A Body to die for

Larry walked hand-in-hand toward the warehouse a hundred feet away. Alex put his arm over my shoulder. I punched him in the gut. He looked sad for a moment. I wondered if it was for Leeza, or for remembering how good we used to be together. He said, “I hope Leeza’s okay. If she’s dead, I’ll track down her killer and... why I’ll...”
    “What? Soufflé him? Leave the hard-guy act for me.”
    “You can’t even climb a fence,” he protested. “Were you not standing right there watching me?”
    “I watched you struggle to climb a fence. Not the same thing.” Somewhere in the distance, I heard a dog bark. I chose to ignore it. We walked toward the warehouse. The blue metal walls were thick and cold. When I got close enough, I said, “Hey, Larry, if you’re bribing this guy with drugs, how come you don’t have a key to the fence?”
    “I do—but if I used it and opened the fence, an alarm would go off at the Jehovah headquarters at the Bossert Hotel. Then the leader would come, and we’d be caught. I’d rather Brother Samuel didn’t find out about this. He’d force me to work again for the church and pray until I’d refound my faith.”
    “Brother Samuel’s from Nebraska,” Molly shared. “I only met him once. He came to the gym when Larry first tried to leave the church to beg me to release him from my witch’s seduction. I told Brother Samuel that if I had any witches’ powers, I’d make his hair fall out.”
    “So do the Jehovah’s call you Brother Larry?” I asked.
    He seemed perplexed. “Why would they?”
    “Nephew Larry?” I asked.
    Larry’s brain clicked. He shook his head. “Brother is his first name,” Larry explained. “Samuel is his last name.”
    Alex and I looked at each other and silently whistled. Larry led us along a narrow path on the outside of the warehouse. It bordered the water. One wrong step, and we’d be in the drink. East River water was one drink I didn’t want to take. Larry said, “I can’t unlock the main warehouse door for the same reason —an alarm will go off at the Bossert—so you’ll have to squeeze through this hole in the wall.”
    Squeezing through a hole I could do. Once inside, Larry hit the lights.
    The warehouse was the size of two football fields— bigger. I looked up. The ceiling was thirty feet high. A narrow aisle cut through the middle of the space. On either side were mountains of burlap bags. The piles reached as high as the ceiling in some places. “On the left, we have five thousand, one-hundred-pound bags of coffee beans,” Larry started. “On the right, two thousand, one-hundred-pound bags of cracked wheat. We’ve got a few thousand pounds of pepper, dried com and dehydrated tomatoes. On the far wall, stacked in boxes, we’ve got five thousand pounds of semolina pasta, ten thousand cans of peas and carrots, and seven thousand jars of baby food. I’m not sure what else they’ve been storing—except the Bibles. They keep them over here.”
    Larry walked down the aisle. The giant burlap bags full of coffee beans smelled great, but, as I walked under them, I feared they’d topple and crush me like a bug. The aisle turned and we rounded with it. A few yards ahead stood a twenty-foot-high wall of black books. I looked closer. On thousands of black spines the words Holy Bible blazed in gold. Larry said, “Just in case the outside Bibles are destroyed in the apocalypse. That’s what the food’s for, too. The end of the world as we know it will come. We wouldn’t want the chosen to go hungry.”
    Molly said under her breath, “Stop saying ‘we.’ ”
    “I’d have stocked up on Doritos and Diet Coke,” I said to Alex.
    He grunted and said, “At least some water crackers and anchovy paste.”
    Larry led us behind the wall of Bibles. We had to squeeze past some sacks of bulgur wheat. Larry said, “This is where I do my finest work.”
    Alex just said, “Wow!” It was pretty neat. A mini chemistry lab, with gurgling test tubes and beakers full of pink and blue liquids on a makeshift table of plywood planks on sawhorses. Not the most sterile environment, I thought. A spiral notebook lay open on the table with unintelligible scrawl covering the pages. A full-size refrigerator (with a padlock on the handle) hummed behind the table and a hot plate rested on a small card table alongside. A bookshelf against the wall was full of mortars, pestles, jars full of liquids and raw powders. A cage under the makeshift lab