One Chance: A Thrilling Christian Fiction Mystery Romance

by Daniel Patterson

www.facebook.com/DanielPattersonAuthor

A powerful romance suspense thriller about family, friendship, love, honor, and courage.

CHAPTER 1

Deputy Penelope Chance leaned back in her chair, and pulled her long, honey blonde hair into a high ponytail. She had just finished the paperwork for the vandalism case at the Jewish deli. Two young men had terrorized the owners three nights in a row by painting swastikas on the front windows. Not the type of crime their little community saw a lot of.

It hadn't taken her long to figure it out because the two kids were the only neo-Nazi types among the almost four thousand people living in Franklin, Florida. Thought they were real toughs doing their part for the pure race. She shook her head. Judge Dirksen would hear their case on Monday and Penelope was confident the two misguided young men would serve a month or two in the town jail, do some community service, and hopefully learn their lesson.

Dear Lord
, she prayed,
thank You for allowing me to help these good people and bring Your justice to my community. Help me be content with my job and my life. Amen.

The truth was, most of her cases were like this one. Little stuff. Nothing big ever happened here. And frankly, in spite of her prayers to God, she sometimes wished something bigger would cross her desk. There were deaths from accidents, sure, but anything like an outright murder case? Nope. Well, not in the last twenty-three years. Not since then.

She pushed that memory back down as deep as she could, because it hurt too much.

Penelope turned her attention to her current pending case. Mrs. Briggs' unlocked car had been stolen in the early hours that morning, and she was distraught. When Penelope had spoken to Mrs. Briggs earlier she had been nearly in tears wondering how she was going to get to the grocery store or to church on Sunday. Penelope hadn't been unable to find any witnesses because of the time the theft happened, but she assured Mrs. Briggs that as soon as the car was found she'd get some answers for her.

Then she had spent most of the morning driving around town, looking for the cherry red 2005 Buick LeSabre, but it was nowhere to be found. Nowhere within her jurisdiction, anyway. With no choice left, she had called the Florida Highway Patrol and issued a BOLO for the car.

At that moment, that was her biggest case, but she couldn't help wishing again that she would get something a little bigger. Something to get her blood pumping and give her brain a good workout.

Just then the phone rang. Penelope answered it while shuffling paperwork around. "Franklin Sheriff's Office. This is Deputy Chance."

"Hello ma'am," the man said, "I need to report a stolen car."

Another one?
Penelope thought. "Okay," she said. "Let's start with your name and a description of the car, okay?"

"My name is Kyle Fredericks," the caller said. "My car is a burgundy 2010 Buick Regal."

Another Buick. Another red Buick.
Penelope noted the similarity on the notepad as she jotted down Kyle Fredericks' information.

She asked for the address.

Mister Fredericks was at home on East River Street. Penelope told the man she would be there in a few minutes to start an investigation and write up a report. She wrote down the time of the call.
Seven thirty in the evening.

Technically, her shift had ended a half hour ago. But the Franklin Sheriff's Office had only a few officers, and if she didn't stay to do this complaint she'd have to make the guy wait for the Florida Highway Patrol to have a free unit. She didn't like making the people in her community wait. And she didn't mind working over a little. Her boyfriend was at work himself, after all.

No. Fiance, not boyfriend, she corrected herself with a lopsided smile. She was still getting used to it.

As she left the Sheriff's Office building and headed to her cruiser, Penelope had a feeling this evening wasn't going to come out the way she expected. The sense that a change was just around the corner was almost a tangible thing.

There were times when she wished her gut feelings weren't quite so sharp. This was one of them.

*

Mister Fredericks was waiting on his porch and walked across the neatly manicured front yard toward Penelope as soon as she stepped out of her cruiser. Fredericks was an older man with graying hair getting thinner on top. The Florida sun had baked the man's skin to a deep brown, and his teeth showed whiter for it as he smiled at Penelope.

As she strode up the lawn to greet the man, Penelope noticed the lack of broken glass in the driveway where Fredericks had said the car had been taken. So, the car was either unlocked or whoever stole it had been able to bypass the lock somehow.

"Mister Fredericks? I'm Deputy Chance," she said, offering her hand. "When did you notice your car was missing?"

The man shook Penelope's hand and replied, "Just about a minute before I called you. My wife and I were planning to see a movie in Gainesville and when we came out to get in the car, it was gone."

"Car unlocked?"

"Yes ma'am, it was."

"Did you go near the driveway at all?" Penelope asked, taking out her little pad and a pen.

"No ma'am, I didn't," Fredericks answered. "As soon as I saw the car was gone, I went back inside and called the Sheriff's Office."

"Okay. When did you last see your car here?" Penelope asked.

The man thought for a moment, and then said, "Must have been about six when I got home from work tonight. The wife and I had dinner and afterwards we decided to go to a movie. But when it came time to leave we had no car."

