The Conspiracy Club

35

On the way to the car, Jeremy popped the orange candy in his mouth and ground it to sweet, citrus dust.

He opened the book while the Nova’s engine idled. The right side was Hebrew, the left English translation. During the brief time he’d been in the shop, the temperature had dropped, and the car had turned frigid. Still a good ways from winter, but his windshield was coated with a gossamer layer of rime. It could get like that because of the lake. Winds whipping across the water, churning up the cold.

His first year at City Central, a storm from the north had plunged the mercury from forty above to forty below in two hours, and the hospital’s auxiliary generators had threatened to shut down.

No deaths, the bottom-liners claimed, but Jeremy’d heard tales of respirators hesitating, operating lights switching off midincision.

He switched on the heater, reached to activate the wipers to clear the frost and thought better of it. Privacy was good.

Time to soak up some ethics from the Fathers. From Bernard Kaplan’s quotations and the Bartlett’s analogy, he’d expected a collection of homilies, and the pages he flipped on the way to Chapter Five seemed consistent with that.

But Chapter Five, paragraph 8 was different.

A litany of punishments wreaked upon the world for a host of transgressions.

Famine for failure to tithe, a plague of wild beasts for vain oaths, exile for idolatry.

Section e read:

The sword of war comes to the world

for the delay of justice.

Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno’s commentary backed that up with a citation from Leviticus: A sword avenging the vengeance of the covenant.

Someone out to set things in order.

A covenant- an agreement- to set things straight.

By clearing up unsolved murders?

Or committing new ones- a cleansing plague?