“Friday,” Tommy said.“So I can get him names in time for Sunday.He’ll text me.”
Marcus leaned forward, elbows on the table.“So you knew what he was planning.”
The line hit; Tommy flinched.“No,” he said, too fast.“No, I thought… I thought he was gonna scare ’em.Put a note on theirdesks, I don’t know.Spook ’em into staying home with their kids.I thought it was like that.”
“But you know now,” Kate said, tapping the photos with one finger.“You’ve seen the news.”
He shook his head fervently.“I don’t read the papers.Don’t got no TV.I swear I didn’t know till you showed me just now.I swear on my mom.”
“Your mother alive?”Marcus asked.
Tommy swallowed.“Thomewhere.”
They let the silence sit.
“I can help,” he burst out, almost pleading.“I can go on Friday.You can hide close, jump him when he comes.He won’t suspect me.”
Marcus and Kate exchanged a short look.The kind that said, ‘We’ll talk about it’ without saying a word.
“It’s noted,” Kate said.
“Please,” Tommy said.“I didn’t mean for anybody to die.I just wanted… twenty bucks a name.That’s dinner for a week if you know where to look.”
Marcus closed the folder.“How do you communicate with him?”
Tommy stared at him.“Like we’re doing now,” he said, slowly, carefully, as if to a stupid child.
"If you have to make contact with him," Marcus said patiently.
“If there’s an emergency I gotta draw a cross on the wall under the bridge, and he’ll find me the next day, whatever it is.He knows where I stay, anyhow.”
“What kind of emergency?”
Tommy shrugged.“Ain’t been one.”
Kate sat back in her chair.“What do you think of him?”
“Think?”Tommy looked almost bashful, flattered, as if nobody had asked him what he thought at any point during the last four decades.Which was probably true. “He’s… he’s like a priest, but not with a church.He talks in this… in this way, like hemaketha picture pop in your head with his words.And when he talks to you, he looks at you like another proper person, you know?And it’s like he knows everything about you.Knows it, and don’t judge you for it.”
“Did you ever hear him… preach?”Marcus asked.
“Little bits.About rest.About how men sold their souls to their bosses for a paycheck.How the city eats people.Stuff like that.He’s got the whole dang Bible in his head.”
Kate slid the photos back into the folder.The room felt smaller.“You’re staying here tonight,” she said.
Tommy’s head came up.“No, I can’t—”
“You can and you will,” Kate said.“For your safety.”
“Mythafety?”
“You think jail would be safer?”Marcus asked mildly.“Men hear things.Men talk.If the Reverend is the man we think he is, he could get to you from a payphone in Queens.”
Tommy stared at the door again, then at the cup.The fight leaked out of him.“I didn’tthink up for this."
“Neither did they,” Kate said, nodding at the closed folder.
He shut his eyes, once, hard, and when he opened them he looked older.“I’ll do it,” he said.“Friday.Whatever you want.I’ll wear a wire.I’ll say the names.Just… just don’t let him know I talked.”
