Cast of Shadows - v4 Read Online Free Page B

daddy.”
    “It’s just target practice,” Mickey told her. “It’s a sport he can enjoy all his life. Like golf.”
    At the recommendation of a friend at the beer distributor where he worked, Mickey started meeting Tuesday nights with a special group. He called it Bible study, and Bev assumed it was a male-bonding thing somehow related to Promise Keepers and didn’t ask too much about it. It didn’t have anything to do with Promise Keepers.
    They numbered thirteen and called themselves “The Hands of God.” They usually met in the kitchen of Phillip Hemley, who worked a white-collar job in Morgantown somewhere. Insurance. They talked about how modern-day religious institutions obscured the true word of God under a fog of politically correct bullshit. They talked about what God
really
said in the Bible, and what He preached in the non-canonical texts that the Catholics originally (and the Protestants since) have hidden from the flock. They talked about the words of God that the selfish and the weak didn’t want to hear.
    Until one day when Mickey the Gerund suggested they stop complaining and do something about it.
    A few weeks later, Mickey the Gerund came home to Bev and their sons and announced that he had quit his job. He sold their house, too (and put a down payment on a smaller place in another town), and had withdrawn about a third of their savings. I’ll be gone for a while, he told them. He’d return if he could, but then he’d be gone again soon after. Bev would have to support the boys on the few thousand he left them and on the money she made cutting hair.
    The other members of the Hands of God had taken secretly from their own savings and given Mickey about $80,000 in cash. Phil, the insurance guy, said they were his “backers,” and they talked about it as if it was an investment, but they weren’t going to get their money back. They were sponsoring Mickey the way the kings and queens of Europe supported explorers to the New World, but for the Hands of God, the return would be everlasting life.
    Two months later, Mickey returned to the smaller house as a new man, called into God’s army. He announced that he couldn’t love them anymore, that he was giving all his love, every bit of it, to God. To seal the covenant, Mickey explained, he had taken a razor blade and circumcised himself in a motel bathroom. Bev left with the kids that night, and the following week she took out a restraining order against him, which was insane. He told her he would never hurt them. In fact, he was sacrificing himself
for
them. He had answered God’s call, as Abraham did, and hadn’t God said to Abraham,
I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing — all this because you obeyed my command
? His family would be rewarded for Mickey’s service. They had nothing to fear.
    He stayed for another month or so, his split-level becoming the new headquarters (a church even) for the Hands of God, who made plans and studied maps and prayed together. They agreed on the details of the next expedition, and Mickey left in his Cutlass Supreme to make it all happen.
    They made one mistake. In Memphis. One of the Hands insisted he had a friend down there — a like-minded friend — who could help with the operation. Reluctantly, Mickey agreed because the friend offered him a place to crash and the Memphis mission was going to take at least two weeks, which would devour a large chunk of his hotel budget.
    After the two weeks were up, and the mission had just been completed, the friend ended up getting himself killed — shot in the chest by Memphis cops — and Mickey was nearly caught fleeing the scene. In a meeting, the Hands of God agreed that on the next job, in Chicago, and on every job after, Mickey would work alone.
    At