Page 123 of Never Flinch

“Do youhavea house and lot, Holly?”

“Actually I don’t, but I do have a condo.”

“After I gotbupkesfrom the church, I called the Baraboo Junction Town Office, which, given the population, is probably the size of a trailer. They were just closing, but I got a clerk willing to chat with an officer of the law. She ID’d Chris Stewart as a member of the Real Christ Holy Church.”

“I already knew—”

“Here’s something you might not know. This chatty clerk said there was some big kerfuffle in the church a few years ago. She told me Chris Stewart was kind of a black sheep in Real Christ Holy because he got caught wearing girls’ clothes as a kid, but this clerk said the church prayed it away.”

“Maybe they didn’t quite succeed,” Holly says.

Chapter 19

1

Chrissy has almost given up on Deacon Andy when her burner finally comes to life. She’s sitting at one of the picnic tables near the Dingley Park food wagons, with her suitcase safely placed between her feet (which are clad in sensible but stylish Vionic flats). The lights have just gone on around the playing field, where the men from the Police and Fire Departments are still practicing. Chrissy would like to be on the well-lighted bleachers over there—here on the park’s darker side she’s already been hit on twice—but doesn’t dare. The chances of being recognized are too great. Here on the edge of the trees is safer, and the two guys who approached her were pretty hesitant. She even toted her suitcase to Taco Joe’s food wagon and got a burrito. She knew it was a risk, but her stomach had gone beyond growling and was actually roaring.

She answers the phone on the first ring.

“You really need to come home,” Andy Fallowes says. He sounds put out and scared. “I got a call from a city detective as well as that bodyguard person. This isserious, Christopher.”

“I’m Chrissy.”

Andy pauses, then gives a longsuffering sigh. “Chrissy, then.”

“Not coming home. Finishing what I started. If I can do that, I’ll keep you out of it. If you don’t help me, I won’t.”

“Pastor Jim says—”

“I don’t care what that old man says. Do you have a list of some places where I can disappear until tomorrow, or don’t you?”

Another sigh. “There are two empty warehouses on Bincey Lane. That’s near the lake. There’s an empty Sam’s Club out by the airport—”

“Too far,” Chrissy says. “I don’t dare go back to my car.”

“There’s also an abandoned hockey rink in a place called Dingley Park. It’s awaiting demolition—”

“What?”

“I said…”

But Chrissy barely hears the rest of it. She’s looking at the conical, paint-peeling roof poking over the tops of the surrounding fir trees. She thought it was some kind of storage shed.

She thinks,Who says God doesn’t help those in need?

2

Chrissy makes a slow, ambling circle of the condemned building, pink suitcase in hand, keeping an eye out for anyone drifting around on this side of the park, probably those looking for drugs or blowjobs. She sees no one, but catches a strange and unpleasant aroma, which she thinks is probably improperly stowed garbage from behind one of the food trucks, most likely the one selling fish.

When she comes back to the double doors, she sets her suitcase down and examines the keypad. Before Chris’s father became rich as an inventor of inverters, voltage regulators, and smart circuits, Harold Stewart was a humble electrician, one who knew many tricks of the trade… some of which Donald “Trig” Gibson would have remembered from his own father’s sermons in this very building.

Put things on the floor. They can’t fall any further.

Never go back to your van empty-handed.

Use a potato peeler to strip wires.

If you can’t get into a building with a keypad, try the Plumber’s Code.

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