Devotion Apart Read online

  Once off the highway, I took the street bike up Kard Way, then doubled back and stopped on Nevy Avenue. There had been development in and around the city, but the Airport District had become more rundown. The gang I had joined at age fifteen had been called the Airport Boyz, and those few streets between the river and the school complex had been ours. We had pressed our influence as hooligans inside the city limits, but the Airport District had been my home. I'd attended Airport Elementary, then St. John Junior High. I'd barely graduated from Grace High, since our shenanigans as unsupervised youths had often stretched late into the nights. Craig had grown up in Highway Village. Even though we'd attended the same school his residence in the Village had set him apart from the Airport Boyz. Regardless, he and I had remained friends.

  Astride my bike, I flipped up my visor and looked south toward the mini storage and trailer park, where my family and I had lived. It was under new ownership, but it still smelled the same. Like a sewer.

  "You selling or buying, honey?" asked a young woman in a miniskirt as she tripped in high heels up the street. "Hey, don't I know you?"

  "I don't think so," I said, and flipped down my visor.

  "You're that guy from ReVo!" She stumbled into my bike. Her face was caked with clownish makeup, her ribs shown beneath her tube top, and her legs were as thin as her arms. She didn't seem sober, so I said nothing more and sped away.

  In the direction of Legion Park, I heard three gunshots, but no sirens. I waited ten minutes, and no police arrived. Whatever cameras were monitoring those streets, they weren't doing anything more than watching. No one responded to the neighborhood's needs.

  Rolling up Stang Street, I saw abandoned vehicles surrounded by trash, and several street parties, loud music blaring around burning barrels. Someone threw a bottle at me, and they laughed until I climbed off my bike. Standing there, I removed my helmet, trying to understand what had happened to my old streets.

  "Whoa, look!" A boy no older than fifteen with a nose piercing backed away from me. "It's the guy from the slap challenge!"

  "Dude, you're a boss!" another yelled, then someone else turned up the music. So much for being anonymous. To test the handling of the motorcycle, I tore halfway up Cornifate Way's long straightaway before I saw a police car and slowed my speed. Retail Row was on my left, and Whetstone Estates lay on my right. The middle-class housing area hadn't been there twenty years earlier. The desert had been claimed by cookie-cutter homes.

  North of the city, I turned into Nobel Arena. The stadium had been under construction when I'd left the city, but now it was a monstrosity, with parking for thousands next to Cornucopia Fair Mall. Most of the shops and storefronts were closed at that hour, but a few were still lit up, and people were wandering around, drinking, laughing, or gathered around parked cars. Everyone seemed to be holding or watching their phones or wrist viewers.

  In the parking lot of the Arena, I took off my helmet to test my phone and the new software Craig had installed that evening. After entering my retinal print and a password for security, I chose an app called RASH, the Regulatory Alert Surveillance Hunter. It took a few minutes to figure out the search engine that interfaced by cell signal with Craig's basement servers, but I finally found a screen with a prompt where I could type in a name or other search parameters. I typed in one name: Sadona Escobar.

  An instant later, her entire profile appeared in frames and folders. Dated entries showed everything she'd ever bought, where she frequented, her income as a real estate agent, all her phone calls, and known associates. Additional icons displayed videos and not just data, down to her every move indoors, outdoors, day or night, all the way back to the initialization of the RASH system two years earlier. The system pried so deep that I felt like a creep for spying on her, although I was simply testing the software for when I'd actually need it.

  Another feature offered a "Present Location." I saw her house from a bird's eye view in Two Sheep Meadows, a neighborhood northwest of the Arena. Other views of her present location were also available, including the twenty most reliable cameras within range, contact tracing imaging among them. Audio was also available, four indexed sources in Sadona's immediate range. When I touched on one that read "phone," I immediately heard a woman humming. It was a hymn, something I'd heard before. It was Sadona's voice. And another woman spoke in the background.

  "Just put it on the table, Mom," Sadona called back.

