The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Read Free Page B

embarrassment to an otherwise fine family. This court exists to teach you and your kind a lesson. I’m going to use this sentencing today to send a message, a message to any deluded or misguided souls who might look at you as some kind of ‘Robin Hood hero,’ as you’ve been called in the press, and be tempted to copy your actions — a message that this nation and this society will no longer accept your polluting the veins of our young people, peddling your despicable, addictive filth. No more!
    “Based on the volume of toxic, narcotic LSD and mescaline you imported and manufactured and attempted to sell and distribute, and on your blatant refusal to show the slightest remorse or contrition forthe sheer scale of your demented and monstrous crimes, having seen you found guilty on one count for each of the estimated million doses of LSD and peyote cactus found in your possession, this court sentences you to serve three life sentences without parole, served consecutively, in a maximum security penitentiary reserved for our most dangerous offenders. And may God have mercy on your soul.”
    The gavel came down. The Annesley mother sobbed into her handkerchief. But the Annesley brothers did something else, something that a few of the more observant drug police couldn’t help but notice. Their smiles may have been tight-lipped and grim, but nonetheless they smiled. The bailiffs dragged Windsor Annesley away. He managed one last look at his wife, giving her a reassuring smile, and then at his brother Worthington. Perceptibly, both brothers nodded. As planned, then, war was declared. Windsor Annesley had just signaled his brother that the path of peace and conciliation had been tried, and failed. The party was now free to try it Worthy’s way.
    Outside, the crowd continued to chant, the volume growing as word began to filter out that Judge Crustio had delivered the maximum sentence, just as observers had expected. The pool reporters dashed from the room, looking for quiet corners from which to call in the story on their cell phones. Two bald-headed bailiffs in beige uniforms with gold braid and badges threw open the double doors at the rear of the adjoining courtroom where the defense witnesses — never allowed to testify — had been allowed to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit TV. Matthew and Emilio stood up and joined those who were shuffling in slow motion down the center aisle to leave.

C HAPTER T WO
    Outside, fully fifty uniformed cops, including several on horseback, kept a careful eye on the still noisy demonstrators. Despite the dapper, Kennedyesque good looks of the upper-crust Annesley brothers, the rank and file of the Church of Cthulhu were pretty much every mother’s nightmare: spiked day-glo hair, heavily tattooed, Dumbo earrings, black leather & chains. Though Windsor Annesley had worked during his term as president to craft a less threatening, more tweed and buttoned-down public image, the more radical elements of the Cthulhian Party were well-known — and widely reviled by the politicos and their lapdog press — as the No-Compromise Drug Lobby, their motto being “Forget Legalization; Hang the Drug Warriors.”
    The fact that the movement hosted a political party as well as a church was something the feds had gleefully used against them, even though the lawyers had carefully created two legally discrete entities, even though American preachers of countless denominations had been urging their parishioners to vote for “Social Justice” and the candidates of the Left for a hundred years — and even though political activism was the last legal avenue open to the Cthulhians once the courts moved to ban the church.
    The Cthulhian political platform was that anyone who had ever arrested a user of a sacramental drug — LSD, peyote, marijuana, any consciousness-altering substance, natural or synthetic — or prosecuted such a person, or sentenced such a person to prison, had thus violated that