Prayer by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

it.”
    “All right. But I can’t promise to act on your material. That way I won’t disappoint you. On top of everything else.”
    “You’re thinking you’re maybe an atheist and that I’ll mind and be disappointed, is that it? God’s got an electronic tether on you, Gil. And for the rest of your life it’ll be there around your ankle so that he can come and get you when he’s ready. Once it’s on, it stays on and there’s nothing you can do about it. You could wander to the end of the world, Gil, and it’ll still be sending God a signal once or twice a day forever.”

SIX
    A lot of people at the Houstonian Club know I’m an FBI agent and I am often given information about some alleged crime that turns out to be a whole bunch of crap. It’s an occupational hazard, I guess, but whenever I’m in the club, it’s not very long before one of the members or even one of the staff approaches me with a story that usually obliges me to step off the running machine and make a few notes: to do anything else would not be good for the image of the Bureau. As would my telling any of these people to fuck off. In order to escape the possibility of any unpleasantness at the Houstonian, I try to stay off the club radar; by using a professional set of picklocks to get in and out of a service door near the parking lot, I can more or less come and go and still keep out of the computer system, thus avoiding any “hot tips” and general bullshit. If no one knows you’re there, they can’t come and find you.
    I had too much respect for Bishop Coogan to brush him off as just another crackpot in a long line of crackpots; however, for Ruth’s benefit, that’s exactly what I did when I got home. Dismissing Coogan’s “tip” was a quick way of dismissing what she always imagined was the case: the power that the Church of Rome still had over me. But as soon as I was alone again—Ruth always went to bed early on a Sunday night—I opened the bag and started to read.
    There were clippings from
The New York Times
,
The Boston Globe
, and
The Washington Post
; but mostly I was looking at copies of webpages reproduced on Coogan’s printer. All of these papers had been neatly hole-punched and filed in strict chronological order so that I was quickly able to gain an impression of just what had convinced him that there was something fishy going on.
    When I had finished reading through the file, I fetched a pad of paper, read the contents again, and made some notes. Just before midnight I poured myself a scotch. I don’t normally stay up late and drink scotch, but you don’t expect a bishop to point out what a lot of law enforcement officers had overlooked.
    It was a sultry night with the air temperature still in the high seventies. I opened the window in my little tower and leaned outside with my glass. I lit a cigarette and smoked it quickly in the hope the smell might not reach Ruth’s nostrils.
    I called Coogan at the bishop’s house on my cell. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I sounded skeptical.”
    “You were just doing your job. What happens now?”
    “There’s a process, a way of doing these things. You might say I have to convert some people to our way of thinking.”
    “But you do agree with me?”
    “There’s something, yes. But don’t get your hopes up. I can’t promise to come back to you on this for a while.”
    “I understand. You’ve got your own archbishops and cardinals, just like I do. Anything else I can do?”
    “Well, I would say that you could pray for me if I thought for one minute it would do any good.”
    That was when I heard something in the doorway and looked around to see Ruth standing there. It seemed like she’d been there for a while—long enough to get hold of the wrong end of the stick because she was looking pretty pissed at me.
    “Eamon, I’ve got to go.”
    “Good night, son, and God bless.”

    “So what were you talking about with Bishop Coogan?”
    “Those papers he