Cash Burn

by Michael Berrier

  “Now I’m the one amused.”

  “Yes, that’s one of his schemes. To try to keep you from believing in him. All this has been your idea, has it? Trust that ridiculous letter over the word of your wife. Pursue another woman instead of pursuing reconciliation. And whatever else.”

  What did he mean by whatever else? “So in your world, if I don’t believe in God or the devil, I’m at the devil’s mercy?”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. If he exists, he sure makes himself scarce.”

  “He’s as scarce as you want him to be. Or as close. Like I told you before, it’s your choice.”

  Jason’s shoes were losing their shine in the dust. Who had chosen this landscaping? He kicked at the dirt and watched the brown flecks cloud into the air and settle on the black of his shoes and the gray cuffs of the big man’s slacks.

  “Can I tell you something, Jason?”

  “You’re asking permission now?”

  The pastor smiled. “I’ve been studying something recently you might find interesting. I imagine you like statistics, being a banker.”

  Jason didn’t bother answering.

  “Have you ever thought about how many people have been on earth? I’m not talking about the six and a half billion here right now. That we’re pretty sure about. But how many have ever lived?” The pastor shifted on the rock. He put his elbows on his knees and made that steeple with his fingers again. “Now, the thing about questions like this is that they lead to many more questions. Like when did the first humans live? The fossil record isn’t really very good, so we don’t know for sure. And how long did they all live? How fast did they reproduce? All this is guesswork. We have population information that’s even remotely accurate for only the past few centuries, and even that just covers the developed world. But the most conservative estimate I’ve found is around a hundred billion.”

  He unclasped his hands and crossed his arms.

  Jason said, “I have no idea where you’re going with this.”

  “Stay with me for just a minute. I know this seems off subject. But now, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Don’t tell me what it was, just have it in your mind. Do you have it?”

  Jason was back to high school. Back to Danah. Back to Philip. Back to his father and a dark room behind a bar. The images circled in his mind for the second time in an hour. Why couldn’t he put this behind him? He nodded.

  “Now take that memory. That’s your worst?”

  Jason nodded. He wanted to take that memory and ball it up and throw it away forever.

  “Now consider this. To God, every sin is level with every other sin. From that thing in your mind to the worst thing in mine, to the vilest offense ever committed, to what you or I would consider a little nit. A white lie, a cross word. A prideful thought. We classify them and rank them because it helps us rationalize them. But to God, they’re all offenses.”

  “That’s one offended God.”

  Miles was not distracted. “Now say you’re what you’d call a really good person. Say you can go through a whole day and just tell one little white lie. That’s your only sin. Say you can hold yourself to just one sin a day. Say everybody could keep their sin in check like that. So that’s three hundred sixty-five sins a year. Say every person over the course of history lives an average of fifty years. A hundred billion people, times three hundred sixty-five, times fifty years. You’re a banker. You can probably do that math.”

  “Yeah, all right. I get it. A lot of sinning. So?”

  “So that is what Jesus Christ took on himself on the cross, Jason. The sins of the whole world. Throughout history—past, present, and future. And I don’t know about you, but I sin a lot more than three hundred sixty-five times a year. Did you know the UN says world population could reach ten billion in forty years?”

  “Can we move on?”

  The pastor reached a hand forward. Jason took it and leaned backward to help the big man up off the rock. They walked back toward the church. The smell of the yucca and dust pricked at Jason’s nostrils.

  “I thought you might be interested in the statistics.”

  “It makes my sins seem pretty insignificant.” Jason realized he was about to say something he could never take back. He pressed his lips closed, but the words pressed against them.

  “That’s where everyone seems to go with that information, Jason. It’s human nature to use data to your advantage. What’s the expression? ‘Figures don’t lie, but liars figure’?”

  He didn’t want the words to escape, but he couldn’t contain them. “I was just a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was only nineteen.”

  Jason’s neck tensed with the effort of holding back the emotions rocking him. He stopped.

  “We were in love,” he said. “And we wanted to get away together. My whole world was wrapped up in her. I didn’t want anything besides her.”

  He flashed on Danah’s face in profile, glowing under passing street lights as he drove. He saw her face turned to him, saw her speak words he would never remember because his attention was focused on the movement of her lips and the love he had for her. Her hand pressed into his. Love loosed from every joint and cell and vessel in his body, urgent love with more meaning than the universe could contain, more righteousness than any rules imposed on them by the dispassionate world. Their love would propel their lives forever. It had more power than anything stacked against them.

  He and the pastor had crossed Bedford. Again they stood in front of the church. Jason didn’t dare look at the metallic Jesus at the end of the room beyond the open doors.

  “We weren’t gone an hour before we fought. She got out of the car.” He choked on the words. They were like chunks of flesh rattling in his throat. He had to cough them out somehow.

  “It was the worst possible place. The worst time of night. She ran into this bar. And I . . . I let her go.”

  He fought to keep tears back. The heels of his hands went to his eyes. He wanted to push his eyeballs through his head, as if that would erase the images.

