Free Dead-Bang by Richard S. Prather

whoremongers in general—to their great detriment, needless to say—had switched from the general to the specific. Need I mention who was the specific?
    The hell of it was, the man didn’t come right out and lie about me, he just took the truth and diddled with it until it died. I will admit I’ve got some faults. I will even admit I’ve got lots and lots of faults. And that I like girls and that sort of thing. And that I have—Yes!—even fornicated, on occasion. Oh, hell—lots and lots of occasions. But Festus Lemming made it sound awful .
    By the time he got through with me I was a vile excrescence from the scum of hell, perhaps only a minor fiend but one allied with the Powers of Darkness and moved by the lusts and lecheries of Satan—these were his words—a man who had committed murders most foul, who banged hoods in their heads and female persons elsewhere. These last were not his words, but I would blush to quote in their entirety his severe condemnation, of “the hairy thighs of lust” and “sweet and undefiled nakedness” and even “innocence and purity ravished and slain by”—well, slain by the slobbering ape-man, let’s say, and I do not blush easily.
    But by that time I was back there in the dimness beyond the pearly-gray curtains. Looking very nervously for a way out, a way which did not require that I walk up the church aisle. To some this may, even now, seem a needless thing for me to have done. After all, what real harm could come to me in church? What, indeed? Everybody knows most good Christians are chock-full of goodness, compassion, charity, and sweetness. And that all these people were good Christians could not be denied. Nor could it be denied that, to them, I was an infidel.
    So I looked like crazy for another way out, and back in the corner I found a small, narrow, rather flimsy door, and opened it, and quick as a wink slipped through the narrow opening into the outside world. Which, strangely, seemed narrower.
    In my expensive Cadillac—which would never get to heaven—I started the ignition and, as the engine idled, took a quick look at Emmanuel Bruno’s note to Drusilla. Sure enough; plain as plain could be. I had known where to find him ever since my own little illumination at the conclusion of the Lemmings’ Sing-A-Long, which had been, though it was difficult to believe, just a tick or two more than five minutes ago. From the time I entered the Church of the Second Coming until this moment, with the Cad’s engine idling in the parking lot, only half an hour had elapsed. It was not yet quite ten-thirty on the night of the fourteenth of August.
    I thought briefly about the elasticity of time, but as I put the Cad into gear and stepped on the gas, I considered something equally fascinating—to me, at least. That was the curious way in which, often, my cases begin, or appear to begin, as matters mundane and routine, then zowie become something else. That’s not always true, but it could not be questioned that this time it was truer than ever before.
    Because this one had begun, simply enough, with a girl calling upon Shell Scott, private eye, because she wanted him to look for her daddy. But now?
    Now a fiend allied with the Powers of Darkness flew through the night to find and rescue the Antichrist.
    And he was pretty damned sure he could do it, too.

7
    I parked near the corner, walked to Fifty-eighth Street, and turned right, kept going for a block and a half until I reached the place I wanted. It was a Spanish-style house constructed of what was probably blocks of compressed sawdust or a new coal tar derivative, but it appeared to be made of adobe bricks with white mortar squeezed out between them like toothpaste between loose beige teeth.
    I checked the number—1521—and walked on past. The house looked empty; no lights showed. A minute later I approached it again, but through the next-door