The Heaven Trilogy (16 page)

It took five minutes for the cranky secretary at Dennis Warren’s office to finally put him through, and then only after Kent’s threat to call back repeatedly every three minutes if she didn’t tell Dennis this very minute that he was on the phone.

Dennis came on. “Kent. How goes it, my friend? Go easy on my girls.”

“She was giving me lip. Shouldn’t give lip to customers, Dennis. Bad business.”

“You’re not a customer. Not yet, Kent.” A chuckle. “When you get a bill, you’ll be a customer. So what’s up?”

Kent chose to ignore the jab. “Nothing. Unless you call sitting in an office doing nothing for eight hours while everybody around you has their ear to the wall, listening for your
nothing,
something. It’s falling apart here, Dennis. The whole bank knows.”

“Lighten up, buddy.”

“We have to move forward, Dennis! I’m not sure how long I can do this.”

A long silence filled his ear, which was rather uncharacteristic of his friend, who never seemed at a loss for words. Now Dennis was suddenly silent. Breathing, actually. Breathing heavily. When he spoke his voice sounded scratchy.

“We can move forward on this as soon as you are positive, Kent.”

“Positive? About what? I
am
positive! They think I’ve lost my mind around here! Do you understand that? They think I’m off the deep end, for goodness’ sake! We’re going to bury these guys, if it’s the last thing we do!” He let the statement settle, wondering if his voice had carried out to the hall. “Right?”

A chuckle crackled on the phone. “Oh, we’ll be doing some burying, all right. But what about you, Kent?” Now Dennis was speaking around short breaths, pausing after each phrase to pull at the air. “Are you positive about where you stand?” A breath. “You can’t go soft halfway through.” A breath. Another breath. Kent scrunched his eyebrows.

The attorney continued. “It’s not like God’s going to reach down and hand you answers, you know. You decide to go one way, you go all the way that way. Right to the end, and screw them all if they need their crutch!” A series of breaths. “Right, Kent? Isn’t that right?”

Kent furrowed his brow. “What are you talking about? Who’s talking about going soft halfway? I’m saying we bury them, man! Screw ’em all to the wall.” He let the comment about the crutch go. Something was confused there.

“That’s right, Kent,” the attorney’s voice rasped. “You do whatever it takes. This is life and death. You win, it’s life; you lose, it’s death.”

“I hear you, man. And what I’m saying here is that, by the looks of things, I’m already a dead man. We have to move now.”

“You do things their way and you end up getting buried. Like some fool martyr.” A ragged pause. “Look at Gloria.”

Gloria? Kent felt his pulse rise in agreement with his attorney. He understood what Dennis was doing now. And it was brilliant. The man was reaching out to him; connecting with him emotionally; drawing the battle lines.

“Yes,” he said. And Dennis was saying that the bank and God were on the same side. They both wanted to do some burying. Only God was really fate, and fate had already done its burying with Gloria. Now the bank was having its go. With him.

The hair lifted on the nape of his neck. “Yes. Well, they’re not going to bury me, Dennis. Not unless they kill me first.”

The phone sat unspeaking in his palm for a few seconds before Dennis came on again. “No. Killing is against the rules. But there are other ways.”

“Well, I’m not actually suggesting killing anybody, Dennis. It’s just a figure of speech. But I hear you. I hear you loud and clear. And I’m ready. When can we get this ball rolling?”

This time the phone went dead for a long time.

“Dennis? Hello?”

“No,” Dennis returned. His voice was distant, like an echo on the phone now. “I don’t think you are ready. I don’t think you are ready at all, my fine friend. Perhaps this afternoon you will be ready.”

The phone clicked. Kent held it to his ear, stunned. This afternoon? What in the world did this afternoon have to do with anything? A sudden panic rose to his throat. What was going on? What in—

The phone began burping loudly in his ear. An electronic voice came on and told him in a roundabout way that holding a dead phone to the ear was a rather unbrilliant thing to do.

He dropped the receiver in its cradle.

Yes indeed, the roller coaster from hell.
After him, lads! After him!

Now what? What was he supposed to do in this cursed place? Sit and stare at fish while Borst sat across the hall, planning how to spend his forthcoming fortune?

