Justice in an Age of Metal and Men

by Justice in an Age of Metal

  Worship and religious ritual had for the most part been eliminated from the common vernacular for several generations. Mostly, talk of Jesus was limited to cussing and fairy tales. Those who still considered themselves faithful were still around, but for the most part faith was put in things like technology and guns.

  There were still a few Christians around. Once, years ago, a group of Southern Baptists started kidnapping folks. It wasn’t obvious at first, but I picked up on it. The thing was, the folks they kidnapped never pressed for justice. They’d always convert. Then they’d forgive.

  Nothing annoys a man of justice quite like forgiveness.

  A little muscle needed to be applied to the Baptists so they’d stop doing it. Southern Baptists. Nobody even knows what they’re south of, but they insist on the name. It’s tradition, I suppose. It was a callback to a time when Southern Baptists were a respected organization. I respected that. Word was they had been around since before Texas was a country.

  All of this contributed to my discomfort as I sat in the back of the church. The place was concrete and packed with nearly a hundred congregants. It smelled of sweat and kerosene and tobacco smoke.

  In the front of the church, on a small stage flanked by two man-sized fake ficus plants, Henry Sharpe started to preach. He had the same square-jawed profile and plastic hair of the younger, sleazier Billy Sharpe. I guessed the two were father and son, but how they were involved with the Brown murder I could not guess. Maybe I could have put it together, but my mind was occupied with more pressing concerns.

  There was a new sheriff in town, but normally sheriffs were selected by election. On rare occasions a judge can assign a temporary replacement, but that sort of thing only happens when a sheriff goes rogue or dies. Since the town didn’t have a sitting judge, the appointment would come from the city. What reason could there be for bureaucrats in the city to send someone new, and who was he?

  Balon Swayle, that’s who he was. Pa had given me the name and I’d heard some folks talking about him in murmurs at the back of the church. He wasn’t well liked. In fact, he’d already gained a reputation for cruelty when he rounded up most of the Cinco Armas and tossed them in jail. Not that anyone thought tossing that lot in jail was such a bad thing. Everyone he locked up got all of their tech crippled, sometimes in a permanent fashion. This man was not out to make friends.

  Suddenly, I found myself paying attention to the sermon.

  “They shall be cleansed of their sin!” With his arms raised, the preacher was giving it his all. “Washed of their murders. Forgiven their adultery! They will give back all that they stole!”

  The white-haired preacher paced from side to side on an open stage like a tiger stalking its prey. Each sin was spat out with greater emphasis.

  “They will hold no other god but God!”

  “Hallelujah!” A woman in the front was so overcome with feelings she fell to the floor in front of the altar. I furrowed my brow. I recognized her from somewhere, but I was having trouble placing it.

  The congregation was wild in general and I felt it. My heart raced and I was having trouble focusing my thoughts. I stood with everyone else and turned my eyes upward.

  “Praise be to the lord!” The preacher said.

  “Praise be to the lord!” The congregation said as one.

  “There is one mightier, my friends.” His voice became soft and we all leaned in to hear better. My heart still raced and sweat formed on my brow. “I have come. I have come into your midst and I shall not baptize you in water.”

  A tense murmur rippled through the congregation.

  “I will not cleanse your sins with the mud that the city man leaves for us.”

  The congregation dropped into silence. I felt it. I was hanging on every word. My emotions raging in whatever direction he pulled. It felt like electricity was pulsing through the air. I was inspired, elated. That’s when I knew what the motive for everything was. This was not my passion. This was the activity of a million nanomachines manipulating my emotions.

  This was Ma Brown’s passion, but knowing its source didn’t seem to help me control it.

  “I!” He gave a decidedly un-Christian emphasis to the word. “Will baptize you in flames!”

  He raised his hands straight to the sky and flames shot up from the floor. My elation turned briefly to panic, but the flames weren’t hot—not too hot, anyway. They still scalded where they touched bare skin, but nothing was set ablaze.

