Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 10 (8 page)

“What do you want?” said Judy, coming to the doorway with her coat over her arm.

He picked up a six-foot aluminum pole. “LaRue gave me this to try. It’s called a take-down blowgun, and it’s supposed to be accurate up to sixty feet. He said he got himself an elevenpound turkey.”

“So?”

“So I was showing it to you. At halftime, I’m gonna go out back and see if it’s as powerful and accurate as LaRue sez. If it is, I’m gonna order one for myself and a shorter one for you.”

“What would I do with it? You know I don’t like to hunt.”

“When the time comes that we have to take to the woods, you may need it for self-defense.” Judy put on her coat. “Well, at least you can’t shoot yourself in the foot with it. I’ll be back at suppertime. Don’t call me over at Janine’s. We’re going to try to get the curtains done while the baby’s napping, and the phone always wakes him up.”

“Why would I want to call you?”

“To stop by the store or something. Anyway, don’t do it if you want supper on the table tonight. We’re determined to finish the curtains in one sitting.”

“Okay, okay,” he muttered, stroking the polished aluminum of the blowgun. The darts with their colorful plastic tips only cost about ten cents apiece. He might just forget about the game and find out if they were as lethal as LaRue said.

/\
/\
/\

“What’s up, Harve?” I asked, having made the tactical error of stopping by the PD for a magazine and feeling obliged to find out who’d left a message on the answering machine. Most of them tend to be from Ruby Bee and therefore on the monotonous side.

“Thought you was gonna have that accident report here yesterday,” he said.

“My dog ate it, but I’ll write up another one and bring it over tomorrow. It’s not exactly the stuff of which bestsellers are made.”

He rumbled unhappily. “That ain’t the real reason I called, Arly. I need you to do me a favor and go check out a burglary on a county road over past Drippersville. I’m real short-handed on account of all my boys calling in sick. Odd how something always goes around this time of year, ain’t it? If I were a suspicious sort and we both know I’m not-I’d almost wonder if deer season had anything to do with it.”

“So what’s the deal in Drippersville?”

“It’s the fourth damn burglary in the last month. The same MO, too. The houses are in remote areas and the owners are out of town. The perps break a window, collect everything of value, and waltz out the back door and load their vehicles. None of the stolen goods have turned up in the county.”

I made the face that Ruby Bee always complains will leave more lines than a road map. “Professionals?”

“Damn straight,” Harve said. “They pull out all the trays and serving pieces, then take the silver and leave the cheap stuff on the floor. They don’t take jars of pennies or paste jewelry. They didn’t bother with a computer that was a couple of years old.”

“And nobody’s seen them coming or going?”

“Like I said, the houses are in areas without neighbors. The owners are on vacation, and none of them sees anybody lurking nearby when they put suitcases in the trunk. At the third house, the guy’d rigged up a device to make the lights go on at dusk and off at midnight so it’d look like someone was there, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. In fact, the perps hung around long enough to cook a frozen pizza.”

I found a notepad and a pencil. “Okay, I’ll go out there and look around. Give me directions to the house.”

/\
/\
/\

Reed banged down the telephone receiver, then took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. “The bitch says she’s filing for a divorce first thing in the morning,” he told Barry. “She already talked to a lawyer, and he told her she can take half my paycheck for the next fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years! Her brother’s coming over toward the end of the week to get the rest of her crap.” He made a fist and hit the wall with such fury the plaster cracked. “Goddamn it to hell! I’m not putting up with this shit! I’ve got half a mind to drive over there and beat her until she gets down on her hands and knees and begs to come back.”

Barry quite agreed Reed had half a mind (and not a fraction more). “Then she’ll file charges like she did last time, and you’ll find yourself doing ninety days at the county jail.”

“At least she won’t get half of any paychecks,” Reed said, examining his knuckles for cuts.

Dylan Gilbert came out of the kitchen, a glass of milk in one hand and a sandwich in the other. “What’s going on?”

“Reed was talking to his wife,” said Barry. “I would have thought you could hear every word. Are you sure you used to be a college boy?”

“Phi Beta Kappa,” he said, then kicked an empty beer can off the couch and sat down. He was wearing jeans and a neatly pressed shirt, and his hair was still damp from the shower. “Sure, I heard, but he calls to yell at her at least three times a day. I was just wondering if there had been any new developments in the drama.”