Cliff poked his head in once and offered a “Good morning” around that pineapple-eating grin of his. Kent forced a small smile and mumbled the same.

“You keep your nose clean, now. You hear?” Cliff said.

“Always. Clean’s my middle name,” he returned. He tried to find some levity in his own irony, but he could not.

“Okay. Just hang in there. Things will look up if you hang in there.”

When Kent looked up, Cliff had pulled out. The door clicked shut. Now what did
he
know? Like some father offering sound wisdom.
Hang in there, son. Here, come sit on my lap.

He tried to imagine Cliff catching air on a snowboard. The image came hard. Now Spencer, there was someone who could catch air. Only it was on a skateboard.

Kent spent an hour running through e-mail and idiotic bank memoranda. Most of it went to the trash with a click. He expected that at any moment one of the others would pop in and say something, but no one did, and the fact began to wear on him. He heard their muffled voices on several occasions, but they seemed to be ignoring him wholesale. Maybe they didn’t know he’d come in. Or more likely they were embarrassed for him.
Did you hear about Kent and Bentley? Yeah, he’s really flipped, huh? Poor guy. Lost his wife—that’s what did it. For sure.

Several times he contemplated calling Dennis back—asking him what he’d meant about this afternoon. But the memory of the man’s voice echoing in the receiver made him postpone the call.

He called up AFPS and entered the new password: MBAOK. The familiar icon ran across the screen, and he let it cycle through a few times before entering the system. A program like this would be worth millions to any large bank. He should just download the source code and take it on the road. It was his, after all.

But that was the problem. It was not his. At least, not legally.

Kent was startled by the sudden buzz of his phone. Dennis, possibly. Calling to apologize about that ludicrous exchange. He glanced at the caller ID.

It was Betty. And he was in no mood to discuss office business. He let the phone buzz annoyingly. It finally fell silent after a dozen persistent burps. What was her problem?

A fist pounded on his door, and he swung around. Betty stood in the door frame, stricken white. “You have a call,” she said, and he thought she might be ill. “It’s urgent. I’ll put it through again.”

She pulled the door closed. Kent stared after her.

The phone blared again. This time Kent whirled and snatched up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Hello, Mr. Anthony?” It was a female voice. A soft, shaky female voice.

“Yes, this is Kent Anthony.”

A pause. “Mr. Anthony, I’m afraid there’s been an accident. Do you have a son named Spencer Anthony?”

Kent rose to his feet. His hands went cold on the receiver. “Yes.”

“He was hit by a car, Mr. Anthony. He’s at Denver Memorial. You should come quickly.”

Adrenaline flooded Kent’s bloodstream like boiling ice. Goose flesh prickled down his shoulders. “Is . . . Is he okay?”

“He’s . . .” A sick pause. “I’m sorry. I can’t . . .”

“Just tell me! Is my son okay?”

“He died in the ambulance, Mr. Anthony. I’m sorry . . .”

For a moment the world stood still. He didn’t know if the woman said more. If she did, he did not hear it because a buzzing had erupted in his skull again.

The phone slipped from his grasp and thudded on the carpet. Spencer? His Spencer!? Dead?

He stood rooted to the floor, his right hand still up by his ear where the receiver had been, his mouth limp and gaping. The terror came in waves then, spreading down his arms and legs like fire.

Kent whirled to the door. It was shut. Wait a minute, this could have been one of those voices! He was going mad, wasn’t he? And now the voices of madness had touched him where they knew he would be hurt most. Tried to yank his heart out.

He died in the ambulance,
the voice had said. An image of Spencer’s blond head lying cockeyed on an ambulance gurney flashed through his mind. His boy’s arms jiggled as the medical van bounced over potholes.

He staggered for the door and pulled it open, barely conscious of his movements. Betty sat at her desk, still white. And then Kent knew that it had been a real voice.

Blackness washed through his mind, and he lost his sensibilities. The days leading up to this one had weakened them badly. Now they simply fell away, like windblown chaff.

He groaned, unabashed, oblivious to the doors suddenly cracking around him for a view of the commotion. A small part of his mind knew that he was lumbering through the hall, hands hanging limp, moaning like some retarded hunchback, but the realization hung like some tiny inconsequential detail on the black horizon. Everything else was just buzzing and black.