  I remembered her face in the car next to me, when I'd not known God would want me to stay in the city to face the tragedies and darkness with the light of Christ. How could Sadona fit into this scenario? I could only imagine what God was setting up!

  Back on my bike, I passed by the Hidden Springs Casino complex by riding through the parking garage. The place was packed, and it was after midnight now. Up Apache Avenue, I reached Jamilla Avenue and turned south. The road was quiet, so I opened up the engine again, testing its power before I reached the zoo. At a safer speed, I cruised through the warehouse district, surprised at how busy the place was in the middle of the night. I understood the activity was probably criminal, but I wasn't prepared to stop and interact quite yet.

  Along the river, I was thrilled to find that River Road had finally been paved. It was a moonlit night, now outside the city, and a smooth ride for several miles before I reached a new community around a manmade lake called Liberty Lake. Here, I pulled off to overlook the huge body of water, so wide and long that I could barely see house lights on the opposite shore.

  It was here that I took off my helmet again and palmed my phone. With a prayer breathed for strength, I punched in my father's name: Earl Dalton. His profile filled my screen, and I felt numb as I reviewed the life he'd lived over the past few months. He was on disability after working for the post office for years. His grocery purchases listed quantities of alcohol on every receipt, and his last doctor visit showed chronic liver disease. He was dying, and he had no one. He knew nothing about his life of decay—or that there was deliverance so near.

  There was an index by hours of the television channels and internet sites he frequented. I quickly sampled enough to find much of the content bordered on sadistic and excelled in perverted. But cross-indexing with other residents of Devotion showed my father wasn't the only one with such rabid tastes. The city's pleasures were deeply immoral.

  Although my disgust grew the more I poured through his profile, it was his list of contacts that checked my judgments and ignited my sorrow. No one had called my father on the phone for months. The last person who'd called Dad was nearly four months earlier: Detective Fletcher. I listened to the call that had informed him of Cora's death. Fletcher had been sympathetic, but Dad had sounded indifferent.

  Curiously, I searched his whereabouts the day of Cora's funeral, and sadly, Dad hadn't even left his house. His own daughter. . .

  I stuffed the phone in my pocket and leaned back on my bike seat to gaze up at the sky. This close to the bright lights of the city, the stars weren't as visible as they had been in the Amazon. It was hard to imagine that a week earlier, I'd been facing down cannibals, trying to teach them the gospel, and fighting for my life against a Chego chief's son who'd insisted on a knife duel to the death. God's hand, to bring me to this moment, was unmistakable.

  A block away from a mini-mart, I parked in front of my father's duplex, a badly-lit brown house with crumbling paint. After climbing off my bike, I stood in the dirt yard for a long time, imagining my father passing years of his life right there. No one cared for him. True, he had cared for no one, either, not even me when I was a young boy, but I wondered if the cycle of apathy could be broken. It could, according to the love of Christ. A miracle happened when hopeless lives came into contact with the love of God. After all, my life had changed. The question was, did my father want to be loved? Would he accept love? Or were the counterfeits he watched on his television screen fulfillment enough?

  From my satchel, I drew my bush knife and slid the blade between
the door and the jam to unlock the front door. By his profile of bills, I knew he had no security system. From a thermal view of the duplex, he hadn't moved from a chair in the living room for hours. The camera on his audio-video system displayed him snoring soundly, so I walked quietly into the kitchen and turned on the light. Trash on the floor was heaped as high as the counter. Empty donut boxes and spent bags of instant coffee from the mart down the street littered the floor. Since I'd spent years in the rainforest, I recognized the smell of mold, and not the good kind. It was in the tile, in the sink, and spanned from the fridge to the window where beer cans sat empty or half-full.

  A few minutes later, I found a box of trash bags and started to clean the place. I wasn't sneaking, but I wasn't unnecessarily loud, either. My father was a stranger to me. Never had we had a memorable conversation. I was there to love him, but I couldn't imagine speaking to him yet. It did humor me that he might be disturbed about someone breaking into his house, but what would he tell the police? And if I were found out, I was family. Why wouldn't I come and go from my father's place, cleaning up where I could help?

