Free Nightcrawler by John Reinhard Dizon

involved. Most Christian families simply don't have that kind of money before taking on the expense of raising a child.”
    “Well, we'll see about that,” Sabrina mulled it over. “If someone were to donate the money to a Church that would give the money over for humanitarian purposes, then I would think someone's got some pretty good tax write-offs coming, don't you?”
    “Gee, that's an idea,” Rita's eyes lit up.
    “The only jam I see might be the Church donating it for the cause, but if the IRS decided to have a go at them, they would have to prove that rescuing a child from an orphanage is not a humanitarian act. And if they went after Pastor Mitchell, they'd have to get through BCC's lawyers. That'd be a pay-per-view matchup, in my book.”
    “Well, I'd run it by the Pastor and see what he says,” Rita decided. “I'm pretty sure Lindsay wouldn't have a problem with it.”
    “Oh, thank you, thank you!” Lindsay wept with gladness, throwing her arms around Sabrina.
    It felt a lot better than singlehandedly beating down two steroid-fueled lesbians at the Statue of Liberty.
     
    Rita and Sabrina went to meet with the Pastor Monday night, and he seemed eager to go provided that all the legal groundwork was tended to beforehand. Sabrina promised that she would meet with her lawyers to ensure that everything would be taken care of. She next called her CPA and asked him to explore the tax shelters available for companies donating to humanitarian causes in NYC. After that, she drove back to the BCC campus to meet with Jon Aeppli.
    “Okay, so you're thinking the addition of a heat-resistant hot-melt pressure sensitive adhesive is gonna make this work if we can combine it with the asphalt sealant compound,” Jon looked at the report and worksheets Sabrina had come up with. “So you're thinking of using the styrene sec-butyllithium as the prepolymerized catalyst?”
    “Well,” she said tentatively, “if we remove the cyclohexane to give it the ABA type block copolymer, plus with the A dosage and B mixing, I think it might be what Tom's looking for.”
    “I'll take this home and kick it around, tweak it up and run it by Rick and Ryan,” Jon exhaled. “Fifteen million, what's he got in mind, paving up through Memorial Park to Borough Hall?”
    “I think he's looking at possible trial-and-error, possible setbacks and profit margins,” she shrugged. “I don't see why we can't come up with one hundred and sixteen thousand gallons of this stuff for much more than eight million dollars. That should be enough to coat the Bridge and have enough left over for a couple of miles on the inroads.”
    “I think you missed your calling.”
    “I agree. I should've been a superhero.”
    “I didn't mean that,” Jon frowned at her as his cell phone went off. “You should've went into construction, it's obviously better money—hello, this is Jon.”
    Sabrina watched as he walked over to his desk, picked up his remote control, and switched on the rarely-used wide-screen plasma TV dominating the far wall of his office space.
    “Barbara called, she says we ought to see this.”
    Jon tuned in to CNN at the behest of his wife and saw a replay of a prerecorded tape that had been broadcast via satellite through Cuba from an undisclosed location. The figure of a powerfully-built blond man in a tank-top sat behind a desk before a shadowy backdrop, his face electronically distorted.
    “The people of New York City must realize that they are in a war that they cannot win,” the man declared. “Their battle is being fought by cowardly incompetents who do not have the skill or the will to defeat a superior opponent who will never give up before victory is achieved. This is not Boston, where an entire city and state consolidated its resources with that of its citizens to defeat two simple-minded adolescents. Think of the terrible tragedy you endured just a little over a decade ago on 9/11. Stopping us at the Statue of Liberty was