Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  “Did he? Get to the answers?”

  “Put your arm around me. Will you put your arm around me?” she asked.

  I did, and she leaned in close into my shoulder.

  “So, did he?” I asked again. It felt good to hold her, warm and sexy and comfortable too.

  “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, it depends more on who you are and what you need than on what the answers actually are. Find the book, and you can judge for yourself. Or you can just stay with me, and I’ll tell you about it, or what I think is in it, bit by bit, like Scheherazade, for a thousand and one nights.” Her hand was on my leg, stroking lightly. My hand was nudging up against the side of her pliant breast. “Personally,” she said, “I would take love over glory.”

  “Is that what you want, love?”

  “Umm,” she murmured. “You don’t know until you’ve lost it.” Then she said, “I have a question.”

  “Alright.”

  “Promise you won’t get mad at me. It’s just a question.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, drinking with one hand. The other—healed, I’m sure, by her kisses—slid down along her waist and began to explore her hip and thigh.

  “I’m happy for you—maybe a little disappointed for myself—that you and your wife are back on solid footing. Really, I am. And I don’t want to undermine that. But if I were just a disinterested friend, you know, there are things that would bother me.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “It’s like you’ve been telling me two different things at once,” she said slowly. “One story is that you think that as a husband in this Christian marriage—”

  “It’s not just about being Christian,” I said, upset.

  She misunderstood the reason for the stress she heard in my voice. “I’m not mocking,” she said. “You have this marriage where it’s up to you to make the decisions, and she follows, which she does, except for a brief moment caused by your own mistake, and now she’s back on the right track. Is that what you said?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s about it.” And although I was talking about Gwen, I was only really thinking about how smooth Teresa’s skin felt through her skirt and how much I liked the shape of her and wondering if I could inch that skirt up and get to the flesh beneath it without being seen in the restaurant.

  “I heard another story at the same time.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s your wife’s story. Her story is that her faith—this church you belong to and its pastor—comes first. That you’re head of the house, sure, but she only has to follow you to the degree that you follow them.” She said this thoughtfully, her hand idly tracing patterns on my thigh. “And each time she had a choice, she chose them over you.”

  “You’re a bitch,” I said, just stating a fact. My hand tightened on the leg it had been caressing, twisted and squeezed hard, not a rejection, an adjustment in our relationship. “You’re not going to drive a wedge between me and my wife.”

  “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I’m not driving anything. What you didn’t tell me was why she would change.”

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That she thought about it. She had time to think about it.”

  “You want to believe her, don’t you?”

  “Yes. And I have reason to,” I said, taking my arm from around her. I moved her off my shoulder and turned to face her. “You live in a world without belief, even in people. You like it there. Fine, stay there.”

  “Carl,” she said softly, “Carl . . . I’m trying to—”

  “Leave Gwen out of this,” I said.

  “Carl, here’s what we’re talking about. You’re going to break into—you’re not going to just walk in—you’re going to break into some huge institution in the middle of the night. Don’t they have security there? Cameras? The university does.”

  CTM has very good security. I could see it in my mind’s eye, the cameras over every door, including the service area in back, where I planned to enter. And yes, there were people who watched those images all night long.

  She nattered on. “And you’re going to do this because you want to believe in your wife.”

  “Gwen wouldn’t—”

  “Belief blinds us.”

  “I know my wife,” I said. “You’re trying to say she’s setting me up.”

  “How long has your wife belonged to that church?”

  “A long time,” I said.

  “She works there. She socializes there. All her friends are from there. How important is it to her?”

  “It’s her life,” I said. “Aside from Angie and me.”

  “What if they told her that they just needed to talk to you, to explain. What would she do?”

  “I’ve already dealt with that,” I said. “I told her if they wanted to talk to me, they could pick up the phone.”

  “Her belief makes her blind to what they are. Just like your belief makes you blind to what she is.”

  Gwen was all I had left, Gwen and Angie, and this bitch was trying to take them away from me. I reached into my pocket, took out my wallet, threw enough money on the table to cover the check, and walked out.

  55

  She came running out into the parking lot after me.

  I ignored her, but she caught up to me and grabbed hold of me by my jacket.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “No,” I said, trying to pry her hand loose.

  “The men who tried to kill you, they haven’t been able to find you, right?”

  “No,” I said. Polasky’s death hadn’t ended anything. Alvarez was still out there, as was Jerry Hobson. Probably looking even harder.

  “What do you do, if you can’t find someone?”

  I took her fingers and bent them back off my jacket. It had to hurt. She didn’t try to pull away; she didn’t complain.

  “I was watching TV,” she said, blathering away frantically. “I know it’s stupid to talk about something you see on TV, but the cops couldn’t find someone, so they set up a sting—told the guy he had won the lottery or something, but he had to come in to sign for the money. They can’t find you. So they dangled something you want, something you’re looking for, that girl. And they used someone you trust to send the message so you would believe it.”

