Making the Hook-Up (16 page)

But nothing in life is ever certain.

“Okay, everybody…one more vote. Those in favor?”

 

The next morning, twelve jurors filed into the courtroom and took their seats. The jury foreman, Number Ten, passed over a note to the bailiff who passed it on to the judge who opened it and read it. Sighing, she took off her glasses and faced the jury.

“Are you absolutely positive, Mr. Foreman, that no consensus can be reached?”

“Yes I am, your Honor. This jury is well and truly hung.”

 

 

 

 

 

L
ightning crackled in long twisted bolts of illumination across the endless stretches of fertile, flat land in the distance. This was Kansas, the fabled territory of Oz, Dorothy and her little dog, Toto.

She kept her bloodshot eyes on the winding asphalt road ahead of her, trying to beat the rain that the dark clouds promised would come. On both sides of the old Dodge, there were golden lakes of grain as far as one could see, with an occasional farm-house or silo dotting the line on the horizon. The car coughed, rattled and spat as she pushed it to the limits of its endurance, attempting to get to some lodging before nightfall.

Nowadays, she spent much of her time spreading the Gospel of the Lord, zigzagging across states, teaching the Holy Word wherever anyone would allow her to use their vacant field or building. Kansas was the fourth state on her current tour across the Midwest. It was a grueling business. Sometimes a good neighbor, one of her newly converted lambs, would take mercy
on her and invite her to take a spare room rather than travel on the road in the dark. Sometimes she was not so lucky and would have to sleep in her car. Since she left Chicago three weeks ago, she'd worked most of the towns around Kansas City, everywhere from Lawrence, Overland City, Topeka, all the way to Emporia. Tonight, with luck, she'd stop in Iola, a small place in the middle of nowhere.

Before God, there was her addiction to men. Always men, of all shapes and sizes. She was brought to New York City more than ten years ago to audition at a modeling agency after a scout had seen her photo in one of the local papers in Detroit, a cheesy shot of her standing next to a new Ford. Her mother watched her like a hawk during that first stay in the big city, never letting her daughter out of her sight. The older woman lectured her endlessly about the perils of being seventeen in a metropolis like New York City without anybody to protect or guide her. Oh, the temptations and sins that awaited her. Everybody that saw her told her how beautiful she was, a combination of Cindy Craw-ford, Iman, and Veronica Webb. Something exotic, something original. She had no idea how obsessed with beauty the entire society was until she listened to her handlers and her mother discuss how much her face and body would bring doing runway and print work in Europe.

Often she wondered what her engineer father would have thought if he'd lived to see her on her way to fame and fortune. On her tenth birthday, he'd been killed instantly when a car driven by a teenager, hopped up on three 40s of chilled malt liquor, lost control of his vehicle. It jumped the curb and ran him down. It was a loss that left a void in her that would never be filled. And yes, she was tall, pretty, clever and healthy, but was she worth the thousands of dollars they paid her hourly to walk up and down in front of gawking people. Her mother
continually cautioned her that looks didn't last.
Take advantage of them while you can. Nothing lasts forever. That's our only guarantee in life.
Her mother always concluded her beauty speech with this little pearl of wisdom.

Beauty carries such a heavy price. Nobody would have imagined that she spent so many weekends alone in a darkened room in front of a television. Nobody would have imagined she'd been dumped more than once by men intimidated by her looks or dreams. Nobody would have imagined how often guys had wooed her with lofty promises of fidelity only to flee at the first note of commitment or real intimacy. No, she'd learned that it was all so fleeting, the magazine covers, the chic nightlife, the fancy vacations, the high life. At nineteen, she was a has-been, burned out, with a serious cocaine habit and memories of an Italian boyfriend, Mario, who overdosed on heroin. The good times were behind her. When things got bad, her mother deserted her, just like she knew she would.

