Strangers

them he was a priest, but no one was listening, and he felt his fedora knocked off his head, but he persisted, and then at last he was through to the front of the surging multitudes.
        The policemen angrily ordered the mob to move back, threatened arrest, drew batons, lowered the visors on their riot helmets. Father Wycazik was prepared to lie, to tell the police anything that might get them to postpone the imminent attack on the house, tell them that he was not just a priest but Sharkle's own priest, that he knew what was wrong, knew how to get Sharkle to surrender. Of course, he didn't really know how to obtain Sharkle's surrender, but if he could buy time and talk to Sharkle, he might think of something. He caught the attention of an officer who ordered him to step back. He identified himself as a priest. The cop wasn't listening, so Stefan tore open his topcoat and pulled off his white scarf to reveal his Roman collar. "I'm a priest!" But the crowd surged forward, pushing Stefan against a sawhorse, and the barrier fell over, and the cop shoved back angrily, in no mood to listen.
        An instant later, two small explosions shook the air, one a split-second after the other, low and flat but hard. The hundred voices of the crowd gasped as one, and everybody froze, for they knew what they had heard: the SWAT team blowing the steel doors off the cellar. A third explosion followed the first two, an immense and devastating blast that shook the pavement, that hurt the ears, that vibrated in bones and teeth, that shot slabs and splinters of Sharkle's house into the wintry sky, that seemed to shatter the day itself and cast it down in a billion broken pieces. Again with a single voice, the crowd cried out. Instead of pressing toward the blockade this time, they scrambled back in fear, suddenly realizing that death could be not just an interesting spectator sport but a participatory activity.
        "He had a bomb!" one of the barricade cops said. "My God, my God, Sharkle had a bomb in there!" He turned to the emergency medical van in which two paramedics were waiting, and he shouted, "Go! Go!"
        The red beacons flashed atop the paramedics wagon. It pulled out of the barricade, speeding toward the middle of the block.
        Shaking with horror, Father Wycazik tried to follow on foot. But one of the cops grabbed him and said, "Hey, get the hell back there."
        "I'm a priest. Someone may need comforting, last rites."
        "Father, I wouldn't care if you were the pope himself. We don't know for sure that Sharkle's dead."
        Numbly, Father Wycazik obeyed, though the tremendous power of the explosion left no doubt in his mind that Cal Sharkle was dead. Sharkle and his sister. And his brother-inlaw. And most members of the SWAT team. How many altogether? Maybe five? Six? Ten?
        Moving aimlessly back through the crowd, absentmindedly tucking his scarf in place and buttoning his coat, partially in a state of shock, murmuring a Pater Noster, he saw Roger Hasterwick, the unemployed bartender with the queerly gleaming eyes. He put a hand on Hasterwick's shoulder, and said, "What did he shout to the police this morning?"
        Hasterwick blinked. "Huh? What?"
        "Before we got separated, you told me Calvin Sharkle slid open the metal shutter on one of the cellar windows and shouted a lot of weird stuff this morning, and you thought something was going to happen, but then nothing did. What exactly did he say?"
        Hasterwick's face brightened with the memory. "Oh, yeah, yeah. It was real weird, see, straight-out crazy stuff." He scrunched up his face, striving to recall the madman's exact words. When he had them, he grinned, rolled his mouth as if savoring the revelation, then repeated Sharkle's ravings for Stefan's enjoyment.
        Stefan not only failed to enjoy the performance, but second by dreadful second, he became increasingly convinced that Calvin Sharkle had not been insane. Confused, yes, baffled and afraid because of the tremendous stress generated by his brainwashing and by the collapse of his memory blocks, badly confused but not insane. Roger Hasterwick and everyone else thought Sharkle's shouted accusations and declarations and imprecations, flung at the world through the shielded window of a jerry-built fortress, were obviously the lunatic fantasies of a demented mind. But Father Wycazik had an advantage over everyone else: He saw Sharkle's statements in the