Urban Shaman Read Online Free

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 andpoked 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. Thoseplaces 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