“Good-bye, Father, wherever you are,” he said, and rose.

He realized, as he eased out of the confessional and carefully closed the narrow wooden door, that the look on the Father’s face-he’d looked like he’d won. But that made no sense. Won what? The good Father had just bought the big one. He hadn’t won a damned thing.

There was no one in the church, not that he expected there to be. It was dead silent. He would have liked it if there had been a Gregorian chant playing softly. But no, there was nothing, just the echo of his own footsteps on the cold stones.

What did that damned priest have to look happy about? He was dead, for God’s sake.

He walked quickly out of St. Bartholomew’s Church, paused a moment to breathe in the clean midnight air, and craned his neck to look up at the brilliant star-studded sky. A very nice night, just like it was supposed to be. Not much of a moon, but that was all right. He would sleep very well tonight. He saw a drunk leaning against a skinny oak tree set in a small dirt plot in the middle of the sidewalk, just across the street, his chin resting on his chest-not the way it was supposed to be, but who cared? The guy hadn’t heard a thing.

There would be nothing but questions with no answers for now, since the cops wouldn’t have a clue. The priest had made him do things differently, and that was too bad. But it was all close enough.

But the look on the priest’s face, he didn’t like to think about that, at least not now.

He whistled as he walked beneath the streetlight on Fillmore, then another block to where he’d parked his car, squeezed it between two small spaces, really. This was a residential area and there was little parking space. But that, too, was just the way it was supposed to be. It was San Francisco, after all.