Sacred by Dennis Lehane

to look sheepish.
    “Ah! I see.” He leaned forward and wrote “fear” ona piece of lined paper on the desk. In the margin above it, he wrote “Deforest Doohan.”
    “You do?”
    His face was noncommittal, flat. “Any specific fear?”
    “No,” I said. “Just a general sense that the world is a very dangerous place and I feel lost in it sometimes.”
    He nodded. “Of course. That’s a common affliction these days. People often sense that even the smallest things in such a large, modern world are beyond their control. They feel isolated, small, afraid they’ve become lost in the bowels of a technocracy, an industrialized world that has sprawled well beyond its own capacity to keep its worst impulses in check.”
    “Something like that,” I said.
    “As you said, it’s a feeling of fin de siècle common to the end of every century.”
    “Yes.”
    I hadn’t said fin de siècle in Manny’s presence.
    Which meant the accounting offices were bugged.
    I tried to keep that realization from flickering in my eyes, but I must have failed, because Manny’s brow darkened and the heat of sudden recognition rose between us.
    The plan had been to get Angie inside before the alarm system was engaged. She’d trip it on her way out, of course, but by the time anyone official arrived on the scene, she’d be long gone. That had been the theory, but neither of us considered the possibility of an internal bugging system.
    Manny stared at me, his dark eyebrows arched, his lips pursed against the tent he’d made of his hands. He didn’t look much like a sweet, big man anymore, nor like a counselor in grief. He looked like one mean motherfucker who shouldn’t be messed with.
    “Who are you, Mr. Doohan? Really?”
    “I’m an advertising executive with deep fears about modern culture.”
    He removed his hands from his face, looked at them.
    “Yet, your hands aren’t soft,” he said. “And a few of your knuckles look like they’ve been broken over the years. And your face—”
    “My face?” I sensed the room going deeply quiet behind me.
    Manny glanced at something or someone over my shoulder. “Yes, your face. In the right light, I can see scars along your cheeks under your beard. They look like knife scars, Mr. Doohan. Or maybe from a straight razor?”
    “Who are you, Manny?” I said. “You don’t seem much like a grief counselor.”
    “Ah, but this isn’t about me.” He glanced over my shoulder again, and then the phone on his desk rang. He smiled and picked it up. “Yes?” His left eyebrow arched as he listened and his eyes found mine. “That makes sense,” he said into the phone. “He’s probably not working alone. Whoever that is inside the offices”—he smiled at me—“hit them hard. Make sure they feel it.”
    Manny hung up the phone and reached into his desk drawer and I put my foot against the desk and pushed so hard I knocked the chair out from under me and toppled the desk onto Manny’s chest.
    The guy who’d been behind me making eye contact with Manny came at me from my right, and I sensed him before I saw him. I pivoted to my right, my elbow extended, and hit him so hard in the center of his face that my funny bone shrieked and the fingers of my hand numbed.
    Manny pushed back the desk and stood as I stepped around and placed my gun in his ear.
    Manny, for his part, was very poised for a guy with an automatic weapon against his head. He didn’t look scared. He looked like he’d been through this before. He looked annoyed.
    “You’re going to use me as a hostage, I suppose?”-He chuckled. “I’m a pretty big hostage to lug around, pal. Have you thought that through?”
    “Yes, I have.”
    And I hit him in the temple with the butt of the gun.
    Some guys, that’s all it would take. Just like in the movies, they’d drop like a sack of dirt and lie on the floor, breathing heavily. But not Manny, and I hadn’t expected him to.
    When his head jerked back from the hit to the