  I admit that I may have let out a holler. It was a cry of joy at a rebirth in which I then had complete faith. Faith was a most intricate and intense byproduct of the emotions that had so powerfully swept over me. It had taken me in entirely. I basked in those cleansing flames, soaking in their promise of a pure soul. I felt as if the sins were seared from my fouled soul.

  A babbling was flowing from my mouth, and soon I became aware of its contents. I was giving an account of my sins. I spoke of the skidder I had stolen and of Sam, who had died from my neglect. I spoke of all the men I had sent to the Canadian border to work in the Des Moines flood plains. I spoke of the men I had killed—those who I knew were guilty and those who might not have been. Thou shalt not kill, the lord had said, and I had killed.

  Something broke me from my spell. It wasn’t greater or more profound. I’d have been more proud if it were. It was, however, something I thought I would never see again in my life. Sometimes a person can miss something so badly that it pulls him away from god. In this case, I suspect it was that material thing that saved me from the power of that Baptist preacher.

  Through the flaming, writhing crowd I saw the one thing that had any chance of pulling me from my newfound faith.

  I saw my hat.

  A person could probably have come up with a dozen theories on what my hat was doing there. My hat had fallen off sometime around the tower explosion at the Junction. A fully functioning brain might have come up with some explanation for how my hat had ended up in this church. My brain was not fully functioning. I was still in the thrall of faith. My brain sought meaning without reason.

  Yet, some part of me protested. I saw the hat so briefly—that brown Stetson with the black cord and the nick where a bullet once nearly took off my head. Nobody was wearing it, but someone was holding it. That person raised it briefly. I just caught a glimpse of it through the rolling orange flames.

  I needed to know who had my hat.

  My new love for God had to wait. I swallowed those feelings down and set them aside. I’d gotten disturbingly good at this during my many years as sheriff.

  The tide of flames was ebbing now. The last flickers were playing across the sinners all around me. I shouldered my way through the reverent crowd, ignoring their pleas for forgiveness and trying very hard to ignore the confessions of their sins out of respect for their privacy.

  The middle aisle was packed, but I managed to muscle my way forward. Once, when I risked a glance upward, I saw the good Reverend Sharpe looking my way. It would not have been good to be recognized there, so I slowed my progress and tried harder to blend in.

  “Benjamin Brown,” I said in a low voice when I saw the kid not two meters away gripping my hat in two hands. His mother was there too, along with the rest of the Brown clan.

  Everybody was in the throes of a passion like I had never seen, but none quite so much as Ma Brown. She had thrown herself to the ground and was weeping great big tears all over the floor. I do believe she was actually gnashing her teeth. I backed into the crowd, eager not to be noticed. As I did so, I caught Ma Brown’s mournful voice calling out louder than all the rest.

  She said, “I killed him. Lord, forgive me. I killed my Danny. Lord, forgive me!”

  A church can be such an enlightening place.

  The place had an emergency door near the pulpit, but the main door was near the back. My senses seemed to be returning to me, even though I could feel my heart pounding like it was trying to escape. My vision was starting to focus, and the f
eeling of unwarranted elation was starting to fade. The only reasonable chance for escape was the back door. I moved carefully back into a position in the rear of the sanctuary, keeping my head low and my hair draped down to cover my face.

  The preacher was still doing his thing. “The lord does not leave man to judge himself, for it is not man who judges, but god. My friends, do not judge or be judged. Only let the world be cleansed in baptismal flames so that the lord might judge for us. Those who are faithful will be saved his wrath!”

  I still felt it. I felt inspired. I felt awed.

  It was a false feeling, though. Knowing its source did not lessen the feeling, but I had some control over my actions. This was a control that I knew others here did not have, which was what made them dangerous. It made Henry Sharpe the most dangerous of them all.

  According to Court, Henry Sharpe had followed Mr. Brown home the night of the murder, and another person had been there too. A woman. The same woman that everyone I talked to seemed to have seen, but nobody could identify. She was the real mystery.

