Jeffrey already knew this. ‘And?’
Nick added more sugar to his coffee as he spoke. ‘They say they’ve got skin privilege, that being white means they’re better than everybody else, that they should be in control. They view it as a special ordination from God.’ The waitress walked by and Nick gave her another wink. He turned back to Jeffrey, asking, ‘You like your history, right?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Then let me tell you this story,’ Nick began. ‘The Skin Brothers got started by a World War II vet, an Army National Guardsman from out West by the name of Jeremiah Todd. Claimed he was with one of the infantry divisions that helped liberate Dachau.’ Nick tried the coffee again, then started back with the cream. Jeffrey suppressed the urge to throw the cup across the room as Nick continued, ‘Todd gets back from Germany and starts telling everybody it’s all been overblown, that the press is just making a big deal out of nothing. He was there and saw it with his own eyes, and it was just a bunch of Jews stirring up trouble, trying to bring down America.’
Jeffrey felt disgust welling up into his gut. ‘He was a Holocaust denier?’
‘Right.’
‘Where does the red swastika come in?’
‘Before Hitler came along – no shitting you -Todd’s National Guard unit had a red swastika on their badges.’
Jeffrey provided, ‘It was a Native American symbol for luck.’
‘Yep,’ Nick confirmed. ‘A lot of the southern and western divisions had Native American call signs. Of course, come the war, the Guard made them change it, but it was on Jeremiah Todd’s division uniforms up until the early thirties. You know how those military boys are. They don’t let go of tradition without a fight.’
‘How did Todd end up in prison?’
‘Liquor store, convenience store. Some kind of holdup with a gun or a knife or whatever. I don’t know the details. Suffice it to say, the fucker ended up inside the same stupid way they all do.’
‘I take it he’s dead?’
‘Shanked in the food hall over an extra bread roll about twenty years ago,’ Nick supplied. ‘But obviously there were some believers left over. They passed on the gospel, all the way up to New Hampshire, it seems. Prisons are seeing a big-time resurgence of these gangs, especially the white pride assholes. First thing you have to do when you get inside is declare yourself, pick a side for protection so you don’t get shanked by the brothers or raped by the Aryans or beat by the brownskins. And it don’t stop at the prison gate. Some gangbanger fucks them up on the inside, they reach out to the guy’s family on the outside. Like I said, most of ‘em ain’t got nothing to lose. What’s the worst that can happen? They get another life sentence tacked on to the six they already have? The SuperMax only gives them an hour outside a week instead of two? They know they’re never getting out, so what does it matter?’
‘And they’re running drugs on the outside, too?’
‘Inside and out,’ Nick said. ‘Somebody’s gotta pay for Armageddon, and these guys sure as shit ain’t gonna make the money digging ditches.’ He sipped some more coffee before asking, ‘How does Lena tie into this?’
‘I have no idea,’ Jeffrey admitted.
‘I would’ve like to’ve seen Jake’s face when he realized she’d run out on him.’
‘He wasn’t smiling, I can tell you that.’
‘You figure out why she legged it?’
Jeffrey shook his head. ‘You think after all these years I’ve figured out why the hell she does anything?’
Nick gave an appreciative chuckle. ‘She always was a pistol.’
Jeffrey wasn’t up for discussing Lena ‘s finer qualities. ‘How come you know so much about this group?’
‘Remember Amanda Wagner?’
Jeffrey had met the hostage negotiator a few years ago when the GBI had been called into Grant to handle a situation gone bad. He asked, ‘What does this have to do with tactical?’
‘Nothing. Wagner’s got some new team she’s put together to deal with violent crimes that cross county lines – some kind of quick response unit that’s supposed to cut through the red tape, ha-ha-ha. These guys, the Skin Brothers, they’ve been causing a lot of problems up north; Cherokee, Rabun, Whitfield. She had all the field reps come into Atlanta a few months ago to give us the lowdown, let us know the signs to watch out for.’
‘What are the signs?’
‘The red swastika, mostly. They run meth out of these small towns like it’s freaking IBM, straight up the drug corridor through Atlanta, New York, New England, and on up to Canada. We don’t even know how many people are in the organization. Estimates run from a couple hundred to a couple thousand.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘It’s the same old story: they go after the teenage boys who feel misunderstood and isolated and they give them a family to be a part of, a belief system to explain why the fact that they’re white hasn’t saved them from being poor. They pump them full of hate and put a gun in their hand. You’ve seen it for yourself, Chief. These kids go in and out of jail, in and out, until they get popped for something major, and then the next thing you know, they’re king of cell block nine, raking in money on the inside, giving orders to their soldiers on the outside. Hell, look at Carl Fitzpatrick. You think he’d have this much power on the outside?’
Jeffrey suddenly felt an overwhelming tiredness. He wasn’t even certain this was connected to Lena. All that he had was a gut feeling, and right now, his gut was telling him that no good would come of getting involved with this group. ‘Are you going to tell Amanda they’re operating in Elawah now?’
‘Hell, she’s the one who told me,’ he answered. ‘Thing is, you know as well as I do that the GBI can’t come onto an investigation until the locals directly ask for help.’
Jeffrey knew Nick was telling the truth, just like he knew the GBI sometimes made sure it was well-prepared in anticipation of a town asking them to step in. ‘Have you gathered any information on the group operating out of Elawah?’