Life in the fast lane was too fast. Before Mario died, there was one night that damaged her trust of men forever. She came home from a photo shoot to a living room where her boyfriend sat with another girl, Laura, a model he'd been working with for a session for
Elle
Magazine. The shock on her face intensified when she saw the yellow girl was totally nude, except for the pale imprints where her bikini had once been. Her man was dressed in his boxer-briefs. They were smoking joints on the bed, twisted around each other and giggling. When she entered the room, they didn't stop what they were doing. Following five deep puffs of the potent ganja, she felt completely buzzed and let them undress her, and soon Laura's head was between her legs, her big, yellow behind up in the air. After a while, they changed places and for her, it was like a dream, fuzzy and disjointed. It seemed as if she was watching herself in a strange porno
movie. From that day forward, it was all downhill, ending with Mario stretched on the bathroom floor, dead and bone white, with his crystal blue eyes rolled up in his head and a spike in his arm.

Ten years later, all of her big dreams of becoming a hotshot actress with a big-time movie career had evaporated, because the drugs had left their mark on her looks. The little cutie-pie girl from Detroit, who had been transformed into a supermodel by a brigade of agents, stylists and photographers, was long gone. In her place was an older, wiser and sober woman determined to redeem herself, to find redemption in this world before going on to the next one. Turning her life around was not easy. It took the near-death experience of an overdose at an after party in the back room at Cosmos, a trendy Soho night-club, to bring her to the Lord. That autumn night, she'd been snorting coke for more that six hours straight when her nose started to bleed, and her heart began racing as if she had just finished the New York Marathon. Disoriented, she tried to get to the ladies' room, thinking she'd splash water on her beautiful face, when everything went black, and the floor came up to smack her in the mouth. A short time later, she was loaded in the back of an ambulance and rushed to St. Vincent's Hospital where doctors twice shocked her back to life after her heart shut down.

While she was fighting for her life, she saw herself stretched out on the gurney, with the doctors and nurses battling to bring her back. Nothing they did seemed to work. Her father, dressed in his usual splendor, gave her an orchid from his suit lapel and whispered to her that it was now her choice.

“Elizabeth, you can live or you can die,” her father said. There was a sly smile on his long, narrow face that she would never forget. “Your choice.” Dead or alive? That night, she chose
life. That night, she found the Lord. And she'd been working for Him every day since.

On the highway headed for the next town, she plowed ahead as the sky grew darker, letting memories of the past play quickly and quietly across the screen of her mind. She reached for a can of soda on the front seat, taking her eyes off the road for only a second. A slender figure suddenly popped up in front of her car just as she glanced up. The car's brakes screamed loudly, and she lurched to a stop scant inches from the man, who leaped back from harm's way.

He stuck his head in the window of her car. “Lady, can you give me a lift to the gas station? My car's up ahead about two miles, out of gas. It looks like it's about to rain, and you're the first car I've seen in about an hour.”

She looked him over carefully. A woman alone had to be cautious about picking up a hitchhiker or supposedly stranded motorist on the road. Still, covered with dust, he appeared not to be the type that would cause any problems. Tall and slim, the man was dressed in a dark suit, shirt and tie, but wore sneakers. That worried her. His head was bald, and his body appeared to be quite solid under the cloak of the suit. It was his face that captivated her, unwrinkled and without any sign of the ravages of time. He wore the face of a child, open, innocent and pleasant to look at. She calculated his age to be somewhere in his early twenties.

“Redding, someplace, not even on the map.” He stuck his hand into his shirt for a cigarette, but left it there when he saw the scowl on her face.

“Are you from there, this Redding?” she asked, keeping him in her line of sight.

“No, I'm just driving back from Kansas City from a job interview,” he said almost cheerily. “A salesman job. I don't know if I got it. The guy said he'd call me in four days.”

“I was just in Kansas City a few days ago,” she said flatly, watching an airplane dust a field far off in the distance, swooping down out of the clouds to release its load of insecticide.

