LITMIR.BIZ

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as Galveston.

      It was the top story of the tower where Ryder currently stood, his office, a burled-oak desk curved to fit the wall below one of the wide windows. On the desk were the six small displays of his Bloomberg terminal, his link to the financial world. On the other end of the desk was his personal computer, a large-screen iMac. The Bloomberg monitors danced with charts and graphs and streaming numbers, the personal computer was dark.

      Pushed to the desk was a Hermann Miller chair, black and expensive and purchased for comfort, as Jeremy Ryder sat in it several hours daily. A richly detailed oaken wardrobe sat across the room, outfitted to hold files and office supplies. Jeremy Ryder hated file cabinets: they reminded him of institutions.

      Three windows faced outward, the northernmost angling toward the re-occupied Schrum edifice. The home had always been well-kept, but lifeless for the most part, a crew arriving every second summer week to keep things tidy, diminishing to every three in the cooler months. The only vehicles in regular attendance belonged to either the crew or tourists gawking at the architectural excesses on the broad avenue. They paused before his home, mouths drooping, cameras ticking.

      But now the street resembled a parking lot: news vans, cop cars, the gathering crowd. A catastrophe, Jeremy Ryder thought.

      But an interesting one.

      A hundred people now, up from fifty just minutes ago, not including the news types. Some stared mutely at the Schrum house, others knelt and prayed. From nowhere a man had appeared wearing a coarse robe and dragging a wooden cross up and down the street.

      Jeremy started to draw his blinds, but stared down the street, unable to pull the cord.

       Why are they there? What do they see? What can a dying man give them?

      No … what do they think a dying man can give them?

      The sound of an incoming Skype. Jeremy flicked his personal computer into life. The screen filled with the image of Ava Davanelle in a green surgical gown, her shoulder-length hair snow white though she was in her late thirties, her skin fair, her green eyes sparkling with amusement.

      “How goes the day, boyo?” Davanelle said. It amused Jeremy Ryder that her hair was as white as that of the glum Schrum supposedly withering away down the street. Ava was calling during her morning break at the South Florida morgue. She was its newest pathologist, hired last year from her post in Chicago.

      Jeremy smiled and leaned the wall across from the camera with arms crossed. “I was checking Baltic shipping rates, but got distracted by the Mongol hordes.”

      Davanelle sipped from a coffee cup. “Strom Thurmond served in the Senate until a hundred years old. His last years he resembled a drooling puppet carried into the chamber by his aides.”

      “Meaning?”

      “Schrum’s a tough and driven old buzzard. Driven types don’t die easy.”

      “I can’t work,” Jeremy said, scowling out the window and noting church buses pulling to the Schrum house. “Maybe I’ll saunter over and inspect the carnival.”

      An arched eyebrow from Davanelle. “That so?”

      “Carson advises me to keep distant from the spectacle, Ava,” Jeremy said. “What’s your advice?”

      She smiled. “When it rains, use an umbrella.”

      Davanelle blew a kiss and the screen went dark. Jeremy changed his khakis and sport shirt for a sky-blue seersucker suit, cream shirt, red-accented tie, slipping bare feet into cordovan loafers, stopping at the entryway closet to select a cream Panama and large sunglasses. He opened the door to a day bright with promise, and walked toward the milling crowd. The police had blocked half the thoroughfare to give people room for their various enterprises, from open-mouth stares to prayer to lugging a wooden cross. There were impromptu singings of hymns, prayers, candles dribbling wax all over the street. Jeremy watched until bored, ten minutes. He yawned and started back to his house, but paused as a stretch limousine with blackout windows passed the cross street at the end of the block. Normally, a stretch limo was not worth a second glance, another celebrity vacationing in the Keys, but this one was pulling an eight-foot trailer.

      A limo with a trailer?

      Jeremy reversed direction, jogging down the street to see the vehicle pull into the gated drive of a house two doors down, the house directly behind the home where Reverend Schrum lay. Two men stepped from the vehicle, dark suits, sunglasses, sized like football linemen, one was a buzz-cut redhead, the other had dark hair and Jeremy knew he was seeing bodyguards, security, whatever. Small minds, large muscles, no creative resources.

      The day was getting brighter.

      Jeremy retreated around the corner and stationed himself midpoint on the block, looking down the back yards. After ten minutes his conjecture was rewarded. The new arrivals at the house whose backyard abutted the Schrum backyard were now crossing between houses.

      Why not park in front? Jeremy wondered. The crowds a problem? Or did they not wish to be seen?

      Jeremy saw the two security types, plus another of the same rugged stature, a third who doubled as a driver, perhaps. With them were two others, one a man in a motorized wheelchair with tall tires – obviously carried in the rental van – and an auburn-haired woman, tall and slender and walking precariously between the yards, the effect of high heels sinking in to sandy ground. At one point she teetered sideways and when the red-haired bodyguard put out his hand to assist, she slapped it away.

      Though Jeremy had seen the wheelchair man and auburn-tressed woman for three seconds and from two hundred feet distant, he knew their names and occupations.

      He’d made money from them.

      The quintet disappeared into the lush foliage at the rear of the Schrum home. Jeremy slipped his hands into his pockets and, whistling a jaunty air, strolled back to his home to ponder the meaning of the visitation.

       13

      Eliot Winkler’s motorized chair buzzed to the bottom of the steps to the back porch of the Schrum residence. The rear door was opened by Andy Delmont, a gospel singer and one of the Crown of Glory network’s most popular celebrities, his five albums in wide distribution. Delmont was in his early thirties, with red-blond hair, emerald-green eyes, freckle-dappled cheeks, and a bright, engaging smile that bordered on childlike. As always, Delmont looked dressed for a performance, white country-and-western-style suit with embroidered lapels and mother-of-pearl buttons, sky-blue shirt with a bolo tie, silver-tipped leather straps through a silver, cruciform fitting.

      “Mr Winkler. Ms Winkler,” Delmont said, his face eager to please. “So good to see you. We didn’t have time to install a ramp, but I’m sure a couple of your men can lift you up to—”

      Winkler scowled and pressed a lever on the wheelchair’s arm, the customized Viking all-terrain-wheelchair climbing the steps as the seat adjusted to keep Winkler upright. He reached the top and rolled across the threshold, Delmont having to jump back to keep his toes from being run over.

      “Where is he?” Winkler demanded as he whirred past. Vanessa Winkler followed, then paused at a full-length hallway mirror to freshen her lipstick and pat her elegant coif.

      “The Reverend is upstairs,” Delmont said, stepping quickly to catch up. “The doctor is with him.” Delmont nodded to a latticed metal door down a short hallway. “There’s an elevator, sir.”

      Winkler rolled to the metal grate, pressing the button and rolling inside before the door was fully open. He craned his head toward his sister.

      “You coming, or you gonna primp all day?”

      Vanessa Winkler dropped the lipstick into her purse. “You don’t have to do this, Eliot. Let’s get back in the limo and—”

      “Get

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