A desk lamp was the lone light on in the Courier offices this night. The dim bulb cast strange shadows on the walls of its editor’s office. The paper’s few employees had left earlier, leaving the building empty except for Grant Grae. He and his staff published twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursdays, and the crew left early on Fridays.
Grae leaned back in his desk chair, his hands locked behind his head. His feet were stretched out and crossed at the ankles, heels resting on the edge of the roll-top desk. He groaned and sat up straight, dropping his head a bit to squint at today’s Courier Press front page. Deputy Hubbard’s death ran above the fold under the paper’s masthead and a huge banner headline screamed Local deputy dies in shootout. A sidebar story also ran above the fold, and the related story’s background was shaded to set it apart from the main story. It ran under the headline, Deputy is Alleged Abortionist Killer. Below the fold ran yet another banner headline that read, Former Mayor’s Fast Ends in Death. The subhead in smaller type read, City Mourns His Passing. At the same time Deputy Hubbard took eight rounds to his upper body, John Lawler drew his last breath. The reporter noted that the time of death recorded on the death certificates of both men read exactly fifteen hundred, or three p.m. Central Standard Time. It didn’t take a religious zealot to know that Christ was supposed to have died on the cross at three p.m. If this didn’t sound like a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not story, then Grae didn’t know what did.
Lawler’s son, Matthew, was quoted in the story saying that his father “Died for our sins.”
Grae looked up from the paper. Michael stared down at the editor from above, his thirty-six points and beams casting bizarre, ghoulish shadows on the wall. Grae never told the FBI Agent or the reporter that he’d named Michael after the archangel. It never came up. He leaned forward and reached into the upper left-hand drawer of his desk. He pulled out an old paperback Bible and turned to the Book of Daniel, verse 12…the end times…
And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered.
Grae looked up at Gabriel, the deer he’d named after another archangel, and which shared its name with the Catholic Church a few blocks north. In the New Testament, Gabriel is referred to as “the angel of the Power of God,” and the words most used to describe him are “great, might, power, and strength.” In Christian teaching, Michael is the angel of judgment while Gabriel is the angel of mercy.
The gun cabinet behind Grae was open, and he reached in and pulled out his Marlin 30-30. He rested the butt on his right thigh, the barrel pointing up at an angle toward the ceiling. He fingered the hickory stock. It seemed like he was being drawn through a thick, heavy fog, called to pick up the cross from the fallen deputy and to continue his work.
He felt the same pull earlier, but instead, he picked up his pen, which he wielded with even more power and precision than his rifle. The result was the editorial that lay within today’s paper. It told the tale of two men who heard a call and who had the courage to answer. A tale of one who wrongly fought murder with murder, and another who humbly and quietly sacrificed his own life in an attempt to save others. With the editor’s help, the second man’s ultimate sacrifice would draw the attention of his community, and maybe even the world, to reexamine one of mankind’s most divisive issues…even if only for a moment.
The editor got up stiffly and put the rifle back in the metal cabinet. He locked it and then switched off the desk lamp before walking out of his office and into the night.