  There were a few people in the lot, either headed in or back out to their cars. Mostly they ignored us. A certain number of the conversations across the dark, intimate tables at Barbarosa are the kind that end in yelling and tears. But one or two looked on, amused.

  “You’re a fucking bitch, Teresa. You’re prepared to destroy everything good in my life just so you can get laid.”

  “That’s not why I’m saying this.”

  I let go of her hand and said, “Get a vibrator and leave me alone.”

  I started walking away from her, around the back, where my car was. She came after me.

  “You’re a fucking bastard,” she said, grabbing hold of me again.

  “What, you want me to stop believing in my wife so we can bang each other?” I snarled at her, grabbing her by the wrist and twisting it. She liked the pain, and right then, I liked hurting her.

  “I want you. I do want you,” she said. “I told you that from the start.”

  “There was no start. There’s nothing.” But there we were again, pressing against each other.

  “That’s not true,” she said, her mouth reaching up for me.

  The fingers of my other hand found their way into her hair. I pressed my mouth down on hers and kissed her violently. She yielded eagerly, almost sobbing, as our hungry mouths slobbered at each other. The hand that held her wrist didn’t let go either, but squeezed and twisted. I was hard and hungry for sex and angry and drunk.

  I let go of her wrist and lifted up her skirt. She reached for my zipper and belt and started opening them up.

  I turned her around and pushed her face down on the hood of the nearest car. As I shoved he
r skirt up and pulled her thong down, she arched her back, eager for me.

  56

  I leaned on top of her, pressing against her, and I spoke into her ear. “Let me tell you something. If I do this, we unleash the chaos.”

  “Take me,” she said.

  “Do you want love, or do you just want to be used?”

  “Carl, I want you. I want you.”

  “After this, we’ll get drunk a lot, and I’ll fuck other women.”

  “I don’t need to own you,” she said.

  “It’ll hurt you because I’ll hate you, because there’s no going back for me. And you’ll try to hurt me back, but you’ll lose because you’ll love and I’ll hate. You understand that?”

  “Take me. Just take me,” she said, hips moving, seeking.

  “It won’t take long. Maybe this one fuck is all you get.” I wanted to break her. “There’s already someone I want more than I want you.” I said it to break what was between us, because I didn’t have the strength to control myself. “Who I think is better and more beautiful than you. So if I have you, it’ll be this one, quick fuck, and then I don’t care what I do anymore, and I move on and go after her.”

  It hurt her as much as I wanted it to. She turned over toward me, her skirt all crumpled, the heat and lust crumbling from her face. “You’re a bastard, a fucking bastard.”

  57

  Clean and sober, Sunday morning I went out in my rental car.

  I followed Gwen as she headed toward the Cathedral, then on Route 28, between the Borders and Devontown Mall, I pulled up alongside her, honked my horn, and motioned her over. She went into the mall with me following. I passed her, parked, got out, took my kit with me, locked the car, walked over to her, and opened the passenger-side door.

  “Carl, I thought . . . ”

  “Change of plan,” I said, getting in beside her.

  She looked at the scrapes and bruising on my face. “What happened to you?”

  “Gwen, we have to talk. First, I’m going to ask you, did you get all the codes? Can we get up the elevator, preferably Plowright’s private elevator? And into his private apartment?”

  “Yuh . . . yes . . . , ” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it this morning.”

  “But . . . it’s time for church.”

  “I know that.”

  “What are you going to . . . ”

  “CTM has great security,” I said. Teresa’s motives didn’t matter; what she’d said had been the truth. “Cameras almost everywhere. There’s not a hope in hell of sneaking up and breaking in, even if I can open every lock in the building, in the middle of the night. Never happen. But you know what I can do? I can walk in, in the middle of six thousand or so other people. Then I can head for the men’s room with a few hundred other guys relieving themselves, and you can head toward the ladies’ room, and then we can open that door that says, ‘Private, Staff Only,’ to the hall that runs backstage. And while Plowright is out there in front of the cameras, we can ride up to his office. Hide in plain sight—that’s my best shot, I figure.”

  “Too many people know you.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll tell you what else I think. I think if I go in there at midnight, Jerry Hobson will be waiting for me. And I expect he will then kill me and dispose of me.”

  “No, no . . . . ”

  “No, he won’t be there?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Or no, you don’t think he’ll kill me?”

  She tried to say, ‘he wouldn’t,’ but it didn’t quite come out.

  “What did he tell you? That they just wanted to meet with me, to pray with me? If you could just get me there, we would all pray together, and it would be alright? That’s what they told you, right?”

  She shook her head from side to side, but it wasn’t even a real denial, and she couldn’t look me in the eye, let alone look at me with love and devotion. Finally, she said, “If you think Jerry is going to do something, won’t it be even more dangerous now?”

