MICHAEL LISTER'S FIRST THREE SERIES NOVELS: POWER IN THE BLOOD, THE BIG GOODBYE, THUNDER BEACH

by Michael Lister

  “Yeah, I’m a minister. And, I would find it easier to minister to anyone in this world other than her.”

  “You can’t do it?” he asked.

  “I am going to do it,” I said. “I just question how effective it will be.”

  “You’ll do great, Son. You’ve got a gift. Now, sit down here, and let’s watch some boxing.” I knew he would say no more about Mom.

  “I’ve got to go, Dad. I’ve got a service to do at the prison. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. By the way, how’s the investigation going?”

  “Barely going at all, I think, but it’s hard to tell. You can go along and think you’ve got nothing, and then you’ve got everything. Who knows?”

  “Well, you keep me posted. This is still my county.” “I will, Dad,” I said. “And, about Mom, too.” “Yeah, thanks,” he said but his mind was back on boxing.

  Chapter 26

  “I know of no other way to put this,” I said, “so I am just going to come out and say it.”

  “Okay,” Jasper said as he nodded his head up and down. He was as big an inmate as we had on the compound—well over six and a half feet tall and well over two hundred eighty pounds. He had skin the color of Tupelo honey and teeth to match. His hair was always unruly, and his two front teeth were separated by nearly a quarter of an inch, causing him to look like a black David Letterman.

  “I hear that you’re one of the main suppliers of drugs on the compound.”

  We were seated in my office in the chapel on Sunday morning around ten. My eyes stung, and I spoke, as best I could, between yawns. I needed some rest. I needed some sleep. I also needed to know if I had the AIDS virus floating around in my blood.

  It was less than an hour until the service, and the sounds of the choir rehearsing could be heard from within the chapel sanctuary. The song they were rehearsing for today’s service was “Power in the Blood.” If Jasper Evans were dealing drugs, then I wanted him to deal himself out of that choir.

  Would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood; Would you o’er evil a victory win? There’s wonderful power in the blood.

  I was anxious to get the conversation over because when I had arrived at my office, I had discovered in my mail another letter from the killer. I was dying to read the letter, but I had to wait until I was alone.

  Since he didn’t answer, I asked him again, “Are you?”

  There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb. There is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb.

  He continued to look as if I had asked him to explain to me the theory of relativity. Finally, he shrugged, tilted his head to the left, and made an expression that said, What can I say?

  He didn’t seem overly concerned that I knew.

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “A while,” he said.

  “And you saw no conflict between what you’re doing and being our minister of music?”

  “Two different things. I know that doing dope is a sin, but I don’t do it. And I only sell the small stuff. I don’t sell no crack or shit like that. But, Brother Chaplain, I love to sing in the choir.”

  Would you be free from your passion and pride? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood. Come for a cleansing to Calvary’s tide? There’s wonderful power in the blood.

  “I know you do, and you are very good. In fact, I don’t know what I am going to do without you, but you must realize that I can no longer allow you to lead the choir.”

  “I got to sing,” he said emphatically as if he were saying, I’ve got to breathe.

  “Certainly you can sing, but not in the choir and especially not as the choir leader.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “As a leader you take on more responsibility and accountability to the group, not to mention God. You have to attempt to live in such a way as not to bring reproach on the Body of Christ.”

  “That what you do?” he asked.

  “I certainly do the attempting part, but I do not succeed.”

  “How you can be the chaplain then?”

  “The requirements do not involve being perfect.”

  Through my window I could see the inmates fortunate enough to receive a visit from their loved ones in the fenced-in visiting park. Couples walked around the yard holding hands, families sat at tables eating ice cream, children ran and played—remove the chain-link fence and razor wire, and you’d have an average Sunday afternoon in any park in America.

  “But you say you don’t do it,” he said, trying to understand.

  Would you do service to Jesus your King? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood. Would you live daily his praises to sing? There’s wonderful power in the blood.

  “Yeah, but I’m not out doing illegal things either. I mean, I am not as mature or integrated in most areas of my life as I want to be, but I’m not doing anything illegal or even immoral. That’s the difference.”

  We were silent for a moment. “You say you don’t sell the hard stuff?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he said with pride.

  “Who does?”

  “Don’t nobody on the ’pound. It’s too hard to get, too much trouble. Not many inmates can afford it anyway.”

  “Are you saying that there is no crack on the compound?”

  “None that I know of. And I’d know. When it come to drugs, I the man,” he said defiantly. Then he realized whom he was talking to.

  “Did you know Ike Johnson?”

  “Knew of him.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “He was taken care of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jasper rolled his eyes in exasperation over having to explain so much to this naive chaplain.

  “Somebody took care of him. But it wasn’t no inmate. It had to be an officer. He do whatever the hell he want. He get high every day, and he stopped getting it from me a long time ago.”

  “Is there another inmate he could have gotten it from?”

  “No.”

  “How do you get the drugs that you sell?”

  “Can’t say, sir. Get lotsa people in trouble. People that can give me a world of trouble if they want to.”

  “So you’re saying that it comes from the staff?”

  “I ain’t saying.”

