Crowley Stories by T. M. Strait

Author:T. M. Strait
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-31T13:50:38+00:00

Miscarriage of Justice

“Oh, shine!” said Lucy Mayer. “It’s them!”

“Them?” inquired Sheriff Alan Steel. Lucy was his Dispatch Officer, a short, stout woman, who had served the county police department for over two decades. She was the second longest active employee, next to Alan’s twenty-five years of service. They had an instinctual rapport with each other, and he had come to rely on her common sense.

Lucy had come back to Alan’s office and looked furtively towards the front. “It looks like half of New Life church has come here. Even that preacher man, I forget his name.” Lucy had some disdain for the church, being that she was a faithful attendee of the more proper First Baptist Church, at least more proper in her eyes. Alan sometimes found the many almost unfathomable divisions of Baptists amusing, but that may be because he attended the one and only United Methodist Church in Dixon County, Crowley United Methodist. They had to get along because if you were going to be a United Methodist, that church was it. “I hate to admit it, Sheriff, but I’m a mite unnerved by them. There’s got to be a dozen or more. What are they all doing here?”

A dozen was a big crowd for the police department’s tiny lobby. Thank goodness it wasn’t half the church as Lucy exaggeratedly said at first. They must have attendance of more than a thousand. There were at least three churches, all Baptist of one kind or another (one claimed not to be Baptist, but it certainly walked and talked like that duck), that had four-figure attendance numbers. His church was good sized, one of the biggest of the non-Baptist churches, but it still never had much more than 200.

Sheriff Alan thought for a second, and then had a horrible feeling he knew why they might be there. “Oh, my lord! It’s probably about Rayce.”

“Rayce?” puzzled Lucy. “Oh, you mean your niece, Racine? That poor girl who just lost her baby? What could they want that had anything to do with that?”

“Watch, Lucy,” said Sheriff Steel. “Watch and be amazed. Send in that preacher man by himself and the rest can cool their jets in the lobby, as long as they’re civil. And that preacher man goes by the moniker Pastor Dan. I don’t know his real full name.”

Lucy nodded and went out to get Pastor Dan. When she came back, she said, “Pastor Dan is ready to come back, but Larry Luck and that politician lady, Dotty Mathers, want to come back with him.” Larry was a farmer in the area, and he was kind of a rival with Alan’s brother, Grant. Grant operated the large family farm; the one Alan just wanted to get away from. Dotty Mathers was the crazy woman running for Congress and had made such a scene at Congressman Winston’s last town hall meeting that a video of it went viral on YouTube.

“No, Lucy. Just Pastor Dan. I’ll come out to the lobby and talk to all of them after I’ve seen him.

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