Dry Heat by Jon Talton Page A

I lowered my voice and asked again for the Reverend.
    He started to advance on me. I noticed his knuckles were bloody and deformed. Suddenly this errand seemed like a lousy idea. I took a step back and then another. I dropped back into a T position, my left foot pointed toward him, my right foot behind me turned at a right angle, my weight well balanced against any attempt to push me down. I felt the reassuring weight of the Python on my belt, and hoped I wouldn’t have to start my day with a shooting.
    “That’s enough, Bill.”
    The big man halted and stared at me. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him, but I glanced quickly in the direction of this new voice. It was coming from the darkened far end of the room.
    “I’m looking for the Reverend,” I called in that direction.
    “Who the hell are you?” the voice demanded.
    “I’m David Mapstone. I was hoping the Reverend could help me.”
    “Are you a cop?”
    “I’m a sheriff’s deputy,” I said.
    The room congealed again into silence. I could barely hear the fan turning. Then the voice told me to come to the back of the room. Bill made sure I found my way. Finally, I was presented before a broad-chested man wearing a white, open-collared shirt. A rough, dark cross hung around his neck with a leather strap. He was sitting at a folding card table lined up with white Styrofoam cups. The man shook a cup at me, put it in my hand.
    “Ice,” he said. “Ice is important.”
    His eyes were gigantic, and buttressed with deep sockets and soaring brows, high arched cheeks and strong nose, as if cathedral builders had constructed his face. Above a generous forehead, he combed lead-colored hair straight back. His skin was the color and texture of cordovan leather.
    “Bill is right,” he said. “You don’t belong here. And I wonder if you’re telling me the truth. You don’t have cop’s eyes.”
    I held out my ID and star, and he squinted at them across the rows of white cups.
    “You look like a professor,” he said.
    “In another life,” I said. “I’m looking for someone called the Reverend.”
    He stuck his large hands in his pockets and regarded me. “I was a pastor in another life,” he said. “So for shorthand, they call me the Reverend. You can call me Quanah Card.”
    “You’re Comanche?”
    “No,” he said. “Tohono O’odham. But my mother, she was a reader. She loved the stories of heroic Indians. And when I came along, she was reading about Quanah Parker.”
    “I’m looking for somebody, Reverend Card.” I pulled out my Polaroid and a computer-generated sketch of the homeless man, perhaps nicknamed Weed. But Card looked at my cup of ice. He picked up another cup and handed it to Bill. Then he took a third cup and held it up to his full lips. He and Bill ate the ice, as if showing a primitive tribesman that it was safe to consume. I sucked on the ice. It felt like everything that room was not: cool, clean, and fresh.
    “They would not give Jesus water on the cross, much less ice,” Card said, a dreamy look in his eyes. “So you are a very blessed man, Deputy.” Then he fixed them on me again. “How did you find this place?”
    “A woman on the street,” I said. “She said her name was Karen.”
    “Karen…” the Reverend said. “She’s got a crack problem. On top of mental illness. She won’t take her medicine.”
    He finished his ice and handed the cup to Bill, who went away. “It’s a goddamned mess, this world.” Card said. “What did you profess, Professor?”
    “History.”
    “History,” he repeated. “Well, David Mapstone, what do you know about the history of homelessness in America?”
    I knew that if I let my natural impatience take over, I would get nowhere with the Rev. Quanah Card. So I said a little about hobos during the Depression, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s, about how urban renewal tore down so much affordable housing. It was nothing brilliant, the kind of