The Edge of the Gulf (19 page)

Finally, the woman called Rachel appeared from the restroom around back, jagging around the largest puddles, her large shoulder bag clutched under one arm, a smaller plastic one dangling from her hand. The man swung open the door and she climbed in just as the tuner came to rest on an ingratiating voice denouncing the “liberals’ conspiracy” to control certain kinds of assault weapons with a conveniently edited snippet of Luke chapter eleven: “It is by the finger of God that I drive out the devils….”

The woman cocked an ear toward the radio and made wide eyes at the man. “Hmm. Might be my brother, the good reverend. You take this in,” she said, dropping the key into his hand. “I doubt it seriously, but those redneck cretins
might
notice something
different
about me.” She turned off the radio, shook her hair, and ran her hands up and down her glistening bare arms. “God, it’s good to get out of
that.
I was about to faint.”

He darted into the building and then back to the car. He swung out onto 26-A, and as they drove through the diminishing rain toward Laurel Beach they resumed their conversation.

Her voice was reassuring. “If Terry thinks it’s necessary the night before, Sister Rachel may make one more fortifying phone call. But I really think he’ll be fine.”

“I still worry about Terry,” he said.

“Terry isn’t going to let anything go wrong. Sometime in the next few days, he’s going to help poor Michael compose his letter of divine judgment. The rough draft, which he will manage to keep, will be his protection if something
does
go wrong. If Michael chokes, then Terry happens to find it somewhere in the bar, dropped apparently when Michael was on the painting job in April. He takes it to Charlie and tells him he had had a bit of concern at the time over some odd allusions the young man had made to events in South Carolina. It’ll be Terry’s smooth former-lawyer’s word against the ramblings of a crazed religious fanatic, one who will be found to have bombed a women’s clinic and who has hand-written a letter of intent to murder.”

“Goddamn it!” he suddenly spat, his head jerking nervously. “It’s like shooting a sitting duck.” He hit the steering wheel with the butt of his hand, “For Christ’s sake…what are we doing? What have we got against Charlie?We’re killing a decent man!”

She turned toward him and rubbed her hand lightly along the back of his neck. “First of all,
we’re
not killing anyone. Terry Main has his own score to settle with Charlie and has been considering this or something like it for a long time. We may be the beneficiaries but we’re only protecting our interests. What we’re doing is keeping an old man, however generally decent he may be, from taking yourinheritance away from you.”

She paused, and continued gently to massage his neck. “Someone needs to be realistic, and it may as well be us. The days of people playing with you and your choices, your future, are over. We both know life doesn’t just hand over opportunities. We have to decide. And which do you want, my love? A couple of million when we’re too old to enjoy it—or between sixty and a hundred before we’re thirty-six?”

He didn’t turn his head, but he reached behind his head and pulled her hand around to his lips and kissed her fingers.

She lightened her tone into a playful tease. “By the way, cousin Joseph, you were pretty
wonderful
back there for a non-Equity kinda guy. I’ve always said you take direction well.” With this, he finally smiled. The rain had stopped and they were slowing for the stretch through Seaside. The choking humidity had broken and the air was fresh and cool. People milled to and fro across the road between the houses and the restaurants and bars.

“Let’s stop for a drink,” she murmured. “I could use a nice cold martini, and I’m not ready to go to the house just yet.” As he parked near the little post office, she got her rings and a broad gold bracelet from her bag. She fluffed her chestnut hair in the mirror and then picked up the plastic bag from the floorboard. From it strayed one long tress of dull blonde. Stuffing it back and tying a knot in the bag, she said, “I was going to get rid of this, but maybe I’ll keep it just for tonight.”

She laughed. “Would you like to have a very special religious experience a little later with Miss Rachel?” She leaned in close to his face and her eyes assumed a piercing, otherworldly quality. “And if you are a
bad
boy,then perhaps Miss Rachel will have to discipline you.”

When Sydney and Chaz entered the small bar just north of the Seaside town green, his arm around her waist, they were both smiling brilliantly. Several people looked up and noted that they were a very handsome couple—“extraordinary,” murmured one older woman to an unhearing husband—and, quite obviously, very much in love.

