The Sacrifice Read online

  The Sacrifice

  The Sacrifice

  Robert Whitlow

  The Sacrifice

  © 2002 Robert Whitlow.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected]

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations used in this book are from the Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV). © 1973, 1978, 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

  Other Scripture references are from the following sources:

  The King James Version of the Bible (KJV).

  The New King James Version of the Bible (NKJV), 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

  The Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV). 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

  The New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV), 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-8499-4318-8 (tp)

  ISBN 978-0-8499-4520-5 (rpkg)

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 08 09 10 11 RRD 11 10 9 8 7

  TO ALL WHO pray for students and teachers.

  Your sacrifice will not go unrewarded.

  I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land.

  EZEKIEL 22:30

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Serve one another in love.

  GALATIANS 5:13

  My greatest thanks go to my wife, Kathy, for her unwavering commitment to the message of this book and her encouragement to complete it. Thanks to my editors, Ami McConnell, Traci DePree, Wendy Wood, and Keren Kilgore—you skillfully used the pick, chisel, and brush. And special appreciation to my good friend Kent Reynolds for his invaluable insight.

  And to those who prayed. You pulled back the veil.

  PROLOGUE

  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

  JOHN 10:10

  Early one morning as the sun was rising, Tao Pang stood at the edge of the river. Thin vapors of mist hovered over the surface of the water. Many years before the river had beckoned as his grave. Today, he thanked the Lord of life.

  To his surprise, the Voice responded, “You are going to America.”

  Hmong refugees had been trickling out of Southeast Asia since the 1970s. Tao and thousands like him longed for the chance to emigrate to the United States, but few made it.

  “How?” he asked.

  No answer.

  “Why?”

  No answer.

  Tao looked across the water. The waterway flowed into a bigger river, the river flowed into the ocean, and the ocean touched the shores of America. If God could take a drop of water from the river swirling at his feet and send it to America, he could do the same with Tao. What he would do when he got there would be revealed in its appointed time.

  Nine months later, he arrived in Los Angeles.

  Darkness has a strategy. For millennia, evil has been associated with chaos, but in reality, it marches in strict cadence to a master plan. Its goals are simple. Its greatest enemy is light. Wherever light appears the darkness rises up to snuff it out.

  In a small North Carolina town, a light was flickering.

  No one noticed the light. Those who held it did not recognize its significance. It shone in the midst of a new generation, and thus posed a great threat. The darkness saw it and knew it must be destroyed. The plan was set in motion. It was a proven scheme.

  Darkness would destroy light.

  A willing ally was already on the scene. So willing, that he would sacrifice himself on the altar of deception. But he was not under absolute control. He was not a marionette, and he could choose avenues that didn’t serve the lowest purposes of evil. Thus, the plan held risks.

  The idea didn’t come to the student in a moment of brooding isolation. It came in a crowded hallway at the high school between third and fourth periods. He was making his way from one class to another and stopped at his locker. Leaning over to pick up his textbook, he was jostled and hit his nose so hard against the metal frame that it made his eyes water. He spun around, but the offender had vanished into the anonymous throng.

  Surging emotions boiled up inside him. Anger, rage, wrath. There weren’t enough adjectives to describe the range of negative emotions that fought to control him. Sometimes, he kept them bottled up, and they seethed beneath the surface. Other times, he opened the door. Never had he given them full reign over his will. He rubbed his nose and closed the locker.

  Suddenly, he had an experience unlike anything that had ever happened to him. He saw a massive wall of fire that started at one end of the hallway and rushed toward him like a flaming tidal wave. Frozen in place, he couldn’t escape the approaching torrent. The fire swept forward and crashed over him. The magnitude and power of the vision took his breath away. After the firestorm passed, it was immediately followed by a darkness that held an unexpected, surprising calm. Peace came over him. And he knew the truth. The end of life was nothingness. Death held no fear.

  Other students streamed past. No one noticed him.

  1

  Roll, Jordan, roll. Come down to the river and be baptized.

  Roll, Jordan, roll. Pass through the waters to the other side.

  Roll, Jordan, roll. In dying you’ll become alive.

  Roll, Jordan, roll.

