Even in my tequila stupor, Father Grabowski had thrown me a lifeline. A lifeline that may have fallen a bit short of my drunken reach . . .

“You still there?” Father Grabowski said.

“Isn’t having a Catholic convention in Vegas a little like preaching abstinence in a brothel?”

“Makes me regret not converting and going to rabbinical school,” he grumbled. “I’ll tell ya, August; priests should be allowed to marry, including same-sex! And we should have mandatory six-month psych evals! I feel like I’m walking through a goddamn Hieronymus Bosch painting!”

I laughed.

Then I tossed a third of my earlier lunch up on the area rug in front of my fireplace.

“Go to bed, son,” Father Grabowski said. “I’ll keep Tomás and Elena in my prayers. You know, I still believe you to be one of God’s most gifted earthbound angels.”

“Or one of the devil’s own,” I said.

“You’ll find peace in bearing this burden, August,” the old man said. “You always have.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “A Carthaginian peace, padre.”

The next day, after waking up slumped over at my kitchen island in front of my open laptop with Thor’s hammer sparking on the anvil of my head, I decided to make the Herculean effort to rejoin the better angels of the human race.

Never once in my time as a marine sniper or my time as a Detroit cop did I ever evade the detailed, always-painful situation reports on how an enemy combatant or a comrade in arms was injured or died. For better or worse, I felt that if an accurate death or injury record was dependent on my word, then my word should be as complete and truthful as humanly possible, even if the truth cost me a hash mark or the loss of a friend or job.

Maybe the Michelangelo-fresco-style image of my soul standing before the interstellar judgment of God had been drilled into me a little more deeply than necessary by my devout Catholic mother. (My agnostic father, meanwhile, had thought acknowledging and embracing thorny or bloody truths was a necessary obligation of living an “honorable man’s life.”)

Tomás lying in a hospital bed because of my half-assed surveillance plan was somehow different. Weightier and more grueling. A hard-edged, indisputable guilt that, if looked at directly, threatened to turn me into a pillar of salt.

It was an altogether too-intimate shame coursing through my veins and reaching into the marrow of my being. I had failed a loved one, perhaps fatally.

Sackcloth, ash and flagellation were not enough to vanquish such shame.

It was for this reason I had not made an effort to talk to Elena about why Tomás was now weightlessly languishing somewhere between the earth and all the rest.