Chapter 26

Terry Main called at the designated time.

His response was affirmative.

They rendezvoused at an anonymous interstate motel forty miles inland. Terry had a backlog of vacation and told Charlie and his assistant manager that he was taking a day off to take care of some business errands, and Chaz “wanted to show Sydney some of the swamp country over near Apalachicola.”

For two hours, over bad take-out Mexican and beer, Sydney and Chaz had listened as Terry unfurled an already remarkably detailed plan, and then as the afternoon wore on in the gray airless room they had gone over and over it, taking it apart and putting it back together.

It seemed that on the very day before their roadside conference, Terry had dropped into the main post office after shopping for some supplies in Destin. As he stood in the seemingly interminable line, his boredom eventually led his gaze to a small bulletin board near the door. To one side of some confusingly worded bureaucratic announcements were two small “Wanted” posters. One was standard-issue FBI—photos of a vague-looking skinny guy who’d killed a federal officer in Mobile and two fairly attractive women wanted for mail fraud. The other poster, issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, was older and less distinct, a composite drawing of a youngish man with sad eyes and an inch-long burr haircut. It made Terry think. Though, of what, he couldn’t guess.

On his way out, he stopped and looked at the drawing, the basic stats, and a ragged photocopy of a newspaper account that someone, probably an outraged local healthcare worker, had stapled to the bottom. Mark DeWayne Lukerson. Possible aliases John, David, Michael. Possibly sighted nine months ago in Montgomery, Alabama. A year ago he had bombed a South Carolina women’s health and family planning clinic where abortions were also performed. The explosive went off after most of the staff had left for the day, but one nurse, a father of two small children, who had been waiting outside for his wife to pick him up, was severely injured by a flying hunk of cinder block. Attempted murder, violation of clinic access, felony arson. When he’d left the post office Terry couldn’t shake the feeling that the face rendered in the police artist’s sketch seemed distantly familiar, but he couldn’t imagine why. He didn’t recall the story, but perhaps he’d seen the drawing many months ago on the news.

It may have been the strange, almost surreal discussion by Western Lake the next day that jarred something loose. (Or it may have been the invigorating prospect of more than five million dollars, it seemed to Sydney.) For whatever reason, just before he dropped them at the intersection near the Hibiscus Bed & Breakfast, Terry suddenly knew where he’d seen the face. In an instant his mind had come up with its own little composite sketch, relocating those sad, lonely eyes above a bushy full beard and under much longer, greasy hair.

It was the painter he’d hired a month earlier to do some outside work on the bar.

The two women he’d used a couple of times before had moved out of the area. This guy had put up a sign in the market and had a recent reference from the pastor of some small church over near Holley.

It all fit. He’d only been around three or four days, did good work and didn’t talk much. But it was what he said when he did open up and how he said it that Terry remembered. He was polite in an almost abject way, and looked so hang-dog and lost that, around noon on the third day, Terry had taken a sandwich and a Coke out to him and tried, briefly, to shoot the breeze with him for a few minutes.

It hadn’t taken long for him to realize he had a fundamentalist weirdo, not an unknown commodity in west Florida, on his hands. Lived in an apartment in Pensacola where he’d moved last year to be near that big revival. Drove all over the panhandle on jobs but was back home every night to clean up and “go with like-minded people to love the Lord” at the big tent. Like-minded people, he allowed, were of course those who hated abortion, homosexuals, taxes, government in general and Democrats in particular, artists, educators, the “liberal” media, and independent women, and who knew that they were on God’s side in a war to win back America’s soul. Terry, who had grown up in the crosshairs between a evangelical mother and a lapsed but not unleashed Catholic father, had merely finished his iced tea, smiled and nodded a couple of times knowingly, said that he, too, was a believer, and gone back in to work. He had needed the job finished.

