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Ministering Spirit

Norm Hudson

    The truck was gone. A spirit of gratitude filled him. Every day he’d seen it on his daily commute to work. Its great hulking frontage sticking out of the church’s door like some woman in the last stages of a sustained birthing process. And he’d been an eye witness to it. Daily.
    What imbecile sold that beautiful church building to a trucking firm? he thought. Why didn’t they just pull down the god-damned building? Rather than desecrate it. But he already knew the answer. Dough. Dollars.
    It had been his church. The church he’d gone to as a youngster. He could still sing some of the hymns. So why had he stopped?
    Was he or the majority of the congregation to blame? Laziness to get out of bed on a Sunday, exhaustion from the extension of the working week or cynicism for the church amid the stringent stride of science and technology?
    Now here he was outside the umbilical, empty church door. Or all that remained of it. Perhaps some ministering spirit had guided him here, he thought.
    Duffy was standing in front of the gaping hole of the door like someone arisen from the dead.
    “A missing truck? Well it sure beats a missing e-bike. Here’s hoping I can stand the excitement,” he quipped. “It’s good to be on familiar ground.”
    He’d worked with Duffy since he’d joined the police. In fact, it was through Duffy he’d got the job. He’d worked alone previously. Sure, it had taken a bit of getting used to but now he wouldn’t have it any other way. A marriage made in heaven. Not like his real marriage. That had crumbled when he’d lost his previous job.
    A woman appeared like Lazarus from the open orifice.
    The wife?
    “Someone stole your truck?”
    Duffy’s question was rhetorical.
    That’s why he was taken aback at the woman’s reply.
    “And my husband!” she said.
    He could see Duffy’s shock too. He had only expected an affirmative nod.
    “Your husband?”
    His voice sounded incredulous.
    “My husband was in the truck.”
    He watched Duffy struggle with what to say next. Duffy was a good cop but he didn’t have his experience. It was time for him to intervene.
    “You didn’t report that on the phone,” he said.
    “It didn’t seem that important,” she said. “The truck is more valuable.”
    He could hear Duffy’s almost silent sigh over his shoulder. A tough cookie, he would have said. If he could.
    Or a suspect.
    He admired her honesty. She didn’t give a damn what they thought. You had to have that attitude if you wanted to survive in this world. He was only sorry he’d learned that so late in life.
    But he’d corrected his mistake when he joined the police force. And he was still correcting it.
    She was an attractive woman. But unhappy. An attractive woman shouldn’t be unhappy, he thought. Why did some people have to make other people unhappy?
    He remembered her from his church days. She and her husband. She, standing out from the symmetric sameness of the other women in the congregation with her brightly coloured clothes and attractive air of aloofness. He like some gargantuan gargoyle at her side threatening to fall on her at any moment. He’d often been curious, in those days, why she’d married him.
    Money had been the rumour. He was a hard living, hard drinking, hard-nosed business negotiator. Successful. But he thought it was more likely security.
    So it shouldn’t really have been a surprise when he bought over the church building.
    “Do you think the husband’s done a runner?”
    Duffy’s voice cut into his thinking. They were back in the car.
    “Taken off with some other woman?” he added.
    “I thought you would be regarding her as a suspect in her husband’s disappearance,” he said later. He could always read Duffy like a bad book.
    “Or that,” he said predictably. He loved Duffy’s predictability. Stability. It suited him well.
    It turned out to be neither. It was their shortest investigation yet. They found the truck. Burned out at the bottom of a gully. What remained of his dead body anointed liberally with alcohol. No other woman. No wifely suspicion.
    Drunk driving. A pure accident.
    He often thought of her as he passed the church on a daily basis. The gaping womb of the church door, not wedged with a replacement truck, seemed to suck him in at times. He didn’t succumb to it. It was hard. After all, she was an attractive woman.
    But seven months later he did. It was when he saw the sold, over the For Sale, sign in front of the church as he passed on his morning commute. It was the same morning he told Duffy he was leaving the police.
    “You’re not thinking of going back to your old job!” he’d said incredulously.
    “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I might.”
    He’d better prepare Duffy for what was to come he thought.
