Brother Odd

slip around to Reno for some R and R. The sheriff's gonna have to get real, give the kids the protection you want."
        "Wish he would, but he won't. We still don't have a body."
        "Maybe all those times I got my ears boxed is catchin' up with me, 'cause what I thought you said was you found his body."
        "Yes, sir, I did, I found his body, but all that's left now is maybe the first couple centimeters of his face rolled up like on a sardine-can key."
        Intensely eye to eye, he considered my words. Then: "That don't make no sense of no kind, son."
        "No, sir, no sense. I'll tell you the whole thing when we get to the school, and when you hear it all, it'll make even less sense."
        "And you think this Russian guy, he's in it somehow?"
        "He's no librarian, and if he was ever a mortician, he didn't wait for business, he went out and made it."
        "I can't puzzle the full sense of that one, neither. How's your shoulder from last night?"
        "Still a little sore, but not bad. My head's okay, sir, I'm not concussed, I assure you."
        Half the storm-suited monks had taken their gear outside to the SUVs and others were filing out of the door when Brother Saul, who was not going to the school, came to inform us that the abbey phones had gone dead.
        "Do you usually lose the phones in a big storm?" I asked.
        Brother Knuckles shook his head. "Maybe once in all the years I remember."
        "There's still cell phones," I said.
        "Somethin' tells me no, son."
        Even in good weather, cell service wasn't reliable in this area. I fished my phone from a jacket pocket, switched it on, and we waited for the screen to give us bad news, which it did.
        Whenever the crisis arrived, we wouldn't have easy communication between the abbey and the school.
        "Back when I worked for the Eggbeater, we had a thing we said when there was too many funny coincidences."
        " 'There are no coincidences'," I quoted.
        "No, that ain't it. We said, 'Somebody amongst us musta let the FBI put a bug up his rectum.'"
        "That's colorful, sir, but I'd be happy if this were the FBI."
        "Well, I was on the dark side back then. You better tell the Russian he don't have a round-trip ticket."
        "You've got his keys."
        Carrying a toolbox in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, the last of the storm-suited brothers shouldered through the front door. The Russian wasn't in the room.
        As Brother Knuckles and I stepped out into the snow, Rodion Romanovich drove away in the first SUV, which was fully loaded with monks.
        "I'll be damned."
        "Whoa. Careful with that, son."
        "He took both sets of keys off the peg," I said.
        Romanovich drove halfway back along the side of the church and then stopped, as though waiting for me to follow.
        "This is bad," I said.
        "Maybe this is God at work, son, and you just can't see the good in it yet."
        "Is that confident faith talking, or is it the warm-and-fuzzy optimism of the mouse who saved the princess?"
        "They're sort of one and the same, son. You want to drive?"
        I handed him the keys to the second SUV. "No. I just want to sit quietly and stew in my stupidity."

CHAPTER 37
        
        THE LINT-WHITE SKY SEEMED TO BRIGHTEN THE day less than did the blanketed land, as if the sun were dying and the earth were evolving into a new sun, though a cold one, that would illuminate little and warm nothing.
        Brother Knuckles drove, following the devious faux librarian at a safe distance, and I rode shotgun without a shotgun. Eight brothers and their gear occupied the second, third, and fourth rows of seats in the extended SUV.
        You might expect that a truckful of monks would be quiet, all the passengers in silent prayer or meditating on the state of their souls, or scheming each in his own way to conceal from humankind that the Church is an organization of extraterrestrials determined to rule the world through mind control, a dark truth known to Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, which we can prove by citing his most famous self-portrait, in which he depicted himself wearing a pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat.
        Here in the early afternoon, the Lesser Silence should have been observed to the extent that work allowed, but the monks were voluble. They worried about their missing brother, Timothy, and were