by Hadley Hury
Sydney added, companionably, “But we don’t have to be wasting time thinking about this stuff. We have plans to make and business to take care of, and we have very little time in which to be successful.”
“This is ridiculous. You folks are crazy.”
“Far, far from it, Terry,” Chaz said. “I think you can already see that. And within, oh, let’s say, no more than one calendar year, you’ll be perfectly certain of it. When you have both your bar and a previously undreamed of five million dollars.”
“You think you’re going to coerce me into…”
“No. There’s no way we could possibly do that and we have no particular interest in trying to. The bar that should rightfully be yours anyway and the five million we’re giving you from the sale of land that should rightfully be mine are simple motivation, Terry. We simply see your shady past as some insurance for us that you’ll hold up your end of any bargain we strike.”
“But I’m not a…”
Chaz didn’t blink an eye and said as calmly as if he were discussing some theory about the weather: “We don’t know what you are or what you’ll do for five million dollars, Terry. We just know what needs to happen and we know what role we’re willing to take in it and what role we’re not willing to take in it. And we just don’t happen to count any mafia folk among our acquaintances.”
“Look, I made one mistake. Once. A long time ago. That’s history.”
“We know that!” Chaz said with conviction. “Believe me, I know what you mean. That’s why we’re here. That’s what this is about. Charlie may have been a nice guy to some people but he’s screwed you out of something you’ve earned and he’s about to screw us out of ours!”
“For your information,” Terry almost sniffed, “I don’t happen to have close and regular ties with the underworld either. I’m not a thug.”
“We know that,” said Sydney soothingly. “We just know that you were a lawyer and that even though you got caught once, you’re pretty sharp. And, to use a word that popped up here and there in our research, ‘tough.’ We know that you really did come out to the coast to ease back and settle down, and we know that most folks think you’re a pretty decent guy, so long as you’re not crossed and though you do seem to keep to yourself pretty much. And we believe that your designs on the Blue Bar have been relatively modest and relatively honest.”
“In other words,” said Chaz, “we felt you probably weren’t so very different from us. Differences in degrees, sure, but similar situations, similar feelings, similar motivations. And, now, I hope you’re beginning to see, a similar belief that we can correct what’s wrong and make it right for ourselves. We can do this.”
Sydney looked at her watch. “We probably shouldn’t be standing here much longer.”
She aimed a cool but reassuring smile at Terry and said casually, “All you have to do now is think about it. Take two or three days. If not, somehow, you—then who? Give us a pay phone number and a time and we’ll call. No details over the phone. Just yes, let’s arrange a meeting and proceed with the next step, or no, you’re out. Consider what’s at stake, Terry. Consider possibilities. Options. ”
As Terry adjusted his sunglasses and his short reddish beard rose into a sudden, rather strange smile, Sydney, for the first time in the interview, drew a blank. She couldn’t read what was happening behind the black wire-rims, as Terry, almost familiarly, leaned close to her.
“The most bizarre thing of all, in this already bizarre little encounter, has just occurred. I actually may have an idea. It’s a long shot, but…” He looked up into the dazzling sunshine and shook his head with a little bark of a laugh. “It’s all I’ve got, but—just maybe.” He added mysteriously, “Something I saw just this morning, in the post office, as a matter fact.”
Chaz put his arm around Sydney. “Leave a time and a number for our call Wednesday on a pack of matches and leave it under the real estate newspaper stand outside the bar tomorrow morning by nine. When I jog, I’ll come around and get it.”
Terry had lifted a hand in brief salute and turned toward his Jeep. The smile had vanished but Sydney thought he still wore an expression of animated bemusement, like someone who has suddenly wakened, not yet fully alert but deeply refreshed, from sleep.
