Salvation Boulevard (5 page)

“That's all. A mere trifle,” Plowright said, getting laughter and more applause.

“Willing to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings full of civilians,” he went on. Not funny now. Starting to preach it. “One million two hundred thousand willing to strap dynamite around their waists and get on a bus, a city bus, in the holy city of Jerusalem, in the land of the Bible, a city bus, filled with women going to the market, with children going to their lessons, a city bus, right in the middle of the day and ignite that dynamite, there in the holy city of Jerusalem.

“There are those who will tell you, it's just one percent, so why worry.

“There are those who will tell you that they are mostly over there, that we have our Homeland Security and we have our high alerts and we have the greatest military in the world... Hallelujah . . . .”

And the choir—the Angels they're called; Gwen used to sing with them—more dimly lit than the pastor so that you could forget they were there, now said, “Hallelujah,” behind him in their heavenly voices, and their voices, though soft, were carried on the speakers throughout the Cathedral of the Third Millennium, and their voices came from all around and filled the room. If you were up among the clouds, weightless, those voices would waft you even higher.

But Plowright didn't need his Angels for emphasis. The congregation hoo-ahed, they clapped, they hollered, “Hallelujah.”

“And we're taking the fight to the enemy. Hallelujah.”

“Hallelujah,” the Angels sang while the congregation roared, six thousand voices or more, in praise of the crusade to defend us all.

“But . . . , ” Plowright said, calling a halt to the noise, “but they are not just over there. Oh no. Oh no.

“We find that once again, that they are here. That they are among us. There's the one billion two hundred million—then there's that one percent—one million, two hundred thousand, and out of that more than a million—there is one, there is one, right here!

“One crazed jihadist, Ahmad Nazami, who pretended to be some sort of refugee, who pretended to accept America's hospitality, America's amazingly generous hospitality, who took advantage of that hospitality to pick up a gun and murder a man because that man dared to disagree with his mad version of religion.

“How many more were on his list?

“How many were on Ahmad Nazami's list? Who was next?”

“Well, I too disagree with his religion,” Pastor Plowright said. “Does that mean I'm next on his jihad hit list?”

“You disagree with his religion,” he said to us.

And we agreed. “Jesus,” many of us cried. “We belong to Jesus.”

“We have the Bible right here. It's the word of God. I have read this book from cover to cover many times. So have many of you, so if I missed something here, feel free to correct me. But as I recall, nowhere does Jesus say, ‘Oh, by the way, although I am the Son of God, I didn't get my gospel right.

“‘So wait awhile, six hundred years or so, and then an illiterate Arab is going to come out of the desert to do a
rewrite
.' An Arab, by the way, who married a woman old enough to be his mother, married her for her money.

“Then he married at least fifteen other women.

“One of those marriages was to a six-year-old girl, and it was consummated when she was nine years old. Nine years.

“Do you think that God would send a child molester—we are speaking of a major-league pedophile—to come and redo the scriptures? What kind of religion worships a pedophile?

“Mohammed is a prophet that only the ACLU could love.”

Laughter, applause, and amens!

“Let me tell you what Jesus did say. He said, ‘I am the way and the truth.'” That got many more amens. “Not
a
way and
a
truth.
The
way and
the
truth, the one and only way and the one and only truth.”

“Hallelujah,” the chorus sang.

“So, am I next on his list?” he asked, then pointed out to us in the congregation. “What about you? And you? And you?” And into the camera. If you were watching at home, he pointed at you through your TV. “And you?”

“We are in a
war
,” he declared. “Our enemy has no hesitation to kill. No hesitation at all. Our enemy is barbaric and violent. This is not a war
between
civilizations. It is the war
for
civilization.

“I call upon you all to uphold the faith and the gun. This is a war we must win!

“There is no middle ground. Compromise is appeasement, and appeasement is death. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy is treason.”

He didn't point at me or call out my name. But I felt as if he was talking directly to me.

I felt as if he was talking
about
me.

Walking out afterward, I felt like eyes were all over me.

The criminal justice business is a small world. Anyone in it knew who Manny Goldfarb was, and he would have been hated as thoroughly as the ACLU itself, except that he made so much
money. Doing it for money made it right. I can't say exactly how or why, but that was the fact. Doing it for ideals made it suspect and twisted, subversive and evil, part of the plot against America and the War against Christianity.

A lot of them knew that Manny was defending Nazami, and quite a few would have known I was Manny's number one investigator, something I'm normally proud of, as he has the hot cases and the deep pockets.

But now, it was as if Plowright had hung a scarlet
A
around my neck, one that stood for ACLU, for Ahmad, for apostate and atheist, friend of the Antichrist.

Jeremiah Hobson gave me one of those cold, don't-fuck-up looks that high school football coaches practice in front of the mirror. He used it a lot when he was running my squad in narcotics.

Alan clapped his hand on my shoulder. He didn't say anything—nobody actually said anything. Maybe I was being paranoid. Alan's expression said, Good luck. Do what you gotta do.

Manny was my number one individual client, but the Christian community that connected through the Cathedral of the Third Millennium, as a group, gave me more business than he did. So I was trying to figure out how to keep everyone smiling, drop the case, and have Manny understand.

Then Leander Peale came up to me, the CO who'd brought Nazami to us. He gave me the kind of smile a hard man with a lot of hard biker miles beneath him has. An inexpensive flipper covered the loss of three teeth on his upper right. He came up close, his idea of discretion, the tobacco smell coming off of him, ashtray sharp, and said, “You gotta do something for that kid.”

“I gotta?”

“If that kid kil't mor'n a roach, I'll draw you milk from a bull's tits.”

