Comeback (6 page)

"Both. Local insert on
Today,
and just about every local radio news spot."

Good. Archibald would have no trouble selling out this twenty-thousand-seat arena, but it was nice anyway to let
other
people, people who so far were insufficiendy aware of the Reverend William Archibald, know that this attraction was such a grabber it drew six hundred overnight campers. Better than the World Series.

Dwayne went on, "Security's shitty at this place, though I don't suppose it matters."

"Dwayne," Archibald said comfortably, sopping up the last of his egg yolk with the last of Tina's second piece of toast, "you say that every place we go."

"It's true every place we go," Dwayne said. "These outfits today, they're not used to cash."

"Dwayne, Dwayne," Archibald said, "who's going to steal from the ministry?"

"Well, we've had some, now and then."

"Pilfering. Employees, misguided smalltime people. You find them out, Dawyne, you always do, and I give them a good talking-to."

"And then I," Dwayne said, "kick their butts into the street."

"But we haven't had anybody like that for a long time," Archibald said. "You pick those people with a great deal of care, Dwayne."

"Which brings me," Dwayne said, "to this boy Carmody."

Archibald sighed. "A knottier problem than most," he admitted.

"I think we ought to get rid of him."

"For zealousness? Dwayne, we've never had to do anything like that before, and I just worry it could backfire on us."

"He's making trouble," Dwayne insisted. "He's an infection that could spread. I like my troops motivated."

"Yes, of course. But the press, Dwayne. The press is a constant affliction. If Tom Carmody's disaffection led him to the wrong reporter, if he found a sympathetic ear in the media to listen when he says we threw him out because he
got religion,
it could be very bad. Very bad."

"Three days' wonder."

"Maybe. And maybe it's open season on servants of the Lord right now, Dwayne, and we ought to, as our corporate friends say, protect our asses."

"I don't like what he says to the troops," Dwayne insisted.

Archibald understood what Dwayne's problem was. The Marine Corps method of dealing with rotten apples was to seek them out, identify them, and throw them away before they could infect the rest of the bushel. But the Marine Corps didn't have to worry about the combination of a naturally hostile press and a business dependent on voluntary contributions. What Tom Carmody could do to sow doubt in the minds of Dwayne's troops was
nothing
to what he could conceivably do, with the right reporter's help, to sow doubt in the minds of people like the six hundred drinking their thermos coffee at the moment out at the arena. Employees come and go, but the six hundred are needed forever.

Which it would not be politic to explain to Dwayne, an essentially simple soul whose range of comprehension was unlikely ever to extend beyond the perimeter of the brigade. If someone was troublesome to Dwayne's troops, that's all he would see or care to see; the larger picture was beyond him.

Archibald said, "I tell you what. After the crusade today, I'll have a chat with Tom, see if I can bring him round a bit."

"Fine," Dwayne said. "But, Will,
look
at him when you talk to him. Look him over. Keep an open mind. If he isn't gonna come around, tell me. I won't just fire him, I'll ease him out, so he don't get mad."

The idea of Dwayne being tactful brought a faint smile to Archibald's lips. He said, "I'll study him like the lesson of the day. How's that?"

Tina said, "Maybe you could talk him into joining some monks or something. Go into a monastery. Then he'd be away from us, but he'd be happy."

Dwayne always squinted a bit and looked away when Tina spoke, as though a bright light were being shined on him. He did that again now, and left it to Archibald to say, "Tina, that's a very good idea. I'll sound him out. A monastery is an
excellent
place for a religious young man."

"He's got a girl friend," Dwayne said, with no inflection.

Archibald raised an eyebrow. "
Has
he? So much for the monastery. Is she part of the problem, do you think?"

"Probably. Don't know for sure."

"Perhaps I should talk to them both together."

"She isn't here," Dwayne said. "She isn't one of us. She lives back in Memphis," he explained,

Memphis being Archibald's home base, where he had his Eternal Jesus Chapel and where his television ministry was taped.

"Well, I don't think we should postpone the issue until we get back to Memphis," Archibald said. "I'll talk to Tom this afternoon, after the crusade, and if necessary, talk to the girl later, when we get home. What kind of girl is she?"

