Salvation Boulevard Read online

  So he signed.

  6

  We didn’t say a word until we were all the way out, out of the interview room, out of the main prison building with its great central tower and the five cell blocks radiating out from it, then out past the great wall that ringed the whole compound, cameras posted everywhere on slow swivels, watching, watching, watching, and like all the other walls, topped with spirals of razor wire.

  The big gates swung shut behind us. We were wrapped in Manny’s Mercedes Benz S600, the one with twelve cylinders and Nappa leather upholstery, the one that costs $140,000, and moving away from the place before we spoke.

  “He sounds convincing,” I said.

  “Yes, he does,” Manny said emphatically. Manny believed.

  “I had a job like this once,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “A woman, said she was abducted by aliens.”

  “Come on.”

  “She sounded totally convincing,” I said. “Completely sincere. As convincing as Ahmad does.”

  “What’d she want from you?”

  “She wanted me to find evidence, show it to her husband.”

  “So he’d believe her?”

  “She’d disappeared for four days. He thought she’d run off with some guy. She said no, she’d been abducted in a space ship.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I got her details, where she was when it happened, where they returned her to. Then checked her credit cards. Found where she stopped for gas, bought some food. Went, asked questions, asked if anyone had seen the flying saucer, showed her picture, asked if anyone had seen her. They hadn’t seen the saucer, but they’d seen her. And the guy she met. Found the motel, nice place, out in the desert, private cabins, pool. Even found a chamber maid who overheard them going at it.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I wrote it up, sat her down, and told her what I’d found.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She screamed at me. Called me a liar. She accused me of being part of the conspiracy, the cover-up.”

  “The point is, she was lying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t convince me that she’d had sex with aliens instead of an aluminum-siding salesman. But she convinced me that she believed it.”

  We got on the interstate. Manny took it up to eighty-five and put the car on cruise control. It felt quieter and more rock solid than a normal car doing fifty-five. Money can do great things.

  “I believe him,” Manny said.

  “Alright.”

  “We have to prepare to go to trial.”

  “You don’t think they’ll take a plea?”

  “I won’t take a plea,” he said, emphatic and final.

  “They got a confession,” I said. “Who knows what else.”

  “The confession was coerced.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “They’ll kill him inside. Aside from the usual, someone’ll kill him.”

  The main gangs in our facilities, like in the rest of the West and Southwest, are Nuestra Familia, the Black Guerillas, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Nazi Low Riders. No memberships available to Iranian Americans. He’d be sold into slavery, turned into a girl. Then one day, someone would kill him to show how patriotic they were.

  “As part of the plea, you might ask for super-max,” I said. “Or even protective custody.”

  Our new super-max is one person per cell, Plexiglas fronts on the cells, cameras looking in, and the prisoners are in their cells twenty-three hours a day. For their own protection, or for any other reason, they can be in twenty-four hours a day.

  “Someone’ll get him,” Manny said.

  It was true. There would always be a moment. A trip to the infirmary. In the library. On the way to a family visit. Or to see his lawyer.

  “You need gas?” I asked.

  “If I need gas, the thing tells me. It says, ‘Manny,’ and then it says, ‘I need some petrol, please.’”

  “Does it really do that?”

  “With a German accent,” Manny said. “Somewhere between the guy who does the commercials and Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  “So let’s get a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “You really want a coffee?” he asked.

  “There’s a Barnes & Noble off the next exit. They have lattés and all that stuff. How about that?”

  “Lattés? You’re gonna drink a latté? Rush Limbaugh will disown you.”

  “You know what’s hard to do?”

  “What?”

  “It’s hard to know if you’re being followed on a freeway. Straight line, everybody zooming along, you got your cruise control on, steady at eighty-five. The guy behind us, he’s steady at eighty-five. So are thirty, forty other cars.”

  “One of them’s following us?”

  “It’s worth the price of a cup of coffee,” I said, “even an overpriced latté, to find out.”

  “Next exit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Mile, mile and a half.”

  Manny smiled and put his foot down. I didn’t hear a thing, didn’t feel a tremor or a shake as the speedometer rolled up to 140 miles per hour. “Terrorists send messages,” he said thoughtfully, gesturing with his right hand, as if doing 140 didn’t require special attention. “9/11 was a message. Suicide bombings, they’re messages. If this was a terrorist killing, where’s the message?”

  “Maybe the manuscript,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “The manuscript that they found with him, maybe it wasn’t just there by accident, maybe someone made sure it was there, a way of saying that this is what happens to people who say, ‘God is dead.’ Killed him for being an atheist.”

  “Apostate,” Manny said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Atheist is when you don’t believe there is a God. An apostate is someone who joins a religion and then quits it, renounces it.”

  A Ford Explorer had broken out of the pack and was trying to keep up. I hoped their teeth were rattling and the guy with his hands on the wheel had sweaty palms. We were almost at the exit ramp.

