The Influence (Supernatural Thriller)

by Matthew John Slick

  “Lord Jesus, I come to you and confess that I am a sinner. I admit that I have broken your Law, that I have broken your Word, and I have sinned against you. Please forgive me of my sins. I trust in what you have done on the cross and I receive you. Please cleanse me of my sin and be the Lord of my life. Strengthen me so I might turn from sin. I trust you completely for the forgiveness of my sins and put no trust in my own efforts of righteousness. Lord Jesus, please save me.”

  If you have honestly asked the Lord Jesus to forgive you of your sins and trusted in him by faith alone to remove the judgment of God the Father, then you are a Christian.

  Fifth, Turn from your sin

  Christ will receive you as you are, but he won’t leave you as you are. He will change you. He will help you turn from your old ways. This is called repentance. God will enable you to resist sin and have victory over it.

  Sixth, tell others about Jesus

  Tell others about your commitment to Jesus. The Bible says, “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation,” (Rom. 10:9-10). You don’t have to do this every time to everyone. But, you’ll find that you want to tell others. This is part of the change that God has worked in you.

  Seventh, find a good church

  If you are curious about what churches to attend and not attend (there are bad ones out there), then check out www.carm.org. It’ll provide what you need to learn more about Christianity and to avoid the traps of false teachings.

  Eighth, read your Bible.

  Get a good Bible. Read it regularly. It is the word of God.

  May the Lord bless you.

  In Jesus,

  Matt Slick

  PREVIEW OF

  Desert Atonement

  by James R. Spencer

  Prologue

  You could, if you selected your sites carefully, detonate a hundred A-bombs in The Great Basin Desert without knocking over a man-made structure. The Great Basin is a vast wasteland in the American West—a quarter of a million square miles of ravines, plateaus, and mountain ranges populated by sagebrush and saltbrush, juniper and piñion. Skittering across the scalded alkaline earth are jackrabbits, cottontails, ground squirrels, and pikas—rock rabbits or coneys—which resemble rodents but are not. Rangy coyotes pursue these mammals like sloppily-dressed detectives. Birds of prey dive-bomb them from the air. Golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, prairie falcons, and the burrowing owls feed on the small mammals and smaller birds, and also on the pack and kangaroo rats, lizards, and snakes. Larger hunters like mountain lions, foxes, and bobcats join the hunt, the largest of which can bring down mule deer and the occasional bighorn sheep. The warfare continues at the micro level among the insects and arachnids. The desert is a savage battlefield with red-dripping teeth and fangs.

  If the land shapes its human inhabitants, as anthropologists claim, it is no wonder the story of the settlers of the American West is stereotyped by its drifters, gunfighters, whores, and gamblers, peppered with a smattering of honest sodbusters, cattlemen, and sheep men. The earliest invaders fought not only the native peoples of the desert, but each other—mirroring the carnage among the animal denizens. Human inhabitants of the desert west are red in their own way; fiercely independent, the reddest of the red states are here. New-fangled zoning laws are voted down here. Hippies please use side entrance (there is no side entrance). Minding your business is your business.

  The Great Basin’s Salt Lake Basin was the perfect place to hatch one of the strangest desert critters ever—a breed of men with an exaggerated taste for, well, women. They instituted The Practice—the practice of polygamy. Polygamy today continues among upwards of 50,000 people among the brush and ravines of the Western deserts, including not only the Great Basin but also the Mojave and the Mexican Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. The Practice was maintained by its own red principle: the principle of blood atonement. Perhaps it was a principle learned from observing the desert bloodletting.

  * * *

  The Big Horn Basin viewed from LANDSAT a thousand miles above, is shaped like a drop of blood splashed over the Rocky Mountains from the Great Basin Pool. Cartographers and gazetteers can’t settle on how to spell Big Horn; is it the Bighorn Basin, Bighorn River, and Bighorn Mountains or Big Horn Basin, River, and Mountains. All, however, agree on the official spelling of Big Horn County. Though not technically a part of the Great Basin, no matter how you spell it, the Big Horn Basin is in every respect like the rest of the Great Basin, including the Practice and the Principle. Blood runs freely there as well.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A pale and nearly full moon hung in the western sky, casting ghostly sagebrush and cottonwood shadows on the alkali patch where a man crouched against a concrete cistern. The moon, when it had risen out of Dead Horse Gulch across the Big Horn River six hours earlier, had been an orange beauty; now, high in the night sky, it looked like a bleached skull. The man waited in the chill morning air, cradling a twelve-gauge shotgun that had belonged to his father. The man felt his fifty-eight years as he turned his ear toward the lane leading to his driveway.