"Don't know," Dwayne said, and shrugged. "Mary something. Don't know a thing about her."

Just around the time William Archibald was whistling in the shower, Mary Quindero was beginning to die. She knew it, or suspected it, or feared it, but couldn't warn her murderers because they refused to hear anything except the answers to their questions, and she had no more answers. They, Woody Kellman and Zack Flynn, didn't know she was dying because they had no idea of the cumulative effect of the strangle-and-reprieve, drown-and-reprieve methods they were using to get the answers they felt she was still holding back. And her brother, Ralph Quindero, couldn't know what was happening because he was over at Zack's place, watching an old horror movie on the VCR, unable to be present while his friends pressured his sister, and not realizing just how stupid they were.

"Don't hurt her, or— You know, don't do— She's my sister, you know, I gotta ..."

"Don't worry, Ralph, when she sees we're serious, what's she gonna do? What's her choice? We gotta pressure her a little, that's all, so she knows we're serious. That's all."

That it hadn't worked that way was simply a miscalculation on everybody's part, starting with Ralph, who hadn't believed his pals would actually harm his own sister, and continuing with Woody and Zack, whose knowledge of the world came from movies and TV, which hadn't told them that, in real life, you could kill a person by repeatedly holding her head underwater in a bathtub, and finishing with Mary herself, who was motivated by a foolish desire to protect her dumb younger brother and who couldn't believe until too late that he wouldn't at some point come in and make them stop. But he didn't.

No. Ralph watched the horror movie until the finish, then brooded at the telephone while the tape rewound, wondering if he should call Mary's place, just see what was going on. This was taking longer than they'd expected, wasn't it? An hour and a half. What could take an hour and a half? How much information could Mary have, after all, and how long before Woody and Zack got it out of her?

Without the movie to distract his thoughts, he found himself worrying a little more about his sister in the hands of those two guys. They wouldn't. . . fuck her or anything, would they? No, they wouldn't do that, because they knew she'd tell him about it afterward, and they knew he'd
kill
them if they went too far, if they even— if they did anything except what they'd already agreed on: Lean on her a little, get whatever else it was Tom Carmody had told her about the guys who were out to grab the preacher's money, then phone him here to go downstairs and wait at the curb.

When Woody realized her eyes were open underwater, and that some new kind of sullen limpness had come over her body, different from the times when she'd passed out, he had an instant of panic, quickly buried. Ignoring the knowledge he already possessed, he pulled her back up out of the tub and stretched her out once again on the white-die bathroom floor. Her eyes stayed open, water drops standing on them, not at all like tears.

"Passed out again," Zack said, disgusted, looking over WoodyV looming back, his view obstructed.

Woody felt a sensation he hadn't known for years, had completely forgotten: Being a little kid on a swing, going too high, until his balls felt like they were being sucked downward right out of him, drawn into the frozen middle of the earth. It had been a scary, exciting, unpleasant but fascinating feeling then; now it only made him sick. "Aw, shit, Zack," he said, and moved to the side, a strong and heavyset but clumsy guy, to let the skinnier tenser Zack have a clear view.

When the tape rewound, Ralph popped it out of the machine and into its box, and considered the rest of Zack's tape library. The three of them, punks in their mid-twenties, inseparable schmucks since high school, were occasional burglars, and Zack loved to break into video rental stores, copping armful after armful of tapes while Ralph and Woody searched the cash register and drawers for chickenfeed.

"How can we
call
him? Jesus Christ, Zack, his sister's
dead!"

"He
doesn't know that. He doesn't know that till long after we got the money, till we're gone and
history,
man."

"Jesus,
Zack."

"Call him, goddamit. You wanna run
with
money, or without?"

Ralph touched the rows of tapes. Was it too early in the day for porn? Nah; he selected a tape, and turned toward the VCR as the phone rang. And now he was almost reluctant to answer.

In the living room of Mary's apartment, the bedroom and bathroom doors both closed, Woody stood holding the phone, while Zack glared at him. They were both sopping wet, and hiding their fear from one another. "Remember!" Zack hissed. "She's locked in the closet! She's okay!"

