There had to be a better way.
He saw the alley coming up, between a deli and the auditorium, and steered the bitch in that direction, shoving through the crowd. Another werewolf was about to take offense, until he got a look at Leon and his painted cheeks immediately crinkled with a smile.
"Hey, brother," the bogus wolf man said, "us lycanthropes should stick together. Put her there!" He groped for Leon's hand, too shocked to scream as Leon crushed his fingers in a grip of steel and left him kneeling on the sidewalk, retching through his pain.
The alley wasn't quite deserted, but the figure sprawled across their line of march was already unconscious. Leon stepped across the scrawny legs and heard the tick-tack-tick of claws on pavement as the bitch kept pace. In other circumstances, she would almost certainly have paused to taste the wino, but her blood was up. She felt the call to vengeance and would let nothing distract her from that quest.
Leon hadn't devised a plan yet, but the auditorium would have a back door, and if it was locked ...well, he would take one problem at a time.
In fact, the back door to the auditorium was standing open when he got there, with a sixty-something man leaning next to it, in shirt and tie, smoking a cigarette.
"My gracious, brother," said the old man, smiling at Leon's approach, "you look a-"
Leon snapped his neck and flung him into the garbage bin some twenty feet down the alleyway. The man was gone in seconds, and no one had been there to see where he went.
"Now," Leon told the bitch, "we going have some fun tonight!"
THERE IS a GOOD DEAL more to saving souls than many people realized. Most thought it boiled down to a rousing hellfire sermon followed by an altar call, and then the sheep came forward to surrender. That was part of it, all right, but Reverend Rockwell had learned his trade from masters of their craft, the planning and the details that went into it.
Making salvation pay.
There were a million different things to think about, from the selection of a meeting place to lighting, sound effects, emergency precautions, all the rules imposed by zoning boards and fire inspectors.
Once you had picked the place, there was a whole new list of details to arrange, from musical selections to the proper shills, if you were healing for the cameras. It wouldn't do to hire some yokel who would make it look too easy-or, conversely, one so drunk that he was unable to leap up from his wheelchair and begin to dance on cue.
Most critical of all, however, any preacher worth his salt planned for passing the collection plate-or bucket, as the case may be. The Reverend Rockwell preferred a shiny metal pail to the traditional collection plate for two good reasons. First, it held more cash, its very size encouraging his faithful audience to dig deep and give until the bucket didn't seem so empty anymore. And second, since the pail was made of metal and produced a ringing clang when coins were dropped inside, the first couple dozen contributors were encouraged to give folding money, thus sparing themselves the embarrassment of looking-or sounding-like cheapskates. That got the ball rolling each time, and those who saw a wad of greenbacks in the bucket when it came to them were more inclined to give in kind.
Psychology was a marvelous gift from God.
So far this evening, everything had gone like clockwork. Music for the first half hour, from a cheap piano and a choir donated-naturally-by the pastor of the Ninth Street Free Will Apostolic Church. They weren't half-bad, at that: more like three-quarters, with a couple of alleged sopranos in the ranks who couldn't hit high C if they were using antiaircraft guns.
Oh, well, Rockwell told himself, it wasn't quality that counted so much in revival meetings as the quantity. More people meant more money, and more souls to trail the first few shills when Rockwell made his special altar call. Same thing at healing ceremonies, only more of them were apt to be in wheelchairs, pushing walkers, maybe hobbling down the aisle like Quasimodo. Reverend Rockwell would "heal" them all, with just a prayer and a light touch. Next night, same thing, his press gang making sure that no one hired the same street people two nights in a row.
Show business was a gas.
This night, the well-oiled, finely tuned machine was running like a Swiss watch. The choir had done its thing and shuffled off the stage, immediately followed by Rockwell's sidekick, Jerry Pratt. Jerry could milk an audience of cash the way an expert snake handler milked vipers. Only Rockwell himself was better at it, which explained why he took personal charge of the untraditional second collection, made concurrently with his dramatic altar call.
Reverend Rockwell was pleased with the crowd, noting that the auditorium was SRO, with only a handful of the spectators in costume, and all of those except a giant Tweety Bird had doffed their headgear in a gesture of respect. Rockwell made no effort to convince himself that he had won them over yet; in truth, he didn't even care. The whole point of his Mission Mardi Gras was getting on the tube, grabbing some airtime that that hell-bound sinner Elmo Breen could not begin to emulate. A few months down the road, when individuals were lined up at the polls and they began to think about what really mattered-family values, sacred principles, the right to life-they would remember Reverend Rockwell as Christ's own candidate.
This night, in keeping with the holiday, he had a hellfire message for the crowd, straight out of the Book of Revelation, strong enough to make the diehard drunkards in the audience take notice.
"The final days are coming!" he proclaimed, his bull voice amplified by the acoustics and sound system of the auditorium. Without missing a beat, he shifted to scripture, leaving the faithful to decide which words were his and which were God's.
"'Before the throne,'" cried Reverend Rockwell, "'there was a sea of glass like unto crystal, and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.'"
There was a stirring in the audience, a couple of the women gasping, while a tall man pointed toward the stage. Rockwell wasn't used to that particular reaction, but he made the most of it, leaning forward with his full weight on the podium, shouting directly at those brothers and sisters in the front row.
"'And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast was like a calf,'" he bellowed, "'and and the third beast had a face like a man, and-'"
Christ, the whole front row was screaming now, some of them bolting from their seats and making for the nearest aisle. Distracted, Reverend Rockwell wheeled to his left, faced toward the wings and saw a most ungodly apparition rushing toward him, long legs eating up the stage.
He wouldn't have described the face as like a man's exactly, even though the thing was wearing overalls and boots. It struck him more as something from a nightmare, spawned by too much pepperoni on his late-night pizza, but Rockwell knew that he wasn't hallucinating. Not if everybody in the audience could see it, too.
Without a weapon close at hand, nowhere to run, Rockwell did the only thing that he could think of, lifting up his Bible in both hands and holding it in front of him to ward off the monster. No one was more surprised than Reverend Rockwell when one long, shaggy arm reached out and swept the book aside, immediately followed by a shoulder slamming square into his chest.
The words that poured from Reverend Rockwell's lips as he began to plummet off the stage and down into the pit bore no resemblance to a prayer.
Chapter 18
Chiun was slightly amused. He was mostly annoyed. These were the worst kind of spectacles, greed cloaked as religion. For some reason, the followers of the carpenter from Galilee had an abundance of gaudy exhibitions such as this. What was most miraculous was that the worshipers came to them and enthusiastically permitted their pockets to be emptied.