***
The young man called Joseph waited, looking around the mini-market gas station, his finger pulsing on the radio’s search button. A succession of country-and-western, bland oldies, and ranting demagogues filled the rental Jetta, competing with the diminishing slaps of rain on the windows. Although the storm was beginning to let up, only a few cars pulled in and out, and a couple of kids, their bikes leaning against the wall, hung around inside, eating junk and talking to the young man at the counter. Four big trucks dozed on either side of the small building, their drivers either sipping coffee or perhaps napping out the downpour.
Finally, the woman called Rachel appeared from the restroom around back, jagging around the largest puddles, her large shoulder bag clutched under one arm, a smaller plastic one dangling from her hand. The man swung open the door and she climbed in just as the tuner came to rest on an ingratiating voice denouncing the “liberals’ conspiracy” to control certain kinds of assault weapons with a conveniently edited snippet of Luke chapter eleven: “It is by the finger of God that I drive out the devils….”
The woman cocked an ear toward the radio and made wide eyes at the man. “Hmm. Might be my brother, the good reverend. You take this in,” she said, dropping the key into his hand. “I doubt it seriously, but those redneck cretins might notice something different about me.” She turned off the radio, shook her hair, and ran her hands up and down her glistening bare arms. “God, it’s good to get out of that. I was about to faint.”
He darted into the building and then back to the car. He swung out onto 26-A, and as they drove through the diminishing rain toward Laurel Beach they resumed their conversation.
Her voice was reassuring. “If Terry thinks it’s necessary the night before, Sister Rachel may make one more fortifying phone call. But I really think he’ll be fine.”
“I still worry about Terry,” he said.
“Terry isn’t going to let anything go wrong. Sometime in the next few days, he’s going to help poor Michael compose his letter of divine judgment. The rough draft, which he will manage to keep, will be his protection if something does go wrong. If Michael chokes, then Terry happens to find it somewhere in the bar, dropped apparently when Michael was on the painting job in April. He takes it to Charlie and tells him he had had a bit of concern at the time over some odd allusions the young man had made to events in South Carolina. It’ll be Terry’s smooth former-lawyer’s word against the ramblings of a crazed religious fanatic, one who will be found to have bombed a women’s clinic and who has hand-written a letter of intent to murder.”
“Goddamn it!” he suddenly spat, his head jerking nervously. “It’s like shooting a sitting duck.” He hit the steering wheel with the butt of his hand, “For Christ’s sake…what are we doing? What have we got against Charlie?We’re killing a decent man!”
She turned toward him and rubbed her hand lightly along the back of his neck. “First of all, we’re not killing anyone. Terry Main has his own score to settle with Charlie and has been considering this or something like it for a long time. We may be the beneficiaries but we’re only protecting our interests. What we’re doing is keeping an old man, however generally decent he may be, from taking yourinheritance away from you.”
She paused, and continued gently to massage his neck. “Someone needs to be realistic, and it may as well be us. The days of people playing with you and your choices, your future, are over. We both know life doesn’t just hand over opportunities. We have to decide. And which do you want, my love? A couple of million when we’re too old to enjoy it—or between sixty and a hundred before we’re thirty-six?”
He didn’t turn his head, but he reached behind his head and pulled her hand around to hi
s lips and kissed her fingers.
She lightened her tone into a playful tease. “By the way, cousin Joseph, you were pretty wonderful back there for a non-Equity kinda guy. I’ve always said you take direction well.” With this, he finally smiled. The rain had stopped and they were slowing for the stretch through Seaside. The choking humidity had broken and the air was fresh and cool. People milled to and fro across the road between the houses and the restaurants and bars.
“Let’s stop for a drink,” she murmured. “I could use a nice cold martini, and I’m not ready to go to the house just yet.” As he parked near the little post office, she got her rings and a broad gold bracelet from her bag. She fluffed her chestnut hair in the mirror and then picked up the plastic bag from the floorboard. From it strayed one long tress of dull blonde. Stuffing it back and tying a knot in the bag, she said, “I was going to get rid of this, but maybe I’ll keep it just for tonight.”
