Melvin was looking at his phone as the two men got back in the Cherokee. “Looks like there’s a cockroach convention in the park. They’re tryin’ to play soccer on the baseball diamond. American kids won’t be able to use the field my tax dollars paid for.”

“I think kids are at school right now,” Del pointed out.

“Shut the fuck up, Del. No one asked you.” He looked over at Chet. “Ready to fight for truth, justice and the American way?”

Chet grinned. “Ready.”

And off they went.

2

Walter had cancelled his Wednesday morning Bible study class at the bank’s request, and was glad to have done so. He was alone in the empty church, and rather than attempt to explain the meaning of obvious parables to over-interested and under-informed parishioners like Norma Crenshaw, he was free to look up information about this weekend’s upcoming games and check out the spreads. FreshBets had also added a new feature to their site, a single-dollar game where you could wager on the outcome of an electronically flipped cartoon quarter. It was an addicting little diversion, one that he could easily spend an hour playing without losing too much money.

But when he turned on his computer and went to the site, a message appeared in the center of his screen: ACCESS DENIED. He signed out, shut down and tried again with the same result. He sat there, frowning, wondering what was wrong. He owed money, sure, but not much, and he was guaranteed to get it back over the next several days, so he couldn’t be locked out because of that. Had he broken some sort of rule? He had no idea. He half-expected the lights to flicker and Pickering to appear in his doorway, but when that didn’t happen, he thought that perhaps he should contact the bank to find out what was what.

He’d been given no email address or phone number for Pickering or the bank, so he attempted to Google it. Apparently, First People’s had no website. Not only that, but all references to it seemed to have been scrubbed. His search attempt got no hits, something that had never happened to him before, and the only note on the otherwise empty screen were the words “0 of 0 Search Results.”

He tried to go on FreshBets again and once more was denied access. Shutting off his computer, he decided to go to the bank and talk to Pickering directly. Sunday’s sermon was already written, and without today’s class, there wasn’t much to do…

And he really wanted to play that quarter-flip game.