“Hell, no.” Reed stomped into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of tequila and a smudged glass. “You know what they call a roomful of lawyers? A target. Maybe we can find out where they hold their annual convention and blow ‘em all skyhigh.”

Barry lifted his eyebrows. “An interesting idea, but a very imprudent one. Let’s save our energies and resources for a more significant project. Don’t you agree, Dylan?”

“I’ve never had any use for lawyers, especially the public defenders who want you to plead out so they won’t have to waste a day in court. However, I agree that we have better things to do than disrupt a bar association luncheon.” He took a bite of the sandwich and washed it down with milk, his eyes never leaving Barry’s face. “I’ve heard Reed’s life story, but I don’t know much about you.”

“And I don’t know anything about you,” Barry countered.

“There’s nothing to know. I grew up in Idaho. When my father lost his ranch to the bloodsuckers at the bank, we moved to a compound where he worked in the machine shop and my mother taught school. I split five years ago, did a couple of years of college, and ended up with the Denver brethren. Now I’m here until something better comes along.”

Barry sat back and gave him a bemused look. “Reed said you tried to send a bomb to a federal judge and brought the feds down on you. Did you put a return address on the package or what?”

“Get off it,” said Reed. “Nobody’s that stupid, fer chrissake.” He paused to down a shot of tequila. “Except for that bitch Bobbi Jo and her brother. They’ve probably been screwing each other since they were in grade school.”

Dylan showed small, even teeth. “It seems someone called the FBI and mentioned my name. I don’t know what else they had, but they had enough to get the warrant. I didn’t stick around to hear the details or to track down the squealer and have a talk with him. One of these days I will, though.”

Although Dylan’s voice had been unemotional to the point of blandness, Barry felt a twinge of apprehension. Dylan was dangerous, he decided. Reed was too, but in a blustery, see-itcoming sort of way; he was as subtle as a grizzly bear charging through a thicket. Dylan was more of a poisonous snake, silently gliding through the grass, its eyes slitted and its tongue flicking as it approached its prey.

Barry put on his cap and reached for his jacket. “Guess I’m going. I’ll see you Friday in Maggody.”

Reed ignored him. “Hey, Dylan, you ever rearmed a sixty-six-millimeter light antitank weapon?”

/\
/\
/\

In a much nicer house in a neighborhood populated by white Anglo-Saxon Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and a smattering of Episcopalians, Sterling Pitts sat in his study. The proposal for the group health plan should have occupied his attention, but he was seated in a leather chair, staring sightlessly at the photograph of himself holding up a large, dead fish. An informant in their midst? Members came and went, either voluntarily like Carter Lee or involuntarily like Bradley and Mo. But he, Reed, Barry, and Jake had been involved since they met at a week-long retreat in Missouri. Reed and Barry were fresh out of the army; Reed, in particular particular, was having a hard time adjusting to civilian life and was ripe to be recruited. Barry had proved himself by setting a fire in a warehouse in Little Rock. Jake was taciturn, but his eyes blazed and he had plenty to say whenever the talk turned to the mongrelization of the white race by civil rights legislation.

Sterling had been unable to recontact his counterpart in Colorado. He’d tried e-mail, but the address had been switched. The only telephone number he knew had been disconnected, which was not surprising since many of those in the movement often moved to ensure their privacy.

He took a pen and wrote down the code names: Silver Fox, Red Rooster, Apocalypse, Blitzer. It was unthinkable that any one of them would betray the cell. Judy Milliford seldom evinced enthusiasm, but she was too mousy to envision in such a role. Kayleen was deeply dedicated; he could hear it in her voice whenever they spoke about the insidiousness of the federal government and the threat posed by the international conspiracy. If she’d not been a woman, she would have easily replaced Mo in the hierarchy.

But Dylan Gilbert swore he’d received the tip from a double agent in Oklahoma. He’d been given no hint about the duration of this despicable infiltration. Sterling looked back down at the code names, imagining faces and recalling fragments of conversation. Had anyone inadvertently slipped up? Had anyone missed a meeting and been unable to supply a satisfactory excuse?