She laughed. “Would you like to have a very special religious experience a little later with Miss Rachel?” She leaned in close to his face and her eyes assumed a piercing, otherworldly quality. “And if you are a bad boy,then perhaps Miss Rachel will have to discipline you.”
When Sydney and Chaz entered the small bar just north of the Seaside town green, his arm around her waist, they were both smiling brilliantly. Several people looked up and noted that they were a very handsome couple—“extraordinary,” murmured one older woman to an unhearing husband—and, quite obviously, very much in love.
Chapter 26
Terry Main called at the designated time.
His response was affirmative.
They rendezvoused at an anonymous interstate motel forty miles inland. Terry had a backlog of vacation and told Charlie and his assistant manager that he was taking a day off to take care of some business errands, and Chaz “wanted to show Sydney some of the swamp country over near Apalachicola.”
For two hours, over bad take-out Mexican and beer, Sydney and Chaz had listened as Terry unfurled an already remarkably detailed plan, and then as the afternoon wore on in the gray airless room they had gone over and over it, taking it apart and putting it back together.
It seemed that on the very day before their roadside conference, Terry had dropped into the main post office after shopping for some supplies in Destin. As he stood in the seemingly interminable line, his boredom eventually led his gaze to a small bulletin board near the door. To one side of some confusingly worded bureaucratic announcements were two small “Wanted” posters. One was standard-issue FBI—photos of a vague-looking skinny guy who’d killed a federal officer in Mobile and two fairly attractive women wanted for mail fraud. The other poster, issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, was older and less distinct, a composite drawing of a youngish man with sad eyes and an inch-long burr haircut. It made Terry think. Though, of what, he couldn’t guess.
On his way out, he stopped and looked at the drawing, the basic stats, and a ragged photocopy of a newspaper account that someone, probably an outraged local healthcare worker, had stapled to the bottom. Mark DeWayne Lukerson. Possible aliases John, David, Michael. Possibly sighted nine months ago in Montgomery, Alabama. A year ago he had bombed a South Carolina women’s health and family planning clinic where abortions were also performed. The explosive went off after most of the staff had left for the day, but one nurse, a father of two small children, who had been waiting outside for his wife to pick him up, was severely injured by a flying hunk of cinder block. Attempted murder, violation of clinic access, felony arson. When he’d left the post office Terry couldn’t shake the feeling that the face rendered in the police artist’s sketch seemed distantly familiar, but he couldn’t imagine why. He didn’t recall the story, but perhaps he’d seen the drawing many months ago on the news.
It may have been the strange, almost surreal discussion by Western Lake the next day that jarred something loose. (Or it may have been the invigorating prospect of more than five million dollars, it seemed to Sydney.) For whatever reason, just before he dropped them at the intersection near the Hibiscus Bed & Breakfast, Terry suddenly knew where he’d seen the face. In an instant his mind had come up with its own little composite sketch, relocating those sad, lonely eyes above a bushy full beard and under much longer, greasy hair.
It was the painter he’d hired a month earlier to do some outside work on the bar.
The two women he’d used a couple of times before had moved out of the area. This guy had put up a sign in the market and had a recent reference from the pastor of some small church over near Holley.
It all fit. He’d only been around three or four days, did good work and didn’t talk much. But it was what he said when he did open up and how he said it that Terry remembered. He was polite in an almost abject way, and looked so hang-dog and lost that, around noon on the third day, Terry had taken a sandwich and a Coke out to him and tried, briefly, to shoot the breeze with him for a few minutes.
It hadn’t taken long for him to realize he had a fundamentalist weirdo, not an unknown commodity in west Florida, on his hands. Lived in an apartment in Pensacola where he’d moved last year to be near that big revival. Drove all over the panhandle on jobs but was back home every night to clean up and “go with like-minded people to love the Lord” at the big tent. Like-minded people, he allowed, were of course those who hated abortion, homosexuals, taxes, government in general and Democrats in particular, artists, educators, the “liberal” media, and independent women, and who knew that they were on God’s side in a war to win back America’s soul. Terry, who had grown up in the crosshairs between a evangelical mother and a lapsed but not unleashed Catholic father, had merely finished his iced tea, smiled and nodded a couple of times knowingly, said that he, too, was a believer, and gone back in to work. He had needed the job finished.
