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Carter Ames is the most dangerous man you will ever meet.”

 
    Atlanta, Georgia…
     
    F or years, Daniel avoided hotels like the one he was staying in now. The luxury had just felt inappropriate for a man who’d taken a vow of poverty.
    The meth-lab fire in Detroit changed his mind.
    Daniel had flown there to investigate a spontaneous cancer remission that turned out to be a misdiagnosis. At the airport, he rented a Toyota Corolla. He checked into a generic chain motel near the freeway. Late that night he sat in his motel room, reading his e-mail, when there came a muffled
whump!
and a flash of light outside his window.
    The room directly across the parking lot was ablaze, black smoke pouring from the open door. A man staggered out of the burning room, carrying the porcelain lid of a toilet water tank, cradling it like a baby. Daniel ran to help. The man saw him coming, wound up, and heaved the lid at his head. Daniel ducked the flying toilet tank lid and it shattered on the blacktop. It was then he saw the wild look in the man’s eyes.
    Fire—crappy motel—meth-lab fire—crazed junkie
all raced through his brain in the moment it took for the man to draw a knifefrom a belt sheath and close the distance, slashing at the shrinking space between them. Daniel broke the man’s nose, dropped him with a kidney punch, and took the knife away from him.
    After giving his statement to the cops, after the firefighters had come and gone, Daniel lay on his lumpy motel bed with the smell of burning chemicals lingering in his nostrils.
    Thinking:
Screw it.
    Thus ended Daniel’s acetic rebellion.
    In the three years since, he’d made peace with the luxury. It wasn’t as if the money he’d saved was being diverted to orphanages, he told himself. And he had to admit that his previous austerity had enabled him to indulge in that pesky sin of pride.
    One of the seven deadlies. And one of the three to which Daniel remained vulnerable, the other two being lust and wrath.

     
    Daniel sat at the desk in his executive suite at the downtown Atlanta Ritz-Carlton. To his side, the room service tray held the remains of dinner—filet mignon and Caesar salad. He was not a glutton and always left some food on his plate. He opened his notebook and reviewed his shorthand version of Giuseppe’s transcripts.
    Reverend Tim Trinity had done a lot of weather reporting during his tongues act and had given a few traffic and sports reports on the side. And sometimes he got lucky. He even predicted a ten-car pileup on the southbound I-95, just outside Savannah, which came to pass. Of course, pileups happen every day, and usually during the morning rush, when commuters haven’t had their morning coffee. So the prediction was a high-percentage bet onTrinity’s part. And, as Nick had mentioned, he got the Superbowl right, but so did most football fans, since the underdog lost.
    “Trivial crap,” Nick had called it. A true assessment, but far from complete. It wasn’t all crystal ball stuff. Trinity also dispensed sage advice to anyone who could understand English spoken backwards at two-thirds speed.
    He proclaimed Mahatma the best brand of rice for making jambalaya.
    He cautioned against carrying a balance on high-interest credit cards.
    And he said that human beings should love each other as brothers and sisters.
    I told you it was gonna get weird
.
    Daniel put the notebook aside and moved his laptop to the center of the desk. He tapped on the spacebar, waking the computer. He’d left the browser open, and as the screen came to life, his uncle still smiled at him from the home page of the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries website.
    The website featured the standard evangelical
prosperity ministry
crap, illustrated with staged photos of clean-cut, healthy couples (white, black, brown, but everybody please stick to your own race and the opposite sex, the photos said) and their clean-cut, healthy, racially unambiguous children.
    Everybody smiling