Deadlock

Yes, Charlene Moore sang in her thoughts. We’re going all the way.

11

Slowing down from a fast walk, Millie realized she had not been in this park for years. She’d done quite a bit of sightseeing when she’d first come to the Court. But very quickly her life had developed a routine that made simple excursions to monuments and tourist sites difficult.

She glanced back and did not see the senator. Had he been too drunk to follow?

Over the course of her judicial career, the one thing Millie Hollander had avoided was publicity. If a judge was making headlines, either through judicial opinion or personal transgression, she wasn’t doing her job.

She was angry at herself for allowing this to happen. She should not have let her guard down, even for a moment. She was not cut out to be with men in any romantic situation, nor they with her. She’d made that decision years ago, after Marty Winters. She should have stuck with that decision.

As she reached the sidewalk on the edge of the park, looking for the roof light that would indicate a taxi, she noticed a figure slowly making his way toward her, from the right.

He was dressed thickly, as if in several layers of clothes. His hair and face were caked with dirt. Even in the dim light she could tell that this was one of the city’s homeless.

She turned her back and started to walk slowly away from him. Her body buzzed with an adrenaline surge. Was this what it felt like to be mugged? She had been so long in an ivory tower, and suddenly she felt ashamed. Her judicial decisions affected people like this, all people, really. But how much did she know about what went on in their daily lives?

She glanced back and saw that the man, in a slow but steady shuffle, was following her.

Millie’s nerves crackled. She looked desperately to the street and saw a taxi coming her way. She put her arm up, more frantically than she wanted to, and waved stupidly at it. It passed by. She saw people sitting in the back. A man and a woman. They appeared to be laughing.

She turned. The homeless man was only a few feet away now. For one moment she could not move.

“You still have time,” the man said.

He took another step toward her, and she could barely make out his eyes. They were wild yet full of some crazy earnestness. Pleading almost.

“You still have time!” he shouted, jerking forward.

Fear engulfing her, Millie stumbled backward. Her shoe caught the edge of the curb. Her body lurched into the street.

She heard the squeal of tires, and suddenly light seemed all around her, coming from every angle, blinding her. And then every part of her body felt as if it had exploded as she was hit by a force that lifted her up for a sprawling moment. Then she felt herself falling, and the ground, unforgiving, slamming her head. And then the light turned to darkness.

CHAPTER TWO

1

No one would have faulted her for staying seated at her age, but Ethel Hollander had to kneel. Tonight she knew she had to pray on her knees.

She and fifteen prayer warriors were at the church for the weekly prayer meeting. It started late, usually around nine o’clock, so Allard Jones could make it. He worked in Bakersfield, an hour north of Santa Lucia, and never wanted to be left out. Allard, like Ethel, had helped build Santa Lucia Community Church.

The building was built by a congregation of twenty back in 1964. It was simple and boxy outside. But inside there was a history as full of warmth and life as anything the Lord had created.

Ethel Hollander had over fifty years invested in this church congregation. She’d seen the good times and the bad. The old building went down in the earthquake of ’57. They built it right back up. And when they broke ground for the new building in ’64, they’d given the shovel to Ethel Hollander.

If someone had asked her what held the church together, Ethel wouldn’t have hesitated to say prayer.

She knew Pastor Holden agreed. He was such a man of prayer. He hadn’t been here long but he was already, in her mind, the best preacher they’d ever had. And he had a line on prayer, like his soul was attuned to things in a special way.

It had to be, in part, because of what he’d gone through. Ethel knew only part of the story. He’d come to the valley to be restored. He was just over fifty, but he’d had enough tragedy for two lifetimes.

That was why he prayed.

And tonight, Ethel needed those prayers. All day she had felt that something was wrong with Millie.

Ethel prayed for her daughter daily. Somehow she had ended up on the United States Supreme Court, and Ethel was certain God had intended that for some great good. Ethel held on to that belief, even though the last ten years seemed to move Millie further away from Christ. She knew that only God’s miraculous hand could change her daughter’s heart.

So each day without fail, Ethel uttered the same prayer, that her daughter would find her way back to the God she had grown up with.

Yet tonight she felt Millie was in trouble. What sort of trouble she could not name. But when she had that feeling she always prayed.

The prayer meeting lasted till almost midnight.

2

Millie heard someone whisper her name.

She was in total darkness. Her first thought was that she had gone blind. But somehow she knew it was not blindness, just lack of light. She reached out, looking for a wall or a switch. She felt nothing but air.

For some reason she felt she had to scream. She tried, but no sound came out. What was this? Paralysis seized her. Had she lost sight and voice?

And then she heard her name again.

The voice that whispered sounded neither like a man nor a woman. It was seductive, in a way that was both irresistible and deadly.

Was she dead?

No, couldn’t be, for she was walking. Not walking, really, but being moved. Upright, as if on some belt made of air. Weightless.

And powerless. Powerless to stop her thrust forward into deeper darkness. Powerless to resist the force – it was a force, she knew that now – drawing her.

Then she felt a slimy thing around her ankles.

She could not scream or recoil, only feel a slithering like a wet snake. No, a pair of wet snakes. Then another pair and another, on both her ankles and her legs.

She opened her mouth, but all was silent.

Then she realized that they were not snakes, but fingers. Fingers on horrible hands that writhed upward from some abyss, grasping at her, trying to pull her down.

This was no nightmare. This was a reality beyond dreams, beyond comprehension, yet fully existent, woven from the cords of every terror she had felt in her life.

Her name was called out again, this time louder, and then the word surrender.

Surrender…

Yes, a surrender that would end this. And yet she knew if she did surrender now, she would be forever lost.

Her will told her to resist, but she had lost all ability to resist. She could not move. She could not control her limbs. She could not scream. She felt a drawing downward, downward.

And then in some far place in her mind – if she still had a mind – in a voice that sounded distantly like her own, she willed herself to say, Oh, God, help me.