The Bible Repairman and Other Stories Read Free

Apparently some sort of physical and mental integrity was lost too, along with the blood and the bits of his hypothetical soul.
    But what the kidnappers wanted from Torrez’s blood was not vicarious integrity – it was nearly the opposite. Torrez thought of it as spiritual botox.
    The men and women who stole ghosts for ransom were generally mediums, fortune-tellers, psychics – always clairvoyant. And even more than the escape that could be got from extorted dreams and memories and the ability to feel affection, they needed to be able to selectively blunt the psychic noise of humans living and dead.
    Torrez imagined it as a hundred radios going at once all the time, and half the announcers moronically drunk – crying, giggling, trying to start fights.
    He would never know. He had broken all the antennae in his own soul when he was eighteen, by killing a man who attacked him with a knife in a parking lot one midnight. Torrez had wrestled the knife away from the drunken assailant and had knocked the man unconscious by slamming his head into the bumper of a car – but then Torrez had picked up the man’s knife and, just because he could, had driven it into the unconscious man’s chest. The District Attorney had eventually called it self-defense, a justifiable homicide, and no charges were brought against Torrez, but his soul was broken.
    The answering machine clicked on, but only the dial tone followed the recorded message. Torrez dropped the Budweiser can into the trash basket and walked into the living room, which over the years had become his workshop.
    Murder seemed to be the crime that broke souls most effectively, and Torrez had done his first ghost-ransom job for free that same year, in 1983, just to see if his soul was now a source of the temporary disconnection-from-humanity that the psychics valued so highly. And he had tested out fine.
    He had been doing Bible repair for twenty years, but his reputation in that cottage industry had been made only a couple of years ago, by accident. Three Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to his door one summer day, wearing suits and ties, and he had stepped outside to debate scripture with them. “Let me see your Bible,” he had said, “and I’ll show you right in there why you’re wrong,” and when they handed him the book he had flipped to the first chapter of John’s gospel and started reading. This was after his vision had begun to go bad, though, and he’d had to read it with a magnifying glass, and it had been a sunny day – and he had inadvertently set their Bible on fire. They had left hurriedly, and apparently told everyone in the neighborhood that Torrez could burn a Bible just by touching it.

    He was bracing a tattered old Bible in the frame on the marble-topped table, ready to scorch out St. Paul’s adverse remarks about homosexuality for a customer, when he heard three knocks at his front door, the first one loud and the next two just glancing scuffs, and he realized he had not closed the door and the knocks had pushed it open. He made sure his woodburning stylus was lying in the ashtray, then hurried to the entry hall.
    Framed in the bright doorway was a short stocky man with a moustache, holding a shoebox and shifting from one foot to the other.
    “Mr. Torrez,” the man said. He smiled, and a moment later looked as if he’d never smile again. He waved the shoebox toward Torrez and said, “A man has stolen my daughter.”
    Perhaps the shoebox was the shrine he had kept his daughter’s ghost in, in some jelly jar or perfume bottle. Probably there were ribbons and candy hearts around the empty space where the daughter’s ghost-container had lain. Still, a shoebox was a pretty nondescript shrine; but maybe it was just for travelling, like a cat-carrier box.
    “I just called,” the man said, “and got your woman. I hoped she was wrong, and you were here.”
    “I don’t do that work anymore,” said Torrez patiently, “ransoming ghosts. You want to