Gwen had just been convicted of her complicity in the attempt to kill me while Angie was by my side, by the dead man’s testimony. She began to cry. She was trying to stay silent, and I prayed that she could.
There was silence. I guessed the DVD had stopped.
“So, what I want,” Jorge said, “is in.”
“Well, maybe I can steer some construction your way.”
“No, no, my friend,” Jorge said. “I want in. Your man is talking about hundreds of millions of dollars—I listened to him on the TV—billions even. I want in, like you got in, from the top, the bottom, and the sides.”
“That’s worthless,” Jerry said, trying to dismiss it. “You can’t bring that into court.”
“Court?” Jorge said. “I don’t need no stinking court,” using a movie Mexican accent, mocking Jerry. “I’ll put this up on YouTube, and all of this, this Cathedral, and all the hundreds of millions of dollars—that’s over, and you’ll be lucky you get a job as a security guard at Taco Time.”
“I’ll talk to Paul. I’m sure—”
“Don’t talk to Paul. You tell Paul.” Jorge snapped his orders like he had a whip in his hand. “You tell him he has a new partner.”
“We’ll work something out,” Jerry said.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll work out. I’m your partner.”
“Yeah, sure, alright,” Jerry said, step by step to surrender.
“There are a couple of details,” Jorge said.
“Like what?”
“I understand there’s a girl who could cause trouble.”
“Maybe,” Jerry said.
“We can’t have that with this much money at stake.”
“I’ll tell you what. If you want in so bad, why don’t you take care of her,” Jerry said.
Nicole was curled up beside me, shaking. I stroked her head, like you would a frightened child or pet, trying to calm her. Gwen looked over at us, and I could tell from the expression on her face that she finally believed that Nicole had been a captive of fear.
“This was your fuckup,” Jorge said. “I’m your partner now, and if something you did fucks up my deal, you pay for it. Now, if you can’t take care of it, then you can come to me, and you say, ‘Jorge, my friend, I am in trouble, and I can’t handle things. Will you help me out?’”
Jerry had to be steaming, and soon he’d start twitching like a boiler under pressure.
Jorge kept pushing at him. “And then I will say to you, ‘Jerry, of course, I will help you,’ and here’s what it’ll cost. A little bigger piece, points off the top. And there’s your friend the Dutchman. He’s on to you, and you know why he’s on to you, because you and your Pastor Plowright, you’re both fuckups, and you practically waved flags in his face and said, ‘We did it, so don’t investigate.’ He’s a stubborn prick, and he needs to be stopped. Are you going to do that? Or do you need me to do it? If you need me to, I can—for a few more points off the top.”
“Fuck you, Hor-hay,” Jerry said, the lid coming off. “You know what, let’s take care of it now.”
Something was happening, and I wanted to look and see what, but they were no longer watching the DVD and could well be looking straight in my direction when my head popped out alongside the desk. Then I heard Jerry laugh and say, “Relax. It’s not for you.”
Jorge did not reply, and I thought I heard them moving.
“Time to get rid of the pastor’s bitch,” Jerry said, like a man deciding to pop a boil.
Nicole made a noise. A moan, a shriek, a squeak of fear.
I knew Jerry would be turning toward the sound, toward me. When he’d said, “Relax. It’s not for you,” I’d figured he’d taken out a gun. Jerry favored a 9 mm with double-stack magazines. He liked the idea of being able to fire lots of shots.
I rose up into a kneeling position, gun pointing over the top of the desk.
Jerry saw, or sensed, my move and pulled Jorge in front of him, arm around his neck, as a shield.
“Drop it, Jerry. You’re done,” I said.
“What we got here,” Jerry said, “is a Mexican standoff.” He laughed, very happy with his joke. But it was true enough. Neither of us was likely to win with the first shot. That meant either of us was equally likely to die with the second.
“Everybody slow down,” Jorge said. As the person most likely to die no matter what happened, he became the spokesman for reason. “There’s enough money here for everybody to get rich. I think it’s time for ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ What do you say, Carl?”
“I say you wanted to have me killed two seconds ago.”
“That’s because I thought you wouldn’t make a deal. Carl, if there is one thing I know, it is better to be rich and alive in this life than poor and dead in the next one.”
When the DVD had stopped, the giant screen had resumed the live feed from the Cathedral. The neon cross still bloomed, the model of the City of God was still front and center, but Plowright had left the stage. He was probably riding in his private elevator already. When he emerged, he would be between us, though not in a direct line, to my left and to Jerry’s right. Maybe that would alter the equation.
Gwen had her eyes closed. She was praying. Nicole was crying out loud now.
“Shut that bitch up,” Jerry yelled at me.
Plowright’s elevator door slid open. Jerry’s eyes flicked toward it, but not enough for me to take advantage of the moment.
Our pastor stopped when he saw us with guns drawn and Jorge Guzman held hostage. I’ll give him this, he didn’t panic. He was used to controlling everyone around him. “What’s going on here?” he demanded to know.