  Four feet from the man a jackrabbit, frozen in the moonlight, stared at him. Across the river sandstone bluffs rose like an ancient mausoleum. Jan Kucera wished he would quit thinking in funerary terms. Even more he wished Monster were with him.

  Crouching in the dark, Jan took deep breaths of pungent, sage-scented night air. Breathing deeply made him lightheaded, but it helped calm him. He laid the old Winchester atop the cistern his father had poured from concrete he had mixed in a wheelbarrow. When Jan was a boy the cistern had held the family’s drinking water.

  Jan heard the distinctive clicking of a diesel engine and watched a shadowy black pickup truck creep down his driveway, lights out, its tires crunching the pea-gravel. The pickup stopped. Two dark figures slid out and made their way to Jan’s bedroom window. They looked around. One of them quietly took a folding chair off the porch and placed it underneath the window. He climbed up on in, racked the slide on his gun and sprayed the darkened room with automatic weapon fire. Then they attacked the front door. The shorter of the two blasted the doorknob and kicked the door open and they both charged inside. Thirty seconds later they reappeared and scanned they yard, looking for something.

  “Somebody warned him,” the short one said. “His pickup is here, so he’s here. But we’ll never find him in the scrub at night. Get the cans.”

  They lifted two five-gallon gasoline cans from the pickup’s bed. Leaving their weapons on the tailgate, they carried the gas cans to the porch. At that moment, Jan stepped from the shadow of the cistern, pumped a shell into the shotgun chamber, and with his right hand, punched the radio control switch in his jacket pocket. Suddenly the farmyard was lit by 6,000 halogen watts, transforming it into near daylight. The gunmen, blinded by the intense light, froze like the jackrabbit.

  “Set the cans on the deck and keep your hands where I can see them,” Jan said.

  The short, stocky gunman glanced toward the truck. Jan triggered the shotgun and blew the gas can out of his hands. The man went down screaming as Jan jacked another round into the shotgun.

  * * *

  John Broadbeck, at his desk in the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office in Basin City, wiped gun oil off the nine-inch stainless steel barrel of a Ruger Super Redhawk. The huge .44 magnum looked delicate in his meaty hands. A Pall Mall cigarette hung from his big lips, smoke curling towards the ceiling. Sheriff Broadbeck had locked Jan’s two would-be assassins in a holding cell and was waiting for the county ambulance to transport the injured one to the hospital for treatment.

  The cigarette failed to hide the pungent odor that drifted on the air from the 100-year-old basement walls of Big Horn County Courthouse. In the daytime, light poured into the office through large windows, but at night the place was borderline dun
geon, lit by a pair of bare 300-watt bulbs on the ceiling. Sheriff Broadbeck had decorated his office in Louis L’Amour basic right down to the longhorn steer horns on the wall above the desk. A gun rack along the back wall housed a dozen rifles, revolvers, and clip-fed pistols, all locked in place by a steel rod running through the trigger guards.

  “Jan,” Sheriff Broadbeck said, “these two are about as likely to give up Prophet Hansen as Bill Clinton is to keep his pants on. They know the Constitution better than Ruth Bader Ginsburg—not to mention they have better ankles.”

  Raising his voice so the young men could hear, the sheriff said, “But they’re two sweeties, all right. Jan, you think Hansen is tiring of his thirteen wives and turning to soft young men?”

  “What about it, boys?” John Broadbeck yelled over his shoulder without turning his head, “Has the Prophet added you two sissies to his harem?”

  Broadbeck’s voice, Jan thought, rolled out of his massive chest like music from the subwoofers the teenagers cranked up full volume in their cars while romancing their dates on the dark lanes around his ranch. The edge of Sheriff Broadbeck’s mouth twitched slightly. Jan assumed harassing the two shooters amused the sheriff.

