«Wet Work», Christopher Buckley

Prologue

He had done only two deathbeds up to now, and both of them coma cases. Father Toomey reserved to himself the conscious; he got the brain-dead, the vegetal and the Do Not Resuscitate. "Dues," said Father Toomey one night, tossing back his third vodka martini. "It was the same when I was just out of seminary. They think because you're new you'll make a mistake and send them to Hell on a technicality."

There wasn't much challenge in ministering to people who just lay there with tubes going in and out. What drama he'd experienced had been decidedly unpleasant. He'd just finished with the anointing when the hairdresser showed up. The family had provided for a weekly shampoo, set and rinse. The hairdresser pointed to the smear of holy oil on the old lady's forehead and said, "Okay if that gets wet?" Six years of seminary to dicker over forehead rights with a hairstylist to the dying?

But now this. Now this had promise.

He was in an Italian sports car with a name like exotic pasta, being catapulted through the dark countryside by a man with a melted face who'd shown up on the rectory doorstep at three in the morning asking for Father Toomey. When he saw the face he'd gasped, but the man only smiled as if to say, That happens all the time. He was a friendly man, in a gangsterish sort of way, with two heavy gold rings. It was entirely possible, he mused, that he was on the way to the deathbed of a Mafia don. The elements were all there.

"Hope we don't hit a deer, huh?"

Strange conversational gambit, he thought. The man tapped a black box on the dash. "This thing here, it sends out like a kind of Morse code to deer-we can't hear it, but they can-that tells them there's this maniac doing eighty on a road posted forty-five and they should stick to the sidewalk. You like venison? I never had it till I came down here, now I eat it all the time."

"Can you tell me something about your employer?" the young priest ventured.

"Charles Becker."

The priest gathered the name was supposed to ring a bell. "Yes?"

The driver seemed amused. He downshifted and the car screamed up a hill, bare-trunked sugar maples flashing by like fence pickets. "He's a businessman."

"I see." There was a long silence. "What kind of businessman?"

"Good businessman." He nodded.

Mafia. The priest felt his heart rate increasing.

"Real estate, mining, agricultural fertilizers, aircraft, cod-you know Captain Pete's fish sticks?"

"Sure."

"Those are his fish sticks."

"Is that right? I ate a lot of those fish sticks, growing up."

"There you go. You made him rich. What else? Oil, gas, timber-he owns a good deal of Oregon, I believe it is, or Washington State. You remember when Mount St. Helens blew up, that volcano? Well, a lot of that ash landed on his land. He turned around and sold it for agricultural fertilizer. This is a smart man, Padre." Padre? "Livestock. Weather satellites. One of the movie companies, he owns a good of piece of that. Defense, his company used to do some defense work for the government."

The priest recoiled. Defense? What ironic grace had brought him to the deathbed of an arms dealer, he who'd been arrested for demonstrating outside the El Salvadoran embassy in Washington. He saw napalm lighting up the jungle, cluster bombs free-falling from the bellies of B-52s, tanks crushing human beings, ballistic missiles hurtling toward what the "defense" industry liked to call "population centers," saw the sky-the very heavens-polluted with laser weapons. He saw children starving, people dying of AIDS, the homeless shivering on steam grates, battered wives, crack babies abandoned in hospitals, he saw-they were going through a gate, a large gate that seemed to open without human agency. He turned and saw them, two men with-of course-holsters. Remember, he told himself through pursed lips, that Christ went to the home of Matthew, the tax collector. But a defense contractor?

"Halfway."

"What?" said the priest, sounding annoyed.

"That's the house up there, those lights."

The priest could barely make them out. They were-miles away anyway. Good lord, how many wars had it taken to acquire a front lawn this size?

"This is the golf course here. The buffalo tear the hell out of it. If it was me, I'd stick them somewheres else, but he likes looking at them from his window, so they just go on replacing the divots. You ever seen a buffalo divot? Tell you something else about buffalo," he said with a confidential air. "They're major defecators. We got someone on staff, that's all he does."

They drove over a stone bridge. The priest saw swans and Canada geese in the moonlight.

"When I was a kid growing up they called it 'Extreme Unction.' You remember that? I guess that was before your time."

The priest didn't like the allusion to his youth. He said a bit stiffly, "It's called the 'Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick' now."