by Ted Dekker
“That’s not how the employment manual lays the program out,” Kent said, still too shocked to be angry. Surely the president didn’t think he could get away with this line of argument. They would fry his behind in court!
Bentley’s lips fell flat. “Now, you listen to me, Anthony. I don’t give a rat’s tushy what you think the employment manual says. In this branch, that bonus goes to the management. You work for Borst. Borst works for me.” The words came out like bullets from a silenced pistol.
The president took one hard breath. “What work you did for the bank, you did on our time, at our request, and for it we paid you well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s it. You hear me? You even think about fighting this, and I promise you we will bury you.” The large man said it, shaking.
Kent felt his mouth drop during the diatribe. This was impossible! “You can’t do that!” he protested. “You can’t just rip my bonus off because . . .” And suddenly Kent knew precisely what he was up against. Bentley was in on it. He stood to receive huge sums of money from the bonus. He and Borst were in on this together. Which made it a conspiracy of sorts.
The man was glaring at him, daring him to say more. So he did.
“Listen!” He bit the word off with as much intensity as Bentley had used. “You know as well as I do that if I had been in Miami, I would have made that presentation, and I would be receiving most if not all of the bonus.” A lump of self-pity rose to join the bitterness, and he trembled. “But I wasn’t, was I? Because I had to rush home to tend to my wife, who was dying. So instead, you and Borst put your slimy heads together and decided to steal my bonus! What was it?” Kent wagged his head, mocking. ‘Oh, poor little Anthony. His wife is dying. But at least he’ll be distracted while we stab him in the back and strip him naked!’ Is that about it, Bentley?”
The bank president’s reaction was immediate. His eyes widened, and he drew an unsteady breath. “You speak like that to me in my own office? One more word out of you, and I’ll have you on the street by day’s end!”
But Kent had lost his political good sense entirely. “You have no right to do any of this, Bentley! That is my bonus you are stealing. People go to jail for theft in this country. Or is that news to you, as well?”
“Out! Get out!”
“I’ll take this to the top. You understand me? And if I go down, you’re going down with me. So don’t even think about trying to cut me out. Everyone knew that the programming was my code.”
“You might be surprised what everyone knew,” Bentley shot back. He had forsaken that professional sheen, and Kent felt a spike of satisfaction for it.
“Yes, of course. You will bribe them all, I suppose?” he sneered.
The room went quiet again. When Bentley spoke again, it was low and stern, but the tremor was unmistakable. “Get out of my office, Anthony. I have a meeting in a few minutes. If it’s all right with you, I need to prepare a few notes.”
Kent stared the man down for a moment. “Actually, nothing is okay with me just now, sir. But then, you already know that, don’t you?” He stood and walked behind the chair before turning back.
“And if you try to take my job from me I will personally sue you to the highest heaven. Your bonus may be an internal matter, but there are state laws that deal with employment. Don’t even think about stripping me of my income.”
He turned to the door and left Bentley sitting with big jowls and squinty eyes, like Jabba the Hut.
It was not until he heard the door close behind him that Kent fully realized how badly it had just gone for him. Then it crashed on him like a block of con- crete, and a sick droning obscured his thoughts. He struck for the public restrooms across the lobby.
What had he done? He had to call Dennis. All of his worst fears had just come to life. It was a prospect he could not stomach. Would not stomach. Walking across the lobby, he suddenly felt like he was pushing through a steam bath. More than anything he’d ever wanted, possibly even more than the money itself, Kent wanted out of this nightmare. Go back three weeks and check back into Miami’s Hyatt Regency. This time when they handed him the note it would have a different name on it. I’m sorry, you have the wrong party, he’d say. I am not Ken Blatherly. My name’s Kent. Kent Anthony. And I’m here to become a millionaire.
Ignoring a young man he recognized as one of the tellers, Kent bent over the sink and threw water on his flushed face. He stood, watched the water drip down his face, and strode for the public phone in the corner, not bothering to wipe his face. Water spotted his starched shirt, but he couldn’t care less. Just let Dennis be in. Please let him be in.
The young teller walked out, his eyes wide.
Kent punched the number.
“Warren Law Offices,” the female voice came.
“Dennis in?” Silence. “Is Dennis in?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Kent.”
“May I tell him what it is regarding?”
“Just tell him it’s Kent. Kent Anthony.”
“Please hold.”
No new thoughts formed in the silence. His mind was dipping into numbness.
“Kent! How’s it going?”
Kent told him. He said it all in a long run-on sentence that ended with, “Then he threw me out.”
“What do you mean, threw you out?”
“Told me to get out.”
Silence again.
“Okay, buddy. Listen to me, okay?” Those were sweet words because they came from a friend. A friend who had something to say. That would be good, wouldn’t it?
“I know this may sound impossible right now, but this is not over, you hear me? What he did in there, what Bentley just did, changes things. I’m not saying it hands us the case, but it gives us some pretty decent ammo. Obviously the political approach is dead. You pretty much slaughtered that. But you also managed to give us a fairly strong case.”
Kent felt like crying. Just sitting down and crying.
