C.E. Murphy - Urban Shaman

Gary hit the brakes hard enough to make my neck crunch again. I winced, clutching at it as I pressed my nose against the window. “That’s it, that’s it!” I shrieked. “Look, there’s the church!

Stop! Stop!” The car was gone from the parking lot, but there was no mistaking the vicious spire stabbing the morning air. “Holy shit, we found it!”

Gary accelerated again, grinning, and pulled into the church parking lot. “Maybe you’re not dumb. Maybe you’re lucky.”

“Yeah, well, God watches over fools and little children, right?” I tumbled out of the cab, getting my feet tangled in the floor mat and catching myself on the door just before I fell. “Well?” I demanded. “Aren’t you coming?”

His eyebrows elevated before he shrugged and swung his own door open. “Sure, what the hell. I never saw a fresh murdered body before.”

I closed my door. “Have you seen stale ones?” I decided I didn’t want to know the answer, and strode away. Gary kept up, which surprised me. He was so broad-shouldered I expected him to be short, but he stood a good two inches taller than me. In fact, he looked like a linebacker.

“You look like a linebacker.”

“College ball,” he said, disparaging enough that it was obvious he was pleased. “Before it turned into a media fest. It’s all about money and glory now.”

“It didn’t used to be?”

He flashed me his white-toothed grin. “It used to be about glory and girls.”

I laughed, stopping at the church door, fingertips dragging over the handle. They were big and brass and twice as wide as my own hands. You could pull them down together and throw the doors open in a very impressive fashion. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“You sure your broad is gonna be in here, lady?”

“Yeah,” I said, then wondered why that was. It made me hesitate and turn back to the parking lot. Except for Gary’s cab, it was empty. There was no reason the woman couldn’t have gotten into the car with the man with the butterfly knife, no real reason to think she’d even made it as far as the parking lot, much less the church.

“Yeah,” I said again, but trotted back down the steps. Gary stayed by the door, watching me. The car’d been on the south end of the parking lot, between the woman and the church. I jogged over there, eyes on the ground. I heard Gary come down the steps, rattling scattered gravel as he followed me.

“What’re you looking for? I thought you said the broad was in the church.”

I shrugged, slowing to a walk and frowning at the cement. “Yeah, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. I was wondering if there’d been a fight. If the guy with the knife was after her, she’d have had to have gotten thr—”

“ What guy with a knife?” Gary’s voice rose as I crouched to squint at the ground. I looked over my shoulder at him.

“Didn’t I mention that?”

“No,” he said emphatically, “you didn’t.”

“Oh. There was a guy with a knife. He was good, too.”

“You saw this from a plane?”

I puffed out my cheeks. “You ever seen somebody who’s good with a knife? Street-good, I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So have I. It looks a certain way. Graceful. This guy looked that way, yeah, even from a plane.”

“Lady, you better have like twenty-two-hundred vision.”

I stood up. The bubble of icky feeling in my stomach was still there, prodding at me like I hadn’t done enough to help the woman. “I wear contacts.”

Gary snorted derisively. I sighed. “I know what I saw.”

“Sure.” He didn’t say anything for another second, looking at the ground. “I know what you didn’t see.”

“What?”

He pointed, then walked forward a couple of spaces. “Somebody lost a tooth.” He bent over and poked at a shining white thing on the concrete, not quite touching it.

I walked over, bending to look at the enameled thing on the ground. It was a tooth, all right, smooth little curves and a bumpy top, complete with bloody roots. “Eww. Somebody got cut, too.” I nodded at thin splatters of blood, a few feet farther out than the tooth, that were already dry on the concrete. Gary cast his gaze to the heavens.

“The lady goes ‘eww’ at a tooth and she’s looking for a corpse.”

“I’m looking for a person,” I corrected.

“And you think she’s in the church.”

“Yeah.”

“So why the hell are we screwing around in the parking lot?”

I looked around. “The light’s better over here?” It was one of my favorite jokes, left over from my childhood. I never expected anyone else to get it, but Gary grinned, dug a hand into his pocket, and tossed me a quarter. I caught it, grinning back. “Now that we’ve got that taken care of.”

We walked back to the church together.

I was right. The doors swept open, impressively silent. I felt like I should be leading a congregation in search of the light, not a linebacker-turned-cabby in search of a corpse. I stepped through the doors, half-expecting a floorboard to creak and mar the enormous silence.

Within a few steps I was sure a floorboard wouldn’t have dared creak in this place. It wasn’t the solemn, weighty quiet of old churches or cathedrals. Those places could absorb the sound of heels clicking and children laughing with dignity and acceptance. This church simply forbade them. I wasn’t even wearing heels, and I found myself leaning forward on my toes a little so that my tennies couldn’t possibly make any excessive noise on the hardwood floors. This was a church where “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” would be performed and harkened to weekly. I noticed I was holding my breath.

It was stunning, in an austere, heartless way. The A-frame probably carried sound beautifully, but the only natural lighting was from a wall of windows behind the pulpit. I use the term natural loosely: there wasn’t much natural about the violent, grim images of Christ’s crucifixion, or Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, or Judas’s betrayal, or any of the other scenes I recognized, more of them jimmied into the stained glass than I would have thought possible. This was a church where you came to be terrified into obedience, not welcomed as a sinner who has found the true way.

The pews were hardwood, without cushions, and the choir books looked as though they’d never been cracked open. I guessed you’d better know your music before you came to church. It was not a friendly place.

It was also completely empty of human life other than my own and Gary’s. I looked back at him. He frowned faintly before meeting my eye. I couldn’t blame him.

“I don’t know where she is,” I said before he could ask, and lifted my voice. “Hello? Hello?” My voice bounced up to the rafters and echoed back at me. The acoustics were incredible, and I tilted my head back to look longingly at the ceiling. “Wow. I’d love to sing in here.”

“Yeah? You sing?”

I shrugged. “I don’t scare the neighbors.”

Gary bent over and looked under the pews. “Yeah, well, maybe you can sing yourself up a dame. There ain’t nobody here, Jo.”

A muscle in my shoulder blade twitched. “Y’know, nobody calls me that except my dad.”

“What, did he want a boy?”

“Not exactly.” That seemed like enough information to volunteer.

Gary unbent a little, hooking his arm over the top of a pew as he looked at me. Enough time passed to let me know that he was politely not asking about my dad before he asked, “Then what do they call you?”

“Joanie, or Joanne, usually. Sometimes Anne, Annie.”

Gary straightened up, hands in the small of his back. “My wife was named Anne. You don’t look like an Anne to me.”