Storm Front

frame revolver. One of the stoners said, “Holy shit,” and Jones sensed all three of them running away.
    The Turk said, calmly, “You will not shoot.”
    Jones said, “Well,” and looked down at the pistol, and then up at the Turk, and the Turk lifted a hand as if to say, “Wait,” but Jones shot him in the middle of the chest and he went down.
    And he didn’t stop. The other Turk half-turned and Jones shot him in the neck, the gunshots echoing like thunderclaps off the amphitheater-type hills to the side of the park. The bigger Turk rolled and climbed back to his feet to run, and Jones shot him in the back, then turned to the other and fired two shots at him, into the back and the back of his head, then fired another shot into the big Turk’s back.
    They were both half-running, half-stumbling away, and Jones lifted the stele and put it back in the bag. The stoners were halfway across the park, the two men far in the lead, the woman running frantically after them; and at the far end, parents were screaming for kids, and both parents and kids were running out of the park toward cars—balls, bats, and gloves forgotten.
    Jones felt a moment of pride. He’d given thousands of sermons in his life, and had never before gotten a response so universal and enthusiastic.
Everyone
was running.
    He had time for only that spark of pride. Then he took the bag and shambled back into the trees, and up the hill. He’d just gotten to his car when he heard the sirens, some way off, yet.
    By the time they arrived, he’d gone around three corners and was accelerating away.
    —
    W HEN V IRGIL AND Y AEL got to the park, eight patrolmen and four detectives were walking the area, with two crime-scene people crawling around the picnic table, and three highway patrolmen parked on the street watching. Part of the turnout was the result of children being nearby, and the school-shooting scares. The other part was sheer excitement: this just didn’t happen much in Mankato.
    The cops were basically looking for anything they could find, and had rounded up two stoners, a boy and a girl, and said that a third one had been with them, but he’d kept running and hadn’t yet been located.
    “I called you because of that Reverend Jones thing,” said the lead detective on the scene, whose name was Don Scott. “We think this was Jones. Big guy, black beard, wearing a black suit with a ministerial collar.”
    “Yeah, that’s him,” Virgil said. “You find anything that would point to him?”
    “Well, we’re doing the crime-scene things, because he apparently wounded the two guys he was talking to. We haven’t found them yet, but we will—the witnesses said they were shot bad. Head, stomach, back wounds. One guy, who seemed like he knew what he was talking about, said they drove off in a Mercedes-Benz SUV. We got all the hospitals looking out for them, and we’re looking for the car. We found a switchblade where the two unknowns were, so Jones may have been threatened. We’ll get at least one good print off the knife, because I could see it, just looking at it. And we’re doing the usual—footprints and so on, got some blood from the ones that got shot.”
    Virgil filled him in on what he’d found, and Scott said, “Well, if he’s dying, then he doesn’t have much to lose.”
    Yael said, “We have considered that, and you are correct. I think his behavior, from the time he stole the stele, is influenced by his illness. This is not an excuse for him, but a motive.”
    Virgil asked, “You mind if we talk to the kids?”
    “Go ahead. I think we wrung them out, though, and they don’t have much.”
    “Just want to hear it, myself.” Virgil ambled over to the two stoners, who were perched on a picnic table, introduced himself and Yael, and said, “Tell me what you saw.”
    They told the tale of the two men walking up to the reverend, about the stone coming out of the bowling bag, about some kind of dispute—they hadn’t been close enough to hear the words, but they could hear the tone of it. The discussion hadn’t turned into a screaming argument, but had been tense.
    “I’ll tell you what,” the boy said, “that sucker opened up with that pistol, the first thing I thought was, he was gonna hit some of those kids for sure. They were lucky he didn’t, too. They were right in the line of fire.”
    “That wasn’t the first thing you thought,” the girl said. She was way past a simple pout. “The first thing you