  “It took me too long to swallow my pride and go in after her. They kicked me out. I called home, and my dad said he was coming with Phil. I went in and tried again. I got into a fight with the bartender. By the time I got to the room where they had her . . . Oh, God.”

  “Jason—”

  “They were having a party, and she was the main event. I heard them whooping and hollering before I even opened the door. Then my brother showed up. I remember afterward, he was holding a baseball bat broken in two. He was pushing Danah and me to the door. Yelling at us to get out before the cops got there. My dad was pulling me away from her. There was blood all over the room.”

  Jason looked up at Miles. Those black eyebrows were knitted. “I’m sorry, Jason.”

  Jason ran his knuckles over his cheeks and blinked.

  “Not half as sorry as I am.”

  “Jason, I have to urge you. Be reconciled to Christ. He can take this guilt from you.”

  The doors to the church were still open. It was a place he couldn’t go. Never mind the pastor’s statistics.

  “God is bigger than your sin, Jason. He can forgive.

  Even if you can’t forgive yourself, God can forgive you. And teach you to live with it. I know what I’m talking about. But don’t take my word for it. Believe God.”

  Jason toed the grass that hedged the sidewalk. These grounds were so green. Across Bedford, the dirt of the little desert shone brown in the angled sunlight of the late afternoon. He didn’t belong in the perfectly maintained garden of the church. That cactus-infested desert was where he belonged.

  He shook his head. “I can’t believe in this.”

  “You can.”

  “No.”

  “I have to say one more thing.” The pastor extended his hand. Jason took it. “You’re using this thing as an excuse, just like you’re using the letter. Your own sin is not so grea
t that God won’t forgive it. God’s gift in Christ is greater than any sin ever committed and all of them put together. That’s how big God is and how great his sacrifice was. Be reconciled to God, Jason. And stop using that letter as an excuse to leave your wife.”

  Jason wrenched his hand free. “All right. You made your point. You’ve done your duty. You can punch the clock now.”

  “There’s no clock, Jason. Time has never been the issue, O master of diversion.”

  Jason looked at the traffic backed up on Santa Monica.

  It would take some time to cross. “Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But my marriage is my business—”

  “And Serena’s.”

  Jason turned his heels to the pastor and stalked away.

  51

  Brenda slid the passports out of the cardboard envelope and spread them before Jason. Three for him, three for her. Each cover was embossed with the emblem of a different country. They would be Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders. He flipped one open. He would have to memorize his new names.

  “How did you do this?”

  “I told you—I know some people who know some people. That whole six-degrees-of-separation thing.” She still wore her work clothes, and Jason hadn’t removed his jacket yet. They’d been in her apartment for only five minutes, but everything was changing. The whole world was changing.

  His face stared back at him from inside the passport, the picture embossed into the page. He held it under a lamp to try to see how they had inserted it, angled it under the light, but he saw no imperfections in the surface of the page.

  When he held this document out to the customs official, that face would be the face of a fugitive.

  The other two were equally well done. If there were any flaws in the documents, they were beyond his ability to see.

  “They look good. Really good.” They were the last piece of the puzzle. With these, he could establish the overseas accounts. And the two of them could travel without leaving a trail.

  Underneath his starched shirt, a drop of sweat trickled down from his chest and lodged near his belt.

  He ran a finger over his brow and it came away wet.

  “What’s the matter?” Brenda said.

  He slipped his new identities into the inside pocket of his jacket. The credit memo covering the thirty-million-dollar loan to Northfield was nearly finished. A loan the company had never applied for. A loan the management of Northfield knew nothing about.

  Sweat was breaking out from every crease of his body. It was the passports that were doing it to him. Even the credit memo as he’d drafted it had the taint of fantasy to it. It was still a game, and at any point he could fold up the board, box up the pieces, put it on a shelf, and walk away. But now he and Brenda had passports, and good ones at that.

  Too good.

  “How exactly did you get these?”

  She smiled. “A lady never reveals her secrets.” She stepped to him and slid her arms around him, her hands moving up to his shoulders, his neck, the back of his head. In an instant, her lips would be on his and he would be finished.

  He pulled away. “No, really. I want to know how you got these.”

  Her hands moved back to his shoulders. She let her eyes roam over his face, his chest, back to his eyes. “I told you. I know this girl from college whose daddy has connections.”

  “Who’s the girl and who’s her daddy?”

  “What’s the matter, Jason? You wanted me to get the passports, and I got them. They’re good. Real. I don’t know how they got them, but they did. They swapped out the pictures or something. She said they should be good for at least a few weeks. That’ll get us wherever we want to go.”

  “And what makes you think you can trust her?”

  “She was my best friend in college. I know I can trust her. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.” She stared at him a moment, her head turning, eyes at an angle toward him, and that smile crept back onto her face. “Come on over to the sofa.”

  She pulled at him, and he obeyed. They sank into the cushions together, and her hands began to move over him again. “I love it that you’re so taken up in the details, Jason. It’s what’s going to make this work. You’ll get that loan approved tomorrow, you’ll get the accounts opened and funded. It’s happening, Jason. We’re going away together. You and me, forever.”

