"Give it to me in percentages. How much of a chance?"
"One in ten."
"Ah'm sunk," Reverend Eldon Sluggard groaned.
"Not if we launch a fast fund-raiser."
"Our last three fund-raisers only broke even."
"You got a better idea, El?"
Eldon Sluggard did not have a better idea. But he knew that he needed to raise over sixty thousand dollars a day just to keep his TV show, Get with God, on the air. And so he launched the first Eldon Sluggard Cross Crusade.
After two months, he called in his media advisers. "How we doin'?"
"At this rate," he was told, "we're out of business by July."
"Any options?"
"We've drawn up a list of old folks-mostly women-who have put you in their wills as an act of faith."
"Yeah?"
"If they should-if something should happen . . . Well, you know, El."
El knew. He just didn't want to say it aloud. No telling which of the other preachers had the place bugged.
"How much we talkin' here? Round numbers."
"Maybe twenty million. Enough to keep us afloat until things settle down."
The Reverend Eldon Sluggard dismissed his advisers. Fleecing the elderly was one thing. Knocking them off was another. It wasn't that he was squeamish. A man who accepts the checks of people on welfare and the poor-which was the demographic group that Get with God appealed to-had no cause to cringe from any tactic. It's just that Eldon Sluggard wanted to figure out a foolproof escape plan if the law got involved.
Reverend Eldon Sluggard was considering what he would do when he was buzzed that a visitor was here to see him. A visitor called Victoria Hoar, he was told. He started to say, "Not today," when she stepped in. She was tall and slim-hipped and pert-busted and everything that his ex-wife Griselda was not. She put out a tapered hand and instinctively Reverend Eldon Sluggard took it.
She smiled. And for the first time, Eldon Sluggard started having trouble keeping his attraction from showing through his trouser fabric.
"You have a problem, Reverend Sluggard," Victoria Hoar said coolly. "And I believe I can solve it."
"You can? You mean here and now?"
"Not quite that quickly or easily, I'm afraid."
"Oh," said Reverend Sluggard, his hand freezing on his fly.
Victoria Hoar looked down at the bulge of Reverend Sluggard's crotch and gave him an assured smile. "Perhaps that problem too."
And before he knew what was happening, she had led him out of the building to his two-hundred-foot yacht, which was down in the books as the ministry's floating chapel, and to his personal stateroom, and to his four-poster bed.
"How'd you know Ah sleep here?" he asked as he kicked off his shoes. Victoria Hoar was undoing her brassiere. It was the kind that clasped in front. Eldon Sluggard had a weakness for that kind of bra.
"The same way I know a lot of things," she said, unzipping her skirt. Eldon Sluggard was so captivated by the way she undressed herself that he stared dumbfounded, forgetting that he was in the middle of unbuttoning his shirt.
"Yeah? Like what?" he asked.
"Like you've been divorced for almost a year and you don't dare date because of who you are and how much money you're worth. You can't remarry because your alimony is one of the contributing causes to your ministry's financial problems." She folded her skirt neatly and laid it across the back of a chair. Eldon liked that. Most women didn't have the presence of mind. They usually let their clothes drop to the floor. "And that you've been as horny as a ram since your wife divorced you."
"Since before that. She got fat. The bitch."
"Some women do when they get to her age."
"She could have warned me. It was in her damn genes." Eldon's voice trailed off. The panties were coming down, crisp and white. They joined the skirt on the chair, and Victoria Hoar, walking like Belit through a Cecil B. DeMille film, joined him on the bed.
"You seem to know a lot about me," he muttered.
"Almost everything. Now let me help you finish undressing and later we can talk about my ideas to rescue your ministry."
"Just a minute," said Eldon suddenly, his eyes coming into focus. "Ah forgot something."
Eldon Sluggard hopped off the bed and got down on his hands and knees. Taking a heavy flashlight, he shone it under the bed.
"It's okay," he said, getting back on the bed. "There's no one under the bed."
Victoria Hoar arched a penciled eyebrow. "Spies?"
"No," replied the Reverend Eldon Sluggard, climbing on top of her cool immaculate body. "The devil." It was in that first twenty minutes of bliss that Eldon cried out that Victoria Hoar was his personal savior and she hadn't even revealed her master plan yet. Pacing his conference room, the afterimages of that first fevered night together fading in his mind, Eldon Sluggard wished that he hadn't. The woman was great, but no piece of tail was worth being drawn and quartered by Moslem fanatics. And where the hell was she? He was going to tell her off. This was it. This was quits. Victoria Hoar entered the room with the assurance of a woman to whom no room, no building, was off limits.
"This is your fault!" Eldon Sluggard thundered in his best orator's voice, turning on her with an accusing finger.
Victoria Hoar looked down at his crotch with a knowing smile. "Is it now?" she asked.
The Reverend Eldon Sluggard looked down at himself. His zipper was becoming undone. It looked like magic. But it was only the pressure of his manhood straining to burst free. Damn, he thought, I shouldn't have thought of that first night.
"Forget this!" Sluggard shouted, pointing to himself. "That isn't me. That's just the flesh, and the flesh is weak. Not me. Ah'm strong. Ah'm fortified with the word. "
Victoria Hoar clicked over to his side, picked the heavy book off the table, and laid it in his hands so that it fell open. The open pages showed as white as snow. "Hallelujah!" she said smugly.
"This can't go on. Have you been reading the papers? Do you know who's gunning for me? What they'll do?"
"Forget today's problems. We have to concentrate on tomorrow's opportunities," Victoria Hoar said, her face inching toward his, her perfume billowing into his nostrils, her hands kneading his hips, moving in growing circles, so close but not quite in the right place.
"Forget?" he said weakly, dreamily. "How can I forget?"
And Victoria Hoar's moist mouth touched his briefly, her tongue darting between his teeth, and then she sank to her knees and her tongue began to work in earnest and Reverend Eldon Sluggard forgot all about the terrorists with their AK-47's and the mullahs with their sharp instruments.
He forgot everything.