Relentless

I’m just a kid. I should defer to you, hear your ideas first.”
    I said, “Nobody likes a wiseass, Milo. What’s your idea?”
    He had a good one. We decided to pursue his scheme before taking time to evaluate our slew of more complicated ideas.

   Penny dropped me off at a discount store and drove continuously through the surrounding neighborhood while I bought three raincoats with hoods and long-handled flashlights. If the Explorer contained a tracking device, we would not appear to have stopped anywhere.
    As I waited outside the store with my purchases, the SUV did not quickly appear. Nausea overcame me, and fear. Then Penny returned.
    From there we drove to the serviceway behind St. Gaetano’s, the church we attended. Penny stopped, and I hastily pulled our remaining luggage from the back of the SUV and dumped it on the pavement.
    She departed, and after trying a back door to the church and finding it locked, I walked around to the front of the building. In my long black raincoat with hood, I suppose I appeared monkish. I climbed the steps and entered by the main door.
    As the true twilight replaced the false and as nine-to-fivers began toleave work, no services were under way at St. Gaetano’s. Vespers would begin in half an hour, but at the moment the narthex and the nave were deserted.
    At the back of the sanctuary, to the right of the altar, a door opened into the sacristy, where Father Tom daily prepared for Mass. The outside door of the sacristy brought me again to the serviceway where I had left our luggage in the rain.
    I transferred the bags to a supply closet off the sacristy. There was a time, maybe prior to 1965, when they say you could leave unattended belongings almost anywhere and find them untouched when you returned. These days, a church is your only half-safe bet.
    Vandals visit churches with increasing frequency, but thieves seldom do. Maybe the average thief worries that someone whose opinion he values might see him entering a house of worship and get the wrong idea, suspecting him of having gone over to the light side.
    Earlier, in the car, I printed and signed a note to place on the luggage: D EAR F R. T OM , I’ LL BE BACK FOR THIS STUFF SHORTLY . E XPLAIN LATER .
    I hoped to retrieve the bags before anyone found them, making an explanation unnecessary. I didn’t know the extent to which Waxx might expand his to-kill list to include people I told about him, so I half feared that involving Father Tom would make him a target.
    Among other things, the closet contained a few rolls of paper towels. I took one, closed the door, and backed across the sacristy, blotting up the water that had dripped from my coat onto the floor, so no one else would open the closet to get towels to attend to the task. Outside, I dropped the towels, used and unused, in a trash can.
    As twilight drowned and night swam down through the rain, I walked to the northwest corner of the church property, where two streets met.
    After I waited about a minute, scanning the oncoming traffic, Ispotted the Explorer approaching. In the gloom and the downpour, I could not clearly see the driver.
    Blinking into the glare of the headlights, I suddenly
knew
that the vehicle would slow but not stop. And as it glided past the driver would be the Maserati monster.
    When the Explorer pulled to the curb and I saw Penny behind the wheel, I shuddered with relief.

    Some parts of the night were darker than others.
    In the current economic mess, which politicians caused and which they insisted they could fix by imposing on us more suffering and unreason, many small businesses were destroyed. Previously thriving commercial centers, where entrepreneurs had stood in line to rent space, now had empty units not leasable at any price.
    Beddlington Promenade had been a busy open-air shopping center. When the real-estate bubble burst, the property value dropped forty percent. The Promenade was losing tenants, hemorrhaging cash, and the highly leveraged owners let it go back to the bank.
    Because the location remained superb, a retail specialist proposed to rescue the center. The bank wanted to finance this new owner in an arrangement that would have made it a partner.
    Having seminationalized the bank, as it did many others, the government insisted on a say in its future operations. The Promenade deal would have been golden for the bank, but the federal regulators had a list of investments more appealing to the political