The God Patent

Chapter 1

The Constable set the arrest warrant on the counter between them.

Ryan, scrambling for something to say, scraped dirty oil from under his thumbnail with a screwdriver. Jail meant he had no other options. It was tempting to relax in this pool of defeat, but no, that was not the man he wanted to be – never again.

The Constable said, “Don’t make sense to me how jailing you helps anybody. If you can’t pay your child support changin’ oil, how you gonna do it from jail?”

“Officer, the judge won’t reduce my child support and there aren’t any jobs that pay anything close to what I was making when Linda threw me out.” His words flowed together. “I can’t come within a hundred feet of my son, I want my wife back, I want my family back, but I can’t even-”

The Constable, well over six feet tall, had to lean forward on the counter to make his eyes level with Ryan’s and, as he did, his eyes narrowed in recognition. “Ryan McNear. Didn’t you used to coach peanut league football?”

“Umm, yeah.” Struggling to recover some poise, Ryan forced himself to speak slowly. “I coached my son’s team two years ago, the Shorthorns.” He licked his lips into a smile. Framed by his chisel-cut jaw, and in the light of blue eyes and auburn wire-brush hair, his smile looked calm and warm and sometimes it was, but not now. Ryan’s wet-lipped grin was his response to stress. As a boy, he used that smile to soften arguments between his sisters; in school it broke up fights; in business it brought opposing sides together. It gave the appearance that he saw humor in the situation, that he couldn’t be rattled, and, in so doing, it disarmed conflict. Pretending to look down at the counter, he stole a glance at the nametag above the Constable’s badge. “Holcomb? Bill Holcomb?” And as he spoke the name he remembered. “Your son – Willie, right? Didn’t he get hurt in our first game?”

“Yes sir, he did.”

Ryan leaned back on his heels and set the screwdriver next to the cash register. Along with his smile, the movement gave the illusion of confidence, but the memory of Willie Holcomb screaming in pain felt like another count against him.

“After the cast came off, my boy wanted nothing to do with football,” Holcomb said. “Nothing I could say would get him back on the field – until you called. I don’t know what you said, but he’s turning into quite a linebacker.” He squinted at Ryan’s nametag. “Assistant Manager? I thought you were an engineer. What happened?”

Ryan shut the door to the garage, directed Holcomb to the waiting room, sat next to him and told the story. Not the complete story, that would have sent him straight to jail, but he couldn’t have described all his failures in ten minutes anyway. Holcomb nodded occasionally and barely blinked. Ryan finished with the words he’d said to a judge six months ago, they hadn’t helped then. “I made plenty of mistakes, but all I can do is keep trying to fix them.”

“And I’m here to arrest you.” Holcomb, with his elbows on his knees, rested his face in his hands and started speaking. He didn’t stop for fifteen minutes. He talked about what it takes to break a man. Maybe he’d seen it in his job, but it looked to Ryan as though he had walked close to the line himself. As he spoke, he looked out the window past the cars waiting to have their oil changed at the used car lots down the street and, by the time he focused on the tired cinder-block saloon next door, he was talking about his wife and children and how the smallest decisions can destroy the greatest dreams.

Finally, he looked at Ryan. “Sometimes it just don’t seem like justice is very just.” He stood, handed Ryan the arrest warrant and ran his hand along his belt, over his sidearm, past the radio module. “I have to cuff you,” he said, and stared deep into Ryan’s eyes.

Ryan’s smile disappeared.

“You see, I have to handcuff you,” Holcomb continued, “but danged if I didn’t leave my cuffs out in the cruiser. I’ll have to go back out and get them and, before I come back in, I think I’ll call my wife. What you’re going through scares hell out of me and I’m like to get a little distracted and want to hear my wife say she loves me.” He tipped his hat to Ryan, turned and headed out the door.

Chapter 2

Driving away from everything you love is hard. Driving away in a Ford Probe with over 200,000 miles on it is almost impossible...