  “Not for me. He won’t kill me with sixty-five hundred people watching and the cameras rolling. Middle of the night, sure. Just him and me, haul my body out, toss it in the dumpster. Midnight’s good for Paul and Jerry, not for me.”

  “Whatever you say, Carl,” she said in the agreeable voice you use with the crazy people you’re afraid to argue with.

  “And you’re coming with me.”

  “Why? What?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Because I have to know. I have to know if you’re really on my side or theirs. Because I won’t take things on faith anymore. I don’t believe. I need proof. I want you beside me when I try the codes and find out if they’re the right ones. When we get up to Plowright’s private office, I want you with me when we find out that Nicole Chandler isn’t there. And if she is there, then you can hear about whatever the hell is going on, hear the truth about her, her and Paul.”

  She began to cry.

  “Gwen, listen. I know you think I’m wrong, even crazy, but nobody will be happier than me if the evidence shows that I’m wrong. I want to be wrong. I want to believe.”

  Through her tears, she said, “How can you say . . . say you don’t believe?”

  “I’ll tell you what I do believe,” I said. “I believe you would never do anything intentionally to harm me. Or Angie. I believe that, Gwen. I truly do.”

  She looked at me, nodding her head to say, yes, that was true.

  “But I’ll tell you something else, and you had better believe this. I’m carrying a gun. If you see Jerry Hobson and you say something to him, if you betray me, Gwen, and they come for me, they won’t take me easy. I’ll tear the temple down. I will tear the temple down. And if I die doing it, that’s alright, because if you betray me, I don’t care if I live or die.”

  58

  Once I realized that Teresa was most probably right and decided that the safest thing to do was go in broad daylight, I decided I’d have to try to disguise myself. I looked at myself in the mirror. The abrasions on my face and the purple, blue, and black bruising on my throat gave me the idea of using bandages. I went to an all-night drugstore and cruised the aisles looking for other possibilities. It was a big place that even had a wig section. I bought a cheap black rug that looked exactly like what it was, something for Halloween or for someone doing chemo whose medical plan wouldn’t pop for a real hairpiece. Then I got a pair of those big, wraparound plastic sunglasses they give to old people after eye surgery.

  While Gwen drove, I put on a big medical dressing that started on the right side of my face and went around my neck and chin all the way to the left side. Then I added the hairpiece and the glasses.

  Gwen watched me with sideways glances. When I was done, I turned to look at her and asked, “What do you think?”

  She burst out laughing.

  The Cathedral of the Third Millennium was thronged. That was obvious when we tried to park. Lots A, B, and C—Acts, Baruch, and Corinthians—were full, and we had to go all the way to Deuteronomy to find a spot.

  When she parked, I took off the glasses and the stupid wig for a moment. “Gwen, I’m going to give you a choice. You don’t have to do this.”

  “If you want me . . . ”

  “Shh,” I said. “You need to know how dangerous this is. Jerry Hobson had at least two men whose job it was to keep tabs on Plowright’s girlfriends.”

  Her mouth tightened in disbelief and disapproval that I should be uttering such slanders.

  “And not just keep tabs. Intimidate them if he thought they were going to create a scandal. Jerry drives that Hummer, the big one—that’s a one-hundred-forty-five-thousand-dollar ride. He wants to make sure the money keeps on coming. They raped at least two of them.

  “One of the guys, Danny Polasky, tried to kill me a second time. Almost choked me to death.” She was beginning to believe me. I could
see it. Maybe because it was specific, with names and the damage to my face and hands and throat.

  “Is that what . . . ”

  “Yes.” I said. “Some other men, I don’t know who they were, grabbed Polasky. They took him away and tortured him. Then they killed him and torched the place where they did it. It’s not just MacLeod and Nicole Chandler. I don’t know what it is, but that’s two dead.” Hearing myself, hearing what I was saying to her, brought me to a complete stop.

  “I’m wrong,” I said. “I am so wrong. I’m sorry. I got this all backwards and screwed up. ’Cause I’m obsessed or some damn thing. Give me the numbers. Just give them to me. I’m going to do this alone.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m listening to myself, and it’s crazy, and if something happened to you, I couldn’t live with that. I’m gonna do what I gotta do, and you go home and stay safe.”

  “What?” she said. “And miss church?”

  It was a face I hadn’t seen for a long time, excited and casually fearless. Her favorite memories, when I’d met her, were about hitchhiking with a girlfriend to Baja when they were sixteen because they wanted to learn to surf—drove her parents ballistic—about getting caught in a blizzard in the New Mexico mountains on a churchgroup camping trip, and about the year in Nicaragua. It was a face I’d almost forgotten, one that had disappeared during our married years, with being a family, paying for the house and Angie’s tuition, putting away money for college, being active in church affairs.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, Carl, I’m doing this with you. I don’t know what you’ve been told or what you think you’ve been told, but somehow you’ve got it wrong. There is no way, no possible way, that Paul Plowright is