Chapter 1

            I met Cynthia Werther in a sushi shop in a strip mall off of Speedway and Wilmot, across the street from the credit union building that looked like an inverted black pyramid, as if someone thought that architecture ostensibly inspired by an Illuminati cult would attract more loan applicants.  I’d asked her to give me a description of herself when she’d called so I’d know her when I arrived, but there turned out to be a total of two patrons opting for sushi at three o’clock, and I quickly eliminated the possibility of her being the bald guy with his tie thrown back over his blue oxford at the bar.  I waved off the kimonoed waitress as she approached, and moved past the dark lacquered tables toward the back of the restaurant.

            Cynthia was petite woman in her mid-twenties, with chestnut hair cut in what would have been called a page-boy or bob in the nineteen twenties, but probably had an updated moniker in Generation X or Y or whichever we were up to these days.  She was pretty in a quaint way, with sharp features, a small, pointed chin and pert nose, bangs cut square over her forehead.  She looked up as I approached her table over the silver rims of her large, opaque sunglasses.  Then she rose smoothly and extended a minute hand toward me.

            “Hello, Mr. Prentice,” she had a taut, troubled smile that stretched her lips straight across rather than up at the corners.  She wore a full-length tan camelhair coat over a white blouse open at the throat.  “I’m so glad you came; I wasn’t sure who else I could turn to about this.”  We sat.  The waitress was upon us before she could begin again.  I ordered some red snapper and a Sapporo, Cynthia had some green tea.  She didn’t actually look all that hungry.

            “Like I said on the phone, I’m a friend of Gye’s from the university.  He said you’d probably be able to make something of this, of my situation,” she spoke mostly with her head bowed and her eyes apparently looking at the insides of her sunglasses. 

            “It’s probably good he passed you on to me,” I said, “He does lack focus.”  She made a small smile and was quiet for a few minutes.  I occupied the time by staring at the nice, even part down the middle of her scalp. 

            “I think my brother’s disappeared,” she murmured. 

            “Why do you think that?”

            “I haven’t been able to reach him for almost three weeks, and we’re usually really close.  He calls every week or so normally, but he’s just sort of dropped off the face of the earth.  And it’s not just that I can’t get a hold of him – the last time he called, he was... creepy,” she brought her head up and looked towards the ceiling.  I could see a tear descending from behind her sunglasses.  “This is wrong.  This is too goddamn weird, and I don’t even know you...”  She took off her glasses with one hand and wiped her eyes with her other sleeve. 

            My sushi and beer came, along with Cynthia’s tea in a clanky ceramic pot.  I thought I’d lay off the gleaming pink flesh of the snapper until she’d pulled herself together, but I took a discreet pull of the Sapporo.  She ignored her tea.  A look came over her, a resolve, as if she’d made up her mind to do something momentous – she squinted quickly and nodded her head. 

            “All right,” she said, making a polite but dispirited attempt at a smile, “I’m sorry, it’s not like I don’t trust you...  It’s just that Dennis has always been pretty spacey, and I think that he might have actually gotten himself into some kind of trouble.”

            “What kind?”  I felt the time was right to make a stab at some sushi.  That way, Cynthia could feel free to open up to me, knowing that any interruptions would be precluded by me having a mouthful of firm, moist fish.

            She finally took off her glasses and set them on the table.  “Dennis has been hanging out with Christians.  I really don’t know if he’s been converted or whatever, but the last time I talked to him, he was talking about the Campus Crusade for Jesus or something.  He said he was going to one of their meetings.  I guess a couple of them came to his dorm room and offered proof that Jesus was that bullshit cosmic superman they’re always going on about.”  She waved an annoyed, gloved hand dismissing the pesky cosmological worldview.  “You’re not Christian, are you?” she asked, seeming very assured of the answer.

            “No, but I’m not in the business of pissing off deities I can’t be entirely certain don’t exist.”

            She took a small sip of her tea.  “Look, these people creep me the hell out, but that’s not what I’m worried about.  When I couldn’t get a hold of him, I went to his dormitory.  His stuff’s gone, and someone else is living in his room now, and he’d never heard of Dennis.  Campus Housing said he’d moved out two weeks ago, and Registration told me he’d freaking dropped out!  The kid’s a complete geek; school’s his life!”