  Her hands coasted over his arms and chest. Her face was close enough for him to feel its warmth. She pressed against him, her breath a caress on his neck. He wanted to tell her to stop, but with every sensation he weakened.

  Instead, he said, “So how many people know about this? There’s your friend, her father, the passport guy. Who else?”

  She didn’t stop the movement of her hands. “Nobody knows, Jason.” She brought her lips to his neck, his ear, his cheek, her hands pulling him to her. “All they know is they did a favor for my friend. They saw those photos—that’s all. Nobody knows our names. Don’t worry. We’re going away together.”

  She pulled him toward her, but he resisted. It was maddening. It had gotten out of his control. Others were in on it now. It had gone beyond a game with a pretty girl. Beyond revenge for Serena’s affair, beyond getting even with Vince and Mark and the whole bank system that had brought him to this place of desperation and fury. And yet, Brenda. . . .

  She would not relent. Her hands, her lips. Every inch of his flesh cried out to her with an urgent reach. The longer he endured her touch, the weaker he became. Stories filtered through his mind—of a man strapped to the mast of a ship to prevent him from yielding to a siren song, of a man shorn of his hair and blinded by his enemies, abandoned by his God. Where were the mast ties now? Where was God when he needed him?

  Here. Here in her arms, her hands, the movement of her body against his, a cascade of motion and desire, Brenda, her eyes the green of a sea in sunshine, her skin milky, tender and hot, her flesh—here was his god.

  52

  Flip inhaled the darkness. It was fuel to him, elemental as the blood that spun through his clenched fists. He let it consume his thoughts, fill his consciousness. He envisioned his tissues and bones and veins darkening from the colors of life to a thick and unalterable pitch.

  Only shadows within.

  He’d already smashed the only light in this section of the alley. Smashed it as if it represented anything that could remove his darkness. It had exploded with a light tap from the crowbar he now wedged smoothly into the gap between the edge of the door and the frame. He popped the door open.

  The music of the Ragtop Club erupted into the alley. A singer’s shouting stoked the night.

  No one was in the hallway leading to Mr. B’s office.

  He pulled out Mr. B’s pistol. Slid off the safety. With the gun in one hand and the crowbar in the other, he stepped inside.

  He blinked at the pale intensity of the light.

  The door wouldn’t close again. It inched outward toward the gaping black outside. He let it go.

  The crowbar’s weight comforted his palm.

  Two steps ahead, three, four. The door at the end of the hallway leading to the kitchen leaked the fragrances of boiling grease, onions, potatoes, and hamburger, but he had no hunger for food.

  The singer screamed a dozen times, “. . . a denial, a denial, a denial.” A final chord from his guitar lingered to an end.

  They’d fixed the plaster where Garrett’s head had broken through. Flip wouldn’t have been able to spot the repair if he hadn’t been in this hallway when the damage was done. He came to Mr. B’s office door and stood to the side. From his pocket he took a small stash of duct tape and tore off a strip to cover the peep hole.

  Another song started.

  He put his back to the patched wall and considered the office door. A metal plate now surrounded the doorknob, encasing the edge of the door. Mr. B had learned something since the last time Flip stood here. It would be tough to bust this down.

  So he would
wait. He was prepared for this. He listened for a moment and, hearing no one coming, returned to the exit door and placed the tip of the crowbar against the nearest bulb recessed in the ceiling. He ducked his head and shoved the crowbar up, and the bulb blew. A shower of glass trickled over his cap and shoulders.

  He listened. The explosion could have been just another thump of bass from the club.

  Two bulbs remained. He moved to the other end of the hall, closest to the kitchen, and used the crowbar there, too. The last light was directly outside Mr. B’s office door. He took his third shower of glass, and darkness resumed its rightful place.

  He leaned against the wall opposite the office door, the crowbar against the back of his left leg, the pistol against the back of his right. In his peripheral vision he could see creases of light from the doors leading to the kitchen and to the club. One of these doors would open. Or the office door itself would. Either way, it was only a matter of time before he brought the fight into Mr. B’s office.

  He focused on the shadows. At the edges of his vision, the glowing thin lines grew in intensity as his eyes adjusted. The angles and corners of the hallway emerged out of the dimness, the blank spaces of the walls becoming gray. It struck him how easily darkness was bullied by light. One tiny source, and the dark oozed away, polluted.

  From the kitchen came the clatter of utensils banging and scraping on surfaces, dishes rattling onto counters. From the other door and through the wall at his back, thudding music pounded its rhythm into his brain. As if removed from himself, he saw his position in the building, an isolated figure against a wall in an unlit hallway while employees bustled in other rooms, while partiers eyed one another and shouted above music in the club, drowning themselves in alcohol and conversation, in munchies and banter. He was only a few feet away from all of them, but he could have been in another world.

  This was taking too long. Like the dissipation of the blackness around him, he felt darkness’s hold on him slipping, his mind losing its sharpness as his thoughts floated. Next he would be thinking about Diane. She shouldered into his consciousness, her green eyes, her fragrance, the silk texture of her skin under his fingertips. She stared at him, brought her hand to his shoulder, her lips to his ear to whisper another mission. . . .