Gate Four

Phil counted the collection envelopes twice before he trusted the number. Forty-three dollars, mostly ones, a five folded into quarters like someone had been ashamed of it. He logged the total in the black notebook he kept for Father Alvaro, the one that wasn't part of any official diocesan ledger. Alvaro had set it up that way himself, years back, said the diocese didn't need to see every dollar that passed through Phil's hands. Phil had never once asked why. He locked the cash box and set it under the vestment cabinet where it always went.

The sacristy smelled of beeswax and the lemon oil he used on the pews on Thursdays. Outside, past the stained glass, the streetlights of the parking lot had come on early, the sky over the tenements a flat gray that promised rain and never delivered it. Phil rolled his shoulders, an old habit from twenty years of framing houses before the seminary, and cracked his knuckles once, twice, a tic he'd never managed to break.

He heard the side door before he heard footsteps, the hinge giving its particular groan, and he set the notebook down.

A woman came through fast, breathing hard, a laptop bag cutting into her shoulder and a phone in her free hand with the screen still lit. She didn't look at the altar or the candles or any of the things people usually looked at when they walked into a church uninvited. She looked at Phil.

"You're Marsden," she said. Not a question.

"Father Marsden, most days." He kept his voice even, the voice he used with grieving families and drunk men in confession, the voice that asked nothing and gave nothing away. "The church closed an hour ago."

"I know. I need ten minutes."

The woman's eyes moved over Phil's collar, then lingered too long on the scar along his jaw, the one from a warehouse fight nobody was supposed to walk away from.

She wasn't looking at a priest.

"With a priest, or with the man who used to run cargo out of Red Hook for Danny Larvik."

Her jaw tightened, and she glanced once at the door behind her, checking it, the way someone checks a lock they already know is locked. "Both," she said. "I need both of those men. Tonight."

Phil set his hands flat on the vesting counter, an old carpenter's gesture, weight distributed, ready to move if he needed to.

"Danny Larvik's been in the ground fourteen years. I stood at the hole."

"His ledgers haven't," she said.

She turned the phone toward him. A photograph filled the screen, grainy, taken through glass. A shipping manifest, a stamp he recognized even from three feet away, a stamp he'd hoped never to see again in his life. "Someone's using his old accounts to move something through the port tonight. Not drugs. I don't think it's drugs."

"Then call the police."

"I did." Her voice didn't shake, but it moved fast, clipped, a woman running numbers in her head while she talked. "Two detectives are dead because of what's in that container. I have four hours before it clears customs and disappears into a system nobody can trace. You knew Larvik's routes. You knew his people. I need someone who can read that manifest and tell me which pier, which crew, which name on that stamp actually means something."

She said it fast, like a woman reciting a case file. It wasn't a case file to her. One of those detectives had called her the night before he died, and she hadn't called him back in time. She wasn't going to file that away and go home.

Phil looked at the photograph a second longer than he needed to. He recognized the stamp, Larvik's old shipping mark, the lane number he'd routed a hundred loads through himself. And he recognized the hand that had inked the cargo figures beside it, the particular slant of the numbers, a stroke he'd taught a room full of men in a cold warehouse office twenty years ago.

"That's Larvik's lane," he said quietly. "But that's not Larvik's hand on it. It's the hand I taught."

The candle nearest the door guttered once in a draft from the hallway and steadied.

She didn't answer right away. She watched him instead, weighing something, deciding how much of the truth she could afford to spend on him tonight.

"Then you're going to walk me through every line of it," she said. "Starting now."

Phil closed the vestment cabinet, turned the small brass key, and set it on the counter beside the notebook he wasn't going to finish tonight.