Free The Trinity Game by Sean Chercover Page B

morning?
    Tim Trinity wiped his eyes, returned the flask to his pocket.
    Thinking:
Fuck it.
    He looked at his watch. It was almost one thirty a.m. Dreammakers closed at one. He lit a cigarette, climbed out of the car, and leaned back against the door like a man with time to kill and money to spend.
    “Lookin’ for some company?” She was a bottle-blonde, with an inch of brunette showing at the roots. A silver crucifix bounced around her cleavage as she chewed gum.
    “Might be, at that.” Trinity offered an encouraging smile. “Just one thing I need to know.”
    The girl sighed. “Hand job’s twenty-five, blow job’s fifty, a hundred for—”
    “That’s not where I was going,” said Trinity.
    “Oh.” The girl looked skeptical. “What’s the one thing you need to know?”
    Trinity pointed to her necklace with his cigarette.
    “Do you believe in God?”

    “How much you wanna spend?” said the girl as the motel room door clicked shut. Trinity pulled a roll from his pocket and peeled off five bills. Hundreds. The girl backed away. “Wait a second,” she said.
    Trinity held up his hands—
let me explain
—and sat on the edge of the bed. “You keep your clothes on, and so do I. No sex. I ain’t even gonna touch you.”
    The girl glanced at the money, and when she looked back to Trinity, her eyes showed more curiosity than fear. In the light of the hotel room, her makeup couldn’t quite hide the bruise under her left eye. Her fingernails were chewed beyond short, and there was a crack pipe burn on the side of her left index finger.
    She said, “So what do you want for five hundred bucks?”
    “OK, just hear me out,” said Trinity. “You’re a hooker…a stripper…whatever. Point is you sell your ass to strange men in theWaffle House parking lot. So I figure your life has gotta pretty much suck. No offense. Not judging, just laying it out there. Fact is God has not been good to you. And you still believe in the Lord, right?”
    “So?”
    “So I’m a wealthy man. Got everything I could possibly need. You could say God’s been very good to me.” Trinity let out a long breath. “And I don’t believe in Him.”
    The girl shrugged. “We both gonna have to answer for our sins on judgment day. Don’t matter if you believe or not. It’s real, and it’s gonna happen.”
    And that, to Tim Trinity, was simply awesome. That a girl like this could be so unshaken in faith. Unbelievable. “See?” he said. “That’s why I need your help. Your belief is so strong.”
    “But what do you want me to do?”
    “I want you to pray for me. See, some very weird shit is goin’ down in my life, and I can’t find a rational explanation. I mean, I’ve tried everything, and it’s startin’ to look like prayer’s all I got left to try. But I can’t pray for myself, ’cause I don’t believe.”
    The girl stood quietly for a minute, then said, “Start to pray, and you’ll start to believe.”
    Trinity shook his head.
    The girl reached out, took the money. “Want me to pray for your soul?”
    “No,” said Trinity. If people had souls, he knew his was way beyond saving. “I want you to ask God to please stop fucking with my head.”

N o heavy bag in the Ritz-Carlton’s workout room. No speedbag, either. So Daniel contented himself with push-ups, crunches, and skipping rope. He spent the workout thinking about the strange contact from whoever was calling himself PapaLegba.
    Probably someone who knew Daniel was from New Orleans, hence the chosen screen name. Someone with the resources to hack into Daniel’s computer and take control of his Instant Messenger program. But who? And why?
    Could be Conrad Winter, tossing a wrench in the works, trying to trip Daniel up.
    Or not. There was no way to know for sure, given the available evidence, and Daniel resolved to put it out of his mind, not to get distracted by it, not to let it make him paranoid. He had a job to do.
    He took a quick sauna and headed back to