  “In Islam, once you join, if you quit, that calls for the death penalty.” Manny turned the wheel and whipped from the fast lane across to middle and slow lanes to the off ramp while he spoke. When we hit the ramp, he took the car down to eighty, maybe seventy-five. The light at the bottom of the ramp had gone yellow. By the time we reached it, it had turned red. Manny accelerated, shot through, and made a left-hand turn. You could tell, he was one of those people who thought that life had granted them immunity.

  “You really want the coffee?” he asked me.

  “Sure.”

  He pulled into the parking lot in front of the big bookstore. “My treat,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Well, it bills to the client.”

  “Of course,” I said, getting out. I pushed the door closed behind me. The thunk was rich and satisfying. You don’t pop for $140K if it doesn’t have that thunk. When he stepped out, I asked over the roof of the car, “And that is? I mean, who’s paying?”

  “Hezbollah,” he said.

  “Don’t even joke like that.”

  “You think they’re listening as well as following?”

  “At some point, yeah.” I said.

  “Ostensibly the family,” he said. The car locked itself as we walked away from it. “It’s hard for them to get money out of their country. So I think they’re getting help from an Iranian-American friendship association. Lot of very rich Iranians here. They don’t want to start being targeted. So, who was that following us?”

  “Manny, making terrorist jokes these days is like making bomb jokes at the airport.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “If we’re going to fuck with these people,” I said, “don’t make jokes. You’ll hear them being played back to you.” I saw the Explorer drivi
ng slowly, out on the road, like the people inside were looking for something. “There they are.”

  Manny looked at the blue Ford. It had a government-issue look to it. What Ahmad had told us was just not possible. It wasn’t possible. So why were we being followed?

  “The guy gets shot, in his office, on campus,” Manny said. “Somebody finds the body. They call campus security? Or 911? Even if they call 911, who gets the call? The police or the campus cops?”

  The Explorer went past.

  “So, the campus cops are the first on the scene,” Manny went on. “They write up a report. Then the cops come, and they write up a report, another one. I want you to get those reports for me.”

  “Discovery,” I said. “File your regular discovery motions.”

  “They’ll say ‘terrorist,’ ‘national security,’ and they may get a rollover judge who’s been shitting his pants since 9/11, or who hates defense attorneys anyway, or who worships the ‘order’ part of ‘law and order’ and is annoyed by the ‘law’ part, and believe me, I know several like that, and the police reports stay buried.

  “Even if we get a good judge, they’re gonna try. Our DA is not Jack McCoy. When he went to law school, he figured ethics was an elective and took the course in getting TV face time instead.”

  7

  Hello, God. Hello, Jesus. It’s good to be with you again.

  I know you’re with me all the time. I know that, but, you know what I mean, to take some special time.

  This cathedral, Cathedral of the Third Millennium, is an aweinspiring place. It has a cantilevered roof, with no visible support, and it’s so high that it feels like the canopy of the sky, the canopy of heaven itself. And way up above, there are 1,250 small, quartz halogen fixtures whose bulbs refract the light and seem to twinkle with shards of color. Not full colors, like Christmas lights, but tints that hide in the white, sometimes there and sometimes not, the kind of colors that the stars themselves display so that you stare at them and ask, Is that one blue? Is that one red?

  It’s good to take some special time to be with you in a special place.

  I was raised lackadaisical Methodist. Mother made us go to church. My father, my half-brother, and I all wore jackets and ties and pants with creases and polished shoes and tried to stay awake. If we couldn’t manage that, we tried not to snore.

  That’s about all there was to it for me.

  In my late teens my life spun gradually out of control, and as an adult it spun wider and wider, and I lost my first wife and the family I had with her, and I couldn’t find any brakes to put on myself, so it went wider and wilder, and then I lost my second wife and I was on my way to losing my life, I was lying on the bottom, sitting in the gutter, the taste of failures coming up into my mouth like the taste of bile when the vomit rises, a flavor I’d tasted far too often, and someone said to me, a fellow police officer, that was when I was on the job, though on suspension and scheduled for a hearing that would likely have me fired, and Alan Stephens said come to church with me and he brought me to the Cathedral of the Third Millennium and for some reason I did and found myself in tears, real tears and then I went down that aisle and Pastor Paul Plowright put his hands on me, he put one hand on my shoulder and one on my forehead, and I felt the jolt go through me, and I gave myself to Jesus.

  The spinning stopped. There was a center. There was order, and I was able to walk away from the alcohol and the whoring and the car crashes and a variety of other excesses that fill the verses of the songs they sing at twelve-step meetings throughout the land. The word went to the hearing board that I’d been saved, and they gave me a pass.

  That was six years ago. Four years ago, I met my wife, Gwen, my third, current, and final wife, here at CTM.