“But I need you to do something for me, buddy. Okay? I need you to walk back to your office, sit down at your desk, and work the day out as if nothing at all happened. If we’re lucky, they will fire you. And if they fire you, we’ll slap the biggest unlawful discharge suit on them the state has ever seen. But if they don’t fire you, I need you to continue working in good faith. We can’t give them cause to release you. They might consider your confrontation this morning as insubordination, but there were no witnesses, right?”
“Right.”
“So then you work as if you did nothing but go to Bentley’s office and deliver some paper clips. You hear me? Can you do that?”
Kent wasn’t sure he could, actually. The thought of seeing Borst and company back there made him swallow. On the other hand, he had to keep his options open. He had a mortgage and a car payment and groceries to think about. And he had Spencer.
“Yes, I can do that,” he replied. “You really think we have something here?”
“It may be messy and take awhile. But yes, I do.”
“Okay. Okay. Thanks, Dennis. I owe you.”
“Don’t worry. There’ll be a bill if things go our way.”
Kent tried to chuckle with his friend. It came out like a cough.
He hung up, straightened himself in front of the mirror, and let his eyes clear. Ten minutes later, he left the restroom and strode for the administrative offices, clenching his jaw. He’d been through hell already. There could be nowhere but up from here.
Nowhere but straight up.
HELEN SHUFFLED over the groove a dozen years of pacing had worn in her bedroom carpet along the length of the double French doors leading to her second-story balcony. It was her prayer closet. Her prayer groove. The place from which she most often broke through to the heavens. In better days she would think nothing of staying on her feet, pacing for hours at a stretch. But now her worn legs limited her to a plodding twenty minutes, tops. Then she would be forced to retreat to her bed or to the rocker.
She wore a long, pink housecoat that swayed around her bare feet. Her hair rested in tangles; bags darkened her eyes; her mouth had found frowning acceptable these days. Despite her understanding of a few things, the fact that her daughter was now gone did not rest easily. It was one thing to peek into the heavens and hear the laughter there. It was another thing altogether to be stuck here, yearning for that laughter. Or even the sweet reprimanding voice of her dear Gloria, instructing her on the finer points of manners.
She pulled at her skin and smiled briefly. Skinpullers. Gloria was right, it was a ridiculous name.
It was most often the memories that brought floods of tears to her eyes. But in the end she supposed that it was all right, this weeping. After all, Jesus himself had wept.
Five feet to the right, her white-lace-canopy bed waited with sheets already pulled back. Beside it, a clay bowl filled with red potpourri sent wafts of cinnamon across the room. The ceiling fan clicked overhead, barely moving the air in its lazy circles. Helen reached the end of her groove and turned back, eyeing that bed. Now it was on her left.
But she was not headed there just yet, despite the midnight hour. Not until she broke through here, in her groove. She could feel it in her spirit—or more accurately, her spirit wanted to feel something. It wanted to be spoken to. Soothed by the balm from heaven. Which usually meant that heaven wanted to soothe her. Speak to her. It was how God drew mortals, she’d decided once. He spoke desire into willing hearts. Which actually came first, the desire or the willing, was sort of like the chicken or the egg scenario. In the end a rather ridiculous exercise best left to theologians.
In either case, Helen knew to trust her senses, and her senses suggested she intercede now—intercede until she found what peace her spirit sought. If for no other reason than she knew of no other way. The problem began when her eyes had been opened to that scene in the heavens before Gloria’s death. She had seen her daughter lying on the hospital bed, and that had sent her over a cliff of sorts. Oh, she had recovered quickly enough, but it was the rest of the vision that had plagued her night and day over the last few weeks.
Helen closed her eyes and paced by feel, ignoring the dull pain in her knees, subconsciously stepping off the seven paces from end to end. Her mind drifted back to the meeting with Pastor Madison earlier that afternoon. He had said nothing more about their conversation at the hospital. But when she walked into his office today and plopped down in the guest chair facing him, he’d stared her straight through. She knew then that he had not so easily shaken her claim at having seen more.
“How you doing, Bill?” she’d asked.
He did not bother answering. “So, what’s happening, Helen?”
“I don’t know, Pastor. That’s what I came to find out. You tell me.”
He smiled and nodded at her immediate response. “Come on, Helen. You are as much a pastor to me as I am to anybody here. You made some pretty strong statements at the hospital.”
“Yes. Well, it hasn’t gotten any better. And you are wrong if you think that I do not need you to pastor me. I am nearly lost on this one, Bill.”
“And I am completely lost, Helen. We can’t have the blind leading the blind, now, can we?”
“No. But you have been placed in your office with a gifting that comes from God. Use it. Pastor me. And don’t pretend that you are a mere clergyman without supernatural guidance—we have enough of those to fill the world’s graveyards as it is.”
The large Greek smiled and folded his hands on his oak desk. He presented a perfectly stately image, sitting there all dressed in black with a red tie, surrounded by bookshelves stuffed with expensive-looking books.
“Okay, Helen. But you can’t expect me to see the way you see. Tell me what you saw.”
“I already told you what I saw.”
“You told me that you saw Gloria lying in the hospital. That’s all you told me. Except that you saw more. So what did you see?”
