Salvation Boulevard (36 page)

We made it down the hallway, along the backstage corridors, to Plowright's private elevator without incident.

I looked at my watch. I wanted to be in and out in twenty minutes. Services would last at least an hour and a half. They often went longer.

The elevator was on the ground floor. When Gwen punched in the code, it opened right away. As we rode up, I drew the HK from its holster. “Just a precaution. I don't intend to use it,” I said softly and held it low, by my side and a bit behind me, so that anyone who might be up there in the office wouldn't see it, and we could try the talking cure first.

As the door opened, Plowright cried out, “Here it is!” full of fervor and enthusiasm, as if he'd been waiting for us.

Reflexively, I brought the gun up, pushed Gwen behind me, and pointed it out in front of me.

There was music and applause. I realized it was the broadcast of the services down in the Cathedral. I took a long slow breath to still
the beating of my heart. Then we began to move slowly into his office. There it was—there he was—on the big LCD TV.

The scene was on a wide shot.

A cross, fourteen feet tall, was just upstage of Plowright. He was pointing to his left at a gigantic display table covered by a cloth. A team of Angels appeared. Choreographed and rehearsed, they gracefully whisked the fabric away to reveal a three-dimensional contour map of the land on which we stood with a model of Plowright's great dream built on top of it, the City on the Hill.

The Cathedral of the Third Millennium was at its center, at the highest point. Roads radiated out in all directions, like spokes, and circled around it in rings. There were all sorts of buildings, small and large, private and commercial.

Miniature lights popped on and illuminated a cross alongside the tower. If it were to scale, the real one would be over two hundred feet high when it was built.

The cross on stage came to life simultaneously. It was made of a multitude of thin neon tubes, and once it stuttered to life, in silvery white, silvery blues, and a fine light gold, it was as vivid as anything Las Vegas could boast of, and it cast a halo of holy-looking light upon both the minister and his model municipality.

“This is it. This is the future. This is seed from which we will grow a truly Christian America!”

The crowd went wild, standing, applauding, calling out, “Amen!”

“The Lord has promised us dominion over the earth, Genesis 1:26–31. The Lord
requires
us to take dominion. Let us do as He commands!

“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sport arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of our society.”

The applause and the voice grew even louder. Shining, fervent faces filled the screen. There was an upswell of music, and the Angels came forth to sing.

I looked around desperately for the controls and saw a remote sitting on Plowright's desk, rushed for it, heedless of whether anyone was there or not, grabbed it, and hit the mute button. The silence was a great relief.

I reached up, tore off my bandages, and tossed them in a trash bin.

The cameras cut back and forth between audience shots of ecstatic faces as they sang along with the Angels and close-up details of the city to be: miniature office buildings, an expanded airfield with toy planes visible through the doors of model hangers, subdivisions with little trees and green-carpet lawns like a Lionel Trains display, and where the college was now, presently just four modest buildings, there was something much larger, large enough that it could call itself a university. There was a hospital with a Matchbox ambulance parked in front of an awning with a tiny sign that read “Emergency Entrance.”

In the silence, I turned away from the mesmerizing screen and looked and listened to determine if anyone was in the offices. Also to better understand the man I was dealing with.

When I'd been here before, Plowright had always been in the room with me, his presence, personable, energetic, visionary, dominating it, giving it a life. And I had looked at it through the eyes of an admirer, the eyes of a disciple. Now it was empty, and my eyes were cold.

Plowright had this whole top floor to himself—and for whatever assistants he wanted around him at any given time. Fortunately, it seemed that all the courtiers were downstairs watching his show. The sweeping arc of his windows gave a lordly view of all his lands. As expensive as the square footage in Manny's downtown office building was, compared to this, it was still a jumped-up version of the basic white-collar shoebox. This was the center of a twenty-first-century fiefdom.

Then there was the circle within the circle, with his personal, private apartment. It would have a view to the north, toward the mountains. The door to that inner sanctum was made of polished wood, thick and heavy. A keypad in a flat rectangle was beside it.

Gwen and I both looked at it, both of us, in different ways and to different degrees, afraid to find out what was behind it.

She looked at me, waiting for me to make the move.

I stepped aside and gestured to Gwen to punch in the code.

She was there.

Nicole Chandler, in a blouse and a skirt much like the uniform Angie wears to school. She was holding a Bible in her hands, the big NIV study Bible, 2,936 pages, with twenty thousand study notes, seven pages of full-color timelines from both testaments, sixteen pages of full-color maps, an expanded topical index, and a “Harmony of the Gospel” section.

I turned to glance back at Gwen, as if to say, “See!”

Nicole snapped the Bible shut. I barely saw her out of the corner of my eye as she swung it, two-handed, with all her might, and smashed it on the top of my head. I went down, seeing stars. If the wig hadn't been there like a pad, I think she would have knocked me out cold. As it was, I went down on my hands and knees, head throbbing, trying to figure out what had just happened. I had dropped the gun and didn't know where it was. Nicole tried to rush out past me. But Gwen was coming in after me, coming to my aid, yelling, “What are you doing? Get away from him.” They collided, Nicole trying to push past, I think, and Gwen trying to grapple with her, and they got entangled in my legs and fell over, both of them, on top of me. Pushing me flat.

They were fighting like women, clawing and grabbing. Legs, arms, and elbows jabbed into my back. Still dizzy, I put my palms on the floor and pushed upward, trying to get them off me and turn over at
the same time. I heaved, and they moved. I turned, and there I was between Nicole's legs. Her short skirt had flipped up, and her kicking legs were spread apart.

