Of Saints and Shadows (1994) Read Online Free PDF

his favorite season.
    As he opened the car door he heard the loud fall of feet on the pavement. Looking up, he saw a short man walking toward him, all in black with a white spot at his throat. An elderly Roman Catholic priest, bundled up in his overcoat, trudged past him.
    “Late night tonight, eh, Father?” Peter said pleasantly.
    “God’s work is never done,” the priest said without smiling, and continued down the street, away from him.
    Peter got in the car and started it up. An omen, he thought, though whether good or bad he couldn’t say. His kind had not had a good history with the church.
    A few moments later his mind was back on Meaghan Gallagher. He had a feeling it would keep returning to that fascinating young woman.
    Peter had gotten home fairly early, about 3:00 A.M. , and had stayed up reading for quite some time. He wasn’t very tired, but it was wisest to be in bed on time. His clothing came off piece by piece, and each item was put away neatly in its place.
    In his underwear, he went quickly to the door and slid the dead bolt home, then checked to see that the rubber lining under the door was in place. It wouldn’t do to have a space under the door.
    He went to the opposite wall and tested the apartment’s two windows. They were locked, but now he closed and bolted the solid wooden shutters he himself had installed on the inside. These lit perfectly into the window frames and had the same lining as the door.
    The apartment was sealed.
    The hunger had been creeping up on him all night, as it did most nights, and now it sang to him from his belly a wild song, an animal song. As he had become engrossed in the book the hunger and its song had receded. But the moment he put down that book, it returned, more powerful than before, the song virtually a hymn.
    He stood in front of the open refrigerator like a child who can’t decide what to eat, but for Peter there were no parents scolding him for wasting the electricity, and after all, he didn’t have much of a choice in meals. He was surprised to find only four bottles left in the fridge. He would have sworn there’d been at least eight before he’d gone out of town. Not that it would have been the first time he’d fed without remembering.
    Well, he’d have to call George when he woke up that night. He’d known George Marcopoulos, his best friend, since he first came to Boston. Many years earlier Peter had become a thief in order to end his career as a killer. This new career forced him to move from city to city fairly frequently. No matter how good you were at burglary, if you kept it up, eventually you got caught. Peter wouldn’t be caught, but he might be discovered, and so he’d moved.
    To Boston. That night he’d been truly starving and he’d actually paused to drink a pint before making good his escape. Had he left right away, he might have missed the other burglar in Boston City Hospital that night. But he didn’t. He saw the tall white guy, all in black, slip quietly through the door to the morgue.
    Against his better judgment, Peter had slid up to the door and opened it a crack, watching as the thief opened drawers and checked toe tags on bodies. Maybe he wanted to say a last good-bye to a loved one, but Peter doubted it. Before he could do anything, an older, white-haired doctor had come around the corner only to knock over the thief, falling on top of him.
    George Marcopoulos, the medical examiner at Boston City Hospital, was on his back with a rather large, serrated edge knife at his throat before he had a chance to call out.
    “Look at it this way,” the thief growled as Peter looked on, “you’re probably not the first guy to die from working late.”
    As the knife bit into George’s throat Peter moved, dropping the bottled blood he carried. Before the bottles shattered on the floor, Peter had the would-be body snatcher on his back. But the guy was quick, for a human. The point of the blade came out of Peter’s back, had