Free Ghost Dance by Mark T. Sullivan

the research on Father D’Angelo would likely send Jerry packing and their partnership into bankruptcy and oblivion.
    So Gallagher came up with an alternate plan. He would research both.
    Gallagher drained his coffee cup, paid the waitress, then exited the diner onto Lawton’s Main Street. As he prepared to enter the crosswalk toward the village green, Chief Mike Kerris’ dark blue Chevy Suburban pulled up and blocked his path. Deputy Gavrilis sat in the passenger seat, his straight-cut bangs making it appear as if a bowl had been the template for his haircut. Kerris sucked his lollipop and pressed his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose as the electric window rolled down.
    ‘Still around, Mr Gallagher?’ Kerris said in a mocking tone. ‘I figured finding a body in the Bluekill might have spoiled your taste for the local fishing holes.’
    ‘I’m not here just to fish,’ Gallagher said. ‘Like I said the other day, I’m researching a film on Father D’Angelo.’
    ‘That is what you said, isn’t it?’ Kerris replied. Then he folded his right hand into a gun shape and pointed the barrel at Gallagher. ‘I saw that note, Pat,’ Kerris said. ‘I’m watching you. Everyone who counts in Lawton is watching you.’
    The tires screeched as he pulled away. Five years before, Gallagher spent a great deal of time in Tokyo putting together a film on the intertwining of the martial arts, religion and Japanese culture. Most of his time was spent in an aikido dojo. The sensei there taught a particularly vicious joint-lock technique called kote gaeshi, the purpose of which was to bend your attacker’s wrist until he either submitted or experienced the spiral snapping of three bones in the lower arm and hand.
    Right then Gallagher had the overwhelming desire to perform the move on Chief Kerris.
    It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Gallagher crossed the green and walked three blocks east to where Newton Street met Whelton Lane. St Edward’s Catholic Church was a white clapboard affair with a single steeple rising amid hundred-year-old maples whose branches were tinged with the first red buds of spring. The adjoining rectory was stone-faced and in desperate need of repointing. There was a high brick wall around a garden to the rear. Rising above the walls, like a constant shadow on the town, was Lawton Mountain. Up there the trees stood bare and pewter-colored, offering no hope yet that they might soon embrace spring.
    He opened the iron gate, mounted the front porch and knocked. Being the pushy type, Gallagher did not wait for a response, but twisted the doorknob and entered immediately. The rectory’s interior was all dark wood and rich red Oriental carpets. The walls of the narrow hallway off the foyer were flush with paintings and photographs of the various priests who had served Lawton’s Catholic community.
    One in particular cried out for attention—an oil portrait of a cranelike priest with a pained expression plastered across his lips. He was bald but for a fringe of white hair around his pate. He stood with his hands clasped around a Bible in a garden containing an ornate birdbath in the center of which were three small stone horses.
    Just then a woman poked her head out of a room to his right.
    ‘I thought I heard a knock but I was chitchatting on the phone,’ bubbled Libby Curtin, the parish secretary. She was in her mid-twenties with a chestnut braid that reached her waist. A simple wooden cross dangled from her neck over a maroon tunic whose neckline was embroidered with daisies. She wore granny-style glasses, baggy, blue drawstring pants and Birkenstock sandals with rag wool socks.
    ‘You’re the moviemaker, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re going to do a film on Father D’Angelo?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘The Lord be praised!’ she cried, clapping her hands and bending over at the waist, all the while beaming. Then she glanced up at the painting and her voice dropped to a