Salvation Boulevard (11 page)

That was not the end.

For the crew I'd left behind, it was just the beginning. When you drop your bucket down the well and it comes up filled with gold, you keep going back to the well. After all, Christmas is coming. Your wife wants to remodel the kitchen. Your son is dreaming about a $2,800 Mongoose jump bike. Did you know that, with 403 horsepower and 417 pounds of torque, an Escalade is “a personal empowerment zone?” Your girlfriend wants to go to Costa Rica. You want to go to Aspen. All that's needed is an arrest—a righteous arrest, no doubt, of a bad guy—a confiscation, a minor polite fiction, and a check is written, and your dreams can come true.

The arrest rate went up. The city made money. The department made money and was able to maintain its federal grants. The A Team was living large. Everyone was happy.

I know all this because my ex-partner, Rafe Halderson, tried to talk me into coming back. So I could share in the bonanza. Rafe was driving a new Vette by then. He was buying turquoise jewelry as an investment. “I can even afford a divorce,” he said.

Instead of being a side effect—call it collateral profit—of legitimate police work, arrests became the means, and money became the end.

They did it too many times, to too many people. One of the fake informants got caught with serious weight by the feds. He asked for a deal, and he offered them a city cop.

Rafe Halderson.

Rafe called me. He was like a kid. He wanted to take it all back. He wanted another chance. He wanted to say how he'd always meant well. They wanted him to rat out all his friends. That didn't worry me very much because I was out before money touched my hands. “I don't know of any other answer,” I told him, “than Jesus Christ. Maybe it's time to give yourself to the Lord, put yourself in His hands. He'll see you through, and nobody else will.”

He asked, “Won't
you
see me through?”

“How?” I asked him. “How can I see you through? I can't be there in the dock with you. If you go to prison, I can't be there in the cell
with you, through the nights, the regret, the fear. But He can. He can be with you everywhere and all the time.”

“I don't know, Carl. I don't know.”

“Give yourself to Him,” I said. “He'll take your hand. He'll walk beside you. Somehow, together, you'll get through all this. Then, there will be a day when this is over, you've paid the price, and you'll be able to say, ‘Thank you, Lord, for getting me through the dark times, through the valley of the shadow.'”

That's what I said to him. What else could I say?

When he hung up the phone, Rafe ate his gun.

It was selfish and awful of me, but I thanked Jesus for coming and rescuing me. Could've been me, could've been me. I quit the police force soon after that.

 

All that was in me. All I had to do was open my teeth, and it would pour forth from between my lips, like serpents and worms out of a corpse, a display to my wife and darling daughter of the corruptions within and without.

We want her to grow up right. And safe. To do so, she needs to respect authority. To believe that her parents and her pastor and her teachers and her leaders are all good people doing the right thing with our interests at heart, so she should obey and be a good girl.

If I tell her these things, will it all fly apart? Then what will she hold onto?

In the silence of my hesitation, Gwen's verdict and the official version were accepted as gospel, and we'd moved on.

“I have a question,” my daughter said. “The lawyer you're working for is a Jew, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“How come Jews are always working with the ACLU to get people like that out of jail. You'd think they'd know better, what with Israel fighting the Arabs and everything.”

 

That night I longed for a drink. But, of course, I didn't have one.

Ahmad Nazami was a job for me, not a cause.

A college professor was dead. An adulterer. A man who likely slept with his students. Of adult age, perhaps, but still. A nonbeliever. I still didn't understand how that could be. Even when I was lost, I still knew there was a God, somewhere. I just didn't know how to let Him into my life to help me.

When I got into bed, I reached for Gwen and began to kiss her.

“I didn't want to say this in front of Angie,” she said.

“What?”

“Somebody called today.”

“Who? What do you mean somebody?”

“I don't know, some man. He said to tell you not to work for terrorists, or you'd get it too.”

“Get what?”

“You know. I mean . . . ”

“What?”

“It was a threat. A death threat.”

“He didn't threaten you, did he?”

“No. No, you.”

“Look, anytime something gets on TV, people get weird. They come out of the woodwork. Gwen, back when I was a cop and actually busting people, I was always getting threats. It was all noise and bluster.”

“They called here.”

“I'm listed. I was on TV. We can change the phone number. Would that make you feel better?”

“I don't know, maybe.”

“Look, we can't go changing our lives because some idiot calls us up and tells us not to do something. If someone called and said, if you keep going to church, the Muslims will get you, would you stop?”

“That's different. That's my faith.”

“Alright. If someone called up and said, Don't wear blue dresses anymore. We're attacking people in blue dresses.”

“We're not talking about dresses.”

“Come here. Let me kiss you. Come on. It's going to be all right. Nobody is going to attack me.”

I kissed her. She kissed me back. She wasn't thrilled. I tried various forms of touching to arouse her. When Gwen gets excited, she can be very, very enthused. But this time, she merely acceded to my touch. She went through the motions as a dutiful wife. I went through the motions thinking that the motions would work, that they would open the doors for sexual healing to work its wonders. They did not.

Having sex with a woman who doesn't truly want to, or only half wants to, or wants to for reasons that are not sexual is strange. But men do it. Or at least, I will do it. The penis has its own needs and sets its own tone, and once it's up and running, it's hard to take it away from where it's gone and say, let's go out to the garage and fix electrical appliances instead. Rather, the penis takes some sort of charge and leads the rest of the body and mind along with it, saying play with her breasts and her buttocks, no matter what she thinks about it—you know I like that. And if she's not responding in your favorite way, it says how 'bout that Teresa. I bet she would. Why don't you imagine how hot and frantic she would be, and what are all those things she'd learned in the intervening years that made her pretty fabulous, that woman with a saint's name who's so eager to play. She'd be whispering hot somethings in your ear. You know she would, urging you on, telling you how big and good you are.

