Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [87]
Pepe laughed loud and long and pointed at the hole in the ceiling, from which drifted bits of drywall and insulation.
“You’re crazy, man!”
“Pepe, you’re a fool!”
“You want the cops all over this place?”
Pepe just kept laughing. “Nobody heard that but you,” he said.
He lifted the shotgun and swept it toward his friends. They all dove for cover. Then he broke open the mechanism again, slid the empty and the live shell out, and handed everything back to Brady.
They hadn’t even talked business yet, but Brady had been sent a message.
Pepe was capable of anything.
31
Christmas Eve | Adamsville
December had broken cold and snowy in Adamsville, and the holidays saw freshly shoveled sidewalks tunneling through drifts and piles from snowplows.
Thomas loved winter almost as much as he loved Christmas. Brightening his spirits this year was that it appeared his fears for Grace’s health had been unfounded. Though Ravinia checked in frequently and kept badgering him to force her mother to see a doctor, Grace had convinced Thomas she was better.
Her energy level seemed back to normal, and they were walking nearly every night, bundled up, laughing and talking through white vapor. The marks on her arms had disappeared, and except that she slept a little longer each night than she had in years, he was satisfied she was herself again. Maybe she had needed more sleep in previous years and either didn’t know it or didn’t feel she could afford the time.
Thomas was also satisfied that after a lengthy search, he and his wife had found their new church home. Their first visit had been at Thanksgiving, and he wondered how they’d missed the tiny chapel set at the back of a small lot just three blocks from their home. Its nondescript name had made it invisible, he guessed. But they almost immediately believed they had been led to Village Church.
The congregation numbered fewer than ninety adults, but they were salt-of-the-earth types, lower to middle income at best, and with bunches of kids running all over the place. Despite its modest size, the nondenominational church had a lot going. Kids’ programs. Men’s activities. A women’s group. The congregation gave generously to missions. And they had a young pastor who was seminary trained but didn’t talk over their heads. Will Kessler was a Bible man, a real expositor, and he and his wife—carrying their first child—seemed to live what he preached.
Thomas had been almost immediately pressed into service, substitute teaching the adult Sunday school class. And he and Grace had even been asked to sing a duet one evening. Thomas agreed only out of a sense of obligation and was grateful that Grace’s sweet tone carried the melody while he reached for a nasally high harmony. Their new friends clapped politely.
Tonight, as they strode—early as always—toward Village and its Christmas program, Grace’s tiny hands enveloped Thomas’s arm, and she drew him close as they crossed a lamp-lighted street. “You know what I want for Christmas this year?” she said.
“Of course.”
“You do?”
“It hasn’t changed in decades, has it? You never want anything for yourself.”
“I don’t need anything but this.”
“Me too.”
Every year it was the same. She’d ask the question, he’d bite, and she’d say, “That my daughter love and serve the Lord.”
That it went unspoken this year made it only more poignant. Neither spoke the rest of the way, and as they entered the cozy sanctuary, where squealing kids in bathrobes and bandannas ran up and down the aisle to find their places, Thomas noticed Grace brush a tear away. He had to do the same, though he hid it in one motion as he removed his hat and scarf.
Thomas remembered when Rav was the age of many of these kids and had played Mary in one Christmas program and John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth, in the next. He would never forget the Christmas—when she was eight—that she came home with the box of treats each child received each year from the deacons. She laid out the hard and soft candies