David Wiltse - Prayer for the Dead

“You’ve already touched my heart,” Becker said.

“Really?” She shook her head vigorously. “I’m sorry. That’s all I can think of to say. You haven’t whispered many sweet-nothings, you know.”

“I know,” said Becker. “I was afraid to start, didn’t think I could stop.”

“You don’t have to stop now.”

“I’m a frightened man, Cindi.”

“You, John?”

“A frightened man.”

She realized the seriousness of his tone. “I know you are,” she said. “I’ve just never been sure of what.”

“That’s some of what Gold and I have been looking at,” he said.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said, hoping very hard that he would. “I know that’s private.”

“Part of the cure is making it unprivate. Admitting it. Aloud. To myself. To my loved ones.”

He faced away from her, pulling his knees to his chest.

Cindi could see she would have to help him with this.

“And I’m a loved one?”

Becker nodded. She put her hand on his back and felt him trembling. For a moment she thought he was truly frightened-or crying, but when he turned to her again, he was grinning ear to ear.

“Isn’t that stupid? I don’t mean loving you; I mean that it’s so damned hard to say. It’s stupid, it’s stupid.”

“So is that what you’re actually saying, John? You love me?”

“Yes.”

“Would you care to say it directly? I hate to be a stickler about this, but everything is sounding rather oblique.”

“I love you,” he said.

She touched his cheek. “I’m glad you told me,” she said. “I’ve been reading so many tea leaves, trying to figure it out… I’m sorry. I’m not really taking it lightly. Maybe it isn’t that much easier for me to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Becker said. “I’m not asking for a response. It’s just something I had to face up to and deal with.”

“Why now?”

Becker eased back down on the bed. “That’s the other thing that frightens me,” he said and the joy was gone from his voice.

“What?” She rose up on one elbow to look down at him. He was staring at the ceiling.

“What else frightens you, John?”

“Me,” he said. “I scare the shit out of myself.”

The room fell silent as Cindi sank back to the bed. A neighbor slammed a car door and yelled at a child.

“Can you tell me why?” she said finally.

“When I come back,” he said. “I’ll try then.”

“Come back from where?”

Becker paused a long time. “I’m not quite sure. Wherever I need to go.” He rolled over and put his hand on her hip and ran it slowly along her thigh.

“And I’m not quite sure who I’ll be when I come back,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

He didn’t answer but ran his fingers the length of her leg, then feathered them across the skin on the back of her knee.

He’s the sexiest man in the world, she thought. I have no idea what’s in his mind-I’m not sure he does-but I want him so.

“Can you promise at least that you will come back?”

“Yes. That much I can promise. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to leave you… I don’t want to find out what’s going to happen-but I seem to have a talent for coming back.”

That will have to do for now, Cindi thought. He moved his hand to the very top of her inner thigh and just held it there where it burned a hole in her skin.

“You have a lot of talents,” she said as she leaned forward to kiss him.

As they made love she thought of saying, “Thank you, Mr. Gold,” but didn’t for fear she would be misinterpreted under the circumstances.

Becker found Nate Cohen’s grave and stood before it like a mendicant before a shrine, his hands folded at his waist. Agent Reynolds, watching Becker through binoculars, wondered if he was praying. His head was bowed and he had the look of a man who had come to stay for a while.

Hatcher had told Reynolds that Becker would be there, if not today then the next, and the Duck had been right. “Donald” was usually right, Reynolds had to admit that. It was not a job in which a man could make decisions and hope to do better than be right most of the time. The problem with Hatcher was that when he was wrong he could never admit it; there was always someone else to blame. That someone else was invariably one of the agents under his command. What Hatcher didn’t seem to grasp was that his men would hold his mistakes against him far less if he didn’t shirk the responsibility for them. Apparently, Hatcher’s superiors viewed things differently because the man held on to his job while the agents under him got transferred or held back from promotion. Hatcher was not a hard leader to follow; he made no extraordinary demands-but he was impossible to forgive. That was one of the things Reynolds most admired about Becker. He had never forgiven the Duck and was as vocal about it as Pavarotti with a paying audience. The man told Hatcher to his face what he thought of him while the other agents could only choke back their laughter and sit on their hands to keep from applauding.

Which made Reynolds feel a bit dishonest about what he had to do next, but then Becker wasn’t really even a member of the Bureau now. just some sort of quasi for-the-case temporary agent, and Hatcher was still the man who made out the performance evaluations. Reynolds glanced at his watch and started walking briskly down the hill toward Becker’s car. It had taken Becker three minutes to walk from his car to Nate Cohen’s grave, which meant that Reynolds had at least that much time and probably considerably more, judging by Becker’s leisurely demeanor.

The beeper attached itself by magnet so all Reynolds had to do was make sure the device was turned on, then kneel beside Becker’s car as if he were tying his shoelace in case any of the locals were watching, slap the device under the inside of the frame of the wheel housing, straighten up, and walk back to his own car atop the hill. The entire procedure took one minute and forty-five seconds.

Becker was still at the grave, praying or meditating or thinking, whatever. He was a strange man, Reynolds thought. Good enough company, a regular guy most of the time, but moody. And his thought processes never seemed to be the same as everyone else’s. Not weird, exactly, but as if he jumped steps in logic. Maybe his mind was just faster, Reynolds thought. Or it was always working on things from an angle instead of straight on. Whatever it was, if even half the stories they told about him were true, Becker would be the last man on earth Reynolds would want to have chasing him.

Reynolds radioed to the communications van and confirmed that the beeper’s signal was being received loud and clear, then settled back to work on the day’s crossword puzzle. He wished he had the Sunday Times puzzle; local papers published things for beginners. Reynolds did them in minutes, contemptuously using a pen and never once having to resort to the crossword dictionary in the glove compartment.

When he checked again, Becker was still there. What the hell was he doing, grieving or something? Nate Cohen wasn’t his grandfather, was he?

Becker lifted the piece of gravel from atop Cohen’s headstone and tossed it in his palm. Dyce had been to visit, he was certain of that. There was no way to know just when, but Becker didn’t need evidence. It was recently, since he’d been in Waverly, sometime within the last two weeks.

A spider lowered itself from the plastic flowers in the funerary urn, laying down the second strand of a brand new web. Becker lifted the flowers and saw the empty space in the bottom of the urn where something had once sat amid a circle of moss and dirt.