“Why don’t you put your hands up and step over by them,” I said. “You’re going down. For the killing of Nathaniel MacLeod, for kidnapping, for torture . . . ”
“Carl, Carl, have you gone mad? I would never do anything of the sort.”
“I have Nicole Chandler. I know. I know it all.”
He was taken aback, oh, for a nanosecond. Then he found the answer. “She’s a Jezebel. I tried to help her, that poor demented child. She’s some sort of sex addict, her mind addled with pornography. It was the atheists, the atheists and secular humanists at the university, who did that to her. I was trying to save her, save her soul, her eternal soul—”
“You shot and killed Nathaniel MacLeod.”
“Never. It was Jeremiah.”
“Me? You lying fool. We had it all, billions, and you couldn’t control yourself,” Jerry snapped at him.
“Don’t listen to this man. He is a dishonest man. He is a man of violence. Surely you know that. I would never do such a thing. It was him. You missed the sermon, Carl. I am building a City of God. Think of the good we will do, the service to God. We’re this close to making the vision real! This close. Don’t stop it now!”
“It was under control, under control,” Jerry yelled at him. “I leave you alone for two minutes, and you have to shoot him.”
“He was an atheist, a militant atheist,” Plowright said, preaching to me. “I saw him destroy young minds, seduce them, steal their faith. And he mocked God. He mocked Jesus. He laughed and called Christians deluded fools. You know what he said to me? He said to me, ‘Your religion is to faith what pornography is to sex.’”
“You!” Gwen cried as she stepped out from behind the protection of the filing cabinet, “You”—she pointed her finger at Paul Plowright—“have angered the Lord. You have broken his covenant.”
“Get back,” I said, but she ignored me like I didn’t exist.
“Jerry,” I yelled. “Keep your gun pointed at me. If it moves a quarter inch in her direction, I’ll shoot you. If you even flinch, I’ll shoot you, the both of you. I don’t care.”
Gwen kept walking toward Plowright. Her voice was unnaturally calm and uncannily certain, and she spoke the words that Jesus said. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
Jerry and Jorge looked at her like she was simply crazy.
But Plowright looked shaken, truly shaken. It was as if, instead of Gwen, that loyal, familiar member of his congregation, one of the many insignificant employees from down below, he was seeing an avatar, a sword-carrying angel of righteousness who possessed her and spoke through her, and its voice said, “Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.”
“Gwen, get down,” I said.
“Be without fear,” she said to me. “My savior is my shield.”
She turned her gaze on Jerry. “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils and the hold of every foul spirit.”
“Don’t fuckin’ move, Jerry,” I yelled.
“Put your gun down, Carl,” he yelled back at me, “or she’s dead. Do it, Carl. Fuckin’ do it.”
“Gwen, get down,” I called to her.
“He will keep me safe from the hands of this Philistine.” The clarion certainty of her words rang true. He would; yes, He would. Unless Jerry shot and a bullet entered her.
“If your gun moves a millimeter, Jerry, you’re dead,” I called out frantically.
Then Gwen turned on Hobson. With the words that Joshua spoke to the Israelites, she uttered God’s curse upon him. “Ye have transgressed the covenant of the Lord. Ye shall perish quickly.” The words of the Book have power and tap our primal fears. No man is so rational that when the voice of the prophet calls his name to ride the hell-bound train, he will not waver. And Hobson flinched.
Jorge sensed the hesitation. He seized the moment and launched himself sideways, twisting out of Jerry’s grip.
As Guzman went clear, I fired.
The big .45 slug hit Jerry’s chest, right over his black heart. I fired again. That one hit him too, even before the impact of the first shot made him stagger back. His arms flew up. Arterial blood spurted from his chest. And then I fired another, a tracking shot, as he fell.
I turned the gun on Jorge. He was reaching for the slim little Beretta that he had on his belt under his suit jacket. He stopped. He pulled the gun out with his finger tips and dropped it. He backed up toward the lobby.
Plowright made a run for his private elevator. He was unarmed. I wasn’t going to shoot him. But as I turned to see what he was doing, Jorge lunged toward the door and made it out. I let him go and went for Plowright, but the elevator closed before I could reach him.
We watched on the TV screen as, moments later, Paul Plowright ran out on the stage. He yelled, “There’s murder, murder, murder in the house of God. Upstairs. In the citadel. Evil is unleashed. Murder. Stop them. We must save the City of God.”
He was waving his hands and pointing, and he struck his hand against the cross. Several of the tubes broke, the glass slashed his hand, and he started to bleed. In frustration and fury, he shoved the cross away, then realized what he was doing and tried to grab it and save it.
Clutching the crumbling cross, he suddenly froze.
He reeled, turning in a circle. He let go of the cross, and it fell across the model, smashing and breaking into thousands of fragments. Plowright put a hand to his head and staggered. His feet caught in the cables, and then he fell.
When he fell, the high-voltage line that was tangled at his ankles was yanked from the ballast box, and it arced. The arc set the cloth drapes around the bottom of the display on fire.