She sighed. “I was praying with Gloria and Spencer, and we were taken to a place. In our minds or our spirits—I don’t know how these things actually work. But I was given a bird’s-eye view of Gloria’s hospital room two days before she died. I saw everything, right down to the green pen in the attending physician’s coat.”
She said it with a firm jaw, steeling herself against emotion. She’d had enough sorrow to finish the year out, she thought.
Pastor Madison shook his head slowly. “It just seems incredible. I mean . . . I’ve never heard of such vivid precognition.”
“This was not pre anything. This was as real as if I were there.”
“Yes, but it happened before. That would make it pre. A vision of what is to happen.”
“God is not bound by time, young man. You should know that. I was there. Maybe in spirit only, but I was there. It is not my job to understand how I was there; I leave that to the more learned in the church. But understanding does not necessarily change an experience. It merely explains it.”
“I don’t mean to argue with you, Helen. I’m not the enemy here.”
Helen closed her eyes for a moment. The pastor was right, of course. He might very well be her only ally in all of this. She would be wise to choose her words with more care.
“Yes. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . maddening, you know.” Memories of Gloria clogged her mind, and she cleared her throat. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely myself these days.”
“But you are yourself, Helen.” His deep voice came soothingly. A pastor’s voice. “You are a woman who has lost her daughter. If you were not frustrated and angry, I might worry.”
She looked up at him and smiled. Now he was indeed pastoring her, and it felt like it should—comforting. She should have come here a week ago.
“You said you saw something else, Helen. What was the rest?”
“I can’t tell you, Bill. Not because I don’t want to, but because I have only seen glimpses that make no sense. And I’ve felt things. It is the feelings mostly that bother me, and those are hard to explain. Like God is whispering to my heart but I can’t see or hear his words. Not yet.”
“I see. Then tell me how it feels.”
She looked past his shoulder to a long string of green books with a German-looking name stamped in gold foil across each spine: knowledge.
“Questions? Step right up! We have the answers. Yes, ma’am. You in the yellow dress.”
“Yes. Why does God kill the innocent?”
“Well, now. That depends on what you mean by kill. Or by innocent—”
“I mean kill! Dead. Head against the rocks. And innocent. Plain innocent!”
“Helen?”
She looked back at Bill. “Tell you how it feels? It feels like those whispers to the heart. Like you’ve just walked into a dark dungeon. You’ve just seen one skull, and the hair on your neck stands on end, and you know there must be more. But you see, that’s where it all gets fuzzy. Because I don’t know if it’s God’s dungeon or Satan’s dungeon. I mean, you would think it was Satan’s. Who ever would think of God having a dungeon. But there are others peering into this dark space, as well. Angels. God himself. And there is the sound of running feet—running away. But I know that the skull there on the black earth is Gloria’s. I do know that. And I know it’s all part of a plan. It’s all part of the running feet. That’s the thing. You see, my daughter was sacrificed.”
Helen paused and drew her breath carefully, noting that it had grown short. “There are some more things, but they would not make any sense right now.” She looked up at him with heavy eyes.
“And this does?”
She shrugged. “You asked for it.”
Pastor Madison looked at her with wide eyes. “And I don’t think you can be so sure that your daughter was sacrificed. God does not work like that.”
“You don’t think so? Well, it’s one thing to read about how God butchered a thousand nasty Amalekites long ago, but when the object of his ax is your own daughter’s neck, the blin
dfolds go on, do they?”
Bill sat back without removing his eyes from hers. His dark brows were pulled together, creating furrows above the bridge of his nose. He’d stopped shepherding, she thought. Not that she blamed him. She had stopped bleating.
“It’s okay, Bill. I don’t really understand it, either. Not yet. But I would like you to pray with me. Pray for me. I’m a part of this, and it’s not yet finished; that much I do know. It is all just beginning. Now you’re a part of it. I need you, Pastor.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course I will. But I want you to at least consider the possibility that you are misreading these images.” He held up his hand. “I know it’s not in your nature to do so, Helen. But so far all that has happened is that your daughter has died. I’m not minimizing the trauma of her death, not at all. In fact that very trauma may be initiating all of this. Can you at least understand my line of thinking?” His eyebrows lifted hopefully.
She nodded and smiled, thinking he might very well be the one who was mis- understanding here; he appeared to have missed the point entirely. “Yes, I can. Any psychiatrist in his right mind would tell me the same.” She stood then. “But you are wrong, Bill. Gloria’s death is not the only thing that has happened. They are rather frantic in the heavens, I think. And there is more to come. It is this for which I need your prayers. That and possibly my sanity. But I assure you, young man. I have not lost it yet.”
She had walked out then.
He had called two hours later and told her he was praying. It was a good thing, she thought. He was a good man, and she liked him.
Helen let the memory drift away and brought her mind back to the present. Lack of understanding seemed as valuable to God as understanding. It required man to dip into the black hole of faith. But dipping into the hole was pretty much like walking through the dungeon at times.
She tilted her head back and breathed to the ceiling. “Oh God, do not keep silent; be not quiet, oh God, be not still.” She quoted the Psalms as she often did in prayer. It was a kind of praying that seemed to fit her new life. “I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail looking for my God.”