            I’d spooned a little too much wasabi onto my last slab of snapper, and I felt the alarm spread like a shockwave preceding the backdraft back through my sinuses.  I knew the pain was on its way, but I managed to maintain my composure enough to stay focused.  “So you think he may have run off to join Orel Roberts or something?”

            “I don’t know where he is, Mr. Prentice, but for him to just pull up and disappear without saying anything to me is really not like him.  None of his friends know where he is, Mom doesn’t have a clue, and now she’s starting to freak out.”

            “Do you think he may have found religion from his Crusader buddies and just doesn’t want to hear you bad-mouth Jesus?”

            “Mr. Prentice, I really don’t give a shit if he started believing that the Holy Trinity was represented by the Banana Splits.  I just want to know where he is and that he’s okay.  Gye said that you had a lot of connections in this town, and that you’d be effective in this kind of thing,” she said.  The waitress re-appeared and asked us if we needed anything else.  The beer was decent, but another would’ve made me dopey, and the carbonation was exacerbating the remnants of the wasabi brushfire in my nose.

            “Yeah, I can be pretty effective.  I’ll see what I can dig up.  Gye understands that he’ll owe me one, though?”  A sudden, involuntary smile swept across her face.

            “He mentioned something about it.  And he said I’d owe him one.”

            “Oh.  Do you understand the ramifications of the deal you’ve made?”

            “I do in fact.  I actually dated Gye my last year at the university.”

            “Oh my sweet lord,” I said.  She smiled some more, and a deep rose crept into her cheeks.

Chapter 2

            I read somewhere that, in the early ‘90s, Speedway Boulevard was named one of the top ten ugliest roads in America, and while I can easily believe that, whoever came up with that piece of good old American smackdown obviously judged Tucson’s main drag in a vacuum.  The rounded slopes of the Catalina Mountains loomed above the roofs of the strip malls and banks and burrito joints, titanic and visible even in thickly hazy days.  Today was clear and cool, nature finally dragging the demonic heat down into the eighties in a yearly ritual of merciful reprieve.  I drove west past Country Club Avenue, and eyed the newly-minted Starbucks with a mixture of sadness and yearning, then made a left onto Campbell, and then into the narrow drive leading into the University of Arizona.

            I parked illegally behind the library and strolled across the U of A mall, a long, green rectangle of lawn that acted as an oasis in the midst of acre upon acre of red brick buildings and parking lots.  Students swarmed across the grass, over the surrounding sidewalks and roadways, into and out of buildings.  I was heartened to see the midriff-baring shirts were still popular, while the tops with the straps over one shoulder and the baggy-jeans-and-exposed-boxers combos seemed to be falling out of favor.  I wondered briefly whether full-length fur coats and propeller beanies would ever make a comeback with the college crowd, or if they really were gone forever.

            The Campus Crusade for Christ had a small office in the student union building, which had just finished construction earlier that year, and among the improvements over the old union were a food court to help young students on their way to their first heart attacks, and some sort of architectural element that suggested that a UFO had crash-landed on the roof.  There were two Crusaders at their posts: a stringy kid in a white dress shirt and tie doing his homework at a large desk near the door, and a girl with kinky brown hair apparently having an intense conversation with a shabbily-dressed boy further back in the office.  The furniture was standard-issue office – metal desk and minimally-comfortable chairs, with a few large, round conference tables with dark wood grain veneers, and a few small wooden bookshelves.  The walls were decorated with metal-framed posters of young White missionaries helping emaciated African children, and one of a colorfully-robed Jesus looking either compassionate or melancholy.  On the blond kid’s desk were stacks of stickers reading, “Jesus Died 4 U,” and “Jesus is My Homeboy.” I got a brief mental image of Jesus descending during Judgment Day in low-slung jeans and a White Sox cap, screaming, “Don’t call it a comeback!”

            The thin kid looked up and smiled out of one side of his mouth, something that might be mistaken for a sneer if his eyes didn’t actually seem welcoming.  As he stood, he had that hyperkinetic yet loose posture that I’d come to associate with hip-hopsters, like he had a really cool case of Parkinson’s.  His nametag read Eric.  Eric gave me a genuine, “S’up?”

            “This is the Campus Crusade for Christ?”

            “You know it,” he gave me a wide smile, as if I’d just gotten the joke.  “You here to find out how you can let Jesus into your life?”