  Jan had known John Broadbeck since they were kids. He was known as “Monster John” during high school. Broadbeck stood six-four, and had been a 240 pound vision as a varsity linebacker, strong and quick. Even now, wearing a slab of fat like a Kevlar vest, he could pick up two men, one in each hand, and throw them into his cruiser—something he occasionally did. Tonight Jan remembered that Monster had once arrested Jan’s older brother, Buzz, on a bad check charge in the Stockman’s Bar. The sheriff had walked in smiling and waving a warrant. Buzz later told Jan he had been so drunk and so terrified by the leering figure stalking him across the barroom floor that he ran outside, jumped into his car, and slammed the door. The problem was, he wasn’t all the way in the car and slammed his head in the door. The sheriff said it was the easiest arrest he had ever made—“The perpetrator knocked himself out!” All that before Buzz drank himself into an early grave, one more victim of the Wyoming oil patch.

  Jan, confused and frightened by the attempt on his life, looked at Monster Broadbeck as his only line of defense from those who wanted him dead and who were determined to get the job done. People feared Sheriff Broadbeck, especially the assorted drifters, unemployed roughnecks, and drunks throughout Big Horn County; most of the upstanding citizenry, if they didn’t fear him, respected him. Somehow, even though the sheriff was not universally liked, he was elected term after term. People knew Big Horn County was a safer place because Monster Broadbeck strolled the streets of the small communities and cruised the dusty county roads. Monster handled his Ruger with unexpected grace considering his lumbering appearance. Dooley, the barman at the Stockman’s Bar, routinely piled sandbags at one end of the barroom and took $100 bets that Monster could plug a silver dollar clean through at twenty-five feet—one shot off a quick-draw. If he missed or broke the rim of the coin, Dooley paid the bet. Dooley split the winnings with Monster and the bettor got to keep the dollar—and Monster’s good will. A silver dollar with a hole through it often deflected a speeding ticket in Big Horn County.

  “What about you?” Monster John was saying to Jan. “You ain’t goin’ back out to the homestead tonight with Hansen’s Avenging Angels looking for you like you’re Salman Rushdie?”

  “Well, I don’t think they will do anything else for a day or so,” Jan said.

  Monster snorted.

  “Well, hombre, flaunting your invulnerability before Prophet Ronald Hansen the third is about as smart as dating O. J. Simpson’s girlfriend—at least before Simpson began getting his sunlight through a pipe. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to challenge Hansen to finish the job he began tonight.”

  “That he began two years ago,” Jan corrected.

  “OK, two years ago.”

  “With Emma’s murder,” Jan said, his voice rising slightly at the thought of his dead wife.

  “I know, I know partner…We’ll bring the Prophet down, Jan.”

  “Will we?”

  Monster was silent, then he said, “If we don’t, I guess you’ll be a dead man.”

  “Yeah,” Jan said, “I will if we don’t stop him.”

  “I’m as frustrated as you are, boy. But it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

  Jan knew Monster was smarting over his failure to make a case against Hansen for Emma’s murder. Nobody, before this time, had been able to stand up to Monster Broadbeck in Big Horn County. Normally, Monster would have—by whatever means—enforced his own “natural justice.” But Hansen had erected a wall of defense that even Sheriff John Broadbeck had been unable to breach. “Redoubtable” was how the sheriff had once referred to Hansen in Jan’s presence. Monster, at the time, stared out the window of his office, chewing on an unlit Pall Mall.

  “Look, John,” Jan said, “I really don’t know where we go from here. I know you’re my only real ally. The Feds have demonstrated that they are powerless to move against Hansen. I thought maybe I could get past all this…” His voice trailed off.

  Monster was silent for awhile. He continued to play with the Ruger, snapping the cylinder open, examining the load, popping the cylinder shut.

  “Anyway,” Jan continued, “tonight has taught me one thing for sure—this certainly isn’t over. It will never be over until I—or we—end it.”

  Monster slipped the Ruger back into its holster. “We’ll end it, all right.”

