The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Rideout returned the smile, exposing teeth that were little more than tiny eroded gravestones. If he had ever seen a dentist, it had been many moons ago. Also, he was a tobacco chewer. Kat’s father, who had died of mouth cancer, had had the same discolored teeth.

‘How much would you pay to be free of your pain, sir?’

‘Ten million dollars,’ Newsome replied promptly.

Kat heard Melissa gasp.

‘But I didn’t get to where I am by being a sucker. If you do whatever it is you do – expelling, exterminating, exorcising, call it what you want – you get the money. In cash, if you don’t mind spending the night. Fail, and you get nothing. Except your first and only roundtrip on a private jet. For that there will be no charge. After all, I reached out to you.’

‘No.’

Rideout said it mildly, standing there beside the bed, close enough to Kat so she could smell the mothballs that had been recently keeping his dress pants (maybe his only pair, unless he had another to preach in) whole. She could also smell some strong soap.

‘No?’ Newsome looked frankly startled. ‘You tell me no?’ Then he began to smile again. This time it was the secretive and rather unpleasant smile he wore when he made his phone calls and did his deals. ‘I get it. Now comes the curveball. I’m disappointed, Reverend Rideout. I really hoped you were on the level.’ He turned to Kat, causing her to draw back a bit. ‘You, of course, think I’ve lost my mind. But I haven’t shared the investigators’ reports with you. Have I?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘There’s no curveball,’ Rideout said. ‘I haven’t performed an expulsion in five years. Did your investigators tell you that?’

Newsome didn’t reply. He was looking up at the thin, towering man with a certain unease.

Jensen said, ‘Is it because you’ve lost your powers? If that’s the case, why did you come?’

‘It’s God’s power, sir, not mine, and I haven’t lost it. But an expulsion takes great energy and great strength. Five years ago I suffered a major heart attack shortly after performing one on a young girl who had been in a terrible car accident. We were successful, she and I, but the cardiologist I consulted in Jonesboro told me that if I ever exerted myself in such a way again, I might suffer another attack. This one fatal.’

Newsome raised a gnarled hand – not without effort – to the side of his mouth and spoke to Kat and Melissa in a comic stage whisper. ‘I think he wants twenty million.’

‘What I want, sir, is seven hundred and fifty thousand.’

Newsome just stared at him. It was Melissa who asked, ‘Why?’

‘I am pastor of a church in Titusville. The Church of Holy Faith, it’s called. Only there’s no church anymore. We had a dry summer in my part of the world. There was a wildfire, started by drunken campers. My church is now just a concrete footprint and a few charred beams. I and my parishioners have been worshipping in an abandoned gas station–convenience store on the Jonesboro Pike. It is not satisfactory during the winter months, and there are no homes large enough to accommodate us. We are many but poor.’

Kat listened with interest. As con-man stories went, this was an excellent one. It had all the right sympathy hooks.

Jensen, who still had the body of a college athlete to go with the mind of a Harvard MBA, asked the obvious question. ‘Insurance?’

Rideout once more shook his head in that deliberate way: left, right, left, right, back to center. He still stood towering over Newsome’s state-of-the-art bed like some country-ass guardian angel. ‘We trust in God.’

‘You might have been better off with Allstate,’ Melissa said.

Newsome was smiling. Kat could tell from the stiff way he held his body that he was in serious discomfort – his pills were now half an hour overdue – but he was ignoring the pain because he was interested. That he could ignore it was something she’d known for quite awhile now. He could master the pain if he chose to. He had resources. She had thought she was merely irritated with this, but now, probably prompted by the appearance of the charlatan from Arkansas, she discovered she was actually infuriated. It was so wasteful.

‘I have consulted with a local builder – not a member of my flock, but a man of good repute who has done repairs for me in the past and quotes a fair price. He tells me that it will cost approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to rebuild.’

Uh-huh, Kat thought.

‘We don’t have such monetary resources, of course. But then, not even a week after speaking with Mr Kiernan, your letter came, along with the video disk. Which I watched with great interest, by the way.’

I’ll bet you did, Kat thought. Especially the part where the doctor from San Francisco says the pain associated with his injuries can be greatly alleviated by physical therapy. Stringent physical therapy.