Free Cult by Warren Adler Page B

to be the same.
    â€œIt’s a bona fide tax exempt religion, approved by the high offices of the United States government. I do not represent anyone but the people of this county. The law is the law.”
    He was not able to tell them that in the beginning, he had tried to do something about it. Hadn’t he told Gladys that something suspicious and wrong was going down at the camp?
Something damned sinister
.
    â€œYou mean voodoo?” she had asked.
    â€œMaybe,” he had answered.
    â€œThey’re raising a whole fucking army of zombies,” he would tell Gladys. “If Father Glory said go kill your mother, they’d do it. If Father Glory said go rape your sister, they’d do it.”
    â€œTee, you’re exaggerating,” she would respond.
    â€œIt’s my gut talking.”
    When the first parents started to troop in, he had gone with them to the camp, genuinely on the parents’ side. Nobody had the right to take away another person’s kid. Okay, they were in their twenties, but to him they were still kids. What he got from all this were some real lessons about the law, about what can and cannot be done when these kids were over twenty-one. Occasionally, he got one out when they were underage, but they had become pretty careful about that in the last few years.
    He also could not tell them that he had tangled with their lawyers. “That’s their right,” lawyers would tell him.
    â€œBut they don’t think for themselves,” he’d protest.
    â€œYou can’t prove that. Rights and First Amendment,” they’d tell him. That covered it all, and he wondered if the men who wrote the Constitution ever figured they’d be faced with something like this. Even when he showed them literature where Father Glory, the bastard who ran the camp, said “I am your mind,” the boys from American Civil Liberties Union told him about rights and the First Amendment.
    He also couldn’t tell them of the deal that he had finally made with the Glories himself.
What was his real name?
Billy Perkins from St. Joseph, Missouri; “Jeremiah” now, the Great Prophet.
A ruthless son of a bitch.
He agreed with Jeremiah to keep the peace within the Sheriff’s county. After all, that was his job.
    Sherriff Moore agreed to do his best to keep troublemakers away. Parents, brothers, sisters who were taken in by the Glories. Sometimes to salve his much-abused conscience he’d go in and slap them with sanitation violations. They were always filling up their outhouse pits too damned high with shit. Also, parents would come in and say their kids had been drugged. He tried on at least three occasions to find drugs in the camp. Real potential busts. But could you classify sugar as a drug? One thing they had was bales and bales of sugar. And there had been two suspicious drownings in the river that ran through the camp. “Slipping along the bank” was always the reason, and nothing he had tried could waver that explanation. He still had his doubts, but left it alone. Too much hassle involved. It was, he often snickered bitterly to his wife, like shoveling shit against the tide.
    Hadn’t he really tried at the beginning, interviewing the kids? They sounded like machines, all programmed with the same script.
    â€œAre you here of your own free will?”
    â€œYes.”
    He was always amazed how they’d get the kids to sign over everything they had, bank accounts, cars, clothes, jewelry. If they had trust funds, the Glories would find a way to get that, too.
    â€œDo you realize that you have signed away all your possessions?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy did you do that?”
    â€œFor Father Glory. For salvation in the spirit world.”
    â€œBut how do they do it to those kids, Tee?” Gladys had asked maybe a thousand times since the Glories had come in with their permit for the three hundred acre Bobson estate. The