The next day, when he paid him, the guy pulled two crinkled pamphlets from his overalls’ back pocket and said he hoped that Terry would come over for the revival one night. Terry thanked him, the guy drove off in his old truck, and the pamphlets, of a particularly garish and virulent variety he had seen before, left on doorsteps or propped on supermarket shelves or urinals in men’s rooms, went into the trash.
Despite the lank long hair and the scraggy prophet’s beard that framed them, the scared, sad, lonely eyes in the ATF Wanted poster were undoubtedly his.
***
“So the entire enterprise is riding on a volatile, probably schizophrenic, religious fanatic moron. That sounds good.”
Chaz had tried to remain calm, but by afternoon, after Terry’s initial outline, he looked harried, aghast. He sat cross-legged on the bed, anxiously poking through the acrid remains of chips and salsa. Sydney paced the room, stopping for moments at a time here and there as if to assess Terry’s strategy from all possible angles, occasionally lighting in one of the two armchairs. Terry sat in the other, near the desk, the lamplight flicking on his glasses.
“It can work. He wants to be used.”
Sydney scrutinized Terry, reminding herself that, so far, Terry had proven quite shrewd. “Well, that could certainly be true,” she said. She had had in her own childhood enough warped zealotry to last a lifetime. “I know these people and that is what they live for. They’re hopeless and weak and have no lives and they hate people who do, so the only way they can know power is to give themselves over to power. Masochistically.”
“But how can you be sure you can control him?” Chaz asked more than once.
Terry looked now, it seemed increasingly clear to Sydney, like a man who, in the new conviction that he could have even more than he’d ever wanted in life, could think circumspectly and even imaginatively, wait patiently when necessary, and act, at the right moment, decisively. He removed his wire-rims and rubbed his hands over his eyes. He looked like a cagey attorney, back in the saddle, as he began to go over the rationale and the strategy, step by step, again. Sydney admired his performance.
***
The n
ight after he had met them on the road, he had found Michael, the painter’s, phone number. He’d left a message on what sounded like a relic of an answering machine, saying that he was pleased with his work and asking him to call about another job as soon as possible. Michael had called back early the next morning and driven out from a nearby job later in the week.
“Right off the bat I apologized for having him come on false pretenses. Admitted that I didn’t really have another job. At least not a painting job. He looked extremely nervous. But I proceeded to assure him that there was, indeed, a job. One of the most important missions he would ever have the opportunity of carrying out, a job that I believed God had sent him to ‘us’ to learn about. I had him then. Looked like a deer in headlights.
“He asked what I knew, and I said very calmly that ‘my superiors’ in the cause knew and had told me about South Carolina. But that no one would be going to the police. That we considered that wanted poster a badge of honor and that we needed him to work with us. That God had led him here for greater things.
“By the time we finished our little conversation forty-five minutes later—and we had prayed aloud together—he knew he was in a corner, and I’d helped him come to believe that not only was that not something to be afraid of but that God and I and certain powerful ‘like-minded’ religious leaders would shelter him there. And that it was really just the first stop on the road to glory.”
“But does he believe it enough to actually do it? He understands what you were talking about?” asked Sydney.
“Yes. And that’s where you come in, our ‘religious leaders.’ He’ll stay on task and follow through if we stage just enough pep sessions to keep the pure flame of his purpose burning. He’s looking for some kind of atonement or, at least, vindication. Not for having crippled the guy in South Carolina—he was, in Michael’s cosmology, a misguided agent of the devil—but for not having made a bigger splash for Jesus. He didn’t want limited fire damage and one injury, he wanted to blow that clinic and all the baby-killers in it out of existence. I’m also positive he’s a lot more afraid of going to prison than of going down in flames as an officer in God’s personal militia.”