  “Let’s talk about it in a day or so,” Jan said. “Right now, if you think you’re safe with these two hitmen, I think I’ll slip over to the café for a short stack and coffee.”

  “Ginny workin’ this morning?”

  Jan ignored the question and said. “By the way, John, I don’t think there’s any point in sweating these guys.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know, amigo, I’m not going to waste county water by rinsing their hair in the toilet. As I said, they won’t give up the Prophet.”

  Jan headed out, Monster throwing him a set of keys to an extra county vehicle to drive home, saying he would have a deputy pick it up later. Monster would hold the gunmen until federal agents made the four-hour drive from Casper to pick them up for arraignment on automatic weapons charges.

  * * *

  Basin City was beginning to glow in the early dawn as Jan walked from the sheriff’s office toward the Basin Café. The buildings of the block-long main street had survived from Jan’s youth. A few modern facades covered the brick and sandstone structures, but new construction was out of the question—the town was dying. Business went to Worland, or Billings, or Casper. Gone were the shops of the 1950s. Back then Basin supported two drug stores, three saloons, a pool hall, a bakery, two grocery stores, a couple of clothing stores and hardware stores, and two cafés. Jan would spend all Saturday afternoon at the Wigwam Theater watching two movies, three cartoons, a serial, and a newsreel. Back then Ethel’s Variety Store had merchandise stacked to the ceiling, everything from thread to greeting cards, candy to shoe polish. Ethel could find anything you needed—if you had enough time for her to dig through all the stuff.

  When Jan was a teenager, he and Ginny Hollingsworth would hang out at Larry Lowrey’s Drug Store, listening to the jukebox and drinking graveyard Cokes. A couple of years later he would hang out at the pool hall, smoking Camels and playing pea-pool for dimes. Eventually he hung out at the city reservoir, drinking Coors. Since Emma had died he hung out at the ranch, drinking way too much whiskey.

  * * *

  At the Basin Café, Virginia Hollingsworth was looking almost as good as she had in high school. Remarkably trim for her fifty-five years, she still had the graceful moves that had fascinated him and all the other boys at Basin High School. In the two years since Emma’s death, Virginia had watched Jan through soft eyes.

  Jan took a stool at the counter, one of those his father had used fifty years earlier when he had pancakes and bacon before
beginning his workday. Ginny moved toward him.

  “Coffee, Jan?”

  “Yeah, coffee, Ginny.”

  “What brings you to town so early?”

  “I had a load of trash to drop off.”

  Ginny glanced up quizzically. “The landfill doesn’t open until nine o’clock and it’s not six o’clock yet?”

  She slid a cup of coffee in front of him and leaned against the back counter, then folded her arms across her chest and squinted her eyes like someone facing into bright sunlight. She did that, Jan remembered, years ago, when she was a self-conscious teenage beauty. Her auburn hair today was shoulder length and naturally curly, lying in soft springy layers around her face. High cheekbones and faint red eyebrows framed dark chestnut-brown eyes. And she still had freckles.

  “Anything else?” Ginny asked.

  “Not right now.”

  “Are you doing OK, Jan? You look…well, weary.”

  “I’ve had a bad night.”

  She was silent. After a moment, she squinted her eyes again, smiled sweetly, and flowed off toward the kitchen. Jan inhaled the warm steam off the cup, rolled it around and watched the reflection of the lights dance on the surface of the coffee. Ginny—the one woman as kind-hearted as Emma had been.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Jan drove six miles south to the ranch—his mother had always referred to the family homestead as the ranch, even though they had never run cattle there. They had grown some alfalfa, a little grain, and melons. To Jan it would always be the ranch.

  Approaching his lane, he deactivated the security system. Made up of laser security detectors set at waist level, the system lined the half-mile lane that was the only approach to his place. The detectors were high enough not to be set off by jackrabbits, and birds flew through the beams too fast to set them off. Sometimes a deer would trigger one of them, but the deer usually stayed in the heavy brush near the river, a good half-mile east of the lane. Other mantraps guarded the trail from the river to the house. Monster Broadbeck had conceived, ordered, and installed the security system—the very system that had saved Jan’s life last night.