About three weeks before the Sunday school picnic, several boys reported to Angela that Tass had asked them to take pictures inside Divine's Emporium. He would pay them to go into every room in the shop and take pictures of the contents. One of the boys asked what he wanted the pictures for, and Tass told him, with a straight face, that he was on a mission from God to rid our town of "evil influences." If the boys took "evil goods" from the shop when he asked, they would be paid even more. When one boy said that sounded like stealing, Tass told him it wasn't stealing if it was a mission from God.
The boys were
smart enough to know there wasn't enough money in the world to convince them to
steal from Angela. Taking something without paying for it was stealing, no
matter how much the slick-suited, big-voiced, crazy-eyed man twisted words
around. The boys went straight to Angela and told her. She called Gordon, who
confronted Tass.
I was so proud
of Gordon. Tass got all self-righteous and snarly. He spit when he got really
wound up, and declared that his mission from God overruled everything that mere
mortals might say. Gordon snapped out one of my favorite lines from Ladyhawke.
"Sir, I talk to God all the time, and He's never mentioned you."
Tass threatened the destruction of his soul. Gordon just smiled at him and told him his soul had already been given to Jesus, and Tass had no say in what happened to it. Then he took the body camera recording and gave it to Chief Tanner, putting the whole encounter on record.
From that day, Tass went on the offensive -- as if he wasn't offensive already? -- against Divine's Emporium and the Neighborlee Police.
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