Most important, was there a way to force the informant to expose himself? If so, justice would be served coldly and swiftly. There was no place for mercy if the movement was ultimately to succeed.

On Sunday afternoon I’d obliged Harve and gone to the scene of the burglary in Drippersville, but it had been a bigger waste of time than trying to teach Diesel to read (Buchanons don’t get hooked on phonics). The breakin had been discovered by a neighbor who’d stopped by to put bags over the rose bushes to protect them from frost; the owners were on their way back from Florida to make an inventory of the stolen items. A deputy showed up to take fingerprints, but none of the prints from the earlier burglaries had set off bells and whistles in the FBI files. My report had been written Monday morning in less than ten minutes (I left out my poetic musings about the sense of intrusion that lingered like a bad cold).

By Wednesday morning, I’d written a few more reports, most involving trespassing on private land and one in which a 1982 Pontiac Grand Am was mistaken for Bambi’s dear old dad. If Raz had run into any wayward hunters, he’d buried the bodies in shallow graves and kept it to himself. Which was fine with me.

I’d just refilled my coffee mug and settled down to do some serious whittling when Dahlia stormed into the PD.

“You got to look at this,” she said, thrusting a much-creased pamphlet at me. “Kevvie tried to hide it underneath his boxers, but I found it anyway. I wanna know what it means.”

“How are you feeling?”

She sat down. “I reckon I’m doing fine, excepting I can’t sleep for more than fifteen minutes without having to go to the pottie. My finger’s a dadburned pincushion. Kevvie’s scared to so much as touch me ‘cause he thinks it’s not fittin’ in front of the baby. I ain’t had a Nehi for seven and a half months.”

“It’ll all be over soon,” I said soothingly, “and then you can have a Nehi whenever you want. Have you and Kevin chosen names for the baby?”

“We’re gonna name him Kevin Fitzgerald Buchanon Junior. I think it’s kinda long for such a little thing, but Kevvie won’t have it any other way. Ma suggested we call him Jerry so’s not to confuse the two. I don’t know where she came up with that, though.”

“Then you’re sure it’s a boy?” I asked. “Did you have some sort of test at the clinic?”

“I came here ‘cause I want you to read that thing and tell me what’s going on. There’s something about it that stinks like a backed-up septic tank, but I can’t rightly put my finger on it.”

I picked up the pamphlet. ‘Our nation is in terrible danger,’ ” I read aloud. ‘No longer can we trust our elected officials to run the country according to the premises laid out by the dedicated and selfless patriots who formulated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Many of these patriots lost their families, properties, and lives to make this republic free from oppressive governments and dictatorships, a republic with freedom and liberty, a republic guided by the principles of the one true God.’ ” Frowning, I turned to the second page.

“So whatall does that mean?” demanded Dahlia. “Is it true that Congress and all the big corporations can do whatever they please without paying any attention to the needs of the ordinary folks like Kevvie and me? That the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ we always recited in school should have been called ‘The Pledge of Alliance with the International Conspiracy’?” She put her hand on her pendulous bosom in case I couldn’t follow her. “You know, ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag-‘ “

“I know,” I interrupted, continuing to skim the blurry purple words that had been reproduced on an old-fashioned mimeograph machine. When I was finished, I put it aside and said, “This is crazy stuff, Dahlia. Do you have any idea where Kevin got hold of it?”

“Most likely at the SuperSaver. He don’t go anyplace else except there, the Assembly Hall, and his ma and pa’s house. He promised to stay real close in case the baby comes early and I got to hightail it to the hospital.”

“Was this all you found in the drawer?”

“Oh, I forgot.” She dug into a pocket hidden in the folds of her tent dress and pulled out a crumpled slip of paper. “This sez there’s a meeting for concerned citizens on Saturday morning at ten o’clock. They can learn how to protect themselves and their families from”-her brow crinkled with exertion as she sounded out the words-“oppression and submission to a foreign army.” I winced. “Does it mention where this is going to be held?”

“It sez to go one mile east on County 102 and look for signs. Shouldn’t you be doin’ something to stop the country from being invaded by foreigners that want to take away our babies and put us in concentration camps? I don’t want someone to snatch my baby right out of my arms, Arly.”