Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [172]
59
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Terrific, Brady thought. Just when he had cleared his mind and was determined to keep the horrific thoughts at bay, at least until he got back to his cell, now this.
God loved him. Uh-huh. That’s why he was born in a trailer park, had an alcoholic mother, lost his only brother, and screwed up beyond repair every last thing in his life. Sure, made sense. That was how God showed His love.
Better yet, it wasn’t just the chaplain, whom Brady had found kindly and seemingly genuine, who was telling him this. God told the man to tell Brady. Great. Now we’ve got a God who ignores a guy for thirty years and now wants him to know He loves him. Well, so much for the murder scenes playing and replaying every waking and sleeping moment. Brady had something new to stew about now.
By the time he was ushered back to his cell—again with the humiliation of making the entire trek shackled and in his underpants, then being unhooked and showering and shaving and being searched before dressing, then being hooked up again for the short walk back to his house—Brady realized he felt a normal emotion for the first time since the murder. Yes, there was some sense of satisfaction that he was dressed and back in his own place, privileges returned.
“Hey, Heiress Boy!” someone shouted. “You’re on channel 5! Check it out!”
Brady was curious but wouldn’t bite. He didn’t need to. As soon as the others heard that, every set within earshot was tuned to the station where an anchorwoman on one of the celebrity roundup shows was telling the story.
“Authorities report that Darby put up no resistance when sent to and brought back from solitary, and while he was confined there for three days, there is no move afoot to have this incident affect his sentence. Of course, he has been condemned to death, though the mandatory appeal process is under way.
“An unnamed source says that while it was clear Darby was trying to flood the entire death row unit, he succeeded in making a mess only of his own cell.”
Over the next few days the story was played out on all the newscasts and tabloid shows. Brady couldn’t avoid it, though he tried to switch channels every time it came on. One station allowed viewers to call in and give their opinions, which ranged from “Why on earth should anyone care about such a waste of space?” to “He’s getting what he deserves and shouldn’t be appealing his sentence.”
Appealing my sentence?
Brady answered every communiqué from Jackie Kent the same way, in pencil—a short, stubby one because a prisoner had killed himself with a long one. “I will never challenge my sentence and will not help anybody else try to.”
As Brady began changing channels more than he used to, just to stay away from inaccurate stories about himself, he landed on a religious station just long enough to hear a preacher close his program with, “And remember, God loves you.”
Couldn’t prove it by me.
Anyway, God couldn’t love everybody, could He? Brady had to be one of many exceptions. Why did God send some people to hell if He loved them? Brady dredged up a vague memory from his childhood when he had asked Aunt Lois the same thing.
“God doesn’t send people to hell,” she had told him. “The Bible says He’s not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. If people don’t want to repent and turn from their sin and trust Jesus, they send themselves to hell. God made hell for the devil and his angels, not for us. He wants us in heaven with Him.”
Brady turned on a classic movie channel and tried to interest himself in an old black-and-white. He always imagined himself as one of the actors and how he would have studied the script and done his research and performed the lines. But he couldn’t concentrate. How could he?
Was it possible for a person to repent of murder? Brady figured he could repent of all the lying he had done to everybody he knew, repent of vandalism, theft, pushing