by Ted Dekker
The corpse stared wide eyed at the poster of the white yacht. Now that Kent thought about it, he should have closed those bug eyes like they did when someone died on television.
He backed to the door, surveyed his work, and pulled the nine-millimeter semiautomatic Uncle Jerry had given him from the box. Okay boy, now you’re gonna do this. He lifted the pistol. Once he pulled the trigger, he would have to fly. No telling how far the report might travel.
But Mr. Brinkley was having none of it. At least not yet. He suddenly slipped to the side and toppled to the floor, stiff as a board.
Kent cursed and bounded over to the body. He jerked Mr. Brinkley upright and planted him in place. “Stay put, you old fish,” he mumbled through gritted teeth. “You’re dying standing up, whether you like it or not.”
He crouched and squinted. The gun suddenly bucked in his hand. Bang! The report almost knocked him from his feet. Panicked, he fired twice more, quickly, into the body—Bang! Bang! The body stood tall, still staring dumbly forward, oblivious to the bullets that had just torn through its flesh.
Kent swallowed and tossed the weapon back into the box. Shaking badly now, he staggered forward and yanked a two-gallon can from the box. He gave Mr. Brinkley a nudge and let him topple to the floor. He emptied the flammable mixture onto the body and then doused the surrounding carpet. He scanned the office, picked up the box, and backed to the door.
It occurred to Kent, just before he tossed the match, that he was about to go off the deep end here. Right off into some abyss, spread-eagle. He struck the match and let it flare. What on Earth was he about to do? He was about to put the finishing touches on the perfect crime, that’s what he was about to do. He was about to kill Kent Anthony. He was about to join Gloria and Spencer in the ground, six feet under. At least that was the plan, and it was a brilliant plan.
Kent backed into the hall and tossed the match.
Whoomp!
The initial ignition knocked him clear across the hall and onto his seat. He scrambled to his feet and stared, unbelieving, at the blaze. A wall of orange flames reached for the ceiling, crackling and spewing black smoke. Fire engulfed the entire office. Mr. Brinkley’s body lay like a log, flaming with the rest, like Shadrach or Meshack in the fiery furnace. The accelerant mixture worked as advertised. This cadaver was going to burn. Burn, baby, burn.
Then Kent fled the bank. He burst through the back door, tequila box in hand, heart slamming. His Lexus sat parked around the corner to his left. He ran to his right. He would not need the car again. Ever.
He’d run three blocks straight down the back alleys before he heard the first siren. He slowed by a trash bin, palmed the gun, and ditched the box. Behind him a cloud of smoke billowed into the night sky. He had known the old wood-frame building would go up, but he had not expected the fire to grow so quickly.
Kent looked back four blocks later, eyes peeled and unblinking. This time an orange glow lit the sky. A small smile of wonder crossed his face. Sirens wailed on the night air.
Five minutes later he entered the bus depot on Harmon and Wilson, produced a key to locker 234, and withdrew an old, brown briefcase. The case held eleven thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills—traveling expenses—a bus ticket, a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush with some toothpaste, and a passport under his new name. It was all he owned now.
This and a few dozen accounts holding twenty million dollars.
Then Kent walked out into the street and disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Eight Days Later
HELEN BROUGHT two glasses of ice tea into her living room and handed one to Pastor Madison. Returning to her own home was the one small blessing in this latest turn in events. No need to stay at Kent’s if he was gone.
“Thank you, Helen. So . . .”
“So,” she repeated.
“So they’ve concluded the fire resulted from a freak robbery attempt. You read this story?” he asked, lifting the Denver Post in one hand.
“Yes, I saw that.”
The pastor continued anyway. “They say evidence from the scene clearly shows a second party—presumably a robber. Evidently this guy found the rear door open and entered the bank, hoping for some easy cash. Unfortunately, Kent was there, ‘working late on a Sunday night, not unusual for Kent Anthony. The thirty-six-year-old programmer was well known for working odd hours, often into the early hours of the morning.’”
“Hmmm,” Helen offered.
“It says that the investigators speculate that the robber stumbled into Kent, panicked, and shot him dead. He then returned and torched the place—probably in an effort to erase evidence of his presence. He’s still at large, and the search continues. The FBI has no current suspects. No actual robbery was committed . . . They estimate the fire damage to reach three million dollars, a fraction of what it could have been, thanks to the rapid response of the fire department.” He lowered the paper and sipped at his tea.
“And of course, we know the rest, because it’s just about the funeral.”
Helen did not respond. There was not much to say anymore. Things had dropped off her plateau of understanding. She was guided by the unknown now. By the kind of faith she had never dreamed possible.
“What’s happening to his belongings?” Bill asked.
“His will leaves it all to Gloria and Spencer. I suppose the state will get it now—I don’t know and quite frankly, I don’t care. From what I’ve seen, there’s no use for this stuff in the next life anyway.”
He nodded and sipped again. For a while they sat in silence.
“I have to tell you, Helen. This is almost too much for me.”
“I know. It seems difficult, doesn’t it?”
