The Face

staring at the altar. “The media love this councilman. His rep is he’s a reformer, got all the right sympathies and positions on the issues. They ought to love me, too, ’cause I’m so lovable, but that crowd would rather cut off their lips than kiss a cop. If they see a chance to save him by crucifying me, every hardware store in the city will be sold out of nails.”
        “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
        “You couldn’t know some fool would whack Reynerd.” Hazard turned his gaze from the altar, and his eyes met Ethan’s as though searching for the Judas taint: “Could you?”
        “Some ways this looks bad for me.”
        “Some ways,” Hazard agreed. “But even you aren’t dumb enough to work for some movie-star asshole who settles business like he’s a rap-music mogul.”
        “Manheim doesn’t know about Reynerd or the black boxes. And if he did know, he’d figure all Reynerd needed to improve his psychology was a little aromatherapy.”
        “But there is something you’re not telling me,” Hazard pressed.
        Ethan shook his head, but not in denial. “Oh, man, this has been one long day in a monkey barrel.”
        [237] “For one thing, Reynerd was sitting on his sofa between two bags of potato chips. Turns out he kept a loaded piece in each bag.”
        “Yet when the shooter rang the bell, Reynerd answered the door unarmed.”
        “Maybe ’cause he figured I was the true threat, and already through the door. My point is you were right about the potato chips.”
        “Like I told you, a neighbor said he was paranoid, kept a pistol close to him, stashed it in odd places like that.”
        “The talky neighbor-that’s bullshit,” Hazard said. “There was no talky neighbor. You knew some other way.”
        They were at a crossroads of trust and suspicion. Unless Ethan spilled more than he had revealed thus far, Hazard wasn’t going to follow him one step farther. Their friendship would not be finished, but without greater disclosure, it would never be the same.
        “You’re gonna think I’m mental,” Ethan said.
        “Already do.”
        Ethan inhaled more incense, exhaled inhibition, and told Hazard about being shot in the gut by Reynerd, opening his eyes to discover he wasn’t shot after all, and in the absence of a wound, nevertheless finding blood under his fingernails.
        Throughout all this, Hazard’s eyes neither swam out of focus nor shifted toward some far point of the church, as they would have done if he’d decided that Ethan was either jiving or psychotic. Only when Ethan finished did Hazard look down at his folded hands again.
        Eventually the big man said, “Well, for sure I’m not sitting here beside a ghost.”
        “When you choose an institution for me,” Ethan said, “I’d prefer one with a good arts-and-crafts program.”
        “Other than having your blood tested for drugs, you cooked up any theories about this?”
        “You mean, besides I’m in the Twilight Zone? Or I really did die from that gut shot, and this is Hell?”
        [238] Hazard took the point. “Aren’t a whole lot of theories come to mind, are there?”
        “Not the kind you can explore with what the suits at the police academy call ‘conventional investigative techniques.’ ”
        “You don’t seem nuts to me,” Hazard said.
        “I don’t seem nuts to me, either. But then the nut is always the last to know.”
        “Besides, you were right about the pistol in the potato chips. So it was at least like… a psychic experience.”
        “Clairvoyance, yeah. Except that doesn’t explain the blood under my nails.”
        Hazard had absorbed this bizarre revelation with quiet trust and remarkable equanimity.
        Nevertheless, Ethan had no intention of telling him about being run down by the PT Cruiser and the truck. Or about dying in the ambulance.
        If you reported having seen a ghost, you were a regular guy who’d had an uncanny experience. If you reported seeing another ghost at another place and time, you were at best an eccentric whose every statement would thereafter be taken with enough salt to crust the rims of a million margarita glasses.
        “The shooter who killed Reynerd,” Hazard said, “was a gangbanger called himself Hector X. Real name was Calvin Roosevelt. He’s a high cuzz in the Crips, so you figure his accomplice must’ve been driving a set of wheels they boosted right