  After I'd taken the trash out to the curb, I got busy with a scrub pad and went hunting for the mold. It was nearly dawn when I'd dried the dishes and put them in the cupboard. He needed a lot more help besides a clean kitchen, but it was a start.

  On the kitchen table, I wrote him a note: "Earl Dalton, Your life matters. We hope to help you more in the near future."

  Since I knew the details from his latest physical, I hoped to speak to his heart about how eternity was indeed looming closer for him than others. His life mattered. I prayed that he'd begin to understand that, then left the house.

  It would've been easy to feel good about doing a kind thing for a man who didn't deserve it, but nothing too meaningful had actually been accomplished. I wouldn't rest until real fruit began to show. This had been my attitude in the forest, and I knew it needed to be the same in the city. It wasn't the kindness that was important, but the Christ-like fruit that came forth. That's what would bring God glory in the midst of darkness.

  Chapter Four

  In my hammock in Craig's living room that morning, I slowly drifted to sleep while praying. I had made moves for God in Satan's environment, and that meant opposition would soon rise against me. In the rainforest, whenever a new tribe was reached with the gospel, Duppo and I had experienced unprecedented spiritual opposition. Sometimes it had been nature raging against us in the form of floods or storms. Other times, a neighboring tribe had interfered with the preaching by attacking the very day we were bringing the gospel to the people. It would be the same in Devotion now. Attacks would come and discouragement would rise because I was pushing up against Satan's stronghold in Devotion. Temptations would harass me. Violence might threaten me. Satan had the advantage over the material realm, but I belonged to the heavenly realm. Because of Jesus Christ, I could overcome.

  Around noon, I woke to a jab in the ribs. My eyes slowly focused on Janae's hefty frame standing over me.

  "Are you ever getting up?" she asked. "Or do I vacuum around you?"

  "Message received," I mumbled and rolled out of the hammock.

  "You can't expect to party all night and sleep around here all day." Her tone was motherly, even if she was misinformed. "Mr. Tasman is the only lazy one in this house, and he can be lazy because he pays the bills. If you start paying the bills, I'll let you sleep all day, too!"

  I chuckled, unhooked my hammock, and wandered into my bedroom. Once the door was shut, I couldn't hear the vacuum on the other side of the mansion. Eventually, I needed to learn to sleep in the king-sized bed, or find a way to hang my hammock in my room.

  With a bran muffin in hand, I walked outside where Tyler was washing a blue Mustang, one of Craig's many cars. I shared with him about finding my father, and that I hoped cleaning up his kitchen would start to soften him toward all that I hoped for his last days on earth.

  "I'm going to be having more night escapades like last night, Tyler. I'll be home late, sometimes not at all. We need to find a way to hang my hammock in my bedroom, so I don't disrupt Janae's routine or disturb the sleep I'll need during the day."

  "Hmm. We thought you were out on the town." Tyler rinsed the soap off the hood of the car. "I can locate the studs in the wall and give you a couple of hooks. Will that do?"

  "That'll do. Ten or twelve feet apart will work best." I thrust my hands into my pockets, then realized I wasn't there to watch other people work, so I picked up a towel and helped dry the car. "You know where Craig used to go to church?"

  "What are you doing?" Tyler had stopped working. "You don't need to do that. Washing these babies in my excuse to get out of the inside work."

  "You'd better get used to me, Tyler." I smiled. "I'm not one to sit around. When I'm not sleeping, I expect to earn my keep with a few chores here and there."

  "Yeah, Mr. Tasman said you'll be sticking around here for a while."

  "Will I be in the way?"

  "Nah, Janae could use someone else to dote over. I suppose I should tell her you're not the partying kind. She was worried about you last night."

  "I'll keep that in mind."

  He told me that Craig had attended most Sundays, before his reclusive behavior, the Set Free Gospel Church on Soma Street. Thousands attended, Tyler said, but he couldn't stand the hypocrisy, so he never went farther than the parking lot. Seeing Craig's lavish lifestyle and drinking, I understood why Tyler judged by Craig alone that all Christians didn't live up to any sort of standard. I'd need to allow Tyler to see my example rather than tell him that true Christians are set apart from the world and its appetites.