Bill cocked his head, and she knew he was letting his frustration get the better of him. “No, Helen. This does not seem difficult. Not everything is about seeming this way or that way. This is difficult, okay?” He shifted uncomfortably. “I mean, first Kent’s wife dies of a freak disease, and that was unfortunate. I understand these things happen. But then his son is killed in a freak accident. And now we’ve hardly put away the funeral garb, and he’s murdered in some freak robbery attempt. Strange enough? No, not quite. Meanwhile you, the mother, the grandmother, the mother-in-law, are walking around—quite literally—talking about some game in heaven. Some master plan beyond normal human comprehension. To what end? They’re all dead! Your family is all dead, Helen!”
“Things are not always what . . .”
“. . . what they seem,” Bill finished. “I know. You’ve told me that a hundred times. But some things are what they seem! Gloria seems quite dead, and guess what? She is dead!”
“No need to patronize me, young man.” Helen smiled gently. “And in reality, she’s more alive now than dead, so even there you are less right than wrong. In practical terms, you might be right, but the kingdom of heaven is not what most humans would call practical. Quite the opposite. You ever read the teachings of Christ? ‘If a man asks for your tunic, give him your cloak as well.’ You ever do that, Bill? ‘If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.’ You see anybody smash their television lately, Bill? ‘Anyone who does not take up his cross’—that’s death, Bill—‘and follow me is not worthy of me . . . Let the dead bury the dead.’ And it was God speaking those words, as a guideline by which to live life.”
“Well, I’m not talking about the teachings of Christ here. I’m talking about people dying without apparent reason.”
Helen searched him deep with her eyes, feeling empathy and not knowing really why. He was a good man. He simply had not yet seen what was to be seen. “Well, I am talking about the teachings of Christ, Bill, which, whether you like it or not, include death. His own death. The death of the martyrs. The death of those on whose blood the church is built.”
She looked away, and suddenly a hundred images from her own past crashed through her mind. She swallowed. “The reason you look for is here, Pastor.” She waved her h
and slowly through the air. “All around us. We just don’t often see it clearly, and when we do, it is not often as we think it should appear. We’re so bent on stuffing ourselves full of life—full of happiness—that we lose sight of God. Make up our own.”
“God is a God of joy and peace and happiness,” he offered.
“Yes. But the Teacher did not have in mind sitcoms that make you laugh or happy sermons about what a breeze the narrow road really is. Heavens, no. What is pure, Bill? Or excellent or admirable? The death of a million people in the Flood? God evidently thought so. He is incapable of acts that are not admirable, and it was he who brought about the Flood. How about the slaying of children in Jericho? There are few Bible stories that are not as terrible as they are happy. We just prefer to leave out the terrible part, but that only makes the good anemic.” She turned from him and gazed at the picture of Christ in crucifixion.
“We are encouraged to participate in the sufferings of Christ, not to pretend they were feel-happy times. ‘Take this in remembrance of me; this is my blood, this is my body,’ he said. Not, find yourselves an Easter bunny and hunt for chocolate eggs in remembrance of me. We are told to meditate on Scripture, even the half that details the consequence of evil, the conquest of Jericho and all. Not to pretend our God has somehow changed since the time of Christ. Obviously, Paul’s idea of admirable and noble is quite different from ours. God forgive us, Bill. We have mocked his victory by whitewashing the enemy for the sake of our neighbor’s approval.”
He blinked and drew a deep breath. “Imagine me talking like that from the pulpit. It would scare the breath out of most of them.” He lowered his head, but his jaw was clenched, she saw. Suddenly those images from her past were crashing through her mind again, and she closed her eyes briefly. She should tell him, she thought.
“Let me tell you a story, Bill. A story about a man of God unlike any I have known. A soldier. He was my soldier.” Now the emotions flooded her with a vengeance, and she noted her hands were trembling. “He was from Serbia, you know, before he came to the States. Fought in the war there with a small team of special forces. He served under a lieutenant, a horrible man.” She shuddered as she said it. “A God hater who slept with the devil.”
She had to stop for a few moments. The memories came too fast, with too much intensity, and she breathed a prayer. Father, forgive me. She glanced up at the red bottle in her hutch, sitting, calling from the past. From the corner of her eye she saw that Bill was staring at her.
“Anyway, they walked into a small town one day. The commander led them straight to the church at the center. The soldier said that he knew with one look into the lieutenant’s eyes that he had come with cruel intentions. It was a gross understatement.”
She swallowed and plowed on before this thing got the best of her. “The commander had them gather the townspeople, about a hundred of them, I think, and then he began his games.” Helen looked up at the cross again. “The priest was a God-fearing man. For hours the commander played his game—bent upon forcing the priest to renounce Christ before the townsfolk. The horror of those hours was so reprehensible that I can hardly speak of them, Bill. To hear of them I would weep for hours.”
Tears slipped from Helen’s eyes and fell to her lap.
“The soldier was appalled by what he saw. He tried in vain to stop the lieutenant— almost lost his own life. But in the end the priest died. He died a martyr for the love of Christ. There is a monument to him in the town now. It is a cross rising from a green lawn bearing the inscription, ‘No Greater Love Has Any Man.’ The day after the priest’s death, they collected some of his blood and sealed it into several small crystal bottles, so they would not forget.”
