Strong Darkness Read Online Free Page A

missionary work back in the times of the frontier; the railroads and the oil booms. How this church tried to convert the Chinese heathen hordes to Christianity.”
    â€œHeathen hordes?”
    â€œIt was a fool’s errand,” Tripp said, bitterness turning his expression even more hateful. “The Chinese made for an unholy, hateful people not deserving of our Lord’s good graces.”
    â€œBut you believe you are, thanks to hurting those good folks across the way, is that right? Problem is you’re not serving God, sir; you’re serving yourself. And I’m giving you a chance to square things the easy way instead of the hard.”
    Tripp sneered at her. “Such threats didn’t work in Lubbock or Amarillo and they won’t work here either.”
    â€œI wasn’t the one who made them in those cities, Mr. Tripp. You’d be well advised to listen this time.”
    â€œAnd what if I don’t?”
    â€œSinners repent or more will die! Sinners repent or more will die! Sinners repent or more will die!”
    The chanting had picked up in cadence, seeming to reach a crescendo as the funeral goers squeezed themselves around Junior Chauncey’s gravesite across the road so the ceremony could begin. Caitlin watched the members of the Beacon of Light Church thrusting their picket signs into the air as if they were trying to make rain, the image of their feet teetering on the edge of the recently dug drainage trench holding in her mind.
    â€œI guess I’ll have to think of something,” she told Tripp and started away.

 
    3
    S AN A NTONIO, T EXAS
    Caitlin looped around the perimeter of the protesters, her presence likely forgotten by the time she reached the John Deere wheel loader parked between matching piles of excavated earth. She recognized it as a 644K hybrid model boasting twenty tons of power that could probably level a skyscraper. Caitlin had learned to drive earlier, more brutish versions while helping to rebuild a Mexican family’s home after they’d been burned out by drunken kids for a pot deal gone wrong. Trouble was the drug dealer who’d screwed the kids actually lived across the street. Caitlin’s father had arrested the boys two days later. Considering them dangerous criminals, Jim Strong made them strip to their underwear and left them to roast in the sun while he waited for backup to assist him in a cavity search. Jim had organized the rebuilding effort, financed ultimately by the restitution paid by the accused boys’ parents to keep them out of jail. Caitlin’s father had brokered that deal as well.
    The hybrid engine of the 644K sounded a hundred times quieter than the roar coughed by the older version, and handled as easy as a subcompact, when Caitlin started it forward.
    â€œSinners repent or more will die! Sinners repent or more will die! Sinners repent or more will die!”
    She couldn’t hear the chanting anymore, imagining it in her mind with each thrust of the picket signs into the air. It was loud enough to keep the protesters from detecting her approach, even when she lowered the shovel into position and let its teeth dig maybe a foot down into the ground.
    Caitlin plowed the growing pile of dirt forward as if it were snow after a rare Texas blizzard. The back row of the protesters turned just as the wall of gathered earth crested over the shovel. Caitlin imagined the panic widen their eyes, heard screams and shouts as they tried desperately to warn the others what was coming.
    Too late.
    The massive power of the John Deere pushed the earthen wall straight into the center of the pack fronted by William Bryant Tripp himself, driving the mass forward without even a sputter. The last thing Caitlin glimpsed were picket signs closer to the front stubbornly clinging to the air before those holding them were gobbled up and shoved forward.
    Down into the drainage trench.
    Caitlin pictured Reverend Tripp toppling