Kent stumbled through the hall door, on autopilot now. He was halfway to the main lobby when the cruelty of it all crashed into his brain and he began to gasp in ragged pulls like a stranded fish gulping on the rocks. Spencer’s sweet, innocent face hung in his mind. Then Gloria’s swollen body, still blotched and purple.

He lifted his hands to his temples and fell into an unsteady jog. He wanted to stop. Stop the groaning, stop the pain, stop the madness. Just stop.

But it all came like a flood now, and instead of stopping he began to sob. Like a man possessed, Kent ran straight through the main lobby, gripping the hair at his temples, wailing loudly.

For a moment, banking stopped cold.

Twelve tellers turned as one and stared, startled. Zak, the security guard, brought his hand to the butt of his shiny new .38, for the first time, possibly.

Kent burst through the swinging doors, leapt down the concrete steps, and tore around the corner. He slammed into the car, hardly knowing it was his.

Spencer! No, no, no! Please, not Spencer!

His son’s face loomed tender and grinning in Kent’s mind. His blond bangs hung before his blue eyes. The boy flipped his head back, and Kent felt a wave of dizziness at the ache in his own chest.

The door to his Lexus was not opening easily, and he frantically fumbled with a wad of keys, dropping them once and banging his head on the mirror as he retrieved them. But he did not feel any pain from the gash above his left eye. It bled warm blood down his cheek, and that felt strangely comforting.

Then he was in his car and somehow screaming through the streets with his horn blaring, wiping frantically at his eyes to clear his vision.

He felt barely conscious now. All he noticed were the pain and blackness that crashed through his mind. He wove in and out of traffic, banging on the wheel, trying to dislodge the pain. But when he squealed to a stop at the hospital and met a wide-eyed paramedic head on, bent on restraining him, uttering consolations, he knew it made little difference.

Spencer was dead.

Somewhere in the confusion, a well-meaning man in a white coat told him that his son, Spencer, had been struck by a car from behind. A hit-and-run. One of the neighbors found him sprawled on the sidewalk, halfway to the park, with a broken back. Spencer couldn’t have known what hit him, he said. Kent screamed back at the man, told him he should try letting a car snap
his
spine at forty miles an hour and see how that felt.

He stumbled into the room where they had left Spencer’s little body lying on a gurney. He was still in his shorts, bare chested and blond. They had worked with his body, but at first glance Kent saw that his son’s torso rested at an odd angle to his hips. He imagined that body snapping in two, folding over, and he threw up on the gray linoleum floor. He lurched forward to the body, hazy now. Then he touched his son’s white skin and rested his cheek on his still rib cage and wept.

It felt as though a white-hot iron had been pulled from the fires of hell and stamped on his mind. No one deserved this.
No one.
That was the tattoo.

The pain burned so strongly that Kent lost himself to it. They later told him that he’d ranted and raved and cursed—mostly cursed—for over an hour. But he could remember none of it. They gave him a sedative, they said, and he went to sleep. On the floor, in the corner, curled up like a fetus.

But that was not how he remembered things. He just remembered that most of him died that day. And he remembered that branding iron burning in his skull.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Week Six

HELEN JOVIC piloted the ancient, pale yellow Ford Pinto through a perfectly manicured suburbia, struck by the gross facade. Like a huge plastic Barbie-doll set carefully constructed on the ground to cover a reeking cesspool beneath. Made to cover these dungeons down here.

It felt strange driving through the world. Lonely. As if she were dreaming and the houses rising above green lawns were from another planet—because she knew what was really here, and it resembled something much closer to a sewer than this picture-perfect neighborhood.

That was the problem with holing yourself up in prayer for a week and having your eyes opened. You saw things with more clarity. And God was making her see things more clearly these days, just as he’d done with Elisha’s servant. Drawing her into this huge drama unfolding behind the eyes of mortals. She played the intercessor—the one mortal allowed to glimpse both worlds so that she could pray. She knew that. And pray she had, nearly nonstop for ten days now.

But it was just the beginning. She knew that just as she would know the turning of the leaves signaled the coming of autumn. More was to follow. A whole season.