She stood and walked to the hutch. She’d told no one other than her daughter of this, but it was time, wasn’t it? Yes, it was time she spread this seed. Her breathing was coming thick as she pulled open the glass doors. She placed her fingers around the small bottle and pulled it out. The container was only slightly larger than her hand.
Helen returned to her seat and sat slowly, her mind swirling with the images. “The soldier went back to the village the next day to beg for their forgiveness. They gave him one of the bottles filled with the martyr’s blood.” Helen held the bottle out on her palm. “Never to worship or to idolize, they told him. But to remind him of the price paid for his soul.”
It was not the whole story, of course. If the pastor knew the whole story he would be slobbering on the floor in a pool of his own tears, she thought. Because the whole story was as much her story as the soldier’s, and it stretched the very limits of love. Perhaps she would give him the book Janjic had written before he’d died, When Heaven Weeps. Then he would know.
“The experience profoundly changed his life,” she said, looking at Bill. His eyes were misty, staring at the floor. “And ultimately it changed my life, and Gloria’s and Spencer’s and even yours and countless others. And now Kent’s, possibly. But you see, it all began with death. The death of Christ, the death of the priest. Without these I would not be here today. Nor would you, Pastor. It is how I see the world now.”
“Yes.” He nodded, gathering himself. “You do see more than most of us.”
“I see only a little more than you, and most of that by faith. You think I wear the face of God?”
He blinked, obviously unsure if he was meant to answer.
“You see me walking around, disturbed, worried, with a furrowed brow. You think it’s the face of God? Of course not! He is furious at sin, no doubt. And his heart aches over the rejection of his love. But above it all he rolls with laughter, beside himself with joy. I see only the hem of his garment and then only at times. The rest comes by faith. We may have different giftings, but we all have the same faith. Give or take. We are not so different, Pastor.”
He stared at her. “I’ve never heard you say those things.”
“Then maybe I should have spoken sooner. Forgive me. I can be a bit mule-headed, you know.”
He smiled at her. “Don’t worry, Helen. If you’re a mule, may God smite our church with a thousand mules.” They chuckled.
For several minutes they just sat there and thought in silence. Their glasses clinked with ice now and then, but the gravity of the moment seemed to want its own space, so they let it be. Helen hummed a few bars of “The Martyr’s Song” and stared out to the field beyond her house. Autumn would come someday. What would walking be like then?
“Are you still walking?” Bill asked the question as if it had been the real reason for his visit and he was just now getting around to it.
“Yes. Yes I am.”
“The full distance?”
“Yes.”
“But how? I thought you were walking and praying for Kent’s soul?”
“Well, that’s the problem. That’s where things don’t seem to be what they seem. I’m still walking because I’ve felt no urge not to walk and because my legs still walk without tiring and because I still want to pray for Kent.”
“Kent is dead, Helen.”
“Yes. So it seems. But the heavens are not playing along. I walked that first day after the fire, seeking release. It was to be expected, I thought. But I found no release.”
She glanced at him and saw that he’d tilted his head, unbelieving.
“And then there’s the dream. Someone’s still running through my head at night. I still hear his breathing, the soft pounding of feet through the tunnel. The drama is still unfolding, Pastor.”
Bill gave her a small, sympathetic smile. “Come on, Helen. I talked to the lead investigator myself two days ago. He told me very specifically that the coroner clearly identified the body as belonging to Kent Anthony. Same height, same weight, same teeth, same everything. FBI’s records confirmed it. That body we buried three days ago belonged to Kent. Maybe he needs help in some afterlife, but he is no longer of this earth.”
“They did an autopsy, then?”
“An autopsy of what? Of char
red bones?”
“DNA?”
“Come on, Helen. You can’t actually believe . . . Look, I know this is hard on you. It’s been a terrible tragedy. But don’t you think this is going a little too far?”
Her eyes bore into his with an unmoving stare. “This has nothing to do with tragedy, young man. Am I or am I not walking eight hours a day without tiring?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is it some illusion, this walking of mine? Tell me.”
“Of course it’s no illusion. But—”
“Of course? You sound pretty sure about that. Why is God making my legs move like this, Pastor? Is it that he has discovered a new way to make the tiny humans below move? ‘Hey look, Gabriel, we can just wind them up and make them walk around forever.’ No? Then why?”
“Helen . . .”
“I’m telling you, Pastor, this is not over. And I mean, not just in the heavens, but on Earth it’s not over. And since Kent was the main object of this whole thing, no, I don’t think he is necessarily dead.”
She turned away from him. Goodness, listen to her. It was sounding absurd. She had peeked in the coffin herself and seen the blackened bones. “And if you think it makes sense to me, you are wrong. I’m not even saying he is necessarily alive. It is just easier to believe he’s alive, given the fact that I’m still praying long days for him.” She turned back to him. “Does that make sense?”
Bill Madison took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “Well, Helen.” He shook his head. “I guess so.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring off in different directions, lost in thought. His voice broke the stillness.
“It’s very strange, Helen. It’s otherworldly. Your faith is unnerving. You’re giving your life to impossibilities.”