The next day, when he paid him, the guy pulled two crinkled pamphlets from his overalls’ back pocket and said he hoped that Terry would come over for the revival one night. Terry thanked him, the guy drove off in his old truck, and the pamphlets, of a particularly garish and virulent variety he had seen before, left on doorsteps or propped on supermarket shelves or urinals in men’s rooms, went into the trash.

Despite the lank long hair and the scraggy prophet’s beard that framed them, the scared, sad, lonely eyes in the ATF Wanted poster were undoubtedly his.

***

“So the entire enterprise is riding on a volatile, probably schizophrenic, religious fanatic moron.
That
sounds good.”

Chaz had tried to remain calm, but by afternoon, after Terry’s initial outline, he looked harried, aghast. He sat cross-legged on the bed, anxiously poking through the acrid remains of chips and salsa. Sydney paced the room, stopping for moments at a time here and there as if to assess Terry’s strategy from all possible angles, occasionally lighting in one of the two armchairs. Terry sat in the other, near the desk, the lamplight flicking on his glasses.

“It can work. He
wants
to be used.”

Sydney scrutinized Terry, reminding herself that, so far, Terry had proven quite shrewd. “Well, that could certainly be true,” she said. She had had in her own childhood enough warped zealotry to last a lifetime. “I know these people and that
is
what they live for. They’re hopeless and weak and have no lives and they hate people who do, so the only way they can know power is to give themselves over to power. Masochistically.”

“But how can you be sure you can control him?” Chaz asked more than once.

Terry looked now, it seemed increasingly clear to Sydney, like a man who, in the new conviction that he could have even more than he’d ever wanted in life, could think circumspectly and even imaginatively, wait patiently when necessary, and act, at the right moment, decisively. He removed his wire-rims and rubbed his hands over his eyes. He looked like a cagey attorney, back in the saddle, as he began to go over the rationale and the strategy, step by step, again. Sydney admired his performance.

***

The night after he had met them on the road, he had found Michael, the painter’s, phone number. He’d left a message on what sounded like a relic of an answering machine, saying that he was pleased with his work and asking him to call about another job as soon as possible. Michael had called back early the next morning and driven out from a nearby job later in the week.

“Right off the bat I apologized for having him come on false pretenses. Admitted that I didn’t really have another job. At least not a painting job. He looked extremely nervous. But I proceeded to assure him that there was, indeed, a job. One of the most important missions he would ever have the opportunity of carrying out, a job that I believed God had sent him to ‘us’ to learn about. I had him then. Looked like a deer in headlights.

“He asked what I knew, and I said very calmly that ‘my superiors’ in the cause knew and had told me about South Carolina. But that no one would be going to the police. That we considered that wanted poster a badge of honor and that we needed him to work with us. That God had led him here for greater things.

“By the time we finished our little conversation forty-five minutes later—and we had prayed aloud together—he knew he was in a corner, and I’d helped him come to believe that not only was that not something to be afraid of but that God and I and certain powerful ‘like-minded’ religious leaders would shelter him there. And that it was really just the first stop on the road to glory.”

“But does he believe it enough to actually
do
it? He understands what you were talking about?” asked Sydney.

“Yes. And that’s where you come in, our ‘religious leaders.’ He’ll stay on task and follow through if we stage just enough pep sessions to keep the pure flame of his purpose burning. He’s looking for some kind of atonement or, at least, vindication. Not for having crippled the guy in South Carolina—he was, in Michael’s cosmology, a misguided agent of the devil—but for not having made a bigger splash for Jesus. He didn’t want limited fire damage and one injury, he wanted to blow that clinic and all the baby-killers in it out of existence. I’m also positive he’s a lot more afraid of going to prison than of going down in flames as an officer in God’s personal militia.”

“Sounds like one of Bin Laden’s boys,” said Chaz.

Sydney and Terry both spoke at once: “Same thing.”

***

By five o’clock, Terry’s voice was wearing down, Chaz’s questions had become less plaintive and more probing, and Sydney’s spirits were on a slow but sure rise. Their role would put them closer to the actual event, but there seemed no other way. And she was as certain of Terry’s determination as she was of the set of checks-and-balances that would keep him in line and keep her and Chaz clear of implication. The fact that what Terry had actually begun to do was to create the outline of a play, a script for them, not only impressed but exhilarated her. There was a fine symmetry to the fact that they would all be actors. It would be the ultimate proof that what she had come to believe a few years back was true: the only interesting, and valuable, theatrical art takes place in the conduct of real life.

