Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  Nicole understood that anything that just came from her, a choir girl having an affair with her married pastor, would be easily mocked and discounted. The e-mails were hard evidence. They were the real prize. She was determined to get them for Nathaniel.

  Plowright was fondling her and pressing his erection against her.

  If she could distract him before he closed up the computer and get him to take her into the apartment, she could wait until he fell asleep afterwards, then sneak out and get the e-mails. She saw sex in service of a greater good as a heroic act. Had not Esther given herself to the king of Persia and in his bed discovered the plot to kill the Israelites, then brought the news to her uncle, Mordecai, and saved her entire people? Had not the prostitute Rahab harbored Joshua’s spies and given them the information that enabled him to take Jericho. It was even said, though not in the Bible itself, that after the battle, Joshua had taken Rahab as his wife. They had children, and through them, Rahab had been in the direct line of the ancestry of Jesus himself. Yes, that was who she would be, Rahab to Nathaniel’s Joshua.

  “Yes, you are amazingly brilliant,” she said to Plowright, yielding to him, pressing back against him. Then he started to reach for the computer. She didn’t know his password and had to stop him before he shut it down, so she acted eager and said, “Now. Oh, love me now. I want you.”

  Afterward, he did fall asleep. The first time she tried to sneak out, he woke up. The next time, she waited almost an hour, until he was snoring and seemed out cold, before she slipped out of bed. She went out to the office and clicked on the computer. To her relief, it was still open. The e-mails were still there. She was about to forward them to Nathaniel but then decided she wanted to hand them to him physically, in person, and be there when he got them so that he would know, instantly, who had done this for him. She wanted to be there to receive his love and admiration.

  She printed them. As she was taking the pages from the out tray, Plowright opened the door from the apartment and saw her.

  Nicole grabbed the evidence and ran.

  63

  She called Nathaniel on her cell phone. She wanted, really, to go to his home, but he told her to meet him at his office, that it was simpler since she knew where it was.

  Fifteen minutes after she got there, Plowright arrived with Jerry Hobson.

  Hobson had a gun. While he held it on her and Nathaniel, Plowright got his e-mails back.

  Nicole tried to snatch them and make a run for it. Hobson grabbed for her with one hand and got her by the hair. Hobson flung her to the ground and put his foot on her neck, holding her there. That’s when the chain that held her cross must’ve broken, but she didn’t notice until later.

  Hobson gave Plowright the gun and said, “I’ll get her out of here. You make sure he doesn’t do anything.” Then he twisted her arm up behind her back and made her get up. He marched her out, holding his other hand over her mouth so she couldn’t yell.

  He put her in his car, the big Hummer. Then he put what she called “weird plastic handcuffs” on both her hands and feet. His cell phone rang, and he answered it. He said, “Yeah,” listened, then said, “I’ll be right there.” He put tape over her mouth, made her lie down on the floor, and attached the “plastic things” to the bottom of the seats so she couldn’t move. Then he went away. She couldn’t say for how long. It seemed long, but she didn’t know.

  Then he came back with Paul, and they drove away.

  “We have to get rid of her,” she heard Hobson say.

  “No! Oh, no, we can’t do that,” Plowright said.

  “We have to.”

  “No, I forbid it,” Plowright said. “She’s been misled. I’ll pray with her. I’ll bring her back to Jesus.”

  They smuggled her into the tower and up to the apartment.

  Hobson went through the place. He removed the phone, disconnected the TV cable hookup, and took the radio. He got a garbage bag and tossed anything he thought could be used as a weapon into it. He argued with Plowright again about what to do with her while she lay on the bed, arms and legs cuffed, the tape still over her mouth.

  Then Plowright came and sat beside her. “I know you were misled,” he said. “I understand. I’m going to take off the tape, and I want you to tell Jeremiah that you want to come back to the path of righteousness and that we will pray together.”

  When he removed the tape, she gulped in deep breaths of air. Then she screamed, “Help! Help!”

  “Be quiet!” Plowright yelled at her.

  She kept screaming.

  “Shut up. No one can hear you.”

  “Let me go! Let me go now! I won’t tell if you let me go now.”

  “You have to stay,” he said implacably.

  “I’m not going to stay with you. Not ever!” Then she started screaming again. “Help!”

  Plowright gave her one of his righteous looks, showing that he was severely disappointed in her. He got up and walked out of the apartment. She screamed one last time, hoping that when the door opened someone might hear her voice.

  Then Jerry took over.

  When he was done beating her, or maybe before it ended—she wasn’t sure—Plowright came back. She was whimpering and moaning, in more pain than she’d ever felt in her life. Than she’d ever imagined.

  Plowright sat beside her once again. He touched her hair gently. She flinched and turned her head away. “It’s alright now. I’ll protect you. I want to save you, body and soul. In the morning, I’ll come back, and we’ll pray.”

  “If you try to escape,” Hobson said, “I’ll kill you.”

  “No, no,” Plowright said. “We don’t want to do that. That won’t be necessary, will it, Nicky?”

  “No,” she said.

  She needed clothing. Plowright brought her a set of school uniforms from Third Millennium Christian Academy.

