“How’d you get him to park in the back alley?”

“He always parked in the back. Too cheap to use the valet.”

Webster stated, “So you got him there, arranged to have the bikers jump and murder him in the back alley—”

“I swear they weren’t supposed to kill him!”

“But they did,” Webster said softly.

Waterson went quiet.

“Why Decameron?” Martinez asked. “What did he have to do with Azor leaving his wife?”

Waterson loosened his collar. “Dolly hated him.”

“She told you to pop him?” Martinez asked.

Waterson shook his head no. “I took it upon myself to have that pervert properly punished. Because it was all his fault. He was vile, the evil serpent of Eden spreading lies, influencing men like Azor to sin. I figure it didn’t make much difference to the world if there was one less faggot.”

“How ’bout one less distinguished scientist?” Webster said.

Martinez said, “How ’bout one less human being with a heart and a soul?”

“He had no heart, his soul was damned. He was a filthy animal!” Waterson grew rigid. “He deserved to die.”

“That wasn’t for you to decide, sir,” Kent said.

Waterson said, “Obviously it was. Because that’s what happened. I decided it. And poof! He was dead.”

32

Answering the page at two in the morning, Decker had no choice but to tell Rina. He called her from the hospital’s waiting room, used a pay phone off the corridor, manipulating the money slot and the keypad with his left hand. His right arm was confined to a sling, the bullet still visibly lodged in his arm. The resident had offered to remove it under a local. Decker had told him he’d have it done later after he found out about the priest’s progress. But as the hours dragged with no news from the operating room, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. Mind-numbing and nerve-wracking watching a family grow old before his eyes.

A twist of irony: Myron Berger was doing the surgery.

Decker leaned against the wall of the nearly deserted lobby, keeping a respectable distance from the family. They were congregated around two brown couches and a pair of orange armchairs. The glass sofa table held glossy in-house hospital magazines, Azor gracing a couple of covers. In the corner of the room a coffee machine bubbled thick walnut liquid. An occasional lackluster page wafted through the PA system.

The waiting. Purgatory on earth.

Eight of them total—five siblings and three spouses, all of them weathered and worn as if wrung out to dry. Luke was sprawled on one of the couches, his blanched face showing the effects of his blood-letting. They had taken the most from him—three pints; the other two brothers had each donated two pints. The two remaining sisters weren’t correctly type-matched. By last count, Bram had gone through two transfusions.