William Johnstone - Devil's Kiss

"Hit a man!" Sam said aloud, shocked at his thoughts. He glanced heavenward, seeking some advice.

None came.

"Is that what it will come down to?" he asked the sand hills. "Man killing?" Only the wind sighed as it moved endlessly across the rolling plains.

Sam drove for a time, crisscrossing ranges. He was stopped just after intersecting with a range road that would take him back to Whitfield.

The cowboy who blocked the road with his jeep was not friendly. "This is Rocking-Chair Range, Balon. Stay off."

Sam, suddenly angry, got out of his truck to face the cowboy. "I've known Paul Merlin for years," Sam said, not realizing he was balling his fists. "I've fished with him. If Paul wants me off his range, let him tell me."

The cowboy was a small, wiry man, his face burned the shade of old leather. But his eyes were strange—dead-looking. The cowboy stood his ground.

'I've told you what I was told to tell you, Balon. Now, git! We don't need your kind around here."

"My kind! I'm a minister, man. What do you mean?"

"That'll do, Davy," the words came from behind Sam.

Sam turned to look at Paul Merlin. He did not know where the man had come from, and Sam Balon was not an easy man to sneak up on.

"Paul," Sam spoke a greeting.

"Balon," the rancher spoke the word harshly. "You're not welcome here. Leave now!"

"Paul, I—"

"Get out!"

Something about Paul was out of kilter. Sam realized this as he studied the face. His eyes, like the cowboy's, were dead-looking, the voice flat.

"All right, Paul," Sam said. "I'll leave. Tell your hand to move his jeep."

"Go around it."

Sam resisted a quick impulse to give the rancher a short right cross to the mouth. "Very well, Paul," he fought back his temper. "As you wish."

Sam listened to the men laugh at him as he backed out and around the jeep, almost getting stuck in a ditch. Sam did not know what was going on around this part of Fork County, but he sure intended to find out—soon.

He drove straight to the Crusader office, where he knew Wade often worked on Saturday mornings, on personal business.

"Sam!" Wade said, surprise on his face as he answered the knocking on the front door of the newspaper building. He looked at the truck. "You trade cars?"

"Yesterday."

"I like it." The editor smiled, taking in his minister's casual dress and the unshaved stubble on his face. "You going fishing, Sam?"

"Hunting might be a better word, Wade. Can you spare me a few minutes of your time? I need to talk with you."

"For you, Sam—anytime. All the time you want. Hunting? I didn't know you hunted." He paused in his locking of the door after Sam was inside. "There is no hunting season open around here, Sam."

"The season on this animal never closes," Sam said dryly.

Wade gave him an odd look as they walked into his office. But he said nothing about whatever his minister might be hunting in the middle of summer.

"Sit down, Sam," he pointed to a chair facing his desk. "I just made a pot of coffee. You take yours black, don't you?"

"Black as sin," Sam smiled, but there was no mirth in his grin; no humor in his eyes.

Wade picked up on his minister's seriousness. Something is very wrong, he thought. Has Miles's alarm drifted over to Sam? I won't open the ball, though. I'll let him tell me.

Pouring them coffee, Wade stole a glance at Sam. The man never ceases to amaze me—never ceases to bring out the curiosity in me.

Sam was the only minister Wade had ever known with a combat background, although Sam never talked about his time in Korea with UNPIK. Whatever in the hell UNPIK was! He doesn't look like a minister. Big man. Barrel chested; thick, powerful wrists. Big hands, flat knuckles. Tattoo on his arm. Boxed in college, some say. I can believe it, looking at the size of those arms.

To lighten the mood of the moment, Wade abruptly asked a question he'd been wanting to ask for years. "How many fights did you have, Sam?"

Sam grinned boyishly. "I had too many, Wade. I enjoyed boxing, even though I felt it best to quit when I went into active ministry. Your next question will be, how many fights did I win? I won all of them." He tapped his head. "Thick skull; hard to knock down," his grin widened. "My trainer was appalled when he learned I was a theology major. He couldn't quite correlate boxing with the Bible. Thought it wrong somehow."

"You were a minister while you were in the service?"

"Yes. But the guys didn't know it. Let me clarify that. I had my degree, but I had not yet held a church. I wasn't sure until after the war—or sometime during it—that I really wanted to be a preacher."

The speculation of whatever it was lurking around Whitfield entered Sam's mind, fading his grin. He did not know how to bring up the subject to Wade. Or what to do about it when he did.

Wade watched the changes sweeping his minister's face. "And you didn't think boxing wrong?"

That grin again. "No, I didn't. God liked his warriors."

"You do like the Old Testament, don't you, Sam?"

"Yes, I do. Our nation—the world—would do well to go back to some of those hard Old Testament rules."

Wade arched an eyebrow—a habit he picked up from watching George Sanders movies. "A lot of people—ministers included—might disagree with you about that."

"Good," Sam said, sipping his coffee. "I enjoy a fast debate. I'm a very opinioned minister, Wade. I've been called a maverick more than once, by my own peers. I really don't care, since I know for a fact that many ministers are notoriously naive about worldly ways. I think going back to the Old Testament might make a better people out of us. Myself, included. I know I could use some hard discipline from time to time."

Interesting thing for him to say, Wade thought. Wonder why he said that? Jane Ann, perhaps. I know he's in love with her.

Wade knew that Sam came from a religious family, but had been a wild one, well up into his twenties. A street fighter; he openly admitted that. Sam's father had been a minister in Kansas City, Missouri. The elder Balon and his wife had been killed in an automobile accident when Sam was fifteen. Sam ran away from his Uncle's home in Iowa, drifting around the country, raising hell wherever he went, until a social worker in California persuaded him to go to college. Then the army.

"It amazes me how well you get along with young people, Sam. My oldest says you're a cool cat."

But not "cool" enough, Sam thought. The youth department at the church has gone from bad to worse to zero. Again, the radio station came to mind. It had to be. Sam could think of no other way it could have been done. But, he recalled, every teacher in the elementary and high school was in that parade of humanity I saw last night, heading out to worship the devil. The radio station and the teachers—a good combination to mold young minds.

"Wade, Jr. is a good boy," the minister said. "He just likes the girls, that's all."

"Would I be asking you to violate a confidence if I asked what you told him that time he talked with you half the night. After you sobered him up, that is," he added dryly.

"No. No violation of any confidence. I just told him if he couldn't keep it in his pants, at least put a rubber on it."

Wade felt his face flush hot. He shook his head. "Sam, you're the darnest minister I've ever met in my life." He fought a losing battle to hide a smile.

"Friend, in this day of blossoming sexual promiscuity among the young—and it's going to get much worse before it levels off—I'm not about to tell a healthy young man to go home and jack off. He'd think me a fool! I have to do what most parents won't or can't do with their kids, mostly boys, and that is tell them about the birds and the bees. It's a job most ministers don't want and are not equipped to handle. It's not our job, although a great many parents seem to think it is. Lucas Monroe told me, last year, a young man said to him that he didn't want to know about the birds and the bees; what he wanted to know about was pussy."