22

            Sitting at the round, cherry wood table in the breakfast room, Cutty and Valdez enjoyed a late-night snack of turkey-and-Swiss sandwiches on wheat, celery sticks, and ice cold milk.       

            Cutty sliced his two sandwiches into quarters, and halved the quarters, too.  He’d also chopped the celery into quarter-inch nuggets.  A bunny rabbit could have consumed larger portions, but those were the proper bite sizes for easy digestion.

            “These sandwiches are excellent, Valdez,” he said.

            “Gracias.”  

            Her plate held only half a sandwich.  She nibbled at it daintily and dabbed at her lips with a napkin after each bite, which he found adorable.

            “Do you enjoy cooking?” he asked.

            She glanced at him.  “Si.” 

            “I approve of that.  Where I grew up, the women did all of the domestic duties and light farming, while the men folk did the strenuous farm work, fishing, and hunting.  Those are the  roles God intended for us.”

            She said nothing, but her eyes sparkled. 

            She was so agreeable.  As a woman should be.  She reminded him of Mother, who had always deferred to Father in family matters, always placed his needs and the needs of their nine children above her own.  What a godly woman she had been.  He missed her.

            Valdez chewed a miniscule bite of her sandwich.  He observed the gentle undulations of her slender throat as she swallowed, and wondered how it would feel to lick her there, just once, and taste that smooth, pliant skin. 

            He said, “Do you want to get married someday, Valdez?”

            “Someday.  Si.”

            “Do you want children?”

            She nodded.  “Someday.”

            “How many children would you like?”

            “Cuatro.”

            He smiled patiently.  “Translation, please?”

            She held up four fingers.

            He laughed.  “Four children?  Really?  I want four children, too!” His grin was so wide that he had to put a napkin to his mouth, as if to keep all of his excitement from spilling out of him at once.  “Isn’t it amazing that we got paired together?  It proves the hand of God at work in our lives, wouldn’t you say?”

            She didn’t return his smile.  “We cannot marry.  It is not for us.”

            “Of course, that’s true.  Marriage isn’t allowed for servants in our division.  But, God willing, I don’t intend to serve in this capacity for the rest of my life.  Do you?”

            “Ah . . . no.” 

            She lowered her gaze to the table.  She had stopped eating. 

            He realized that he had embarrassed her.  Once again, his inexperience with the fairer sex had betrayed him.

            “I apologize,” he said.  “We hardly know each other and here I am discussing marriage and children.”

            She kept her gaze on the table, twisting a napkin around her finger.

            “Excuse me.”  He picked up his food and milk.  “I think I’ll go back to the library to ah, check out the books Thorne wrote.”           

            She appeared relieved that he was leaving. 

            Walking away, he chastised himself.  He had to be careful what he said to her, or else when this mission concluded, she might request a re-assignment.  If that happened, it would break his heart—because he was sure he was falling in love with her. 

            In the library, he placed his meal on an end table and resumed his perusal of Thorne’s work.  Although he had originally intended to search the entire residence, as was his habit, the books could tell him everything he needed to know about his mark, since the title character, Ghost, was obviously Thorne himself.  The books were maps of the man’s tormented soul.

            Picking a chapter at random from Ghost Hunter, he found himself in the middle of a grisly, yet richly detailed interrogation: Ghost was using a pneumatic nail gun to drive carpet tacks underneath the fingernails of a murder suspect, to compel the man to admit to his role in a crime.

            Each lurid sentence crackled with fervor.  Thorne believed in what he was writing, which meant he was a profoundly evil man.

            Barely able to take his eyes away from the novel, Cutty slowly chewed a sandwich morsel. 

            After several blood-saturated, obscenity-laced pages, the violent scene ended.  He flipped forward in the book and soon found another.  This one featured Ghost pummeling a police officer who was described as “corrupt.”

            It made Cutty laugh out loud.  Corrupt?  These books were corrupt, and were precisely why censorship of mass media was not only desirable, but necessary.  A society that allowed the distribution of filth like this was destined to sink into moral turpitude.

            He wanted to speak to Thorne and demand to know why he felt the need to channel unadulterated depravity into the pages of a book and offer it for popular consumption.  He wanted to know why he was glorifying violence.  Why he was advocating disobedience to established authority.  Why he had rebelled against God’s plan.

            When Thorne supplied satisfactory answers to those questions, Cutty would kill him.  No one who earned his living producing such degenerate tales was fit to live in God’s Kingdom.   

            A text message arrived on his cell phone.  It was from the dispatcher: the auto service had been completed.  Mission support had kept their promise to complete the repair within an hour.

            He ate a few more bites of the sandwiches, chased the food with the milk, and returned to the kitchen.  He brought Thorne’s book with him, as evidence to present to his superior.

            Valdez had cleared her dishes off the table.  She sat there, quietly reading her pocket Bible.

            She gave him a lukewarm smile.  He had fallen out of her good graces, and somehow, he would have to redeem himself.   

            He took his plate and glass to the sink, washed them, and placed them in the dish rack.  Although he was in the home of a spiritually unclean man, he’d been raised to observe good manners at all times.

            He cleared his throat.  “Mission support got in touch.  We’re ready to go.”

            “Si.  I see them outside just leave.”

            “I didn’t hear them from the library.  Those guys operate with mucho stealth, huh?”

            His use of an authentic Spanish word, one he’d not realized that he knew until it came from his mouth, summoned a genuine smile to her face.

            He opened the patio door. 

            “After you, senorita.”

            She bowed slightly, and walked out of the house.  He didn’t know where that Spanish word had come from either, and he interpreted it as proof that God planned for him and Valdez to be together someday.  Everything was going to be fine.

            At the Suburban, he tossed her the keys, and she deftly plucked them out of the air.

            While she drove away, he powered up the MDT and logged on to Genesis. 

            The background report on Thorne had arrived.