  I needed to get my bounty removed, which probably meant cracking the tainted dairy case and the whole business with the mysterious new sheriff.

  I couldn’t just let it go, though. I tensed, trying hard to blend in without completely losing myself in the orgy of faith. The congregation was being whipped into another frenzy. If the flames came again, I thought I might be able to duck outside.

  The doors flew wide open with a thundering bang.

  The congregation stopped and a murmur crept through the sanctuary. Suddenly, everybody turned around and looked at me. My heart raced and then I realized that they were looking toward the back of the church. The dentist met my gaze but didn’t say anything. A few of the bikers I had angered the previous night were there too, having apparently escaped the new sheriff. I cursed under my breath when I recognized the old lady who had shouted her hallelujah earlier. It was the same woman who had been to the station early in the morning to complain about Reverend Sharpe’s unwanted proselytizing. I counted that as another law enforcement failure in my growing list.

  They weren’t paying attention to me, though.

  “Got some business here,” said a deep voice from outside the door. “I expect full cooperation.”

  I couldn’t see who it was, but I knew. There was a slow, deliberate footstep and then another. The whole congregation seemed to hold its collective breath. Another step. I shifted so that the man closer to the door would mostly obscure me.

  Then I saw him.

  It was the man in black. He wore a three-piece black suit that was so dark that it seemed to suck up all of the light around it. His hair was unnaturally black and slicked back with immaculate precision. His black goatee complemented it handsomely. A pair of solid mirrored coverings obscured his eyes, but his mouth was twisted into a sneer. There were no lines on his perfect skin—nothing to show that he’d ever smiled or frowned.

  At first glance, his metal wasn’t obvious. I envied that a little. Still, something smelled about him and his footsteps were far too heavy. He was an upscale modder but a modder nonetheless. By the cold look on his face, it seemed that compassion was part of the humanity he’d left behind. I had told Trish once that I could tell what a man was capable of. It was only a first impression, but I couldn’t think of anything that this guy couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

  “First off, where is Henry Sharpe?” Sheriff Balon Swayle spoke slowly, enunciating each word meticulously.

  Every head in the crowd turned to the pulpit, including mine. Henry was gone.

  The new sheriff frowned and the skin around his eyes hardened.

  He cocked his head to one side and spoke to someone outside of my vision. “Go around the other side. Make sure they pick him up if he tries to get out.”

  “Yes, sir.” It was Trish’s voice, but it had an edge to it. I had plenty of experience hearing her annoyed voice, and this was it. What was going on there?

  “Second,” the sheriff paused like he was carefully considering his words. “The old sheriff is now a known criminal, charged with murder, theft, and terrorism. He will be found. If anyone here has information leading us to the man, then that person ought to bring forward that information. There is a considerable bounty.”

  There was a long pause. I sneaked a glance back at the crowd and noticed the dentist looking my direction. He gave me a nod and shifted uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure if he would turn me in. He definitely recognized me.

  There was nowhere for me to go. The crowd was pressing in. I hunkered down, trying to make myself blend in with the crowd and reveal my face to as few people as possible without looking like I had something to hide. That’s when I saw the kid doing the same thing.

  Francis Brown, the eight-year-old, had his flashing fancy eyes pointed in my direction. There was no expression on the child’s face—not humor or passion or smugness. He simply stared. He knew who I was. For the life of me, I could not think of a reason he wouldn’t turn me in.

  Except, I had promised him I would catch his father’s killer.

  Sheriff Swayle was slowly making his way forward. The clumping of his footsteps formed a regular rhythm, punctuating the returning murmur of the crowd. I shifted, keeping most of my face hidden from the grim lawman.

  Francis watched me with those flashing, emotionless eyes. I started to wonder if he really wanted me to catch the killer. If he knew that the killer was his own mother, he might be pretty motivated to stop me. After all, Billy Sharpe had been convinced that there was a witness. Sharpe had thought it was Ben, but it was possible that Francis was the one who had seen his father get killed.