Get the hell out of my mind, Teresa. Get out. I know the games you're playing. Planting seeds that promise to blossom in that garden where the orchids are made of flesh.

I am not going to ruin my marriage, my life, my daughter for you, Teresa.

How about, if you have to drop Teresa, my erectile consciousness said, why not think of some of the women you used to know, when you were a wild young stud, and then it started coming up with their names.

So I ejaculated to get it over with.

I scrolled down through the caller list on the telephone until I saw a number that I didn't recognize. I noted the time. Then I went to the bedroom and asked Gwen what time the threatening call had come. She told me. Yes, that was the one.

I put the phone number in a search engine. It popped up a name, Tod Timley, and an address. I put the address in Map Quest and got directions directly to his house. I took a look at the neighborhood on Google Earth. The geography of our lives at the touch of a button. So convenient. So few places left to hide. I went back into the bedroom and began to get dressed.

Gwen asked, “What are you doing?”

“Making sure he never calls again.”

 

Tod drove a ten-year-old Chevy Malibu. It was maroon. He lived in a small ranch-style house in the Castle Creek development.

The house was big enough for a single man or a couple without kids, but not much more. From the streetlights and a little help from the moon, it looked well kept and recently painted. It was off-white with a blue door. The lawn had been mowed and the edges trimmed. There were no unusual shrubs or desert plants. Tod was a neat person but not very imaginative. According to the most recent information available on the net, he was divorced and lived alone. There were
many things I didn't know: if he had an alarm system, if he had a gun, if he was trained in the martial arts, if he sat up all night in a rocker with a shotgun on his lap waiting for
them
to come.

So I parked out front. I wore a beige jacket, a white shirt, a tie with an emblem on it, and a western hat so I had a law-enforcement look. I carried a big flashlight that added to the effect and would serve as a weapon too. I walked calmly up to his door and knocked with the knocker, a cast iron fist that hung from a hinge at the wrist. Then I saw the buzzer, and I rang that too. Like I had a right, a duty, to bang at the doors of strangers after midnight.

I waited. I saw a light go on, the glow leaking around the edges of his front windows. I buzzed again.

“Hold your horses,” he said.

He came to the door in a bathrobe and peered out the peephole. I figured he'd seen me on TV, so I had the hat pulled down low to obscure my face, held up my wallet flipped open to an official looking ID in my left hand and the flashlight in my right, turned on and pointed at him.

“Who're you? What do you want?”

“Sh'r'ff department,” I said. “Had a r'port of prowlers.”

“Not from me.”

“Could I come in an' talk to you a moment, sir? Security of the neighborhood.”

“It's late.”

“Could be important. Home invasions lately 'round here.”

“Well, I guess.”

He unlatched his chain, undid two locks, then opened the door. I saw him there, pale, skinny, hairy legs sticking out below a plaid robe that had been washed a year longer than it should have been. I didn't see a gun in his hands. I shoved the door hard, knocking him back. Went at him fast, kicking the door shut behind me. I stomped on his instep. He grunted and bent toward it. I hit him on the back of his head with the flashlight. He gasped and fell to his knees, his hands reaching up to his head, to the black pain there that had knocked
him down and taken the fight out of him, if he'd had any in the first place. I tapped the flashlight on the back of his knuckles, not too hard, not so hard that I broke anything, but hard enough to hurt. Then I kicked him in the side to roll him over.

“You called my house. You threatened my wife,” I said.

“I didn't,” he said.

“I checked the phone records,” I said. “You did.”

“I didn't do anything bad,” he said.

I drew my foot back to kick him. He put his hand out to block it. So I picked my foot up and stamped on his wrist instead.

He moaned. It had to have hurt.

“You called my house, didn't you? Didn't you?”

“I called, but I didn't threaten.”

“Admit it.”

“Don't hurt me.”

“You do it again,” I said, giving his knee a tap with the flashlight, “and I'll make it so you can't walk, and I'll bust up your fingers so you can't even dial the phone. Do you understand me.”

“Yes.”

“Fine,” I said.

“I didn't threaten. I was just trying to explain,” he whined. “I know you're a good Christian . . . and if I explained, I knew you wouldn't, wouldn't work for those people . . . I know you,” he said.

“What do you mean, you know me?”

“From church,” he said.

I turned on a lamp. Yes, I did know him. I'd seen him at Cathedral of the Third Millennium. Like I said, it seats 6,450. Thousands of people come. I didn't know him, but I'd seen him.

“It's us against them,” he said, still lying on the floor, half curled up, holding one hand over the other so it wouldn't hurt. “It's us against them, and I know you're with us. I know you are.”

“Listen to me, Tod. You stay away, far, far away, from me or mine.”

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

“MacLeod's wife,” I said to Manny, “They're recently separated. She claims it was all very happy and good-natured. But almost the first words out of her mouth were, ‘Why don't you talk to his girlfriend?' She's forty, forty-something, attractive, but still, women that age get very unhappy about competing with twenty-somethings.”

“You don't like her?” Manny said. “What she do? Come on to you?”

I didn't say anything.

“Carl, you're practically blushing. You didn't . . . ”

“No. I didn't.”

“No, you didn't. If you'd slept with her, you wouldn't feed her to me as a suspect. You're too much the gentleman and too self-aware. But if she came on to you . . . . Did she know you were married? . . . Uh-huh. You're a funny guy, Carl. But you're good. You really think she could have killed her husband?”

“I don't know. I really don't know. But more cause, more opportunity than our guy.”