  “Okay. If you think of anything else you can tell me about the drug trade inside here, I would sure like to know. You coming to church this morning?”

  “Am I going to be singing?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb. There is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb.

  As soon as he left, I tore open the letter. “Chaplain, I not going to tell you again. This is your last warning. I will kill the bitch if you don’t back off. I’ll kill you too. It’s going to hurt. Leave Molly Thomas alone, too. Nothing but trouble there. Now’s a good time to take some time off.”

  I read and reread it several times. Maybe the letter wasn’t from the murderer. It could be from a witness or about something that was totally unrelated. I wondered if Anna was in any real danger. I thought about taking more precautions, and, as it turned out, I should have.

  “Today we are here to receive the holy Eucharist,” I said, beginning my Sunday morning chapel communion service. All week I had been thinking, even obsessing, on the power of blood. I was interested in seeing how it would affect what I was going to say.

  “We are here to eat the body and to drink the blood of Christ. On the night of the feast of the Passover, Jesus revealed to his disciples that he was about to become their Passover. His blood would be shed for an entirely new Passover. This was, of course, very familiar to them. Their minds raced back to the time when the people of their great nation were little more than a band of slaves in Egypt
. Daily they cried out to God for deliverance. God answered them after four hundred years—for God is never in a hurry. God’s answer came in the form of a deliverer.

  “God’s unlikely deliverer was a Hebrew shepherd who had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years. His name was Moses, and his mission was to go and tell the pharaoh that God said, “Let my people go.” He did. Pharaoh, however, was resistant to this idea, so God sent plagues, each one an affront to the gods of the Egyptians. Pharaoh, however, continued to resist.

  “So it was that on the Hebrews’ final night as Egyptian slaves, God sent a death angel to kill the firstborn of every family. This would be the final straw that would break the back of the pharaoh, and he would then indeed let God’s people go. God’s instructions to the Hebrews were for each family to sacrifice a lamb and smear his shed blood over their doors. Thus, seeing the blood, the death angel would pass over and allow their firstborn to live. Because of the blood, the death angel passed over—only because of the blood.

  “So when Jesus said that his shed blood would be the beginning of a brand new Passover, the disciples understood him to say that they would be spared from eternal death because of what he was about to do. Christ, our Passover, shed his blood for us. As we prepare to receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, I want to remind each of you that there is power in the blood. There is power in his blood. We are about to receive Jesus’ own blood, and as we do, we will receive forgiveness for our sins, restoration of our inheritance, and eternal life, the death angel will pass over and not come near us. There is power in the blood.

  “The shedding of blood represents covenant. A covenant is a sacred and binding agreement that demands the death of the one who breaks it. When a man and a woman enter into the covenant of marriage, the consummation of that covenant involves the shedding of the woman’s blood.

  “God’s grace is not cheap. It is costly. When we partake of the cup of Christ, we are accepting the costly gift of forgiveness. Realizing that we could not pay the price ourselves, we accept Christ’s free, but costly, gift. We acknowledge that it is only through the painful shedding of blood that our sins are blotted out. There is power in the blood. Life is in the blood. Death is in the blood, too. Christ exchanges the life in his blood for the death in ours.

  “So come to the altar and receive the body of our Lord and the cup of Christ, and as you do, receive healing, recovery, and redemption. And also, too, remember what it cost Jesus.”

  Serving communion to my congregation, the inmates of Potter Correctional Institution, I dipped the wafer, which was his body, into the cup of juice, which was his blood, saying, “The body that was broken for you. The blood that was shed for you”—all the while wishing, praying that it were true.

  After serving everybody else, I partook of the body and blood of Christ, praying: Let your blood become mine. Life for death. Give me life, for I receive and accept your death. Please don’t let me have HIV, but if I do, please cleanse it now from my blood with yours.

  After church, I decided to look around the medical building again. I knew the body had been hidden in the closet there. I knew that Johnson, Jacobson, and Thomas all spent a great deal of time there and were all involved in this thing. Whatever this thing was.

  “Hey, Chaplain,” Nurse Anderson greeted me loudly as I approached the medical building. She was standing outside smoking. She was a large attractive woman with bleached blond hair, green eyes the color of lime Jell-O, and bright red lips.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “How are you today?”

  “Just fine, thank you. How are you?” she said. Smoke came out of her mouth as she talked. The moment the last word came out of her mouth, she brought the cigarette back to her mouth. In contrast to the dainty Capris that Sandy Strickland smoked, Anderson smoked full-sized Winstons. She held the pack, along with a lighter and a cup of coffee in a paper cup with large red lipstick stains on it, in her left hand.

  “Fine, thanks. Is there anyone in the infirmary today?”

  “Yes, we have two convicts today,” she said. She waved the Winston with her hand as she talked. Her gray uniform matched the buildings around her, and its wrinkles matched those around her mouth as she sucked on the cigarette.

  Behind us a steady stream of inmates, returning from the chapel, library, or dining hall, made their way back to the dorms. A couple of them remarked on my message as they went by. Many of them spoke or waved to Nurse Anderson. She was warm and friendly, brightening up their day with her sweet smile.

  “Don’t you mean inmates?” I said with a smile.

