The truck stopped at a toll booth, and together they lept from the cab roof to a crawlspace under the bridge cluttered with bedrolls and old drunks mousing around in the trash for dinner. A helicopter swept the highway with a finger of light, and Detective Ackles wound his arm around Father Collin's waist to keep him close. "Not yet," he whispered, "Wait til they're facing the other way."

"Do you know where we're going?"

"No, you?"

Misha's eyes lit. "I know where we can hide."

The light fell on Sheppard's body, dangling from the guard rail with his toes scraping the tops of passing cars. As soon the helicopter angled away, Misha clasped his hand in Jensen's and began to run, and when the searchlights shone their way again the two had vanished through a break in the hedge, into the fugitive shadows of that off-road geography of Miami known only to cats and panhandlers.

"What street is this?"

Misha looked over his shoulder. "It doesn't have a name."

Slicing their hands on grass to climb up a drainage ditch, a little known sidestreet widened into an unpaved utility road used by the water company, and further down some scattered tires marked a neglected offshoot with planks laid over the mud. Airplanes passed loud and unseen over the trees, and some enterprising soul had buried loops of barbed wire on the path to act as an early intruder alert. They came to a tin shack with three men inside and a thick black cable snaking out the door to steal power from a neighboring billboard, but Misha knew this meth lab never sold to anyone in his parish, so he moved on.

When they finally emerged from the forest, they were on a rough beach cluttered with foreclosed apartments and a four-story department store that the fire department had bricked up years ago. Misha circled around the back to a loading dock, and beckoned Jensen through an unlocked door.

Jensen narrowed his eyes. All the windows were sealed, and the moonlight stopped a few feet in front of him. "I can't see anything in there."

"There's light on the top floor."

"What if there's someone sleeping inside?"

Misha held up his hand, with a curious edge in his voice. "There isn't."

Jensen looked around at the ocean, the palm trees, the hollow-eyed apartments, as if for the last time, as if he were to enter another city entirely. Then the door clanged shut behind him and suddenly the basement was as hot and dark as the inside of a dog.

Misha lifted a door off its' hinges and passed through an office and up a narrow stairwell, their shoes crunching on broken glass. Jensen flicked open his lighter to a ceiling networked with copper pipes, and once Jensen craned his head toward what sounded like a human groan, but Misha hurried him along and he snapped off the flame. A dim circle of light shone at the top of the stairs where a doorknob had fallen out, and pressing his fingers into the doorjamb Misha sprung the lock and went inside.

"What do you think?"

Misha was still holding his hand, but Jensen paid it no mind. "Got any place we can sit down?"

Misha nodded and led him to an old-fashioned couch with curved armrests. Jensen had explored a lot of derelict architecture in his line of work, but the fourth floor of Misha's safehouse was surprisingly feminine. A grid of wooden desks sagged under typewriters, with marble washrooms book-ending the ends of the far wall and occasional gaps in the otherwise square ceiling tiles. The floor was swept and the windows opened and overall it had a Euclidean symmetry that suited Misha.

Misha sat on the couch first, still holding Jensen's hand. "They won't find us here," he insisted, "I come here all the time."

"I wouldn't be so sure," said Jensen, ears pricked to a helicopter in the near distance, "If Sheppard had a getaway boat, so would his colleagues. FBI'll be searching every inch of coastline."

Misha pulled him down gently. Jensen glanced toward the stairwell where another groan echoed, and reached for his holster. "Did you hear that?"

Misha moved closer, and when Jensen finished the question and turned back Misha was so still that his eyes could have been painted on with enamel, attentive but this side of scared.

"Your teeth are chattering."

"I'm cold."

It must have been ninety degrees in there, but Jensen took the hint. He lowered his eyes and his fingers drifted down the length of Misha's arms, filthy with gravedirt and other men's blood, and he seemed to lose all awareness of the room around them. And closing his fingers over Misha's wrists he dug in until he felt something hard, pulling him close until his head tilted back, all in one smooth motion. You're never too old for some things.

"You trust me?"

Misha breathed slowly, his chest rising but the rest of him still. "Yes."

Jensen crossed Misha's wrists behind him against the armrest, and held them in his right hand as he reached for something with his left. "You sure no one'll hear us out here?"

"We're too high off the ground.

"Good," he said, as the handcuffs clinked over Misha's wrists and Jensen stood up from the couch, "Cuz I have a few questions."

