My name is Jeremiah Dalton and I’m a private dick. At least I was before that night…

That night began like every other night, I was alone in my office reclining carelessly on the back legs of the chair. I had a whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The night was hot and rainy. I had the window about half-way open, but the ceiling fan did nothing except push the stale air around. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and whiskey. Smells I no longer even noticed, they had become my friends. My only friends.

There was a knock at my door, but who could it be at this hour? I saw the silhouette through the frosted window in the door. It was a dame! Just what I needed right now, dames are nothing but trouble. Most of the people that walked through that door were trouble, but dames? They are a special kind of trouble.

She opened the door just enough to slip into the room and I knew she was trouble, her face showed me she was a double-portion of trouble. She looked at me and said, “I need help, I’m in trou–” I interrupted her, “I knew it, I KNEW IT.”

“What did you say?” “Huh, what? Nothing never-mind, what can I do for you?”

She said, “I am desperate, I have nowhere else to turn. I am looking for a man named Jesus, but I don’t know where to find him.”

“Can you tell me more about this man?” I asked her. She told me that he wasn’t much to look at, that he hung around with drunks and other dregs of society, and that some called him a drunkard and a glutton. I knew just where to find guys like this–guys who have been broken by the world and cast away. The forgotten men. They line the gutters and the back alleys of the city street. This guy shouldn’t be too hard to find.

“I don’t work for free.”

She slid an envelope across the table and I picked it up and looked inside. “It’s empty,” I said. She said that if we found the man there would be a reward above all we could ever expect.

Now I was intrigued so I took the envelope, wrote IOU on it, had her sign it, and stuffed it into my pocket without taking the time to look at her name. This shouldn’t be too hard of a job, it would be worth the risk.

I started to reach into the desk draw for my revolver but she quickly told me I wouldn’t need it. Against my better judgment I closed the draw, took off my shoulder holster, tightened up my tie, and put on my sport coat. We headed out into the night on a search of Jesus.

We stepped outside and it didn’t take long to find the first man on the street. He was sitting on the steps in the doorway to my building with a brown bag in his hand. He was not the man we were looking for. We talked to several people who were sitting on the curb and a couple of people who seemed to be hiding in the alley. None of them seemed to know Jesus or where he was.

Next we went to the local pool hall and gambling houses, but again nobody seemed to know Jesus in those places either. So we hit the bricks again.

We pounded the pavement for what seemed like hours with no luck. There were some people who didn’t want to talk and there were some who wouldn’t stop talking, but none of them knew this Jesus we were looking for.

Eventually we stopped in front of a small church and I said to the woman, “we know that somebody like Jesus wouldn’t be in there. This place is for people who have it all together. No drunk is going to stumble through those doors, not unless somebody paid him.” No sooner had I finished speaking when the rain turned from a drizzle to a downpour. We ran inside the church for cover.

We sat down in the back pew and started to dry off. There was a man with long dark hair sitting a few pews in front of us. My first thought was that he came in here to get out of the rain, but then I realized he was dry.

He had been there before the rain started. His head was bent down as if he were praying. He put his left elbow onto the back of the pew and turned his bearded face toward us. I recognized the face but I couldn’t place it. I knew I had seen that face before.

That’s the funny thing about being a private dick. You see a lot of faces and you remember a lot of faces, but sometimes you can’t remember where.

The dame got up and went to him. The man slid over in the pew and she sat next to him. He put his arm around her and said, “Mary.”

Mary started, ” How did you kn–” He interrupted her, “daughter, I know all my sheep by name.”

What did that even mean? How did he know her name? I had been with her half of the night and I didn’t know it.

They began to talk, but I couldn’t hear much of the conversation. I heard her say something about her past and how she regretted the things she had done. I heard her say she was sorry, but I couldn’t understand why she would be baring her soul to this stranger. She could have told me all this and we would have saved a lot of time and effort.

She was running from something in her past, nothing new there. We are all running from something. My mind started to drift back to that time at–no, I didn’t want to think about that. But she was–stop it, focus. I pushed those thoughts out of my mind. I could use a slug of whiskey right now…

He put one hand on each of her cheeks and turned her face towards him. Still holding her head in his hands, and looking her straight in the eyes he said, “your sins are forgiven.” She began to sob uncontrollably and buried her face in his shoulder.

When she finally looked up, she turned to me and her face was different. She didn’t look like trouble, she looked like the weight of the world had been lifted from her shoulders. I felt kind of envious.

The man helped her stand up and they walked out together with his arms around her. She started the night walking down the street with me. She ended the night walking out of the church with him.

Suddenly I was all alone, so I got up from the pew and walked back to my office to have a drink. I had to think about everything I had just witnessed. And then I remembered that I didn’t get any reward. I should have known better!

I was replaying the night in my mind over and over, but I still couldn’t comprehend what had happened. How did we even end up in the church? Why did she bare her soul to him? How did it help her? I started to focus on the man in the pew and then it finally hit me. I knew where I saw the man before, it was a picture my grandmother had on her wall. She had found Jesus!

And then I remembered something my grandmother said many years ago: “Always be kind to strangers because many have entertained angels without knowing it.” I began to wonder if she was an angel, or could the angel have been me?

I looked out the window and realized it was morning. I heard the bells ringing and I knew it was Sunday morning. I reached for the bottle like I do every morning. I needed a slug to take the edge off. But there was no edge so I pushed the bottle away.

The sun was shining brightly in the sky as I put my coat back on and headed back down the street. I ended up at the church. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt different that morning and I was drawn to that old building.

I stopped on the steps to the church and looked at those who were entering. I saw faces I recognized from our search the night before. They were some of those people I said would never enter a church building, and I realized they were broken and in need of help also. I thought to myself that I was wrong when I said they didn’t know Jesus, it was me that didn’t understand. I was also broken.

I pulled the empty envelope out of my pocket, the one I wrote IOU on, and I saw Mary Dolen’s signature for the first time. Ms. Dolen found peace that night, and I wondered if I could also find it inside those four walls. I ripped the empty envelope in half and entered the church.

As I entered the church I thought to myself, maybe I’ll find that reward after all…

Coming June 20th: The Dalton Files: A Distant Memory