Bubba was so big he’d cast a shadow on Manny, and he was about a hundred times scarier. We’d all grown up together—Angie, Bubba, Phil, and I—but Bubba had never been what you’d call, oh, sane. And whatever minute chance he’d had to become so ended in his late teens when he joined the Marines to escape a prison term and found himself assigned to the American embassy in Beirut the day a suicide bomber drove through the gates and wiped out most of his company.
    It was in Lebanon that Bubba made the connections that would create his illegal arms business in the States. Over the last decade he’d begun to branch out into often more lucrative enterprises such as fake IDs and passports, counterfeit money and name-brand appliance replicas, flawlessly bogus credit cards, permits and professional licenses. Bubba could get you a degree from Harvard in four years’ less time than it