“Good boy,” said Harrigan, and after Jake’s friend miraculously did not respond by saying “Oy!” the preacher straightened up. “I have something for you, Father Don. Just a minute.”

“Sir, we really have to—”

“I have something for you, too, son—praise Jesus, say dear Lord! But first … this won’t take but a second …”

Harrigan ran to open the side door of his illegally parked old Dodge van, ducked inside, rummaged.

Callahan bore this for awhile, but the sense of passing seconds quickly became too much. “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

“Here they are!” Harrigan exclaimed and backed out of the van with the first two fingers of his right hand stuck into the heels of a pair of battered brown loafers. “If you’re less than a size twelve, we can stuff em with newspaper. More, and I guess you’re out of luck.”

“A twelve is exactly what I am,” Callahan said, and ventured a praise-God as well as a thank-you. He was actually most comfortable in size eleven and a half shoes, but these were close enough, and he slipped them on with genuine gratitude. “And now we—”

Harrigan turned to the boy and said, “The woman you’re after got into a cab right where we had our little dust-up, and no more than half an hour ago.” He grinned at Jake’s rapidly changing expression—first astonishment, then delight. “She said the other one is in charge, that you’d know who the other one was, and where the other one is taking her.”

“Yeah, to the Dixie Pig,” Jake said. “Lex and Sixty-first. Pere, we might still have time to catch her, but only if we go right now. She—”

“No,” Harrigan said. “The woman who spoke to me—inside my head she spoke to me and clear as a bell, praise Jesus—said you were to go to the hotel first.”

“Which hotel?” Callahan asked.

Harrigan pointed down Forty-sixth Street to the Plaza-Park Hyatt. “That’s the only one in the neighborhood … and that’s the direction she came from.”

“Thank you,” Callahan said. “Did she say why we were to go there?”

“No,” Harrigan said serenely, “I believe right around then the other one caught her blabbing and shut her up. Then into the taxi and away she went!”

“Speaking of moving on—” Jake began.

Harrigan nodded, but also raised an admonitory finger. “By all means, but remember that the God-bombs are going to fall. Never mind the showers of blessing—that’s for Methodist wimps and Episcopalian scuzzballs! The bombs are gonna fall! And boys?”

They turned back to him.

“I know you fellas are as much God’s human children as I am, for I’ve smelled your sweat, praise Jesus. But what about the lady? The lay-dees, for in truth I b’lieve there were two of em. What about them?”

“The woman you met’s with us,” Callahan said after a brief hesitation. “She’s okay.”

“I wonder about that,” Harrigan said. “The Book says—praise God and praise His Holy Word—to beware of the strange woman, for her lips drip as does the honeycomb but her feet go down to death and her steps take hold on hell. Remove thy way from her and come not nigh the door of her house.” He had raised one lumpy hand in a benedictory gesture as he offered this. Now he lowered it and shrugged. “That ain’t exact, I don’t have the memory for scripture that I did when I was younger and Bible-shoutin down south with my Daddy, but I think you get the drift.”