Father Jaime Arriaga of the Church of Santo Tomas in Nogales was young and thin and had a twinkle in his eyes. Hood sat in his office. Arriaga's English was as good as Hood's Spanish and they alternated easily between the two.
He told Hood he'd watched a yellow airplane land on the dirt road that ran through the desert around the church. This was a curiosity. Arriaga had watched as a very tall man with long blond hair had come walking across the desert toward Santo Tomas. He was dressed like a motorcycle gangster. A black dog trotted along ahead of him.
When the man walked into his office, Arriaga saw that he had a machine gun of some kind slung over his shoulder. He introduced himself. He said he wanted to be baptized and he wanted his dog to be baptized also. Arriaga said that the man did not seem to mean disrespect to our Lord by having his dog baptized along with him.
"But you don't just baptize someone into the Catholic Church," said Hood. "Do you? Don't they have to go through certain steps, learn certain things?"
"Yes," said Father Arriaga. "But he brandished the machine gun instead."
"Describe it."
Father Arriaga laughed deeply. Tears of mirth rimmed his clear brown eyes. "I baptize a dog and you ask me to describe a gun! Oh, you have made my day a better one, Mr. Hood. I'm sorry. I mean no offense to you."
Hood laughed, too. "None taken. His wife sent this to me."
He set his smartphone on the priest's desk. They watched the tiny screen as the miniaturized priest sprinkled water onto Sean Ozburn's forehead and intoned the baptism with solemnity and feeling. Daisy sat beside her master, looking up. Sean had one of the Love 32s in his left hand, held loosely like an umbrella or a bundle of flowers for a loved one. The strap dangled almost to the floor.
… in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…
When it was Daisy's turn the priest's voice became goodhumoredly dubious and he managed to get through the ritual. Daisy lapped the water from his hand, then off the pavered floor. The priest's voice echoed in the empty church and the lapping of the dog was pronounced. A stained-glass window threw a burnished orange light that to Hood lent the proceeding a dignity he had not anticipated.
"When I saw the weapon I had decided that my fear of the gun was greater than my fear of blasphemy," said Arriaga. "I am a man, and weak. But the Lord knows my heart and I know He will judge me with mercy and fairness. Please don't ask me to describe what the dog was thinking."
Hood smiled again and watched Sean Ozburn face the camera and speak.
"I, Sean Gravas, have seen all manner of good and evil. And I have seen things that are not good or evil, strange things without values we can assign. At the end of my understanding begins my understanding. At the end of my life begins my life. If every man and woman on earth would do one small good thing each day for someone else, the world would be better. This is my small good thing for today. Just as man is not less than God but only separate from Him, so is Daisy not less than me but separate and distinct from me."
With this, Ozburn stepped closer to the camera and leaned down and put his face into the lens and growled. It was brief and wild. Then he smiled and reached out and took the camera and aimed it down at the altar boy who had been holding it, and Hood saw fear on the boy's face.
Please leave us now, said the priest. His voice was tremulous and thin and it seemed brittle coming from the tiny speaker in the empty church. Leave this house to God and His children, Mr. Gravas.
Hood reclaimed his phone and slid it closed. He followed Arriaga down a hallway and into the vestibule, then into the chapel. They stood on the proscenium where the baptism had taken place. The basin was no longer there but the same warm light came through the stained-glass windows. He smelled incense and burnt candle wax and the smell of decades. Hood felt goodness surrounding him here, a notion that only good things were allowed within this tiny part of the world. He wondered if he was only imagining goodness.
"What did you talk about besides baptism?"
"He wanted to know if God communicates directly with some people."
"What did you say?"
"I said that this is possible but rare. Mr. Gravas said he has felt the presence of something he cannot understand in his life. This something moves him to emotions and actions. He compared it to an ocean swell that invisibly moves toward land and when it hits the land becomes waves. He said he felt like the waves, propelled by an unknown swell. He suspected that the swell was God. Sean was uncertain about the baptism of the dog. He believed God wanted him to do it, but he wasn't sure."
Hood considered. He was never a churchgoer and he had never given much thought to God or the devil until fifteen months ago, when he'd met a man who claimed to be a mid-level devil. Mike Finnegan. Mike had talked knowledgeably about doing things he could not have done. He knew things about Blowdown personnel and cartel players that flabbergasted Hood. At times, observing Finnegan, Hood believed he was seeing something outside his experience. Later, of course, Mike had repudiated his devilish claims and chided Hood for even half believing him. And Hood had chided himself.
"So just how rare is it, that God talks directly to us?" he asked the priest.
"I honestly don't know. He has never spoken one word to me. That I could actually hear, I mean. I do feel presences. I feel the presence of the Lord when I walk into this church. I have felt evil in certain men."
"Sean?"
The priest thought. "Perhaps. But I felt in him the presence of God, too."
"That's contradictory," said Hood. "That's unhelpful."
"Good and evil are not always separate," said Arriaga. "They are often together. They are parts of us-present, changing, unequal."
"A doctor would say that Sean has delusions of grandeur," he said.
"There are many ways to see a thing," said the priest. "And many words to describe the seeing of it. Sean can hear God and perhaps even a devil inside him. A doctor can hear madness. Either way, Sean is a man driven by things he does not understand. His growl? There was something primitive in it. It was genuine and pure and true. I fear for him and for those around him. And, although his growl frightened little Israel, and although he forced me to commit a venial sin by baptizing his dog, Mr. Gravas was most generous to us."
Hood waited.
"Mr. Gravas offered five thousand American dollars to us. I very gratefully accepted. You cannot imagine what good five thousand dollars will do in this parish. We can help feed the hungry and clothe the poor. We can buy desks for the school. And textbooks. The roof needs patching and the parking lot needs a coat of slurry to keep down the dust. It would take us a year to get that in the collection plate. Our faithful are poor. For us, this is a small miracle."
Hood listened, unsurprised. Sean and Seliah had always been generous-a sponsored child in Somalia, the ASPCA, Big Brothers-even with the beggars who would hit Hood and Ozburn up on the streets of Buenavista.
Arriaga sighed. "Let us pray for him. And for you to find him before any tragedy takes place."
Arriaga prayed aloud. Hood closed his eyes and thought of the three assassins blown to smithereens two mornings ago by Ozburn; then he opened his eyes, barely, just enough to see the light coming through the stained-glass window and the dust motes rising up through this light, and the glow of the old oak pews and the floor pavers cracked and crumbling from years of faithful trample, and the tall wooden cross with pale Jesus hung in agony upon it.
From the shade of the church portico Arriaga pointed to where the plane had landed, and Hood traipsed off through a few hundred yards of hard flat desert to stand on the wide washboard road. He saw Sean's prints and Daisy's prints and the fat tire marks that Betty had left.