THE FOURTH WATCH by Edwin Attella Page A

many, the excitement of the investigation and the
occasional chance to make justice happen.
    Father Jack, action hero.
    He never tires of listening, and often times
without him saying a word, just talking these matters out with him
helps me see the edges of it more clearly. I know he will catch any
flaw in any argument and knowing that makes me examine them more
carefully.
    "It was all kind of vague," I told him, "Alex
referred her to me, I guess the old man was a client of his." Jack
knows Alex well, through me, and he would tell you that he was
about the business of saving his soul, whether Alex liked it or
not.
    "So?"
    "Well, I didn't feel quite right taking her
money. Its just that I don't want to lead her down the garden path,
you know what I mean, get her hopes up, if that's what you call it.
But she is so determined."
    Jack chewed his food in silence and I could
tell that something was turning over in his mind. He spread a pat
of butter on his bread and dipped it in the sauce on his plate and
ate it slowly. He took a drink of his Coke and looked at me over
the rim of the glass.
    "Then Alex gave me a bunch of double talk, the
gist of which was that he wouldn't be surprised if I turned
something up."
    "How do you mean?"
    "Well, you know what Alex is like, but I got
the feeling that he was saying that it wouldn't surprise him if
someone took the old man out."
    Jack kept nodding and kept eating. "What do
you know about this guys business?"
    "Nothing, yet?"
    "All that junk he sells. Must buy it all
overseas. That could be something. You might have a little
international intrigue on your hands."
    I thought about that. ''I could live without
the excitement."
    ''Not me."
    We finished our lunch in a comfortable
silence, except for the sounds of our silverware working like picks
and shovels.
    When we were done Jack said, "Listen Kato, you
don't know, there might be something there. She has more money then
she knows what to do with, so it’s not like you'd be breaking the
bank. If you don't take the job, someone else will, and they won't
have any qualms about taking her money. They might just burn it up
and tell her to forget about it, that there's nothing there, and
she'll maybe go away satisfied and then if there is something
there, justice won't get done, see what I mean? At least with you,
she gets her money's worth. You at least will follow the thing
where it goes, give her an honest days work for an honest days
wage, and in the end, if nothing turns up, then at least she won't
have false closure."
    I thought about that for a while, nodding,
then I said: "1 could have figured that out all by myself, Jack,
forget what I said about buying lunch."
    "Ah," he said, "but you were buying me lunch
in hopes that it might be a cheap
    ticket to heaven, not because of any wisdom I
might impart."
    "Oh yeah," I said.

    5
    It always starts with the sound of
music. The voice of violins caressed
softly, high on fretless necks. Then I think, no ... voices… quiet
voices, soft on the tongues of children in choir. But then, no, no
... whoshing and whispering ... shushing really, like .. .like
...
    And then I am a point of light, no
more than a singular match stroked against the darkness of the
universe. I am turning there, warm and tumbling, bobbing, floating.
But, wait! I'm not the light, I'm hurtling toward it - or it toward
me, in the long narrow tunnels of my vision. It is as if I am
standing back from two windows on either side of a room and looking
out of them, but I can bring them together into a singular vision
... looking telescopically through ...
    I hear the rhythmic tumbling of
a...dryer? ... thuderdum ... thuderdum ... thuderdum...not a dryer
though, what? And then I know, It is a heart, beating somewhere in
the fathoms of darkness above me. I am rolling with its cadence in
a warm and fluid bliss.
    Now, in a microsecond, I realize
that it's all of that, and none of it. The singing of tires on wet
pavement, and the whisper of water