She was screeching, “Let me go.” She pulled Gwen's hair, and Gwen yowled. I put my eyes back in my head, rolled away, and kicked the door shut before someone heard us. Then I looked around for the gun, figuring I better get to it before either of them did. I saw where it had landed. So did Nicole. She kept yanking at Gwen's hair with one hand and was reaching for the gun with her other. She got to it before I did. The safety was off, there was one in the chamber, and she'd only have to squeeze, and someone would be dead.

I leapt—I tried to leap; it was more like I staggered and fell—on top of her hand holding the HK. I reached blindly, found the barrel, held it tight, and twisted as hard as I could to rip it from her. It came loose before she could fire it. I shoved it away from us and went after her other hand to make her let go of Gwen.

Nicole started yelling at the top of her lungs, “Help, help!”

All of us were rolling around on the floor. I pried Nicole's fingers loose from my wife, then twisted her arm up behind her back. That put me behind her and forced her into a sitting position, her legs out in front of her, her back bent forward from the upward twist against her shoulder joint.

She was still shrieking, so I put my free hand over her mouth. She bit down. I yanked my hand away before she could chomp a piece of flesh off, and she started yelling again. I pulled my wig off and put that over her mouth, hairy side first. “Bite on that, damn you. Bite on that.” Which she did and got a mouth full of whatever the fake strands were made of. She started trying to spit the wig out and twist her head away.

Gwen was sitting on the floor. She held her head where Nicole had been tearing at her. There was a big scratch on her face.

“Nicole, come on. Quiet down. I don't want to hurt you,” I said, though I was doing exactly that as I pressed her arm up to immobilize her.

Her skirt was up around her waist. Gwen looked at her with disgust. Nicole reached down with her free hand and covered herself, but she didn't really stop struggling.

“We're here to help you,” I said. She shook her head as violently as she could, trying to get rid of the wig at the same time. “If I let you go, will you be quiet?” Not getting a response, I pushed her arm up even harder and held her tighter.

She made a muffled noise and tried to nod yes.

I took the wig away from her mouth but kept her arm up behind her back. “Why did you attack me?”

She coughed and gasped and spit the black strands from the wig out of her mouth.

“Why?”

“You're going to kill me,” she said bitterly.

“No, we're not,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, although my head was throbbing.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You're Jeremiah's friends,” as if that were proof enough of the reason we were there.

“I'm not,” I said. “I'm really not. And I'd like to get out of here, with you, before he shows up or Plowright does.”

She panicked. “I won't go,” she cried, trying to pull away from me.

I pressed up on her arm again, locking her in place. “Calm down, Nicole. Calm down, and listen. We're not here to hurt you or kill you. We're just trying to find out who killed Nathaniel MacLeod.”

“Nate is dead?” she cried out in disbelief and anguish. “Nate is dead?” Her surprise and shock seemed real. All the fight went out of her. I released her. She curled up in a ball and began to weep and moan, crying out, “No, no, please, God, no.”

“How could you not know?” I asked her.

Her sobbing stopped for a moment, and she spoke like a bitter, sarcastic child. “All I know is what
Pastor
”—she was extra snide when she used his title—“tells me.” Then, sniffling, with the tears coming back, pleading, she asked, “What happened?”

“It's been all over the news.”

“I don't have a radio, TV, Internet, anything.”

“How long have you been here?”

“There's a TV right there,” Gwen said, gesturing at a screen across the room.

“How long?” I asked Nicole.

“Since they took me,” she said.

“When?” I asked.

“Thursday night,” she said. “It was a Thursday night, late, Friday morning.”

“Which Friday, last Friday, the one before?”

“Three weeks,” she said, making it the night of MacLeod's death. It also meant that she'd been right there, behind the wall, while Pastor Paul was trying to convince me to leave the case alone.

“From where?” I asked. “Where were you when they took you?”

“He was alive. He was alive when they took me out.”

“There's a TV right there,” Gwen said again insistently. She didn't like Nicole, with her schoolgirl outfit, claiming to be a prisoner in Plowright's private apartment. Sleek and new, the forty-two-inch HD screen, set up to be easily viewed from the king-size bed, looked like a few thousand dollars' worth of evidence that Nicole wasn't being exactly truthful.

“It only plays DVDs,” Nicole said.

“Sure,” Gwen said with disbelief.

I got up. My head hurt like hell. I felt my scalp. There was no blood, but a bump was rising. I went over to the machine to have a look. There was only one cable, and it went to a DVD player.

“Just Bible movies. We watch Bible movies. And
Left Behind.
Rayford
Steele
and
Buck
Williams,” Nicole said, mocking the names of Tim LaHaye's heroes. There was a DVD rack, and I looked. Sure enough
, Left Behind
was there, plus the sequels,
Tribulation Force
and
World at War.
Also
Joseph: King of Dreams, Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments
,
The Passion of Christ
, of course, the documentary,
Seven Signs of Christ's Return,
and lots more like them. There were also blank DVDs, the kind that you can burn videos on, in plain plastic cases.

“And lots of porn,” Nicole said.

“Liar,” Gwen said.

I took one of the unlabeled DVDs from the rack, put it into the player, found the remote on the bedside table, and pushed play. The screen asked me if I wanted to start from the beginning or resume. I resumed. A hard-core scene came on, larger than life. The standard obscenities of dramatized lust chanted from the speakers. I shut it off.

When the sound stopped, Gwen accused the girl, “You brought those here, didn't you?”

Nicole looked at her, full of contempt and disgust, and then looked to me, full of pain. “What happened to him?”

“He was shot,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Who . . . ”

“Ahmad Nazami has been arrested,” I said.

“Ahmad? He wouldn't . . . he's . . . ”

“Where were you when you were kidnapped?”

“In, in his office. Nate's office.”