City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance Page B

slightly slurred said, “Well. You look like you could use a drink.”
    “I wouldn’t say no. How do you feel about having a house-guest for a few days?”
    She said, “Mixed feelings. You don’t look like you’re up for nailing me anytime soon.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
    “We’ll test that out later. For now, though…”  Her perpetual rum and Pepsi was on the coffee table, but for him she went off to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vodka that had been in the freezer and some lime soda and a glass.
    For the next three days he didn’t do much. He drank more than he should in the evening, exercised half-heartedly to keep his muscles from stiffening up. He thought about Peter Murke, and the bizarre coven of killers who’d rescued him. If Chester hadn’t seen the same thing, he might’ve become half-convinced it was all some crazy dream.
    But it wasn’t a dream. They’d been stymied by some freak-show posse, and now Peter Murke was free, and all Crowe’s plans were teetering on the brink of utter failure.
    He and Faith didn’t talk much. She was drunk, usually, but on the occasions she wasn’t she looked after him pretty well, helping him around in the mornings when the pain was at its worst, feeding him, changing bandages. She even made a trip to the farmer’s market downtown and came back with a paper bag full of fresh fruit. On the second afternoon, she went out for a couple of hours and came back with a new overcoat for him, just like the one he’d bought a few days earlier, and which was now blood-stained and lacerated. For his part, he tried at least to clean up after himself, not mention the nauseating smell of rum sweat or the increasingly tedious sex, and in the evenings, when she was at work, he drank and brooded.
    He had no idea how to go about finding Murke. But that was what he had to do.
    On the third day, he made his way into the bathroom and peeled the bandages off his face and had a sickening minute of incomprehension. Dr. Maggie had warned him, but to see it for the first time was sort of a shock.
    From directly above his left brow, a long ugly scar ran over his eye, and ended in a jagged edge at his cheekbone. It was red and raw-looking. His face was the face of someone he’d never seen before.
    He was so shocked by what he saw in the mirror that it took a minute before he realized he was seeing the image with both eyes. So at least he still had my vision. But Christ, it was a hell of a scar.
    Lucky, he said to himself. Lucky that the blade skipped past the eye. Lucky that he wasn’t blinded. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
    He grabbed the astringent out of the cabinet and cleaned the wound. It hurt, bad enough that it made him woozy and he teetered back to the sofa and sat down hard and took a few minutes to will the agony away.
    So, a slight change of plans. Marco Vitower and Chester Paine weren’t the only ones who needed to die.
    Faith went gray when she saw it. She came up to him slowly, squat down in front of him and said, “Crowe.”
    He grinned at her and said, “Don’t worry. I’m about to go bandage it up again.”
    She shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s just… what the hell are you doing out there that this would happen?”
    He didn’t know how to answer that. What he did hardly seemed to matter. It could happen to anyone. He’d read about a guy once, just an ordinary every-day sort of fella, who worked in the railroad yards, who fell in front of a rolling boxcar and got himself cut right in half and actually lived to tell the tale. Another man got attacked by a grizzly bear and had both his arms ripped off. Another one was walking out of his house one morning on his way to work when a goddamn oak tree fell on him.
    Chance. Blind and random. And maybe Crowe did tempt fate a little, but crazy things happened, it didn’t matter who you were or what you did.
    He didn’t say any of that to Faith. He pushed himself up and headed