  “No, these are definitely convicts,” she said. She spoke more loudly than was necessary, and regardless of where I stood, she moved toward me and invaded my space.

  “Good for them,” I said.

  “Good for us,” she said and laughed. When she laughed, her large breasts bounced up and down with the buoyancy of a cork in the Apalachicola River.

  “This is a pretty popular place, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “You have no idea,” she said with a wink. “A lot of these men just need some feminine TLC, if you know what I mean.”

  I hoped I didn’t. “So, you all are consistently busy?”

  “It’s always busy,” she said after a long drag, “but at night, for some reason, things really get crazy.”

  “ATTENTION ON THE COMPOUND,” a loud voice said over the PA system. The words echoed off the buildings. “RECALL. INMATES RETURN TO YOUR DORM. RECALL. INMATES RETURN TO YOUR DORM.” The stream of inmates behind us became a river of blue. Many of the inmates carried paperback books in one hand, a few had their Bibles, nearly all were talking and laughing.

  “Aren’t you usually on the night shift?” I asked.

  “Yes, but we’re all working overtime to prepare for the ACA inspection,” she said. “I work midnights, but Sandy, she runs the show. She’s one of the most competent nurses I’ve ever seen, both medically and administratively. She’s the best. She really does care.”

  “I saw her in action when the inmate was killed in the sally port. She was very impressive. Cool as a cucumber under extreme pressure.”

  “I’ve heard the same about you,” she said with a small nod in my direction and a quick wink.

  “Thank you. That was an awful thing that happened, wasn’t it?”

  She took a big gulp of her coffee. “Wasn’t it though? I just can’t believe it happened. He was here the night before it happened. I talked with him for a pretty good while. We weren’t that busy. I just can’t believe it. It’s really freaked me out,” she said.

  “I can imagine,” I said. “Death is always difficult, but when it’s so brutal and so bizarre, it’s even worse.”

  She took her last puff, a long, slow drag that caused her cheeks to grow hollow—well, hollower. Her face said that it was as satisfying as she thought it would be. She ground the butt down into the sand of the ashtray.

  I always thought that smoking, unlike alcohol, involved much more than just an addiction to a drug. It was oral, busy, and nervous. Smokers enjoyed the lighting, the extinguishing, and especially the fondling of the cigarette.

  “Who was in the infirmary that night?” I asked.

  She thought for a minute. “Let me see,” she said, “seems like it was only Thomas, Jacobson, and Johnson. I think that’s right. We usually have more than that, so it sort of stands out, you know? Especially after what happened.”

  “Anthony Thomas?” I asked.

  “Yes, I believe so. I mean, I know he was in there. He’s always down here.” She leaned in and whispered, “He’s in love with Sandy.” She leaned back and continued in her normal tone, which for her was loud. “I don’t think there was anyone else that night. Come on, let’s go back there and take a look at the log, then I can tell you for sure.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She set her coffee cup down on the counter of the nurses’ station and began flipping through the pages of the log book. Her move
ments were awkward and overstated like her speech. “Just Johnson and Jacobson according to this,” she said, looking at the log, “but I know Thomas was here. I remember. Oh well, somebody forgot to write it down.”

  “Somebody forgot to write it down?” I asked, my voice revealing my skepticism.

  “I know. That shouldn’t have happened, and it usually doesn’t,” she said, then thought about what she had said and added, “At least I don’t think it does. But, I know he was here. I saw him with my own two baby blues.”

  “Blues?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said loudly, “I have colored contacts on.” She rolled her eyes.

  “So Johnson, Jacobson, and Thomas were the only ones here last Monday night, right?”

  “Right. I’m sure of it.”

  “Who took the trash out that morning?” I asked.

  She gave me a large shrug. “That’s the sixty-four-thousanddollar question, isn’t it?” She leaned in closer to me and whispered, “I can tell you who it wasn’t. It wasn’t Jones. He was cleaning up a urine sample for me. I saw the bags when I went and got him, and when we went back, they were gone. Oh, and it wasn’t me. I was with Jones the whole time.”

  “Did you see him go into the caustic storage room at anytime that morning?” I asked.

  “When we saw that the trash had disappeared, he tried to look into the caustic closet, but it was locked. He said it was unlocked just an hour before, but I tried it, too, and it was locked.”

  I went by the infirmary and prayed with the two inmates, who were really not inmates at all, but convicts, before I left medical. When I walked back out into the late afternoon sun, I saw spots. I considered going to confinement, but a voice inside my head said for me to go home instead. It was the voice of God.

  Chapter 27

  Loneliness eats away at you from within and without simultaneously. Within, it’s the dull ache of emptiness and the sharp pains of hunger—hunger for another. Without, it’s the dull hum of silence when noise stops and the sharp pains of a body needing to hold and to be held. The only thing wrong with going home was that I would be alone. Actually, there were other things wrong with going to my current home: like the fact that it was not a home at all, but a trailer. And the fact that it was not just a trailer, but a butt-ugly trailer with several inches of crud on it, alone, like me, in the middle of a prairie of poverty around a lonely, dried-up palm tree. However, the worst thing about going home was being alone.