  The members of Hall’s Chapel weren’t in a hurry. In some cases, friends and relatives had prayed and waited decades
for this moment. Prodigals had come home; those wandering in the wilderness of sin had come to the edge of the promised land. The celebration of salvation was a time to be savored. The voices of the congregation gathered along Montgomery Creek flowed over the water in triumph. Refrain followed refrain in affirmation of a faith as unrelenting as the force of the current rushing past the white frame church. Tambourines joined the voices. Hands clapped in syncopated rhythm.

  Dressed in white robes, the five candidates for baptism walked forward to the edge of the stream and faced the rest of the congregation. The small crowd grew quiet.

  A heavyset woman in a baptismal garment lifted her hands in the air and cried out at the top of her voice, “Thank you, Jesus!”

  Her declaration was greeted with a chorus of “Yes, Lord!” and “Amen!”

  Bishop Moore joined the converts and introduced each one using their new first name—“brother” or “sister.” From this day forward they would be part of the larger family of God’s children who had met on the banks of the creek for almost 150 years. The former slaves who founded the church took seriously the command to love one another and passed on a strong sense of community that had not been lost by subsequent generations.

  Each new believer stepped into the edge of the water and gave a brief testimony of the journey that had brought him or her to the river of God’s forgiveness. The stories were similar, yet each one unique.

  When it was her turn, the woman who had cried out shed a few tears that fell warm from her dark cheeks into the cool water at her bare feet. Some who knew her had doubted she would ever let go of the bitterness and unforgivingness that had dominated her life for more than twenty-five years, but the chains had been broken, the captive set free. Other testimonies followed until all five confirmed their faith in the presence of the gathered witnesses.

  Bishop Moore waded into the water. Much of the stream bottom in the valley was covered with smooth rocks that made footing treacherous for the trout fishermen who crowded the stream each April, but the church deacons had cleared away the rocks and made a safe path to the small pool where Bishop Moore waited for the first candidate. A teenage boy walked gingerly forward into the cold water that inched up his legs to his waist. His family looked on with joy.

  Bishop Moore held up his right hand and said in a loud voice, “Michael Lindale Wallace, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  Then, putting his hand over Mike’s face, the bishop laid the young man back into the water. Bishop Moore didn’t do a quick baptism. He wanted people to remember their moment under the water, so he went deep and stayed long. The five had been cautioned by the lady who gave them their robes to take a deep breath.

  After several seconds, the bishop lifted Mike out of the water and proclaimed, “Buried in likeness to his death in baptism; raised to walk in newness of resurrection life.”

  The sputtering boy managed a big smile. His father shouted, “Hallelujah!”

  Mike splashed through the water toward the shore. The next in line was the woman who had shed the tears. She stepped deeper into the water.

  The first shot didn’t cause a stir. One of the elders later told the police detective, “I thought it was a firecracker.”

  The second shot knifed through the water about three feet from the woman wading toward the bishop. The bullet left a line of bubbles before disappearing into the sandy bottom.

  The third shot shattered the windshield of a car parked next to the sanctuary. At the sound of the splintering glass, pandemonium broke out. The air was filled with screams. People began running away from the water. Some ran toward the sanctuary. Others hid behind cars and trucks. Several children who were not standing near their parents froze, unsure what to do.

  The fourth shot passed through the bottom of the new dress Alisha Mason was wearing. At that moment, the teenager didn’t know how close she’d come to serious injury. (It was several days before she took out the dress and saw the place where the bullet almost nicked her left calf.) She hid behind a tree.

  The fifth shot hit the church above the front door. It was the only bullet recovered by the sheriff ’s department.

  Hurriedly glancing over his shoulder, Bishop Moore scrambled toward the bank as quickly as his aging legs could carry him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure running downstream through the dense underbrush on the other side of the stream.

  Papers from a real-estate development contract were neatly stacked in rows across the wooden surface of Scott Ellis’s desk. He ran his fingers through his short brown hair as he searched for a paragraph that he wanted to move from one section of the document to another. Stocky and muscular, the young lawyer had taken off his coat and hung it on a wooden hanger on the inside of his office door. The phone on a small, antique table beside his desk buzzed.

  “Harold Garrison on line four,” the receptionist said.

  Scott didn’t recognize the name. “Did he say what it was about?”