Misha tried twisting away, and his mouth shaped itself a few seconds before he could think of anything to say. "What are you doing?"

"You were pretty good out there," said Jensen, fishing his cigarettes out of his jacket, "I stood and watched you waste a guy that I've been too scared to go near for five years and you don't even have the fuckin' shakes."

"He had it coming."

"Uh-huh. That helicopter should be here in a few minutes, and if you talk fast enough I might be the only one getting on it tonight."

Misha shifted a bit. "Talk about what?"

"All this spooky business. Like how you could play so cool with that kid while the Easter Bunny's bleeding out in the backseat. Or your hangman trick. Or the pipes, how come I got a city full of crackheads tearing the copper out of old houses but they leave this place alone?" he said, placing his sides on either side of Misha and leaning in, "What are they scared of?"

Misha swallowed hard. The kiss from on top of the truck still burned his mouth, and he looked away bitterly.

Jensen backed off. In the space of a day, the priest had lost his home, his church, and his rocky but noble endeavor to keep the drug dealers in his congregation alive. Jensen wasn't about to take his dignity. "Fine. Take a minute to think, maybe the answer will come to you."

Jensen cupped his hands around a cigarette and closed his eyes on the first drag. The tide was low, and somewhere down the beach he heard kids drive to the edge of the water and cut donuts in the sand, bass thumping from cheap speakers. Stupid fucking kids, he thought.

He recalled that night years ago in the old Chevy, how only the week before Jensen had been tasked with praying for Misha's soul and yet lacked the sense to keep Misha was crashing a parked car. Afraid someone would call the cops, that Jensen would be labeled a bad influence and tossed out of this quiet little preacher kid' life forever, he ran home and dreamed he was back in the Chevy and woke up alone and cried himself to sleep again. He couldn't protect Misha. Better to run and let Misha learn to fend for himself.

He watched a pair of seagulls hang suspended over the moon and then dive for the water. There was a story in this old building, and Jensen could walk to a payphone four blocks away and call in his team and dust for prints and possibly it'd be another nail in Sheppard's coffin, or he could ask his friend what happened here and hope it saved a few more lives in the long run.

He dropped his cigarette, held the smoke for a moment, then let it out in a long thin plume. "Who's that downstairs?"

Misha stalled, and Jensen played with a button on his sleeve, letting the silence stretch. "You need to talk to me."

"His name is Ed Tom Carter."

"One of Sheppard's?"

"Yes."

"A bad one I'd venture?"

"Yes."

"And he wouldn't be the first?"

"Someone needed to send Sheppard a message."

Jensen sat on the couch as far from Misha as possible and ran his hands over his face. He wanted to shake him and ask what it was in this town that had so curdled his soul, but the helicopter was fast approaching and Jensen composed himself. "I'll talk to the judge. Maybe get you time served, run your term as chaplain next door in the Alabama pen. Provided..."

"Provided?"

"Provided you never come back here."

"Not much I can do elsewhere."

Jensen faced him. "You can start again. This is your chance."

"I don't feel a second chance in me."

"Then it's lucky the church burned. If the DEA found a mob clinic with you cutting the checks..."

"I was trying to help."

"And you couldn't pick up a phone to ask for my help?" said Jensen, closing in with one foot on the floor so that his face hung over Misha's, "Sheppard wasn't gonna leave town just cuz you bounced a few flunkies. These sons of bitches can kill each other all day and it doesn't matter which gang makes it on top so long as someone's still around to push the merchandise."

"Maybe. But his boss wouldn't care for all the front page headlines. He wouldn't care for it so much that he'd fly up and demand Sheppard move his operation elsewhere. We'd be free."

"You can't take that kind of thing on yourself."

"I can. I did."

A gray tear floated in each of Jensen's eyes at the enormity of what Misha was suggesting. "You can't."

"Why not?"

"Cuz every time I run into you your trouble gets worse and the next time it may not be the kind I can fix."

"I'm not afraid to die."

The helicopters stopped over the building, the whirlwind flattening their hair. Jensen pulled his feet off the floor and gathered Misha into his arms protectively as trunks of light appeared and disappeared through the ruined ceiling and yet could not touch them, and in this strange gallery of noumena Jensen knew he could never again break from his friend's orbit. The law passed over them and the palm trees arighted themselves and the room fell into darkness once more and they pressed together in a fevered kiss that had waited ten years and would see one of them dead by tomorrow.

TBC