I answered the doorbell. A punk stood on my front porch, silver fish-hooks glinting in his nose and earlobes. He wore colored contact lenses, one eye yellow as piss, the other black. Dirt caked his undershirt and torn corduroys.
"Selling girl scout cookies?" I asked, trying to smile, hoping he didn't want to kill me for my pension check.
He shifted from foot to foot nervously, and I wondered what drugs he'd taken that day. Something that made him jittery. "Are you Adonis Sinclair?" he asked.
I looked at him, thinking: It can't be. "Harry. Harry Sinclair. I go by my middle name. Mom had high hopes for my looks."
He didn't smile. "You have to come with us, Mr. Sinclair."
I looked past him to the street and saw a beat-to-shit gray sedan idling on the curb, spattered with mud up to the windows. "Why's that?"
He answered with a question, his voice hoarse. "Did you really do it? Find him, all those years ago, and start the Order?"
"The Order?"
"The Order of Watchful Vigilance."
I didn't laugh, though I wanted to. It's impolite to laugh at someone's religion. Dean came up with that name, I thought. "I guess I did. I never called it that, and neither did Dean, when I knew him, but I imagine we're talking about the same thing."
"Dean didn't think we'd find you," the boy said.
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