Woody nodded impatiently and said into the phone, "Ralph? Okay, everything's done here. She's fine, we locked her in the closet, you can let her out when we get back."

Zack stared, wild-eyed, a ventriloquist no longer sure he controls his dummy. Woody said, "Well, she didn't want to tell us for a while."

Zack looked alert, worried, imperiled. Woody said, "You know, she always wanted to keep you out of—wants to keep you out of trouble. You know how she is."

Zack silently pounded the sofa back in frustration, and Woody said, "Well, she seen we weren't gonna take no for an answer, that's all, so then she opened up. She didn't know much more than she already told you, by the way. Not as much as we figured."

Zack nodded in exasperated agreement—so much effort, such a rotten accident, for so little return—and Woody said, "Except the name of the motel where Carmody's supposed to get in touch with them, if anything changes. Yeah, where they're gonna be today. So that was worth it, huh?"

"I don't know," Ralph said, hefting the porn tape in his other hand, thinking about how mad Mary was going to be, even when he came back successful, even when he had more money than
God
in his hands and all her irritating little doubts and sermons and putdowns were proved for once and all to be wrong, wrong, wrong. "I guess so," Ralph said. "Okay, I'll see you downstairs."

It was a five-hour drive from Memphis to where William Archibald's crusade had latterly taken him; they should get going, if they wanted to be there in time for the robbery. "Ten minutes," Ralph said into the phone. "Right."

He watched five minutes of the porn movie, rewound it, and went downstairs.

Lunch for the staff on crusade days was simple and short; bowls of salad, slices of bread, plastic cups of tea or apple juice, all laid out on long folding tables in whatever arena they found themselves. It's true this was an inexpensive way to feed a crowd, but Archibald's motives went beyond the squeezing of a dollar. He wanted his angels, his choir, his assistants, all his boys and girls to be cheerful and energetic and sparkling during the crusade to come, not bogged down by great sandwiches of cheese and meat, dulled by rich desserts, logy with milk shakes. And the staff enjoyed it, too, enjoyed the camaraderie of paper bowls and plastic forks, the rough fellowship of bleacher seats while eating and big open barrels for their trash afterward, the sense of coming together in peak condition to face the long and arduous campaign ahead: the saving of souls.

Dwayne Thorsen always ate like that anyway. He didn't see how people could stuff their faces with all that bad crap available to the idiots of this world. He'd eaten sparingly as a child back in Kentucky, out of necessity—they were
poor—
had turned necessity into virtue, and now virtue had become mere habit. But a good habit.

Among the first to start lunch, and the absolute first to finish, Dwayne discarded his implements in the empty trash barrel and began a roving tour of the facility, a kind of stubborn prowl, movement mostly for its own sake, to relieve the pressure he felt, the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. The rest of them could laugh and joke together down there in the bleachers, take it easy, pay no attention to their surroundings, and if something screwed up they'd just shrug and go on about their business. Because avoiding the screw-ups
was not their business.
Not even Archibald's business, not really. The smooth functioning, the seamless progress, the glitch-free continuation of the William Archibald Crusade; that was Dwayne's business.

This is what he'd learned in the Marines: Do not ask why, only ask how. That's the philosophy he'd carried out of the Marines and into his work with Archibald, and it's what made him so valuable. Irreplaceable. Whether Archibald were sincere or a phony, or some mingling of the two, wasn't Dwayne's concern. His only concern was that the crusade go forward with no bad publicity, no awkward snags, no loss of money, no distractions from the task at hand. None.

His roving of the stadium showed the security weak spots, showed the crowd-control difficulties, but showed also the advantages of the terrain, the narrow-funneled egresses, the vast clear space at the center of the stadium that meant no troublemaker could get very close to Archibald during the crusade without being seen and intercepted.

Dwayne visited the money room—fairly well concealed, fairly well protected—he visited the temporarily erected cubicles where counseling would be available at the end of the crusade, he visited the sexually segregated changing areas where the choir and angels would soon be getting into uniform (he didn't think in terms of 'costumes' but 'uniforms'), he visited the public restrooms and the refreshment area, he personally tried every door that was supposed to be locked and opened every door that was supposed to be unlocked.