  The door was wide open, but there might have been a whole army just outside the door. Any movement toward it would certainly draw attention. The emergency exit was also too far away and the sheriff was watching it carefully. Henry had been lucky to duck out of the partially concealed door. I wouldn’t get any such luck. I found it suspicious that the preacher would flee from the law like that. It made me think that maybe both the sheriff and the preacher knew a piece of the puzzle that I was missing. There wasn’t time to think about it, though.

  The sheriff was two thirds of the way up the aisle when he stopped. Ma Brown was there.

  The crowd’s mood shifted. I felt it too. A sudden surge of fear set my heart racing again. My breathing sped up and a sheen of sweat formed on my brow.

  “Ma’am.” The sheriff nodded to the woman. It was the first personable thing he had done since arriving, and I was a little surprised to hear it. His voice softened when he spoke only to her. “Condolences.”

  The tension in the room ebbed just a little. Sheriff Swayle took another heavy step and then he stopped. I couldn’t see who he was looking at, but he was right next to Ma Brown, so I prepared myself for what I suspected might be next.

  “Benjamin Brown.” The sheriff’s voice was hard again.

  My heart raced so hard it felt like it was tearing a hole in my chest. That urge to protect Ben surged again. My hand was on my pistol, unclipping the holster before I figured out what was happening.

  “What the fuck is it to you?” Ben’s voice made me smile a little. It was nice not being the focus of his unwarranted rage.

  “You are under arrest as a member of the Cinco Armas gang.”

  I heard a quick scuffle. The lawman was likely grabbing the boy.

  That’s when the rage hit.

  I knew it was coming. I had prepared myself, but still blind fury almost took me. My gun was out and I was halfway across the room before the light from the open door caught my eye.

  In front of me was a mass of raging humanity. Every poor emo-chip-addled sap was trying to tear the sheriff apart. Two deputies, Johnson and another, were trying desperately to pull people off of the pile.

  I stopped in the doorway and looked back. Wind whirled around the entry, sending sand into the air and causing my duster to crack like a whip. The raging mass of the congregation
heaved upward, temporarily falling back from the sheriff. In no time, they fell back onto him, shoving him back and smashing him to the floor. In all of my days as a lawman, I had never seen such a mass of rage. It didn’t matter how modded that sheriff was. He was going to die under that pile. He was likely to kill a number of innocents too.

  Those folks were just victims, made insane by Ma Brown’s surge of protective emotion. It wasn’t just them that stopped me at the door, though. As much as I disliked the new sheriff I just couldn’t let him go out like that.

  There was no way I could get everyone’s attention, but I didn’t need to. All I needed was to get Ma Brown’s attention. My gun was already in my hand. I pointed it skyward and fired one shot. The crack rang out like a cannon through the solid little bunker-church.

  Everybody stopped.

  There’s nothing that grabs a mother’s attention like a gunshot in closed quarters. For a moment, nothing moved. The mass of humanity froze and the deputies blinked at me, confused. The boy, Francis Brown, stood to one side. I only then noticed that he hadn’t joined the fray.

  Slowly, people began to peel themselves from the pile. Deputy Johnson was the first to speak.

  “Boss, um, how did you get here?”

  “Long story, Johnson. I’ll explain back at the station.”

  “Right, well, about that…”

  “Later,” I said, taking a cautious step backward. “I have some work to do first.”

  Johnson drew his gun.

  “Deputy,” I said, eyeing the confused congregation behind him. “I am not interested in getting in a gunfight at this time. Please holster and we won’t have any problems.”

  Johnson hesitated. “It’s just, the new boss…”

  I met Johnson’s gaze, pleading silently for him to just let me go. It was his chance. He had to choose between his job and me. He knew me. He knew I wasn’t guilty of anything. So really, he was choosing between following orders and following justice.