Minor Prophets by Blair Hurley

Author:Blair Hurley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing

* * *

It’s two weeks before Christmas, and the Santa stockings are hanging in the window of the coffee shop. At the same table where they met several months before, Mike’s cop friend sits across from her, bulging under a massive winter parka.

“I’ve got some information for you,” he says. “But be warned. It’s a real mess.” He pulls out a manila envelope and taps out a sheaf of papers. “Like I thought, the sheriff’s department up there keeps shitty records. And the county coroner is just some asshole who is elected to the position, he doesn’t even have to have a medical license. A couple of federal agencies were in the middle of a massive investigation of the compound your father lived on when he died. But you knew all that already, didn’t you? There was some kind of a standoff when you were there?”

Nora nods.

“Well, the ATF—that’s the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—has been trying to improve their PR after Waco and Ruby Ridge. So they’ve had a ‘noninterventionist’ policy in place in recent years. Particularly if the group in question is white and not jihadists, if you catch my drift. There are white supremacist groups armed to the teeth all over this nation, I’ll tell you, and nobody is doing a thing about it.”

They were lucky, Nora thinks to herself. An accident of birth, citizenship, race, and religion let them do whatever they wanted to.

“So anyway. The reports are sketchy but there was some sort of armed standoff. Shots were fired. At the end of it, your father was dead. A bunch of people were arrested. They got charged with drug manufacturing and unlicensed firearms.” He shuffles his papers. “You can look through these.”

He hands Nora the papers, which she flips through impatiently. This face and that one, all familiar, still eliciting the same old fear in her.

“You knew about the drug dealing?” he asks.

“I figured.” She’d been stupid for so long about what the deacons were up to, but has smartened up since coming to Chicago, seeing what she has seen. It was just another of those things about the church that she was not permitted to know.

 “After your father’s death, it looks like the authorities decided to back off. Threat neutralized, you know. They put a lot of stock into taking down figureheads. They were probably patting themselves on the back.”

“So they didn’t investigate his death? Who shot him? Some cop?” Nora doesn’t realize she’s been tearing a paper napkin to shreds until the sweaty pieces fall into her lap. A string of bells tied to the front door keeps ringing every time someone comes in, making her jumpy. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” pipes through the ceiling speakers.

“Well, that’s the thing. It wasn’t them. His death was ruled a suicide.”

“What?”

“It was a shotgun blast, close range. The gun was registered to him. One of the few guns on the whole compound under his name, actually. He was found in the woods after the fracas.”

Nora struggles to speak, to block out of the ringing of the bells.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.