“Damn, Bradley Wayne,” Quinn said. “Sorry about your lack of schooling. This silver star on my chest give you any indication?”

*   *   *

Skinner stared down into the sanctuary as E. J. Royce ambled up the skinny staircase behind the choir loft to the baptism room of Jericho First Baptist. Royce didn’t say a word as he walked over to the big porcelain tub to fire up a cigarette. The man having no class, no sense of propriety, acting the way he did, thumbing his nose at convention and at Christ Almighty Himself. “Hell of a place for a meeting,” E. J. Royce said. “Smells like an old woman’s coot.”

“You shouldn’t smoke in here.”

“Why?” Royce said, grinning. “You gonna tell the pastor?”

“Put it out.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Skinner,” Royce said. “I aims to please.”

“Let’s get this done and over with.”

“Didn’t figure you brought me here to save my soul,” Royce said, spewing smoke from his nostrils and then tossing the cigarette into the empty baptism bathtub. “I figured you had me come here because the good Reverend Traylor lets you do as you please. You really have your own key?”

“I’m a church deacon.”

“Goddamn,” Royce said. “Ain’t that something? So this is where a man gets born again.”

Skinner gripped his Stetson tighter in his hands, nearly crushing the crown. His eyes began to water from the cloud of smoke, mixing with all those good church smells of old hymnals and burnt candles and such. During the Christmas season, they’d fill the tank with a tower of poinsettias, the prettiest dang thing he’d seen in his life.

“Maybe you should try it, Royce.”

“Oh, hell,” Royce said. “I been saved so many fucking times, I can’t even recall. This tank’s a mite better than Sarter Creek, where they damn near drowned me when I was a kid. All that ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ bullshit. The last time I got saved was by my whore wife who done run off with the mailman.”

“Don’t know about all that,” Skinner said. “Where I come from, a man’s only saved once.”

Skinner heard a creak out in the sanctuary, stopped for a moment, and lifted his finger to his lips. He walked from shadow into the light, over where the choir usually stood and the pulpit. He didn’t see anything and turned back to Royce, as much as it pained him to be in the profane man’s presence. But every man had a place in God’s toolkit. God love him, Royce had his place just as much as Skinner.

“What’d those New York women say?”

“What’d you mean what’d they say?” Royce said. “I was the one doing the talking.”

“And you told them?”