After jotting down a few notes and facts, Penelope asked, "Did you hear your car's engine start up? Another vehicle? Anything like that?"

Mrs. Fredericks, shorter than her husband and a little rounder but just as deeply tanned, had walked out to them as they talked. Mister Fredericks looked at his wife. "I didn't. Did you, honey?" he asked her.

She shook her head as Penelope wrote some more. "Is it possible," Penelope asked, "that one of your neighbors may have seen or heard something?"

Mrs. Fredericks said, "Mrs. Fitch across the street might have seen something. She sees almost everything that goes on in the neighborhood."

"That so?"

The woman nodded and whispered in a conspiratorial tone. "She's retired and has nothing else to do, you know."

Penelope nodded. "Okay, I'll go talk to her and see if she can help. Let me look over your driveway first."

She looked up and down the paved driveway, and along the sides in the grass. Nothing. There might have been an impression where the grass was bent over. If it was, it was too obscured to be of any use.

She smiled at the Fredericks, thanked them and turned around to walk across the street.

Mrs. Fitch had indeed seen what happened. A big white van pulled up in front of the house about five minutes before the couple came out, she told Penelope, sitting in a rocking chair on her front stoop and rocking in the evening warmth. A young man, she guessed him to be about nineteen or twenty years old, got out and went up to the Fredericks' car. In less than a minute, he had the car started and was gone.

"Can you give me a description of this young man?" Penelope asked her.

She nodded, her dark skinned face serious. "Sure I can, Deputy. The young man was just about six feet tall. He was, like, very thin with dark hair. Didn't get a good look at his face, but he looked to be a white boy with maybe some Hispanic parentage. Maybe from his momma."

Penelope wrote down everything she said in her little notepad. "Did you happen to call anyone to report this, Mrs. Fitch?"

"Well, 'course I did. Started to, anyways. But when the Fredericks done come out I hung up. No sense in both of us calling you, right?"

Then she told Penelope something that made her wonder if Mrs. Fitch was in complete control of her mental faculties. The reason she didn't get a good look at his face was because she couldn't stop looking at his chest.

"Why is that?" Penelope asked, her pen pausing.

"Well, it was the strangest thing," Mrs. Fitch said. "He was wearing a woman's brassiere outside of his t-shirt and it looked like he had stuffed it up with something. It musta done stood out nearly a foot in front of him."

Penelope looked at her questioningly.

Mrs. Fitch pursed her thick lips. "I know what you must be thinking, Deputy Chance," she said. "But I'm telling you what I done saw. I ain't lost my mind. I know what I saw."

"Oh, I'm not doubting your word, ma'am," she said. "But you have to admit it just seems very odd."

"That's what I thought, too," she replied, her hands fidgeting in her lap. "But that's what I done saw."

She thanked Mrs. Fitch for taking the time to speak with her, went back to her cruiser and headed back toward Main Street and the Sheriff's Office. She hadn't gone more than a block when she received a radio call from Florida Highway Patrol's dispatch to head over to the town clinic and interview the victim of an attempted murder.

Penelope asked them to repeat it before she believed it.

Finally, a challenging case. She was anxious to get started on it. Until she heard who the victim and prime suspect were.

CHAPTER 2

The Last Chance Tavern was just that for Doug Foster. The last opportunity to get a drink at the end of his day. It was at the east end of Main Street, just before he had to make a right turn onto the county road that would take him to the other end of town and home. He could never resist the urge to stop in for that one more beer, even though he knew it would more likely be four or five. Sometimes he lost count of how many he had. Tonight would be one of those times. Come the wee hours of the morning, his pickup would be the only vehicle left in the parking lot.

He always stopped in here before he began the long three mile drive home. Most people would have enjoyed the scenery on this route. Plenty of trees, with a field or two here and there. But Doug hated it. The sheer abundance of flora and fauna never failed to bore him near to death. And there was the empty lot across the T intersection from the Last Chance Tavern. The lot where a house used to stand. The memory it sparked was painful.

Most of his memories were painful these days.

His was the only house on South Riverside Avenue, all the way down at the very end. It was the first street off the County road south of the Franklin River, which was really nothing more than a sixty-five foot wide creek. No other streets crossed or connected to South Riverside and the town, as small as it was, never had the money to build another bridge. They felt that if only one person, him, would be using it regularly, well it just wasn't a major concern. That's why Doug was forced to circle all the way around the edge of town to get home. And his route took him past the Last Chance.

In reality, the drive didn't take long, it just seemed that way because he disliked it so much. What Doug hated most about it was that he had no choice in the matter. He should have known better than to buy that house, but it was the one his now ex-wife had wanted. Three years later she had divorced him, taken half his money, packed up their two year old son from daycare and run off with another man. Two years gone and he hadn't seen her since. Come to think of it, he had begun stopping into the Last Chance Tavern on a regular basis shortly after she had left.