Although it was well out of his way, Steve decided to take a swing past the university hospital to try for a look at Greer, just to see what the monster looked like. Although the reports he had were that the man had been badly burned, there was no telling how bad since the stories had been passed from hand to hand until they’d reached the point of being rumors.

At least during visiting hours, security at the hospital was so slack as to be non-existent. He was easily able to find out the room number from an elderly volunteer in the lobby, and she even gave him directions to find the room. The hospital was large, sprawling and a little confusing, but he soon made it to the room.

Greer was out cold when he walked into the room – asleep or unconscious, Steve couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. Really, there wasn’t much to see; the man was swathed in bandages and didn’t look good. By now Steve knew that it had been almost five months since the burning, but if he were still that wrapped up it was obvious that he wasn’t doing well. A computer on a rolling cart had been left on, with the current history and medical record showing; Steve glanced at it but couldn’t get much out of the numbers and medical jargon, other than to say that it apparently jibed with his original impression: bad shape.

Steve stood there, reflecting that it would be easy indeed to send him the rest of the way to hell but that it might be doing him a favor. Let him live in pain.

Beyond that, Steve didn’t learn a great deal from the visit. He went back out, got in the LaCrosse, and pointed it toward home – which was to say, toward Wychbold and Ann. He was aware that he still had things in his apartment down south, and that he needed to do something about them, but he wasn’t sure what. Maybe a moving company could pack it up and ship it to him, and there was certainly enough spare room on the upper floors of Uncle Homer’s old monstrosity of a house to store things that he probably wouldn’t need soon again, if ever. Maybe it would be easier to just get a moving company to move his things to the nearest dumpster.

Steve was anxious to get home to see Ann, but there was no point in killing himself driving, either. He stopped early for a night stop; there was no need to rush now. Once again he spent the evening working on the 1914 nickel; it was coming along but far from done. It was something to do.

He made it back home before sunset the next day, and at that he hadn’t hurried. Ann greeted him at the door, with a deep, deep kiss. How much his life had changed in a few days! She was certainly part of his future now. “It’s good to have you back sir,” she said warmly. “I really missed you.”

“I missed you too, Ann,” he told her. “How are things around here?”

“Much the same as always, sir. Mr. Taylor is asleep, and he should be for a while. I wasn’t expecting you this early, so I was about to take a walk out to Mrs. Cooper’s grave.”

“I’d like to go along with you. I’ve been sitting in the car enough and would appreciate a little exercise.”

It wasn’t far to Mrs. Cooper’s grave, but it was a pleasant walk. The wind was blowing fairly hard, making Ann’s long white hair blow around sensually. In only a few minutes they came to a small plot enclosed with an iron fence. There were two headstones there, one used, one awaiting use. “Peaceful out here,” he said. “Nice view.”

“Yes, I come here often,” she replied. “Sir, I owe her so much, in so many ways I can’t begin to tell them all. It’s very likely that if it weren’t for her I’d be rotting away in some mental hospital somewhere. She gave me so much, and there was so little I could do for her.”

“She gave me a lot, too, Ann. She gave me you, and you’ve changed my life about as much as she changed yours.”

They stood there silently for a while, then turned back to the house, walking hand in hand along the broad pathway. “Sir,” she said partway back. “When you called last night, you told us that you’d seen that evil monster. What was it like?”

“Cold,” he replied. “I mean, he looked pathetic laying there in bed all wrapped in bandages, but knowing what he’d done to you and to Melanie, and probably to others, I could just feel the room full of evil. Bobby did everything we could have wished for to him and probably more, but somehow it seemed a little empty.”

“I feel a little frustrated, and for the same reason, sir. I mean, I know what was done is done, but I wish there were some way it could have been done a little more directly.”

“Setting his gas-soaked pants on fire is about as direct as you can get, Ann.”

“That’s not what I mean, sir. I feel very strange about this, sir. I mean, the man was evil, and there’s no denying it. But at the same time, what he did to me led me here, to Mrs. Cooper, to Mr. Taylor, and now to you, so I feel very lucky. I know I shouldn’t feel vindictive, but I do. I just wish I could add a little bit of my share to what Bobby and Melanie did to him.”

“Ann, the hell of it is that, burned to a crisp or not, he’s still evil. Ann, I did more than just look in on him in his hospital room. I did a little more snooping around, some of it with Melanie’s help. Greer still has control of the bastards in that lunatic church of his, and they see him as some kind of god. Well, maybe not that. What Bobby did to him made him some kind of martyr, I guess. Even if we can get Bobby out of jail, there won’t be any going home for them. He wouldn’t last a day. That’s something else we have to worry about when the time comes.”

“It’s too bad those people don’t know the truth about him, sir.”

