Gary knocked on the glass door of my bus a second time, still smiling, and I did not open it. I am Roy Pettis, sixty four years old, a charter driver for seventeen years, and I sat in the driver seat of a forty seven passenger coach in the parking lot of a Casey store outside Ozark with Mrs. Opal Lindquist crouched behind me, and the rattle of a pill bottle in the pocket of the windbreaker of Gary. “Driver,” he said, through the glass, pleasantly, “I just need my jacket.” He was wearing his jacket. I looked him in the eye and shook my head.
With my right hand I dialed 911 on the telephone on my belt, and with my left I kept the door lever locked. The dispatcher in Christian County heard me out in a minute and said that a deputy was eleven minutes away. Eleven minutes is a long time to hold a door. I counted them on the clock of the dashboard, with the engine idling and the air conditioning humming, and I thought of every trip I had ever taken with those forty two passengers, every hymn, every bag of butterscotch, every birthday cake passed down the aisle. The smile of Gary began to slip. He stopped knocking and stepped back and looked toward the store, where forty church ladies were browsing the aisles for peppermints and postcards, unaware of what stood in the lot.
In the mirror, Mrs. Lindquist sat on the floor of the aisle in her good purple coat, holding her phone in both hands. She was eighty two years old and as calm as a clock. “Mr. Pettis,” she said, quietly, “I would like to say something before I forget. Brent is the son of my sister, and I have loved him since he was in diapers. I do not want to believe this. But I have read it with my own eyes.” She looked at the phone, and then at me. “Thank you for not opening the door.”
A pill bottle rattling at a bus door gave one charter driver eleven minutes to keep a church group safe outside Ozark.
I gave my terms to Gary through the narrow gap at the top of the window, because a driver learns to talk to angry men through narrow gaps. “Sir, the deputies are coming. You can wait for them here, and tell your story to the man in uniform. Or you can walk away, and I will give them your description and the plate of the car that dropped you at the church. But you are not getting back on this bus, and the lady is not getting off it. Those are my terms. I am not going to change them.”
The face of Gary went dark. He stood still for a moment, calculating. Then, as I had feared he might, he gave up on the door and ran toward the side of the bus where the stairs of the Casey store came down. In the doorway of the store, the ladies had begun to come out in twos, with their paper bags, and Mrs. Lindquist, hearing the shouting, climbed to her feet and opened the window of the bus a few inches to see. In a flash, Gary reached up and snatched the telephone from her hand.
He ran. He sprinted across the asphalt of the Casey lot, clutching the phone, past the gas pumps, with the windbreaker flapping, toward the road where a white car was waiting. He had gone about forty yards when the clerk of the store, a big young man named Tyler in a red apron, saw what was happening and stepped from behind the counter and out the door with a broom. And then the ladies of First Baptist, forty strong, with their purses on their arms and their sensible shoes, spread out across the lot without a word and made a line.
Gary skidded to a stop. The ladies did not move. Mrs. Hollister, who is eighty seven and has never missed a Sunday service, lifted her purse in both hands, like a club, and the whole line took one step forward as if they had rehearsed it for years in the church choir. “Young man,” she said sweetly, “you will give that back.” Gary looked at forty gray heads and forty determined pairs of eyes. He opened his hand. The telephone dropped onto the asphalt. Tyler the clerk set the broom across his shoulders, and the line of ladies closed around him, and in the distance, at last, I heard the sirens.
The money consequences were settled with the law. The pills in the pocket of Gary were identified by the state lab as a lookalike, swapped for the heart medicine of Mrs. Lindquist, and strong enough to stop her heart in an hour. Gary agreed to testify, and Brent was arrested at his house in Joplin. The car dealerships, worth two million, four hundred thousand dollars along with the estate, were placed in a trust that Mrs. Lindquist controls, with the church as a witness.
In the name of her husband Wesley, who passed in 2019, Mrs. Lindquist started the Wesley Lindquist Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for senior safety training, legal help and transportation for older adults in church groups, in Greene, Taney and Stone counties. In the first year we trained nine hundred seniors to spot pressure and fraud and provided rides for three hundred more. One was a widower from Branson who had been wiring money to a stranger on the telephone for eight months.
The following October, the First Baptist senior group went to Branson again, forty two passengers, two shows and a buffet. I drove, and in seat 14 sat Mrs. Lindquist, with a thermos of coffee and a new telephone. Halfway down the highway, she tapped my shoulder. “Roy,” she said, “would you stop at the Casey in Ozark? For the ladies room.” I laughed out loud. I pulled the bus into the lot and set the brake, and the autumn sun came down gold across the pumps, and forty church ladies stood and cheered.