  Most of that Friday, I lounged in my bedroom and better familiarized myself with the RASH software. My interest in Craig's church was not for personal reasons exactly. Cora had gone to the same fellowship as Craig, but that wasn't my focus, either. I believed that God would support my work in the city, and that meant I needed to become familiar with sound assemblies to which I could direct new converts. The church was meant to be responsible for teaching new believers, and I wasn't so self-absorbed as to think that I could do alone what needed to be done within a whole body of believers. The members of the body of Christ would need to be involved in my work going forward.

  That afternoon, I also called Lucas Norman in Brazil and informed him that I hoped to be returning to the river, but not right away. He assured me that he'd send a canoe upriver to get word to Duppo, my Christian evangelist friend from the Matamata tribe, to explain to him that I was delayed.

  "One other thing, Cord," Lucas said in Portuguese. "There's a native who's been living down by the river here since you left. He's a Majerona, and he's scaring away my local clients. Having cannibals around here is bad for business. He says you saved his life and he's trying to find you. So, how do I get rid of him?"

  "What's his name?"

  "He says it's Paco, but I don't know. That's not a native name. He has an ugly scar across half his chest."

  "Okay, I know him." He had been interested in the gospel the final night I'd been on the river. If he said I'd saved his life, then he must've been referring to his reception of the gospel message. "Tell him to join Duppo, but if that's no good for him, get him cleared for a visa to come up here to Devotion, Arizona. If you do the paperwork for him, Lucas, I'll make it worth your while."

  "You really want a cannibal up there in Arizona?"

  "Ex-cannibal, Lucas. Yes. He's now a Christian, and we need all the Christians we can get."

  That evening, I walked to the Morliam Acres Property Management building. It was open day and night, servicing the gated community's every need. Inside the air-conditioned building, I walked around the display area and placed Sadona's real estate cards on various stands and tables between sofas and against the walls. The Morliam Acres staff member on duty was a woman behind a counter. I waved to her as I browsed several luxury vacation brochures. Sadona's cards were unique among the rest,
but it was hard to say if anyone from the closed community would actually call on her services. However, I had done what I could do.

  Thankfully, Tyler helped me hang my hammock in my bedroom, so I got a full night of sleep in my room and woke early to go for a jog.

  Outside Morliam Acres, I found East River Road and jogged along the Lazy Body River. The Saturday morning air was crisp, and the highway was clear. I missed my strenuous hikes through the rainforest, so I stretched my limbs by managing a fast pace south toward Robbi's Ridge.

  As I came upon Shay Estate, I slowed down to study the security of the private residence. Morliam Acres was secure and gated, but nothing like what I saw around Shay Estate. Here, a high wall separated the outside world from the exclusive interior. Upon the wall were cameras, barbed wire, and broken glass. I noticed several areas of the wall that passed through dark, forested sections, but the cameras probably had thermal imaging, which was something Craig had explained to me. Getting inside to spy on Shay would require more stealth than I'd imagined. The challenge excited me!

  Beyond the estate, I crossed the river on the bridge to Robbi's Ridge, and climbed the pathway to the highest point. There, the ground was littered with syringes, condoms, and gun shells. In the distance, I could see over the wall of Shay Estate, and in a moment I had committed to memory the lay of the land inside the compound—which was nearly as large as the entirety of Morliam Acres. Although I could research the details of Shay's property through RASH, I wanted a personal view of the place. My first impression was that the man had hidden himself away from society by isolating himself within his own private paradise.

  Shay interested me immensely. Fletcher had said the man had his hands in everything, from DOD contracts to the casino action. I couldn't study Shay directly under the microscope of RASH, but perhaps I could study him more covertly and in person. When I had heard of powerful men who were doing evil in the rainforest, I intentionally sought them out, to see if they were open to the gospel. That day on Robbi's Ridge, I started to pray for Adrian Shay.