“And you know that?” I asked.

“Carl, I walked C”—that was C block, not the worst, but bad enough—“seven years. Worked the hoo' d'ow'”—midnight to morning, the hoot owl shift. “You know they cry. They call you
over, hunk' by the grate and whisper tales. Done the mainline three, and the row two”—that was central block and death row. “Heard every line of shit, every con, hustle, prayer, conversion, the born-agains, Nation of Islam, Black Israelites . . . . Makes you a judge a character, Carl, seeing what I seen.

“That Persia kid, he di'n't do the crime, and you know he can't do the time.

“A'other thing, those Homeland Security guys, there's something ain't right. I don't know what, but they give me the feelin' like some guy pissed on my leg, then tol' me it was rainin'.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “Do you know who they are?”

“That's part of the strange. They got no names.”

Alan Stephens was still on the job. He was someone I could reach out to, ask for a favor and trust too. It was the Tonto and Lone Ranger thing. He saved me, so you'd think I owed him, but he's never asked for a thing, and he keeps offering me his hand.

It was best not to see him at his office in the police building downtown. So I caught up with him at the Bible study group he runs for men in law enforcement. There's talk of making it
people
in law enforcement and letting women in, but right now the thinking is to let them start their own group, women in law enforcement, a separate-but-equal thing.

“As men in law enforcement,” Alan said in his introductory statement, “we may well find ourselves in that terrible situation where we have to take someone else's life. Maybe in self-defense or to protect someone else. Sometimes we may unintentionally cause someone's death. We've all known car chases that resulted in a death—to one of our own, to the person running away, or most upsetting of all, to an innocent bystander.

“As Christians, we are fortunate to have God's Word, his Holy Book, to guide us. The Bible is very clear—make no mistake about this—killing is not wrong. Especially if you kill in defense of what is right. Then you're doing God's work, and it is righteous.

“Let's cut to the chase. We've all heard the Sixth Commandment quoted as ‘Thou shalt not kill.'

“That's wrong. It's a bad translation. It really, truly is . . . what it should be—and I will show you the Hebrew and the best dictionaries—what it should be—and in some Bibles you will see it the correct way—it should be, ‘Thou shalt not murder.' That's what God carved into the stone with his fiery finger, and it is what God meant.

“Murder is the wrongful and intentional taking of a life.

“Murder is wrong. And, in fact, God decrees the death penalty for murder. That is obviously the intentional taking of a life, but it is righteous and God approves, in fact God
commands
, the righteous taking of life.

“Why does God support the death penalty? For the very same reasons that we believe in it. Deuteronomy 19:20, ‘And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.'

“The strange thing, and the thing that may trouble many of us in law enforcement, is that every time we have an execution, or possible execution, there are ministers out marching against the death penalty to save the murderer.

“Think about this. What does Satan want? He wants to convince people that there are no consequences for their actions. So that they will feel
free
—free to murder, to fornicate, to commit adultery. Free to do anything because there are no consequences. God's law is that there are consequences, that there is punishment, even for his chosen people, should they commit error.

“So why would a so-called reverend take up Satan's work? Or fail to realize that he is taking up Satan's work? Satan uses his own good-intentioned weakness to seduce him to try to seduce us.

“How can that that happen? you may wonder. Lack of Bible study. Even preachers and pastors, and certainly priests—Catholics don't actually read the Bible—you know that, don't you?”

“Anyway,” Alan said, coming back to the point, “God
wants
judges and police and soldiers here on earth. To keep earthly order, to keep His order, to protect the innocent, to protect His nations, His beloved followers, and He is not a fool, and neither was Jesus Christ
a fool. They understand we live here in real life, with real problems, so they gave us this book with real solutions.

“So if you see a crank fiend, and he is holding up a roadside attraction, and there is danger to yourself or to civilians, you should not be afraid to terminate his existence on the spot, if that is what's necessary. You are doing God's work. Don't harm yourself with guilt afterward. You are doing God's work.

“If you see a terrorist, and he is plotting to go to the university and bomb it because it is critical of Islam, do not hesitate to use any means necessary to stop him and save innocent life.

“And our work here today is to see that this is written down for us in scripture. Because, in something so serious as taking a life, we need to know we're on the right side.”

For the next forty or fifty minutes, we talked about Numbers 35:17–19, which ordains the death penalty; Matthew 5:17–18 and Luke 16:187, in which Jesus is very clear that he is here to enforce the old law; Exodus 2:11–12, in which Moses slew an Egyptian who was smiting a Hebrew, the sort of thing a cop can easily be called upon to do; and First Samuel 17:1–51, the story of David and Goliath, in which David, with God's help and God's blessing, killed someone who was threatening God's people.

 

Afterward, when we broke for coffee but most of the guys rushed off to work, I found a moment to be alone with Alan.

“I'm kinda stuck here,” I said. “GGW&G, they're my best client. I said I would take the job, and I don't like to go back on my word.”

He nodded. He could understand that, even agree with it. A man's word is supposed to mean something.

“Also, I'm not supposed to start judging their clients for them. ‘Don't call me unless you have a case I approve of'—I say that, they won't call me for anything.”

“You're gonna lose a lot of friends,” he said.

“I got that,” I said.

“And a lot of business,” he said.

“I have a plan,” I said. “Maybe not much of one, but it's the best I can think of so far. What I want to try to do is get Goldfarb a good start, get him enough to go on, enough that I can cut the case loose, and we both feel good about it.”

“What do you need?”

“Police reports,” I said.

“I'll tell you right now, I can't get you anything on Nazami. That's wrapped up tighter than shrink wrap.”