The room went as silent as a tomb. Baskins swallowed hard and nodded.

It was twilight as most of the cops charged off in Belafonte’s wake, Harry and I and two Osceola officers speeding to Andrew Delmont’s southern hideaway. A mile west of the Florida Turnpike by Cypress Lake, it was tucked into several tree-dense acres, a heavy gate barring a gravel lane that snaked into the overgrowth. The Osceola guys were a bit nervous since I had no warrant, but I told them we were just going to ring the doorbell, like bible salespeople.

The cops pushed the gate open and we headed through, the night now dark and streaked with lightning to the southwest. I smelled rain in the stiffening wind, the treetops dancing as we drove two hundred yards to a pair of buildings in a clearing. The scene was not what I’d have pictured for a successful gospel artist, the house small and gray and desperately needing paint, shutters hanging askew, the sparse grass studded with weeds. There was no light in the house.

I climbed the steps to the listing porch and pounded the door. “Mr Delmont? Andy Delmont? I’m from the Florida Center for Law Enforcement and I need to ask you some questions.”

Not so much as a creak of a floorboard inside. I backed away, staring at the house until hearing words from this afternoon, Pastor Tate: “The Dredds were originally from Satsuma, Detective, a broken-down old house on the edge of town.”

Was Delmont, consciously or subconsciously recreating a childhood home?

“No one’s here,” I said. “Anything down the lane?”

The county mounties aimed their headlamps down the dusty trail, revealing a barn in the distance, half sunk into overgrowth. “Might be a place to hide a van,” Harry said.

I nodded. “Gotta look. Then we’ll head to Delmont’s home in Jacksonville. Bet it’s fancier than this wreck.”

Harry and I drove the five hundred feet to the barn, the slats of a one-time corral rotting on the ground, connected by tangles of barbed wire. We got to the door as rain started. I heard Harry sniffing the air.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been smelling rain for an hour.”

“Not rain,” he said. “I smell smoke. And … is that gasoline? Kerosene?”

I suddenly smelled it, too. “I think it’s naphtha,” I said. The door was unlocked and swung into a wall of black. The smell became overwhelming.

“There’s gotta be a light,” Harry said, patting at the wall. “There.”

The barn flooded with sickly yellow illumination. I saw a brown-dirt floor littered with round stones the size of oranges, a stack of torn fabric, and at the far end sat a concrete bench, charred, reeking of oil and naphtha.

Atop the bench lay a woman, naked, bound by ropes, her bruised head hanging off the side. Dead, but not yet wrapped. I felt sickened as we crossed a floor studded with orange-sized stones. Getting closer, I saw none of the expected tissue damage from being pummeled with rocks. I picked up speed, running the final feet.

The woman’s eyes flickered open and her head turned our way.

“I never thought I’d be happy to see cops,” she said, her voice a dry rasp as her mouth fought to make a brave smile. “You guys are cops, I hope?”

“What did Dredd say?” I asked Sparks as she was loaded into the ambulance ten minutes later. She had a hematoma on her thigh and various facial contusions, but seemed in good shape, considering. “Did Dredd tell you where he was going or when he’d be back?”

The medic handed her a cup of water and Sparks refreshed her voice. “The bastard was screaming about blasphemy and needing to leave, but that he’d be back to kill me. He was real pissed off by something about Pentecost. I mean, even for a lunatic with a rotting dick. It was crazy … like he was yelling into the scar in his chest.”

“The man in the cowboy garb,” I said, “Delmont. Any idea of his whereabouts?”

“I heard a car leave. It was still light out.”

“Just one vehicle?” I asked.

“It sounded like it. But mostly what I could hear was my heart.”

“Suggestions?” I asked Harry, twice in one evening.

“Dredd is a big package of weirdness, Delmont seems a big package of weirdness. The only other weirdness I know is whatever the hell Owsley’s doing in that building behind Hallelujah Jubilee. Maybe the weirdnesses are coming together.”

57

The Osceola guys stayed on scene, Harry directing us toward Hallelujah Jubilee as the storm arrived in earnest, low, roiling black clouds delineated in hard flashes of white light. In the distance I saw a cross so tall it seemed more of the sky than the earth, invisible until lightning flashed, then gone.

Harry cut down a side road and drove a quarter-mile until we came to a locked gate.

“They just built this. Hang on.”

Harry had brought his .45 Colt, a big and powerful pistol that looked small in his hand. He blew the lock into component parts, pushed open the bar, and we continued, cutting south and no longer seeing the spectral cross. Instead, I saw a vertically oriented structure about a hundred feet tall, like a square silo, fifty feet a side or thereabouts. It pushed from a long and low two-story structure. The thing looked like it had scales until I realized they were corrugated panels slapped together in willy-nilly fashion.

Harry pulled to what appeared to be a guardhouse. It was dark.

“No security types?” I said.

“I figure the locked gate was supposed to keep folks away. And maybe the fewer eyes, the better.”

I peered past the guardhouse as shapes resolved against the dark: two large SUV’s and a dark Hummer. The main gate was open.

Harry nodded at the Hummer. “Owsley’s here.”

I studied the turf as we exited the car: stacks of construction refuse, battered barrels, upended crates, bales of wire. Two big silver tanks sat side by side against the wall of the building, behind them a big Cat ’dozer with a blade.

“What’s in the tanks?”

“Usual construction stuff … water and diesel fuel.”

I kept up my scan, looking into the flashes of lightning. “Over there,” I said, “parked back in the trees – a van.”

We trotted that way and peered into the van, Harry shining a penlight. It looked recently cleaned. “Wasn’t Dredd in a white van?” Harry asked.

“The van was repainted,” I said, looking closer. “Probably with spray paint. Dredd’s around here. What time is it?”

“Almost midnight. Almost Pentecost.”

We turned back to the structure as lightning flashed, showing a square cannon pointed at the sky and illuminated in slow strobing. We went to the main door and tried the handle. “Locked,” I said.

Harry nodded to our left. Another jagged white line sizzled through the rain-smelling air. I looked down the horizontal wing of the building, fifty meters of windowless corrugated metal.

“Testing,” said an amplified voice inside the structure. Then louder, “Testing!” We heard a fingernail tapping the mic, a squeal of feedback.

“It’s Owsley,” Harry said.

“Test …” Owsley said as if in confirmation. “Give me more echo. Test … testing. OK, that’s good.”

We jogged to the far end of the structure. The door was unlocked and hanging open. We entered a dark cavern, blocked by looming, spectral shapes. Harry flickered his penlight over sections of crane boom, construction timbers, sheets of corrugated metal, spools of cable. We crept forward, dodging and ducking construction equipment, tripping over bolts and wires and other detritus, our sole light the pale circle of Harry’s penlight. I watched it shine over timbers, an acetylene tank, a Bobcat loader … a small face.

“Hi, Harry,” the face said. “Who’s this?”

“Rebecca?” Harry hissed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

The kid slipped out from behind a box large enough to hold a pickup truck. “I wanted to see where Daddy worked. He drove over and I hid in the back.”