Salvation Boulevard (31 page)

I wanted to explain the problem of evil to her. It wouldn't work. It would just circle around to “We can't understand His ways. If you would only talk to Pastor Paul, he could explain it. He could explain everything.”

“What?” she said into the silence, caring, I thought, worried about me.

“Do you remember Rafe? Rafe Halderson?”

“You talked about him.”

“The night he . . . shot himself, he called me. And he wanted me to help him. I said he should give himself to Jesus.”

“Yes, that was the right thing.”

“No. Don't you see? He didn't call on Jesus. He called on me. And all I did was pass it on.”

“But there's no true answer except Jesus.”

“What happens if you call on Jesus, and he doesn't answer?”

“He always answers. You know that, Carl.”

I'd been calling on Jesus regularly, constantly, daily, and all I'd got was Manny Goldfarb. I'd enjoyed his visits, but if I had to bet on it, I'd put my money on hallucinations. “This kid,” I said, “Ahmad, if he gets the needle, and he's innocent, and he's a Muslim, or an atheist, or whatever, does he go to hell?”

“He can come to Jesus if he wants to.”

“Gwen, I love you. I love you a lot, and I think you love me. I believe you love me.”

“I do.”

“What would happen . . . did you ever doubt, Gwen? Did you ever stop believing?”

“How could I? That's . . . how can you doubt reality?”

“What if I stopped believing? What would happen to us?”

“I would pray for you. I would pray as hard as I could, and I know you would come back.”

We had become two strangers living on different planets, using words that were in the same dictionary, but when we picked them up and put them together in sentences, they spoke in foreign tongues. I was angry. Deeply, terribly angry, that she would choose . . . that I couldn't explain without losing her . . . I held my anger . . . I needed her to get into the citadel . . . and I needed her to be there if I ever found my way back. I disliked myself for my weakness and essential dishonesty.

I said, “I love you. I'll see you Sunday.”

Then I went out for a beer.

The first sip was almost like the first time. I was eleven. Everyone talked about beer, and the TV told me how it was satisfying and refreshing. So I approached my first can with great expectations. I figured it would be like Dr. Pepper, which I considered the height of beverage perfection at that age, but doubled, or maybe squared.

After all that buildup, I was shocked and outraged that it tasted like what I imagined cold piss must taste like. But I got used to it then, and in spite of my long layoff from alcohol, I got used to it again. By the middle of the bottle, I knew I was with an old friend. Kickin' back, chillin', takin' the edge off.

It was an easygoing, friendly place named Donohue & Bazini. Two big rooms. One was just a restaurant doing a family trade. The room I was in had a big square bar in the center, a pool table on one side, and tables around two of the other sides. I'd found myself a spot alone toward the back, just watching how people lived, before I tried to fit myself in.

Teresa had called four times that day. One of those times, the third, I think, she'd left a message. She said she was entitled to know what was going on. Not the personal things but the business things. That if she had hired a lawyer, or real estate agent, or anybody else, she'd want to know what they were doing. That was my
Teresa, always ready with a reasonable reason. We could talk on the phone, she went on, but she'd prefer to speak in person.

During my second beer, I called her back. She didn't answer. I waited for the beep and said, “Sure. Let's do it. Let's hook up. Call me.”

I signaled the waitress. When she arrived, she gave me a professional smile. She was barely out of her teens and cute. The evening was young. Indeed, it was happy hour. I decided to imagine it was personal and smiled back, asked her name and where she was from, made some other chit-chat, then ordered a burger and some fries to slow my metabolic rate.

While I was working, slowly and carefully, on my third beer, Manny showed up. Sitting in the chair to my right.

“Want one?” I asked automatically, starting to raise my hand to call the waitress back.

He shook his head. When you're dead, you can't drink beer. I should've realized that right off.

“I don't know how you do it,” I said, then corrected myself. “Did it.”

“What's that?”

“What it is . . . when you're a cop . . . see, you work for an organization. When you live a Christian life you have a Book . . . . ” The table next to me was empty, but one of the people a couple of tables away was starting to look at me funny. Whether Manny was my guardian angel or my hallucination, I figured nobody else could see him, and I wasn't anywhere near drunk enough not to care if people thought I was talking to myself. I fished around in my pocket, surreptitiously, and took out my Bluetooth and stuck it in my ear. A great invention for people having self-on-self conversations in public. Properly equipped, I got back to it. “You have a book and a church and a pastor to guide you. When I was working for you, all I had to do was go out and get the information, then
you
were responsible if they went down.”

“You do the best you can,” Manny said.

“What kind of answer is that? Is that what you said to yourself? Fuck it. Did the best I could. Poor fuck is doing life without parole, but I did the best I could, so it's all right?”

“I gotta admit, no, it still . . . ”

“Come on, Manny, with where you are, you gotta be able to come up with a better answer than that.”

“It is better,” he said carefully, “than if you didn't do the best you could.”

“See, with Nazami, I can't lay it off anymore, not on you, not on get-it-all-wrong Mulvaney, not even on poor old Jesus. It's down to me, Manny. I'm not used to that. I don't like it. Most of all, I don't know if I'm up to it.”

People were staring at me. Bluetooth or not.

“Can we take this outside?” I asked.

“Since you're embarrassed to be seen with me,” he said, “you get the check. I'll meet you out front.”

“You'll be there? You sure?”

He was gone. I threw enough money down on the table to cover the tab, got up, and headed out the door. My feet worked just fine. Didn't bump into a single table. Or a person. Or anything. I could have a few beers. No problemo.

 

The prick wasn't there. I looked to the left, to the right. Nowhere. I thought about going back in, but they would all think I was weird, so I headed for my rental car, got in, and started it up. When I turned to look around before pulling out, Manny was in the passenger seat.

