Salvation Boulevard Read Online Free PDF Page A

you.”
    â€œYou know what’s hard to do?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt’s hard to know if you’re being followed on a freeway. Straight line, everybody zooming along, you got your cruise control on, steady at eighty-five. The guy behind us, he’s steady at eighty-five. So are thirty, forty other cars.”
    â€œOne of them’s following us?”

    â€œIt’s worth the price of a cup of coffee,” I said, “even an overpriced latté, to find out.”
    â€œNext exit?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œHow far is it?”
    â€œMile, mile and a half.”
    Manny smiled and put his foot down. I didn’t hear a thing, didn’t feel a tremor or a shake as the speedometer rolled up to 140 miles per hour. “Terrorists send messages,” he said thoughtfully, gesturing with his right hand, as if doing 140 didn’t require special attention. “9/11 was a message. Suicide bombings, they’re messages. If this was a terrorist killing, where’s the message?”
    â€œMaybe the manuscript,” I said.
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œThe manuscript that they found with him, maybe it wasn’t just there by accident, maybe someone made sure it was there, a way of saying that this is what happens to people who say, ‘God is dead.’ Killed him for being an atheist.”
    â€œApostate,” Manny said.
    â€œWhat’s the difference?”
    â€œAtheist is when you don’t believe there is a God. An apostate is someone who joins a religion and then quits it, renounces it.”
    A Ford Explorer had broken out of the pack and was trying to keep up. I hoped their teeth were rattling and the guy with his hands on the wheel had sweaty palms. We were almost at the exit ramp.
    â€œIn Islam, once you join, if you quit, that calls for the death penalty.” Manny turned the wheel and whipped from the fast lane across to middle and slow lanes to the off ramp while he spoke. When we hit the ramp, he took the car down to eighty, maybe seventy-five. The light at the bottom of the ramp had gone yellow. By the time we reached it, it had turned red. Manny accelerated, shot through, and made a left-hand turn. You could tell, he was one of those people who thought that life had granted them immunity.
    â€œYou really want the coffee?” he asked me.

    â€œSure.”
    He pulled into the parking lot in front of the big bookstore. “My treat,” he said.
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œWell, it bills to the client.”
    â€œOf course,” I said, getting out. I pushed the door closed behind me. The thunk was rich and satisfying. You don’t pop for $140K if it doesn’t have that thunk. When he stepped out, I asked over the roof of the car, “And that is? I mean, who’s paying?”
    â€œHezbollah,” he said.
    â€œDon’t even joke like that.”
    â€œYou think they’re listening as well as following?”
    â€œAt some point, yeah.” I said.
    â€œOstensibly the family,” he said. The car locked itself as we walked away from it. “It’s hard for them to get money out of their country. So I think they’re getting help from an Iranian-American friendship association. Lot of very rich Iranians here. They don’t want to start being targeted. So, who was that following us?”
    â€œManny, making terrorist jokes these days is like making bomb jokes at the airport.”
    â€œOh, come on.”
    â€œIf we’re going to fuck with these people,” I said, “don’t make jokes. You’ll hear them being played back to you.” I saw the Explorer driving slowly, out on the road, like the people inside were looking for something. “There they are.”
    Manny looked at the blue Ford. It had a government-issue look to it. What Ahmad had told us was just not possible. It wasn’t possible. So why were we being followed?
    â€œThe guy gets shot, in his office, on