  She can be daring and has a great sense of adventure, but my first two wives would find her worldviews, especially her views on marriage and a woman’s place, to be like putting on a burka and a chador. But there is so much peace in our home. So much order between us. So much comfort in our lives. We made a home that was a suitable place to raise a child, and I was able to get sole custody of Angie, the child of my second marriage, when her mother went to prison, because it was genuinely the best thing for our daughter. It would not have been so without Jesus Christ, without the church that brought me to Him, and without the wife that He sent unto me.

  Going to church is like going home, going to a picnic with your old friends, getting hugged and loved, and being reminded that there are people, lots of people, who have the same kinds of troubles that you do and who have found the same solution, Jesus Christ. That puts us all on the same team.

  And when church is full, that’s over sixty-four hundred of us.

  That and being uplifted in song and giving your soul a chance to rev its engine all the way up, screaming and crying if you want. Make no mistake, it’s a high, a high that doesn’t leave you crashing, dirt in your mouth, shame smeared all over the memories you wish the morning light could wash away. A high that lingers and keeps you balanced and sane through the strains of the week to come.

  A lot of military and law-enforcement people are members of the church. You can tell who they are just by looking at them.

  The people in the service, mostly from the air force base seven miles down the road, are fit, upright, and have short hair. The state police are similar, but their hair is shorter, and they’re angrier. The cops from the city and the various towns look like they were once in the service, but now they only work out once or twice a week, if that, and they eat donuts. The correction officers look like they were headed for a life on the other side of the bars but then somehow took a right turn and now are trying to look like they’re cops.

  Leander Peale was there with his wife and several other Christian COs. We made eye contact and traded smiles of fellowship. I saw Jeremiah Hobson, who was once my lieutenant when I was on the job, living for the city. Now he runs security for CTM, which is more than just the church but a whole empire of enterprises. He was wearing an expensive suit, tailored to hide his extra weight. Alan Stephens and I hugged each other on the way in. Since he brought me here the first time, I owe him my life.

  A lot of my job is about contacts like them. It’s part of what make me good at what I do and why I make a decent living from it.

  “There are one point two billion Muslims,” Paul Plowright, our pastor, said, standing up in front of the thousands, microphones and cameras recording him too, and he was as comfortable as your neighbor sipping an ice tea at a backyard barbecue.

  He spoke as a man of reason; he spoke of facts. “And the vast majority of them, I am sure, I am sure, are good people. Yes, they are.

  “It’s only a tiny minority who believe in jihad, violent jihad.

  “It’s just that pesky minority.

  “I don’t know how small that minority is. Some people say it’s just ten percent. Some say five percent. Some say it is as little as one percent. Just one percent.”

  “Just one percent,” Pastor Plowright mused. “There are those who want to make you think you should not be concerned. Just one percent. There are those who would like you to think you have no cause for worry. Just one percent.

  “Astonishing, isn’t it, when the math is so easy to do. Why don’t they do the math? Why don’t they? What is one percent of one billion two hundred million? What is it?

  “Why, it’s one million two hundred thousand.

  “Oh, that’s a relief! Just one million two hundred thousand jihadists.”

  That got a huge response, led by the military guys and their families. Someone was acknowledging the size and power of the enemy they faced, understanding their job, what they were up against. They laughed and said, “Oh yeah! Oh yeah!” They clapped and whistled and chanted, “Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!”

  “That’s all. A mere trifle,” Plowright said, getting laughter and more applause.

  “Willing to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings full of civilians,” he went on. Not funny
now. Starting to preach it. “One million two hundred thousand willing to strap dynamite around their waists and get on a bus, a city bus, in the holy city of Jerusalem, in the land of the Bible, a city bus, filled with women going to the market, with children going to their lessons, a city bus, right in the middle of the day and ignite that dynamite, there in the holy city of Jerusalem.

  “There are those who will tell you, it’s just one percent, so why worry.

  “There are those who will tell you that they are mostly over there, that we have our Homeland Security and we have our high alerts and we have the greatest military in the world... Hallelujah . . . .”

  And the choir—the Angels they’re called; Gwen used to sing with them—more dimly lit than the pastor so that you could forget they were there, now said, “Hallelujah,” behind him in their heavenly voices, and their voices, though soft, were carried on the speakers throughout the Cathedral of the Third Millennium, and their voices came from all around and filled the room. If you were up among the clouds, weightless, those voices would waft you even higher.

  But Plowright didn’t need his Angels for emphasis. The congregation hoo-ahed, they clapped, they hollered, “Hallelujah.”

  “And we’re taking the fight to the enemy. Hallelujah.”

  “Hallelujah,” the Angels sang while the congregation roared, six thousand voices or more, in praise of the crusade to defend us all.

  “But . . . , ” Plowright said, calling a halt to the noise, “but they are not just over there. Oh no. Oh no.

  “We find that once again, that they are here. That they are among us. There’s the one billion two hundred million—then there’s that one percent—one million, two hundred thousand, and out of that more than a million—there is one, there is one, right here!