Strong Darkness Read Online Free Page B

in first, imagined the trench as a mass grave or, better yet, the week’s deposit zone in the local landfill. Because that’s where the members of the Beacon of Light Church belonged in her mind, dumped in along with the other stench-riddled trash.
    Some of the protesters managed to peel off to the side to escape the John Deere’s force and wrath, and Caitlin didn’t brake the big machine until the earthen wall she was pushing stopped on the edge of the trench. Portions of it sifted downward, forestalling the efforts of Tripp and his minions to climb out. So she gave the Deere just a little more gas to trap them a bit longer.
    Caitlin cut off the engine at that point. Her gaze drifted across the street to the funeral ceremony for Junior Chauncey, where everyone had turned around to face the other side of the road. They saw the members of the Beacon of Light Church visible only as hands desperately clawing for purchase to pull themselves from the trench into which Caitlin had forced them. She hopped down out of the cab and walked around the wall of dirt and grass the John Deere had helped her lay.
    Then, to a man and woman led by Bud Chauncey himself, the funeral goers started to clap their hands, applauding her. It got louder and louder, reaching a crescendo just as the television cameras began rotating feverishly between both sides of the road and reporters rushed toward Caitlin with microphones in hand.
    She leaped across the trench, brushing the microphones and cameras aside, the sun hot against her flesh.
    â€œYou’re going to pay for this, Caitlin Strong!” she heard Tripp scream at her, as he finally managed to hoist himself from the ditch. “The Lord does not forget!”
    â€œNeither do I, sir,” Caitlin said calmly, regarding the dirt clinging to him that no amount of shaking or brushing could remove. It turned his ash gray hair a dark brown, making him look as if he was wearing a vegetable garden atop his head. “And you’d be wise to remember that.”

 
    4
    S AN A NTONIO, T EXAS
    â€œYou know what a TV camera looks like, Ranger?”
    â€œI believe it’s one of those dark things with a man’s eye stuck to it,” Caitlin told Texas Ranger captain D. W. Tepper, head of Company F headquarters in San Antonio. “And in this case it caught a whole bunch of people at that funeral applauding my actions.”
    â€œSo you’ve seen the coverage.”
    â€œNope. I just saw the directions all those cameras were pointing in.”
    â€œAll those ?” Tepper shook his head, his expression growing even tighter. His ceiling fan spun lazily overhead, picking up the room’s stray light and splashing it against the cream-colored walls stained by cigarette smoke. “How many cameras we talking about here? Or were you too busy bulldozing two dozen people into a drainage ditch to notice?”
    â€œA trench, actually.”
    â€œSo you don’t dispute the bulldozing part.”
    â€œIt was a wheel loader.”
    Tepper puckered his lips. “I gave you the assignment because I figured even you couldn’t cause a storm at a funeral. But never underestimate the reach of Hurricane Caitlin—you’d think I would’ve learned that by now,” he said, and made a show of lighting one of his Marlboros just to piss her off. “You got something you wanna say about my smoking?”
    â€œWhy bother?”
    Tepper slapped his desktop with enough force to rattle his fingers. “Exactly my point, Hurricane. Now you know what it feels like.”
    â€œI thought I behaved responsibly.”
    â€œWhy’s that?”
    â€œBecause I didn’t shoot anybody, D.W.”
    â€œNo, today you put a whole bunch of live people into graves, instead of dead ones.”
    â€œAt least they could climb out. Normally it’s a permanent condition.”
    â€œYou know what else is permanent?” Tepper said, cigarette