    “I’ll always be grateful to you for the job in the police,” he said. “Why, if you hadn’t been a member of the congregation, we might never have met.”
    They’d both been at the same church.
    “Just so you know what you’re doing,” was all Duffy said.
    He knew. He’d known all along. From the moment they’d taken his church away. His church. The church where he was minister. And sold it. To the trucking firm.
    He entered the empty womb of what had been his church. It was empty of trucks. Or people. Apart from her. She was standing there. Like she was expecting him.
    He was home. He walked over to her and grasped her in his arms like he’d done on so many other occasions in that hotel room half a mile away. Over seven months before. Or was it longer? The same room where she’d come up with the idea. The idea to kill her husband.
    “It would be killing two birds with the same stone,” she’d said in her argument to win him over. “I’d be free of an abusive husband to be with you. And you’d get revenge on him for what he did to your church and your job.”
    She must have sensed his hesitation for she went on. “Just look on it as an accident. An unfortunate accident. He’s already had convictions for drunk driving. It would just be another one. A fatal one.”
    He wouldn’t be a loss to anyone. He told himself that. And they’d never suspect him. He’d see to that. He just wanted her to be happy. Didn’t she deserve that? And him too. And she was right. He’d get her. And his church.
    It seemed the perfect solution.
    That’s why he’d stopped her husband in his truck that rain-soaked night. Flagged him down. Standing in the middle of the road. On that dangerous bend. On top of Jack’s Bluff. He couldn’t avoid him. He’d told him his car had broken down. When he’d offered him a lift, he’d grabbed his neck, forced his mouth open and, with his gloved hands, poured most of the contents of the whisky bottle in his pocket down his throat. Oh, he struggled all right but before he overcame him, he’d hit him on the head with the car jack and run the remains of the whisky bottle over his clothing before tossing it on the floor of the cab. Then he’d switched on the engine, put the truck in gear, applied enough pressure on the accelerator pedal to encourage the engine, thrown himself like a saved sacrifice from the open cab door and watched the truck judder forward over the jagged cliff and explode in a fiery judgement.
    Retribution can be rough, he thought.
    He should have given Duffy more credit. He realised that now. From his jail cell. He’d wondered why Duffy was called out on a case without him.
    Duffy had made a joke of it as he always did.
    “Maybe they’ve got higher things in store for you!” he’d said.
    Being a good cop, Duffy had found his fingerprints, which she’d vowed to remove from every surface, on a whisky bottle in the church. She’d told Duffy that her husband and he had been drinking, there had been an altercation and she’d seen him drive away after her husband’s truck. Of course they found the tread marks that matched his car and he had been arrested. He had protested his innocence, said she was lying and referred the cops to the hotel they’d always met up in. But she’d covered her tracks well. She’d always said the wig she’d worn was so no one would recognise her. And the hotel owner didn’t. He said no way was this the same woman.
    He guessed Duffy was right. He was destined for higher things. But he hadn’t known until today. A year after he’d been arrested. A year he’d spent as a model prisoner, his only monthly visitor being Duffy.
    He’d never blamed Duffy. He’d only been doing his job. Like he had done in the past. It was only when Duffy hadn’t turned up for his monthly visit that he’d wondered why. And today he’d seen it. In the prison library. The newspaper. The newspaper announcement. In the marriages column. The marriage of Duffy and her. And then he’d known. Known Duffy had seen the same thing in her he’d seen. Known he’d been wrong all along. She was no angel. And Duffy was no friend. They’d planned it. All along. And he had been the patsy. And the husband? He’d tortured himself with that one. Had he been a patsy too?
    He’d always believed in higher things. A higher purpose. From his early days in church. And his ministry. Though it sometimes seemed that he’d forgotten it. But now he remembered. As he climbed on the chair in the prison library where he’d hidden out after closing time.
    Duffy had been right about one thing. He was destined for higher things. Maybe Duffy had known that on his last visit when he’d smuggled in the rope that he had said would help him escape.
    That’s where they found him. The next day. Hanging from the height of the library roof.
    A copy of the Bible in one hand.

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