  “No. Mr. Humphrey talked to him and told me to forward the call to you.”

  “Okay, I’ll take it.”

  Scott knew from the receptionist’s response that Mr. Garrison was a potential client referred down the line from the firm’s senior partner. He couldn’t dodge the call. Leland Humphrey would ask him about it later. He punched the flashing button.

  “Scott Ellis, here.”

  “Yeah, this here is Harold Garrison. My son is in trouble with the law, and I have to talk to someone today.”

  Scott looked at his calendar. “What kind of trouble?”

  “He’s locked up at the jail for teenagers.”

  “The youth detention center?”

  “Yeah. The police picked him up this past weekend. I’m leaving town tonight and need to see a lawyer before I get on the road.”

  “What are the charges?” Scott asked.

  “Uh, the summons from the juvenile court said he’s unruly and delinquent.”

  “That could mean a lot of things. Did anyone at the detention center tell you anything more specific?”

  “Yeah, a guy wrote it down on a piece of paper.” The phone was quiet for a few seconds. “It says ‘assault with a deadly weapon with intent to inflict serious injury, assaulting by pointing a gun, and criminal damage to property.’”

  “Those are serious charges.”

  “Lester says it’s a big mistake. He ain’t never been in any kind of trouble before.”

  “Lester is your son?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Sixteen. He’ll be seventeen in less than a month.”

  Scott’s calendar was clear at three o’clock. “Can you come in at three this afternoon?”

  “Yeah, but I need to know you’re a fighter. I want someone who can win.”

  “I’ve had some success,” Scott responded.

  Actually, he’d appeared in juvenile court two times since graduating from law school. In his first case, he represented a student who was suspended from school for fighting. The other matter involved a young man charged with illegal possession of a few pills. Scott worked out deals for both clients that involved supervised probation. He wasn’t sure that met Mr. Garrison’s definition for success, but the juvenile court process was informal and the results predictable. He was confident that he could do as well as any other attorney in town.

  “How much is this going to cost me?” Mr. Garrison asked.

  Scott thought quickly. “Did Mr. Humphrey mention a fee?”

  “He said it might be $2,500 if it has to go to a hearing.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “Do I have to bring all of it this afternoon?”

  Scott hesitated. The cardinal rule of criminal cases was to get the entire fee up front, but he didn’t want to lose the chance for courtroom experience.

  “Can you do that?” he asked.

  “Only if y’all take cash. I don’t have no checking account.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, sir. Cash will be fine.”

  Scott Wesley Ellis, the newest associate of Humphrey, Balcomb and Jackson, checked the time on the small digital clock that divided his working day into the six-minute intervals billable by the law firm at rates of $115 to $160 per hour. He quickly completed a billing slip: “Initial phone call—Garrison case.”

  Scott’s cream-colored office was at the end of the hall on the second floor of the firm’s two-story, brick building. Everything in the office was there for a reason. Scott’s diplomas and his law license were framed and hung in a razor-straight row behind his desk. A picture of his father at the main entrance to Fort Bragg stood at attention next to a similar photo of Scott taken at the same location twenty-five years later. Inside the top drawer of his desk every pen and paper clip was in its place. The young lawyer didn’t have to look twice when he needed something.

  The dark-colored wooden surface of his desk and the small antique table where his phone rested were always shiny. Scott tried to keep clutter in the office to a minimum. There weren’t any pleadings or documents on the floor, and stray letters or memos found a home in the proper file or ended up in the trash can without lingering in paperwork limbo. As much as possible in the midst of a developing law practice, Scott tried to manage the flow of work from his in-box across his desk and into his out-box. For him, outward organization was a key to efficiency.

  As a child, Scott had ridden his bicycle past Humphrey, Balcomb and Jackson on his way to the barbershop. He never imagined that one day he would enter the building as an attorney himself. The same shiny brass nameplate was still there, but the firm had expanded over the years from three to seven attorneys. Lawyers, secretaries, and paralegals occupied every available inch of both floors.

  From his office window, Scott could see the steeple of the First Baptist Church and the southwest corner of the Blanchard County Courthouse. One of the advantages of practicing law in a small town was convenient access to the halls of justice, and all the law firms in Catawba clustered around the courthouse like baby chicks around a hen.