Good Christian Bitches by Kim Gatlin

Good Christian Bitches by Kim Gatlin

Author:Kim Gatlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Christian, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9781934812198
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-01-02T06:00:00+00:00


Chapter 15

The difference between an evildoer and a martyr is spin—it’s not what happens that matters. It’s how people perceive what happens that makes the difference.

Such was the case for Susie Caruth, whose husband, in spite of the rumor, promptly bailed her out of jail even before she had so much as set foot in a holding pen or drunk tank. Word reached Edward’s office of Susie’s arrest even before she and her two police escorts reached the station house for processing. One phone call from Edward to the desk officer ensured that Susie would spend her entire “incarceration” in the women police officers’ lounge, an astonishingly lavish facility donated to the department by the husband of a repeat drunk driver who got sick and tired of hauling his wife out of the drunk tank and thought that a major gift might smooth troubled waters the next time she got pulled over.

While the police department was naturally elated with its over-the-top new lounge, which featured a huge flat-screen TV and large leather swivel chairs, the donor’s wife’s habit of driving while intoxicated continued unabated, and her rap sheet continued to grow until finally her husband was quietly convinced by his attorney to move to their spread north of Lubbock. There, she could drink and drive all she wanted, putting at risk no one but herself and a lot of prize cattle.

Susie was not fingerprinted, photographed, cavity searched, or subjected to any of the other indignities that an arrested person normally faces. Instead, she sat watching Days of Our Lives until her husband came and collected her. But that’s not how the story was spread around town. Instead, rumor quickly took flight throughout Hillside Park, conveyed by voice, texting, instant messaging, furtive whispers, and a variety of other high- and low-tech methods of communication, that Susie had been (take your choice) strip-searched, locked in a holding cell with candidates for deportation, roughed up by police officers, roughed up by fellow inmates, assaulted six ways to Sunday, or, according to one feverish instant message that rapidly made the rounds, that she had all but been murdered behind bars. None of this had happened, of course, but the overall effect was to create a wave of sympathy for Susie, the “innocent victim of vicious police brutality,” that far outweighed any remaining outrage the women felt toward her for screwing up the Longhorn Ball. Adding to the drama was the fact that Susie was nowhere to be found. Her husband had spirited her away on a ninety-day round-the-world cruise, to keep her from blabbing to friends, enemies, frenemies, and even the local media about what she had done or not done with piles of cash, some of which she had brought home in brown paper bags from the office, much to the consternation of her husband. Edward rightly feared that criminal proceedings could be instituted against Susie, not just for stupidity, but for malfeasance and for sticking her hand in the till. In his mind, it made more sense to get her out of the country until the whole thing died down.



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