“Oh, they know the truth,” he snorted. “That’s the absolute hell of it. Those people think he can do no wrong. They just won’t see what it means. If he could be separated from them, then he’d really be hurting, but it would take a clear sign from God to . . .” he broke off in mid-sentence.

They walked along another few steps, with the silence of his thinking almost deafening Ann. Finally she said softly, “Sir?”

“Ann, I have an idea.”

“I thought it looked like it, sir. What is it?”

He told her about it, adding, “There’s still a couple pieces missing, but they can be handled. Are you up for it?”

“Sir, your saying ‘I have an idea,’ just pushed ‘tax deduction’ out of second place in my list of favorite words to hear from you.”

Even at three in the morning security in the university hospital was lax. There were still people around, so there was the need to not seem too out of place.

Like many hospitals in the modern era, staff members wear uniforms that denote their functions. Steve was wearing brown scrubs, denoting maintenance. The name tag on his uniform read “Elmore Whipple” and it had been very little trouble to forge it, even the hospital logo. He carried a medium-sized tool box in one hand and a pipe wrench in the other. When he went into Greer’s room he checked briefly to see if the man was awake; there was a small reading light on at the head of the bed, so it appeared he was. Could not be better, Steve thought as he said quietly, “Got to fix the toilet.”

“Oh, OK,” Greer mumbled. Steve stepped back out the door and gave a thumbs up to Ann.

The uniform code didn’t always extend to doctors; Ann wore white pants, a print blouse, and a white lab coat, with the name tag, “Janice Pfieffer, MD.” It had been no more trouble to forge than Steve’s. She wore a black wig, just to change her appearance a little.

A minute or so after Steve went into the bathroom, leaving the door open so it blocked the view of the hall from the bed, Ann walked in. It took only a well practiced moment for the lab coat to come off, and for her to put on a long, flowing gown of somewhat heavier material than she’d worn when she’d first joined Steve in bed not all that long before. As Steve helped her slide it on, she took off the wig and shook out her long white hair. The final touch was for Ann to put in her reflective red contact lenses; as she did that, Steve attached a couple of small containers to the hem of her gown.

Steve handed her a small object, which she took carefully – touched in the wrong place it was dangerous indeed, but she’d practiced it many times. It was a small but very hot piece of metal object bonded to a piece of high-tech ceramic of the sort that had once protected a space shuttle on re-entry – something that Phil Crocker had found for them without knowing why it was wanted. “All set,” Steve whispered to her. “Go for it.”

Ann didn’t say anything, but just strode silently into the room and stood next to the bed. Greer didn’t notice her until she dropped the first container onto the floor, then the second. As the cloud of dry ice vapor arose around her, she said in her clearest, coldest voice, “Behold!”

Greer opened his eyes to see what appeared to be an angel standing next to him. “H . . . have you come to take me to the Father?” he asked in amazement.

“No, I have come to deliver an order,” the angel said in a voice as cold as ice, as cold as space. “That order is to live as long as you can, for if you think you have suffered pain here, you have no idea what awaits you for what you did to one of our sisters. I shall give you this to remind you.”

The angel reached out her hand and touched his forehead with the small object. The pain was clearly incredible – he sucked in air hard to fight it off, but couldn’t manage to let out a scream. She only held it there for a moment, and then she was gone; his pain was so intense that he didn’t notice her leaving.

In the bathroom Ann and Steve did the second half of their well-practiced quick change, and in half a minute they were done, and Dr. Pfieffer was walking on down the hall much like normal. By then Steve had the still-hot former piece of space shuttle in an insulated container in the tool box, and he walked out of the room only a few seconds later, going in the opposite direction.

Steve’s exit took him by the nurse’s station. There was a nurse sitting there, drinking coffee to stay awake in the wee small hours of the morning. “You might want to look in on that guy in 313,” he commented casually. “He sounds like he’s hurting.”

“Oh hell,” the nurse replied. “He’s always hurting and bitching about it. This is a burn unit, after all. He probably needs more morphine but he’s not due for it yet.”

“Happens up here, I guess,” he said. “You have a good one.”

“You too,” she said as she took another sip of her coffee.

Freeing Bobby took longer – seven months, in fact, but Steve was waiting with Forrest Baldwynn as Bobby and Melanie walked out the door of the Price County courthouse arm in arm. “Bobby,” Melanie said. “This is Steve Taylor. He’s the man I told you about who did so much to get you the new trial. I know you know Forrest.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, sir,” Bobby said to Steve. “I thought . . . well Christ, that I was going to be in there forever, but then Melanie said that good things were starting to happen, and that you were responsible for most of them.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Steve replied, “but it needed to be done. Forcing through the change of venue was the big thing. We might have been able to pull it off in Milton, but we didn’t want to take the risk.”