The model city was made of cut foam and plastic, balsa wood, and paint, and the moment a flame touched it, it offered itself up as if fire had always been its true desire. It hissed and it crackled and it sighed, and it seemed that out of the sounds of destruction, there came the mad cackle of John the Revelator, crying out from Chapter 18, “Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to naught.”
66
So many things must come from that moment. Running off in different directions, crisscrossing each other, as we all work out our own destinies.
Gwen and I had each been in the same place, lived through the same moments, heard the same words, threats, confessions, lies, and pleas.
She had experienced the presence of the Lord. He had held her in the palm of his hand. He had protected her with his sword and shield.
Admittedly, I was a little miffed that she gave Him all the credit and none to me, as if I hadn’t kept Jerry in check and finally killed him. As if I were merely an incidental instrument of the Lord, to the degree that I mattered at all. But that’s a minor thing.
I loved her more than ever. I was in awe of her faith and the courage it gave her. I envied it.
But I could not share it.
I didn’t think that Paul Plowright had erred in spite of his faith. In his sexual misconduct, and even some of what followed from it, he could be seen as a sheep who had strayed. But he had also committed crimes as a direct result of his faith. The same faith that gave him the strength to do great and good things told him to commit deceptions and theft and to engage in coercion and conspiracies, even murder, certain that he was good and righteous and doing the work of the Lord.
It wasn’t a matter of finding some other church, maybe one less dogmatic and certain. Or some other pastor, one less powerful and less of a sinner. The lesson of the parable, for me, was that belief, in and of itself, was neither good nor evil. It wasn’t even a guide to good and evil. They existed independently of faith, came from a different source and resided in a different place. That struck at the very root of the thing. It couldn’t be fixed by trimming branches here and there.
Where would Gwen and I go from there?
If Gwen and I couldn’t make it, what would happen to Angie?
Even if we could, then what? I had exposed the leader of our community. I had killed his closest advisor. Rumors were already flying around. No one knew the truth; most of them wouldn’t believe it even after they heard it. How could Angie go back to school? How could she go to church in the face of all that?
Did I want her to go to Third Millennium Christian Academy? Or to any other religious school where people like Paul Plowright set the curriculum and taught that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, that obedience came ahead of thinking, that the world was seven thousand years old, and where they were so obsessed with the sins of lust that their moral compasses only and always pointed due south to the genitalia?
67
Homicide is the taking of someone’s life by another person. I had committed homicide.
Despite what the Ten Commandments say or how they’re translated, homicide is not a crime.
There are a whole variety of circumstances in which it is not a crime. When it is ordered by the state, as in war or an execution. When the police use lethal force, in a reasonable way, carrying out their duties. When it is an accident. Provided that it was not done during the commission of a crime and provided that there was no contributory negligence.
Finally, and most importantly for me, when the killing is done in self-defense or in defense of another.
Facts do not speak for themselves.
As a matter of law and as a practical matter, a district attorney speaks for the facts. He speaks to a grand jury. There are exceptions, and in some states it’s different, but in our state he makes a presentation to a grand jury. The person who committed the homicide, which is at that point not yet a crime, may speak to the grand jury and present his version of the facts. The grand jury determines if the homicide is a crime.
In almost every circumstance, the grand jurors decide how the district attorney wants them to decide.
“Your case is a clear case of justifiable homicide,” my attorney, Max Hernandez, said.
That was the good news, and my body automatically sighed with relief, though my mind knew there was more coming.
“Provided we accept the facts as you
told them to me.”
At the very beginning, which seemed like long ago, Manny had told me, “I promise you this at least. If you get charged with anything, this firm will defend you. At no cost to you. You have my word on it.” I had called in his marker.
As the flames devoured the model of Paul Plowright’s dream, I tracked down William Thatcher Grantham III on his cell phone. He was in the locker room at Kavanaugh Golf Club. It was true that I was no longer working for Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb when I shot Jerry Hobson, but I told him that I had only continued the job because I’d made a promise to Manny.
He listened until I was done. “Manny was my friend,” he said.
They assigned Max Hernandez, a relatively new associate. He was a local boy who’d gone to USW, then to Columbia Law. He spent three years with the Manhattan district attorney’s office because he liked criminal law. He’d come home because he liked it here better than there, then joined Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb because he liked money too.
While I told him the short version of what I knew, Max had taken notes. He paused thoughtfully, looking at them, then he said, “This is a pretty high-profile shooting. There’s going to be pressure to bring charges. If the DA doesn’t, then there will be howls of outrage, and the Christian community is a very politically important group. They’re not going to want to accept that a couple of their leaders were involved in kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder, which led you to commit justifiable homicide.”
“There are witnesses,” I said.
“Bear with me here,” Max said. “I was an ADA, just like you were a cop, so I know how prosecutors think.
“If I were prosecuting, and I wanted to put you away, here’s what I would say.
“You entered into a conspiracy, with your wife and Nicole Chandler to extort money from the Cathedral of the Third Millennium and Paul Plowright in particular.
“You were short of money. I’d pull up your financials and establish that.
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