  If she got snippy, he would impose corporal punishment, just as they did at the school. If she got defiant, he would threaten to bring Hobson back. She called his bluff. But only once.

  So they prayed. Watched inspirational movies and pornographic DVDs. And had sex.

  Gwen said, “That’s totally unbelievable. You don’t have sex and watch pornography with people who beat you up and who you hate.”

  In her world, where people had control of their lives, that might have been true. If she’d been on the job and met the battered wives, gone to the brothels full of women beaten into sexual slavery, visited the fortress of stone where once-straight men became other men’s bitches, she’d have known that people of both sexes who have been hurt and abused and are living under constant threat will engage in sex and perform with apparently great enthusiasm. Whether that’s feigned or real, or some combination of the two, is another matter.

  There was one more thing. “I always thought Nathaniel would come to rescue me,” Nicole said, crying. “Now I know why he didn’t.”

  64

  “Nicole,” I said as gently as I could, “we have to get out of here, before Paul, or Jerry, shows up.”

  “I’m scared,” she said, sounding it and looking it and unwilling to go.

  “She doesn’t really want to leave,” Gwen said, looking down at the sex toys scattered all over the floor, then over at Nicole.

  There was something to that. But Gwen didn’t really understand. Gwen had Jesus, big time and for real. And she was innately courageous. She would burn at the stake before she would break.

  She didn’t understand how prisoners adapt. How people flow into the world around them the way water goes into whatever space is open to it, compromising one day at a time, taking consolation in whatever pleasure or relief they can find. After that, leaving means facing the dreadful knowledge of what you did, of what you became, and knowing you’ll never quite believe the excuse that it was just to survive.

  Even the strength and consolation of faith was lost to Nicole. It was through Jesus that she had been seduced and abused and imprisoned. It was the men of God who ha
d killed the man she loved.

  What awaited her outside this room? Nathaniel, the man who was to be her new salvation, was gone. No one she knew would see her as a Rahab who had opened Jericho to the Israelites; everyone would see her as what Gwen had already called her, Delilah, a whore and traitor who had seduced their Samson in order to worm his secrets out of him and betray him to the Philistines.

  I went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She jumped back, away from me, onto the bed, and curled up. I went to her, but not too close, and squatted so that I would be at her level, not looming over her. “I won’t hurt you,” I said. “Please, listen to me. I’d let you stay if I could. I’d leave it up to you. But with what I know now, tomorrow the world is going to know, and then . . . then you won’t be safe here anymore. You have to come with us now. I have to get you out of here. Otherwise . . . and I can’t let that happen.”

  She lifted her head and looked at me, then past me at Gwen, then back at me. “I want to . . . , ” she began, and I thought she was going to say, “trust you.” But then it got lost, and she asked, “How do I know that you haven’t just been playing me to get me to go quietly and kill me? How do I know?”

  “Oh, please,” Gwen said, offended by the idea. “What do you think we are? We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “I don’t know what to think of you,” Nicole snapped back, “but you’ve made it damn clear what you think of me.”

  “Whatever you are,” Gwen said patronizingly, “whatever you’ve done, we wouldn’t kill you. We’re good people, Christian people.”

  It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Nicole froze. “Get out! Get out! Leave me be!” she blurted, then began to cry, almost hysterically.

  “Nicole, listen to me. You know that Nathaniel wrote a book?”

  She nodded yes.

  “Plowright and Hobson tried to destroy that book, to erase everything that Nathaniel was, like he never existed. One of the things I was hired to do was find that book. So that Nathaniel will be remembered, so that his life will have meant something.”

  That got her attention.

  “I need you to help me. If you can help me, then you will have done something really special, truly special for him, the most special thing that anyone ever could do.”

  “Do you think he’ll know?” she asked me.

  I thought about Manny. Were his appearances real or just my imagination?

  She asked, “Do the dead know what we do after they’ve gone?”

  Had Manny known, even before he died, that he could trust me to carry on when he was gone? Was that how the dead know what we do?

  “Yes, I think they do. I don’t know how, exactly, but I think they do.”

  “Alright,” she said, reaching up to take my hand. Plowright, MacLeod, now me. I was her new guide. “I’ll go with you.”

  65

  We stepped cautiously out of the apartment and back into the office. I went first, gun in hand, but it was still quiet and deserted.

  Nicole stayed close to me. I was prepared to accept the role she put me in for as long as it took to get her out of there—and maybe up on the witness stand.

  Gwen still didn’t buy Nicole’s story. She was ready to hear Pastor Paul explain it all away, and she would believe him when he did, no matter how far-fetched his stories were. She showed her disapproval by keeping her distance from us.

  She made me realize that there were plenty of people out there just like her. In a contest of he said, she said, Plowright would win. I needed hard evidence.

  I could see on the screen that Plowright was still down on stage, the model of his City of God beside him. The light from the neon cross created a halo around his head and painted one side of his face with blue, cold silver, and pale gold. The effect of having the sound off, combined with the hyperreality of high-definition video, made the image strangely lurid, like an illustration on a poster from a 1950s movie that screamed warnings about the wages of sin. When the camera cut to a close-up, his face twice life size and his wet lips moving in fervent, unheard speech, I couldn’t help thinking of him with Nicole, the toys buzzing and the downloaded videos yelping and moaning away.