“People talk to themselves in their cars all the time,” he said. “I thought this would be more comfortable for you.”

“Is that what I'm doing, talking to myself?”

“What did you want to talk about?”

“You really want to know? You really want to know?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Are you in hell, Manny?” He didn't answer. “'Cause if you're in hell, I sent you there. I fucked up, big time, with Timley and . . . and

Rafe. I didn't help him. Is he in hell? Could you check that for me? He was a hell of a sinner, Rafe, but he was a good guy. Ahmad, if I fuck that up, him too? I got a problem with that, sending all you people to hell.”

“You didn't send me to hell,” Manny said.

“'Cause there isn't one, is there?”

He didn't answer, just sat there, looking at me, waiting for me to work things through.

“If there were and you got sent, if Ahmad gets the needle and gets sent, and I die, and I go to heaven, just 'cause I stumbled into a church one day and said, yeah, this is it, that wouldn't be fair. That wouldn't be justice. That would just be flat out fucking wrong.”

“Are you sure of that?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I'm sure. I'm flat out positive. Which means, even if it means . . . I'm putting my judgment over God's. This is a mindfuck for me, Manny. I'm having trouble with it.”

“I see that,” he said.

“What are you playing at, being a psychiatrist? Kicking it back to me? Give me some answers, Manny. Give me some answers.”

“No,” he said. “But I'll ask you a question. Have you done the best you can?”

“You're right,” I said. Eduardo Alvarez and Daniel Polasky were out there. I had their home addresses. Why hadn't I gone after them? Fear? Confusion? Weakness? What was I waiting for? They were less than an hour away. “Yeah,” I said, “time to kick ass and take names.”

I rolled out of the parking lot and headed for the state line. Manny was gone, so I stopped by a convenience store and picked up a six pack to keep me company on the road.

Daniel “Beef” Polasky lived in a spiffy new little California-style development just outside of Davis—two-story townhouses, duplex apartments, a nice-size pool, and a couple of tennis courts.

I called, knocked on his door, looked for his Ford Explorer. He wasn't home.

On the way in, I'd seen the sales and rental office, so I parked in front and ambled in. The twenty-something saleswoman inside was happy to tell me about Rancho Verde Estates and show me around. I told her I was looking to rent, but I didn't know for how long. Her eyes went down to my left hand. She saw the ring and asked if it was just for me. I said I was in the process of moving out and, yes, it was just for me. “Oh, you'll just love it here then,” she said, getting extra flirty. “There's a very lively social scene.” She wanted to show me the pool. There were five women and three men hanging out, catching rays before the sun went down. One of the women, wearing a string bikini, looked me over, then looked away and began to oil her legs.

The saleswoman gave me a satisfied, “see what I mean” look. Welcome to the land of friendly smiles and hungry eyes. A vision of life after Gwen.

I said, “My friend Danny Polasky told me how much he likes it here. I was going to say hello, but he doesn't seem to be around. You know where I might find him?”

Her smile lost about a hundred watts. She said he was probably at the gym. I asked where that was, and she said it was about five miles down the road.

 

The place was called For Bodies. It was one story high and had a big glass front. The sun was going down by the time I got there, so the lights inside made it look like a giant display window in a department store that was having a big post-holiday sale on muscles.

I spotted the Explorer. I parked three spaces down, got out, and looked it over. It had been repaired. There was a black panel van with smoked windows sitting next to it, with a guy in the driver's seat, waiting for someone. He looked over to see what I was doing.

I strolled over to the front of the health club. I was feeling good. On just two more beers. When I'd come to Jesus, blinkers had gone over my lusting eyes and chains of restraint had wound around the reckless impulses that beat out of my heart. Now that He'd gone—bye-bye, so long—they were falling away. The loose and easy flow was feeling good.

There was Danny boy, “Beef,” on view through the window, doing barbell squats with big plates of iron. He was wearing a loose tank top and tight Lycra shorts to mid-thigh.

He was huge. I hadn't realized how large he was when he was playing Homeland Security in a cheesy suit. Six foot three or four, and a real steroid shooter. Fuck it. There never was a muscle big enough in this world to stop a bullet.

I knocked on the window. He was about fifteen feet away and concentrating on all that iron on his back, working for the testosterone rush. I knocked again. This time he looked. It was probably hard to see out, with the bright lights on inside and dark on the street, so I waved at him. Now that I had his attention, I pointed at him with my forefinger, thumb up, the way a kid does when he's playing gun, and mouthed the sound, “Bam.”

Then I stepped away, disappearing from his sight.

I took the HK out of my shoulder holster, made sure the safety was off and there was a round in the chamber, and waited for him to come out. Once we got past the introductions, which would be a little rough, we could discuss impersonating a federal law-enforcement officer. That might loosen things up.

When he didn't come out, I figured I'd push a little harder. I went in. The fellow at the desk, all buffed, but still only half Danny's size, asked for my membership card. I said I was just looking for a friend of mine. That seemed all right with him. But I didn't see the big man anywhere. So I headed back outside.

He'd disappeared. Oh my, what a fun game.

As I made for his SUV, I reached for my HK.

His fist came down on the back of my head like a baseball bat, and I went sprawling to the pavement, my hands barely breaking my fall before my face hit the blacktop. He was on me, over two hundred pounds of him, instantly, both his knees on my back. He grabbed me by the hair, yanked my head back, then wrapped his forearm, thick as a normal human's leg, around my throat and began to choke me. I clawed at him. I twisted and turned, trying to get him off me.

It was no use. I couldn't breathe. The blackness came. I was going to die, but the joke was on him since I now knew that there was no hell.

I saw a light. A brief, dim flash in the darkness.

Then the pressure seemed to be gone from my throat. I figured it was just me, that I was drifting off into the dead zone, out past pain and sensation and struggle.