            “I was hoping you could help me with something.  I was looking for a guy named Dennis Werther; he used to work for the CCC on campus.  Do you know him?”  

            He froze for a second and then leaned back, as if the seriousness of my question might be viewed better from a slightly more distant perspective.  A wide grin appeared slowly on his boyish face.

            “:Fuckin’ Dennis!” he exploded.  His hand, shaped like it was signing the letter h, swung in an arc from his side down past his groin.  “You are looking for fuckin’ Dennis?”

            “Actually, no.  Just Dennis.  Dennis Werther.  I’m assuming you’ve heard of him,” I said.

            “Oh, shit yeah.  That muthafucka was here last semester.  Ain’t here now.  What do you want with Dennis, you a friend of his or something?”

            “You pray with that mouth?”

            “Doesn’t say nothing about swearing in the Bible.  ‘Sides, language changes – we don’t say “thou shalt” and “begat” anymore.  We say muthafucka, and by muthafucka, I mean gentleman.”  Eric said gentleman with a very studied Ivy League lilt.

            “It does say not to take the Lord’s name in vain.”

            “Well, I don’t do that.”

            “That’s very pious.”

            “Damn right.”

            “Anyway, I’m looking for Dennis.  Do you know anyone here who might know where he is?”

            Eric turned his head over his shoulder to the kinky-haired girl at the table behind him.  I noticed that the boy she was expounding to was stealing periodic wide-eyed glances back at Eric. 

            “Angela, you know where Dennis is?”  Angela looked directly at me as if I might have been a used snot rag, and spoke very carefully.

            “I do not know where Dennis is.  I do not care where Dennis is.”  She apologized to the boy she was talking to and resumed their conversation.  Eric turned back around to face me.

            “There you go.  Nobody knows where Dennis is,” he said.

            “What the hell happened here?  You guys don’t seem to care if Dennis is alive or dead.  What did he do?”  I leaned across the desk with my forearms to try and simulate a little comradery between Eric and me.  Eric moved in a little closer, and lowered his voice in a confidential tone.  Just us homeboys.

            “Listen, man, Dennis was a pretty alright G when he came here.  I don’t know what happened to him.  Some cats come here with the wrong ideas about what we do, about missionary work, about getting the whole message out about the J-Man.  I mean, everybody comes here know Jesus is dope; only people who don’t are dumb muthafuckas.”

            “I like Jesus,” I owned.  I omitted the fact that I liked Buddha and Mohammed and a few others about as much.  His eyes narrowed and he leaned in closer, lowered his voice to a near whisper.

            “Damn right, man.  You got no friend like Jesus.  He’ll keep your ass outta Hell, and take you to see the Boss Gangsta.  He’ll set all your shit up for you.”

            “About Dennis...”

            “Man, I liked Dennis.  When he got here, he was ready to fuck shit up on campus.  You’da thought Jesus was his damn room-mate or somethin’.”

            “So what happened?”

            “I dunno, man.  He got all weird and shit.  Like he started to doubt, like maybe there was some other god that Jesus had nothin’ to do with.  Like something had nothin’ to do with love or salvation – not evil like those Satanism assholes, but a god that just didn’t give a shit.  Fuckin’ creepy, man.  He started actin’ wack in here – got into one of those deep discussions with Angela, and wound up screamin’ at her about somethin’.  She don’t like talkin’ about it much.  We were about to do something with him, like talk him down or somethin’.”

            “Like an intervention?”

            “Yeah, whatever.  He never came back, so we just said fuck it.”

            “Is that what Jesus would have done?”

            “Yo, Jesus got a limit.  You read about what he did to those moneylenders in the temple?  Jesus kicked some ass back in the day.”

            I thanked him and gave him one of my brand new cards.  Since I didn’t really have a job, I went with style over information.  It just had my name, phone number, and e-mail address printed over a shadowy profile of an Assyrian winged bull.  Eric took exception to the motif, commenting that the Assyrians were “dicks to the Jews.” 

            “Give me a call if you think of anything,” I said.

            “F’sho, man, but I don’t think you’ll be hearin’ from us.  He didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout where he was goin’, and we didn’t ask.  But you, you come back sometime, and we’ll get you in good with the Geez.”  I left.

Chapter 3