  He was nowhere near done. There was time.

  I went to his computer. When the screen came on, it asked for a password. His birthday? His wife’s birthday? His name spelt backward? Something biblical? “What’s his favorite passage?” I asked Gwen.

  “What are you doing? Shouldn’t we go?”

  “His favorite passage, what is it?”

  “Genesis 1:26,” she said.

  “Dominion?”

  As I began to type it in, I heard a ping.

  I looked toward the source of the sound.

  A little red light was blinking on the closed-circuit TV monitor over the regular entrance to the office. The screen showed a view of the small lobby on the other side. It made sense that a preacher who liked to watch porn and rub the flesh of his choir girls would want warning bells to go off before someone came in.

  The little monitor showed the elevator door in the lobby opening. Jerry Hobson stepped out. Another man in a suit and tie was just behind him.

  One more step and his identity was revealed: Jorge Guzman de Vaca.

  “Down,” I hissed to Gwen. “Hide.” I took Nicole’s hand and pulled her back toward one of the secretary’s desks and down behind it. Gwen froze for a moment, then saw the two men on the screen just as Jerry was opening the door into the office. She scrambled backward and found a spot behind the tall filing cabinets.

  “Here we are,” I heard Hobson say. “Plenty of privacy. What do you want?”

  “I want in on the action,” Jorge said.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Jerry said with that casual contempt for civilians that comes so easily to cops. He’d always had it. Especially toward Mexicans.

  “My construction companies are some of the best in the state,” Jorge said, sounding unfazed and unoffended. “We do it all—housing, offices, roads. I have a company that does financing. Cash looking for a home.”

  “You mean money laundering,” Hobson said, like he disapproved of it.

  “These are big things you’re doing here,” Jorge said, sounding impressed. “Plenty for everybody.”

  “Nah’ for chu, cholo,” Jerry said, sneering at him with a broadly fake accent.

  “I got something you should see,” Jorge said, still the pleasant business man working on a sale. “Hey, are you a PC guy or a Mac guy?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I got this promotional video. Did it myself on iMovie. It’s so easy, even a grown-up can learn it. You got a DVD player? You want to see this, Jerry.”

  “Chingate, Cheech.”

  “You need to see this,” Jorge said, serious as death. “If you don’t see it, you will regret it later, very much regret it.”

  “Sure I will,” Jerry said sarcastically. But he wasn’t sure enough to call the bluff; he needed to find out what cards Guzman was holding. “Alright, go ahead.”

  They were silent for a moment, and there was some moving around. Then I heard Jorge say, “Sound, you need the sound.”

  “Some idiot hit the mute button,” Jerry said and turned the sound back on.

  A new voice said, “We’re working for Jerry Hobson, this company he’s got, but it’s him.” It was Daniel Polasky.

  If they were watching the DVD on the same screen that Plowright’s sermon had been on, then their backs were likely turned toward me. I slipped my HK back out of its holster. Then I took the risk of peeking around the edge of the desk.

  The two of them were standing three-quarters turned away from me.

  Danny “Beef” Polasky was on the screen, naked, tied to the chair, one hand clutching the bloody rag wrapped around the other hand. He was illuminated by a single harsh lamp that threw a dark shadow onto the dingy, cinder block wall behind him. While I’d been peeking through the vent on the roof, there’d been a camera
down there, beyond my angle of vision, looking straight at him.

  “What do you do for him?” asked an offscreen interrogator.

  “Mostly the girls—we keep an eye on Plowright’s girls.”

  I looked over at Gwen as Polasky spoke about “straightening them out.” Reality was tearing pages out of the Bible stories in her mind. She looked devastated.

  Nicole clutched my hand when Polasky went on about the rape of the “nice blondie.” It could have been her, and she was starting to snivel. I got her attention and put my finger to my lips. She swallowed and tried to control herself.

  When I heard the interrogator say, “If you don’t tell me the truth, you know what I’m gonna do,” I peaked around again. The pruning shears poked into the frame and prodded his crotch. Whoever was holding it had been careful not to appear in front of the camera.

  “. . . It was just that Plowright was getting out of control, you know, with the babes, and Jeremiah said we just hadda keep a lid on.”

  That was it for Gwen too. She looked over at me, devastated. I wondered how the hell we were going to get out of there. Would they finish soon and leave?

  Jerry said, “Alright, I get it.”

  But Guzman didn’t shut it off, and Danny told the story about kidnapping and torturing Ahmad. There was my evidence. I didn’t know what it would do in court, but it should be enough to free Ahmad. I thought maybe I should just try to take them. But then what? Try to march them out of the Cathedral at gunpoint?

  There was more. The part that I’d missed when I was trying to get down from the roof.

  “. . . And that detective, we were supposed to take him out. Jeremiah called us and said, ‘Get over here right away. He’s going to be headed from his house to the city at around 11 a.m. Wait for him near Exit 28, where he’ll get on the interstate, and find someplace to take him out.’”