They spent their last hour before heading back to the coast fleshing out the roles, the timing, the nuances.

Terry had left it with Michael that he would be back in touch immediately. That he should pray about what a great gift God was presenting him. And that he shouldn’t even think about getting away not only because God would punish him but because it was impossible. (Terry’s “superiors in the cause” had authorized him to put a team of private investigators on twenty-four-hour surveillance until the mission was accomplished. “It’s for your own good, son. They don’t want you to blow your chance to get this right, to serve God in such a vital, once-in-a-lifetime way.”)

“I also built up his feeling that he was a member of a team, a chosen MVP, by swearing him to secrecy. He’s really locked into that Pensacola Revival thing. It’s been his big spiritual teat, I think, since he hightailed it out of the Appalachian woods where he apparently hid out for several weeks last summer. Going to that tent with a few thousand other lost souls five or six nights a week has been an integrating focus. That’s why I alluded vaguely to one or two of ‘the superiors’ he would meet when we got together again—and that they had close connections to the Revival.”

Sydney mused, “He needs to have no doubt that he is needed, that he belongs.”

“Exactly. It’s the critical variable. The idea about the private eyes put the fear of God in him.”

“But now we need to put a loving face on the mission. Ensure his motivation. To welcome him and lift him up in the loving arms of fellow-believers.” Sydney knew the territory. “That’s easy. We can do that.”

“I thought you could. Some sort of special emissary from the upper echelons of the movement.”

The first come-to-Jesus summit would be at some out-of-the-way location further east, to be followed by a last-minute hand-holding if necessary.

***

Before going their separate ways, they reviewed each element of the strategy. They assessed the risks, over and over, reassuring themselves, individually and as a unit, with the various self-protections that could be reliably built in. With the various fallback options at every stage right up to the very moment of the event.

There was a provision for every possible development. If Charlie broke form and unexpectedly talked with anyone about the land, or somehow moved faster with his attorney and the will change, they would cancel. If the final seduction of Michael for whatever reason didn’t work and he somehow got away (perhaps even, they had had to consider, by suicide), they would cancel. If he talked to anyone, it would be their very credible amazement against the outrageous babblings of a deranged criminal fanatic. Nothing would be lost. Terry could console himself with a little upfront money and Chaz and Sydney would have a terrific beach house for their sunset years.

They also reviewed every element of their business plan. Their talk was extremely candid, everyone knowing that they had already journeyed light-years and there was no time to waste. Instead of resenting it, Sydney found herself quite reassured by Terry’s elaborately detailed selfishness and the unblinking eye with which he watched his back. She trusted his hungriness and his utter inability to trust.

For engaging in a more active role in the actual event, Terry was to receive fifty thousand dollars. Ten now, twenty if they decided on the final “go,” and twenty immediately after. And the involvement of Chaz and Sydney, if indeed at a certain remove, was nonetheless his added insurance of their all staying on the same page. Should they renege on his cut after the disposition of the will and the sale of the property, he would talk. Even with no hard evidence like video or sound, he could give the authorities too good a story to ignore. Getting them to believe it might be a challenge, since in the current will Chaz was heir, no one knew that was about to change, and therefore he’d have no apparent motive. But Terry reminded them of their own threats about the media. This would be exactly the sort of juicy soap opera investigative journalists thrived on, with the two of them as the stars, day in and day out until they cracked.

As for their part, Sydney and Chaz knew that Terry wasn’t about to risk prison by coming back to them for more.

Discretion was the very best part of valor for everyone concerned.

As Sydney put it, just before they dispersed, “The prospect of mutual poverty can do much to keep everyone honest. None of us gets a thing if this doesn’t work, and if anyone turns on the other after we succeed, we lose everything. All we have to do is concentrate on making it work. We can all have everything we want.”