Grief Street

missing.
    “God to enfold me, God to surround me, God in my speaking, God in my thinking... God in my sleeping, God in my waking, God in my watching, God in my hoping... God in my life, God in my lips, God in my soul, God in my heart—”
    “Shut up, shut up! You think I’m impressed by your mumbling the Carmina Gaedelica? Oh my, yes—I know that bloody old Paddy’s supplication. Hah! You thought perhaps I didn’t speak the language? I'm really quite erudite, and dead tongues give me particular pleasure.”
    “God in my sufficing—”
    “Shut up, I tell you! Shut up and think! Did your priests never learn you I’m only that which Holy God allows me to be? That I’ve no powers but those which Holy God gave to me, including the jurisdiction of life and death—including, in this very instant, your life and death?”
    “God in my slumber—”
    “Shut up! Shut up!”
    “God in mine ever-living soul—”
    “Fook God!”
    Eddie flapped his rat-catcher arms, swooping them down toward the crawling vermin. He raised up a swollen-bellied rat, stretching the she-creature until it shrieked from pain in its womb.
    “Fook your God—and fook your saints! The holy fookers all be damned!”
    “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt —”
    “Shut up with your screaming about the tears of mortal things and your bloody mortal heart! Shut up and behold— a belly full of babies!” Eddie said this softly while twisting the rat some more. “Think careful on this now, Hockaday. Think personal like...”
    I thought of Ruby, in the hospital.
    “After all the horrors I done, ask yourself: how easily might I strangle the innocent life of some she-belly in your world above, or inspire others to do it for me?”
    Eddie tossed the shrieking rat full of babies against a wall, then lunged at me.
    I saw the huge knife coming at me again...
    ... and heard shots ring out from behind.

Forty-one

    T he first two shots slammed into the low ceiling, scattering bats and dust. A bat flew straight at the candles, and fell, screaming and clicking, its veined black wings on fire.
    Another shot to the ceiling, and another. Then the unmistakable sound of somebody racking up a Remington twelve-gauge riot gun, the department-issue short-barrel sweeper that rides up front in every squad car in the city.
    “Drop to the freaking floor, Hockaday!”
    When I did, a final volley of shots went sailing over my head. They caught Edward Michael Mallow in the chest and stomach, blowing him back against his chair in two pieces. “Did I nail that sick wacko, or did I nail him?”
    King Kong Kowalski was standing over me now in the muck. He had a smoking Remington in one hand, and a smoking Te-Amo in the other. He stuck the cigar in his mouth and offered me a hand up from the floor.
    “When did you get down here, Sergeant—and how...?” There was nothing I could say for a few seconds. I was as disoriented as the burned bat.
    “In the freaking nick of time, that’s when. How come? Well, that’s a long and weird story.”
    “Which has to do, in part, with this house,” I said, pulling myself to my feet with Kowalski’s help. “Your son, Johnny, he had a talk with my wife...”
    “Did he now?”
    “Yes. I understand. Part of you anyway.”
    “Must be nice. I wish I understood.” Kowalski screwed his face, and puffed furiously on the Te-Amo, the stink of which I had never appreciated until now. “I think we got all the business done that needs doing in this goddamn hole. Come on, let’s go.”
    Kowalski led the way, plodding past the tombstone and the graves of the Mallows and the Wollams and a Monaghan, then up the stairs and out the back corridor to the fresh air of a trash-strewn garden plot.
    There was a high yellow moon in a sky that had cleared of rain.
    “Look, Kowalski—”
    “You don’t got to thank me, Hockaday. I seen the wacko with the knife coming down on you, I seen my own rabid self.” Kowalski tossed his cigar to the ground, and jammed a pinky up one of his nostrils. “I wonder if I’m ever going to get the freaking stink of this place out of my nose hairs.”
    “How do you mean you saw yourself?”
    Kowalski said nothing and neither did I. The two of us just stood there in the dark.
    “This morning I thought about dicing my old lady with a butcher knife,” Kowalski finally said. “Which I eventually did not do.”
    “Lucky for your wife.”
    “She don’t look at it that way. She’s looking at the