“That's why the bees are disappearing, the insecticides,” he said to her. “Bug sprays. It's killing them. Maybe mites, mobile phones, even the loss of their hives.”

“What?”

“Did you know bees in this country pollinate more than fourteen billion dollars' worth of seeds and crops yearly?” He stood looking in her face, waiting for her response.

“What crops?”

“Mainly vegetables, fruit and nuts.”

“How do you know so much about bees?” She still didn't trust him.

“I raise them on my place,” he replied. “I have a few hives there.”

She motioned for him to get in, which he did after swatting some of the dust from his clothes. “I didn't know bees were so important.”

“Yes, they are,” he said, smiling. “Bees keep the reproduction of plants going and keep them surviving. If the bees vanished off the earth, some say man would only have four years left. With no more bees, there would be no more man.”

“Or woman, for that matter,” she said.

“What do you do?” the man asked, reaching absently for the cigarettes again. “Do you live in Kansas City?”

She laughed and swerved to avoid something on the road, then straightened out the wheel. “I'm an evangelist. I travel around the country, teaching the Word of God.”

“That must be pretty tough on your family, with you on the road all the time,” he said. “What does your husband say about you driving all around preaching?”

“I'm not married,” she answered. “I'm too busy for that kind of thing.”

“That's odd. I thought all women wanted a husband, a family and a home. It seems like the normal thing to do. Surely God wouldn't mind if you took yourself a man. It doesn't seem right for a person to go through this world alone. Without love.”

“Well, my personal life takes second place to the work of God,” she said, thinking about what he had just said. “Sometimes it's not about what you want, but what He wants. He wants me to serve Him, taking his Word to sinners wherever I find them.”

He laughed and said he'd been rude. “My name is Ray. Ray Draper, originally of Abilene and now of Redding. What's yours, lady?”

“Reverend Elizabeth Little,” she replied. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Reverend Liz, answer me this,” Ray began, choosing his words with great care. “Do you miss men? Do you ever miss being loved and adored by a man?”

Sure she missed it. Not that she'd ever tell him what it was like, sleeping in a different bed every night, with your body throbbing and aching from the lack of touch. It had been so long since she'd been with a man. Maybe six years. Maybe she'd forgotten what to do if the opportunity ever arose. And then there was the matter of her Calling, her ministry, that Divine business that left no room for indulging the flesh. If she strayed from the path and took herself a lover, how could she say that she was a true disciple of the Lord? He'd saved her once, and she owed Him. Maybe this young man was a test of her faith, of her resolve, and she couldn't let herself be swayed by temptation.

“I've lived a full life and tasted every fruit,” she said. “But that
was all before I found the Lord. That's all behind me now.”

“It's sad.” He said it like he pitied her. “Your God won't let you be a woman. I know people who worship or preach the Bible, and they live a good, normal life without denying themselves anything. I don't think they're evil people or anything.”

“Everyone has their way of serving the Master,” she said, pulling into the gas station, which seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere. “This is my way of serving Him. I don't question Him.”

“How do you know this is what He wants you to do?” he asked her, watching the man at the gas pump take a fistful of cash from another man in a truck. “You might have it all wrong. It sounds to me like you're punishing yourself for something.”

She wanted to answer the man but he jumped out of the car and walked over to the gas station attendant, who appeared to know him. As she watched him, they started quarreling and the attendant took a swing at her passenger, who quickly knocked the guy down with a punch to the face. Then he went through the man's pockets before taking the money from his hand. She revved up the engine to pull away but Ray ran in front of her car, waving his hands. There was a gun in one of them. He pointed it at her, and she lifted her foot off the gas pedal. He walked around to her side of the car and got in, pushing her into the passenger side.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, fighting down her hysteria. “Why did you hit him like that?”

“He owned me some money. Also, my wife and kids ran off with him. He's lucky I didn't kill him. That's what I came up here to do, kill him. He got off easy, I think.”