Gone (Michael Bennett)

smoke?”
    “No,” the Tailor said. “You work at the school?”
    “Sorta. I’m the assistant football coach, and you can save the Sandusky jokes, thank you.”
    The Tailor handed him the file with the photos in it.
    “You recognize any of these kids? They would have arrived within the last eight or nine months.”
    “Nope. Not even a little,” Joe said after flicking through them. “An Asian kid around here? That, I would have remembered.”
    The Tailor nodded to himself. They were homeschooling them. Witness Protection 101. The Tailor had expected that.
    “Go through the pictures again, Joe, and think again slowly. You might have bumped into them at the Walmart, the local pizza place, on the sidewalk, church?”
    “Wait,” Joe said, holding up a finger. He fished through the folder again and took out the photo of the priest.
    “This guy ain’t Irish, is he? Has, like, an Irish accent?”
    The Tailor was pretty sure he did, but he glanced at his notes anyway.
    “Yes,” he confirmed.
    “My mom told me an Irish priest subbed for the local pastor a couple of weeks back.”
    The Tailor felt it then. A primordial tingling down his spine as warmth spread in his belly. He always thought of the sensation as how a shark must feel on detecting the first traces of blood in the water. Fresh meat this way. The happy foreshadowing of victory.
    The Bennett contract was a whale, all right. Three million. He knew what he was going to buy with it, too. A flat in Paris. Travel was one of his few passions.
    “That right?” the Tailor said as he lawfully put on his clicker and made a perfect K-turn.
    Joe nodded, pulling on his beard.
    “The old biddies couldn’t get over it. Imagine, that’s what passes for news here in Susanville, USA.”
    “Where’s the Catholic church?” the Tailor asked.
    “Where’s my money?” Joe said.
    “In the glove box.”
    Joe took it out and gazed on it, smiling. The Great Recession really must be hurting these hicks out here , the Tailor thought. He’d never actually seen someone happy to be setting up a hit on a family for five hundred bucks in twenty-dollar bills.
    “Make a left up ahead,” Joe said. “The church is there on your right.”

CHAPTER 80
     
    MARY CATHERINE’S BEDROOM WAS on the third floor, in the quaint, rickety Victorian farmhouse’s converted attic. It was little bigger than a closet, but its dormer window, with its clear, unbroken view of the flat grasslands and the grand Sierra Nevada beyond, actually made it her favorite spot in the entire house.
    A bright moon was hanging just above the awe-inspiring peaks when Mary Catherine suddenly came awake a little after one a.m. She flipped her pillow over and lay there staring out the window, listening intently, wondering what had woken her.
    After another minute, she decided that it was nothing, probably just the two glasses of the wine that Leo had brought over for dinner. She hardly drank at all these days, but Leo had seemed concerned about whether the wine he’d brought matched up properly with the roast chicken she’d served. Indulging in a couple of glasses of pinot grigio seemed the least she could do to assuage his fears.
    Dinner with Leo is swiftly becoming part of the regular routine now, isn’t it? she thought, smiling. Even the boys who had given her so much trouble had decided to stop the silent treatment when Leo quietly started talking baseball with them. Leo had that effect on people. There was something still inside him, an openness, a … gentleness. You couldn’t help but like him.
    She didn’t know how Leo would fit into the picture once Mike came back, but she’d decided to cross that bridge when she came to it. She wasn’t one for making people jealous, but she was actually looking forward to Mike’s reaction. At least a little. It would be quite interesting to see how much Mike liked watching another man pay her some attention for a change.
    She was looking out at the dark land, the mountains glowing in the starlight, and groggily thinking about Leo and Mike when she thought she heard something downstairs. Then she heard it again. A soft thumping, followed by the creak of weight on wood.
    How now, brown cow? she thought, frowning, as she put her bare feet to the rough floorboards and found her slippers. Out her door and down the stairs, she stopped and looked over the banister of the second-floor landing. A suspicious, flickering glow of blue light was coming from what seemed