“Not with those church bastards there,” Bobby said. “I was surprised they didn’t lynch me.”

“They’re not the force they used to be,” Steve said simply. “They’re not exactly kissing the ground that asshole walks on any more.”

“What happened?” Bobby asked.

“Oh, Bobby, you didn’t know about that?” Melanie laughed. “The story is that an angel appeared in front of him one night, told him to live as long as he could because he was definitely going to hell. Then the angel burned ‘666’ into his forehead.”

“You’re kidding! The mark of the beast from the Book of Revelations? It couldn’t have happened to a better person.”

“It makes me believe in angels, all right,” Steve laughed. “It sure changed the attitude of his followers, too. Most of them seem to believe that the beast has truly been marked. From what I hear, he does nothing but pray at the top of his lungs until he passes out. They had to move him to a mental unit, but then he was a mental case, anyway.”

“So what happens next?” Bobby asked. “Melanie said there was no way I should go back to Milton.”

“Definitely not,” Steve told him. “The power of those idiots may be reduced but the asshole still has some followers around. Bobby, we’re going to take you to a safe place where you can get re-acquainted with Melanie for a while before she has to go into the hospital to get that iron mark taken off of her back. It’s not going to be an overnight procedure, and she’ll need you to be as strong for her as she was for you.”

“God, it’s good of you to do that. When I saw it in the courtroom I was all set to . . . well, I was really pissed to see it.”

“It’s going to be a while, and it may never totally go away, but at least she’s not going to be bearing as much of his mark any longer. But let’s get going. We have plenty to talk about, but we can talk on the plane. We have a private charter to take you to your new home, and there’s my wife and an almost homebound old man who did as much to free you as we did. They want to meet you, too.”

Forrest left them at that point; Steve, Bobby, and Melanie got into a limo that took them directly to the Price County airport, where a business jet was waiting for them. Both Bobby and Melanie were surprised to see it. In a minute, they were on board. “Where are we going, anyway?” Bobby asked.

“I’m taking you home with me,” Steve smiled. “Not many people know where that is, but it’s in a house that some people think is haunted. It isn’t really, but occasionally some odd stuff goes on there. We’ve recently had part of the third floor converted to an apartment for you kids, but you’ll probably spend a fair amount of time with us. Bobby, you’re going to be able to go back to college, but not at your old school down here, of course.”

“Wow, I didn’t think that would ever happen. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it, though.”

“In one sense of the word you’ve already paid for it, because of what you did to that Greer creep. But the money isn’t a problem. We need to talk about what you’re going to be studying, but we don’t have to do that now. In the interim, there will be times we can use an extra pair of hands, and you can really help us on that.”

“I’m glad you’re taking us out of there,” Melanie said, “but I really hate to leave Cousin Forrest when he needs some help.”

“Melanie, Forrest hated to let you go,” Steve explained, “but he agrees that it would be best if you were out of this neck of the woods. Besides, as I said earlier, they’re going to be a while getting your back looking better, and you’d have to be taking a lot of time off. This way it won’t matter as much, and we’ve got some things for you to do, too.”

Something over an hour later in the weak light of the dying day they were on the ground in Hawthorne, the nearest airport to Wychbold that could handle a business jet. “Well, we’re here,” Steve said as the airplane came to a stop near a huge old classic Lincoln Continental.

The three of them got out of the plane, and walked over to the old white Lincoln, where a tall woman with a hat and mirror sunglasses was waiting for them. “Bobby, Melanie,” Steve said by way of introduction, “This is my wife, Ann. She’s really the power behind bringing you here.”

“I really appreciate it, ma’am,” Bobby said. “I was never expecting what happened. You people sure spent a lot of money on me,” Bobby said.

“Only because we needed to,” Ann replied, taking off her sunglasses to get a better look at the two. “You deserve it and I’m just sorry you had to sit in jail as long as you did. Bobby, I know we’ve never met, but you and Melanie did me a huge service, so it was the least we could do.”

“What was that?” Bobby asked. “I don’t recall meeting you before.”

“Bobby, let’s just say that Melanie and I are sisters of a sort, because Melanie wasn’t the only one that monster burned.”

Melanie looked at Ann for a moment, taking in the nearly pure white skin, the long white hair – and the mottled brownish red of her eyes, then sucked in her breath. “Oh, my god!” she almost squealed. “You must be Jasmine! Greer used to preach that you were the devil sent to haunt him. There are stories in the church that you escaped from him by going back into the underworld.”

“Not quite,” Ann smiled. “Yes, I used to be Jasmine, but I’m not anymore. Like I said, Melanie, we’re sisters of a sort, and we have to take care of each other.”

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