‘Not much,’ Nick admitted. ‘Seems to be a tight structure. Some of these gangs, you know exactly who’s running the show because the bastard in charge wants you to know. They don’t become gangsters so they can hide behind their mama’s skirts. They wanna be out in the open, playing the big man, seeing the fear in people’s eyes when they drive down the street.’
‘But not in Elawah?’
‘Not in Elawah, and not with the Brotherhood,’ Nick confirmed. ‘How the Fitzpatricks work is, they get a handful of key people in town and if there’s a problem, they send in out-of-state help to take care of it. That way, nobody gets their hands dirty and nobody knows who to rat on if they get caught. They’re real serious about this Armageddon shit. Jesus is gonna come and wipe out darkie and Carl and Jerry Fitzpatrick are gonna inherit the earth.’
Jeffrey felt his uneasiness grow. It was always the true believers who felt they had nothing to lose. Christ, what had Lena gotten herself mixed up in?
Nick told him, ‘There’s a couple or three henchmen in Elawah doing the dirty work. Don’t ask me their names because I’ve got no idea. We’ve kind of poked around, but everything ran cold. Whoever’s running them is keeping himself to himself. Playing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. That’s how the organization works. It’s not about flash or showing your piece or banging the hos, it’s about money and control.’
Jeffrey sat back in the booth, watching Nick add more sugar to his coffee. ‘What about the sheriff?’
‘Valentine?’ Nick shook his head. ‘No way Jake’s running this. It’s too sophisticated. Somebody with a lot of patience and a lot of control is pulling the strings.’
He meant someone older, more mature. ‘Cook?’
‘I’d buy Cook taking some cash to look the other way, but being a part of it?’ Nick shook his head again. ‘Might be, but I’d be surprised.’
‘Pfeiffer, then? Maybe he got greedy and that’s why they threw the firebomb?’
‘That’d make sense if there’d been a vacuum. You know how it is – take out the guy and all the cockroaches scramble to take his place. There wasn’t a scramble. Matter of fact, you trace back the purity levels and they actually spiked after Pfeiffer left.’
Jeffrey knew that drug agencies tracked their effectiveness through the purity of the drugs on the street. The weaker the mixture, the better they were doing at shutting down the supply line. The higher the concentration, the more likely it was that the bad guys were winning the game.
Jeffrey asked, ‘How much money do you think’s involved here?’
‘Just in Elawah?’
Jeffrey nodded.
‘Shit, hoss, more money than you or me’s ever gonna see in our lives unless it’s in the evidence lockup. They just did that bust up in Atlanta, right? Caught two guys driving a U-Haul packed to the rafters with crystal meth. Paper says the street value’s upwards of three hundred million.’
Jeffrey could not even fathom that kind of money. ‘The sheriff before – Pfeiffer. Why didn’t he call in the GBI?’
‘You’ll have to ask him yourself.’ Nick reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of damp notebook paper. ‘When you told me you were in Reece, I assumed you might have some questions I couldn’t answer. Sorry it got wet,’ he apologized, unfolding the page. ‘Old guy lives a far piece out, so you’re gonna need a good map. I’ll let you borrow mine if you promise to get it back to me.’
Jeffrey scanned the address, noted that the town was at least four hours away from Reece. ‘He doesn’t have a phone?’
‘He’s so far off the grid I’d be surprised if he’s got electricity.’
Jeffrey looked again at the piece of paper Nick was offering him. Elawah wasn’t his county. These weren’t his people. Jake Valentine hadn’t said word one about needing any help, and even if the man had, it wasn’t Jeffrey’s job to bail him out. He was here to help Lena, not take on a bunch of skinheads. The problem was, he didn’t have much else to go on. Short of following up on Sara’s idea and going to the county courthouse to look up the property deed, there was nothing else Jeffrey could think to do.
Sara. He couldn’t leave her alone in the motel room while he drove to within spitting distance of the Florida border. Of course, she might make the trip look a little less official. Nick mentioned that Pfeiffer had a wife. Sara could help get the woman out of the way while Jeffrey asked the man some hard questions.
Nick was still holding out the paper. He asked, ‘What’s it gonna be, hoss?’
Jeffrey hesitated again, thinking about the terror in Lena ‘s voice as she’d told Sara to get out of town. He wasn’t fooling anyone, especially himself. ‘I’m going to need to borrow your map.’
SEVEN
The Home Sweet Home motel on the outskirts of Reece had been Lena ‘s only option the night before. The two-story cinder block building looked like a slasher movie set out of the sixties. Even as a kid, she’d thought of it as the Whore Hotel, the kind of place where people who didn’t want to get to know each other too well met to fuck. At the age of sixteen, Lena had pretended to lose her virginity here. The guy, Ben Carver, was thirty-two, which was about the only thing she’d found attractive about him. He was dull and stupid to the point of being possibly retarded, and she’d been on the verge of breaking up with him until Hank had found out they were seeing each other. Hank forbade her to see Ben again, and the next night, Lena had found herself flat on her back at the Whore Hotel.
She wouldn’t say it was the most boring three minutes of her life, but it came close. It was safe to say that when Ben didn’t call her the next day, she was far from heartbroken. Lena had been too terrified to think about anything but her fear of being pregnant. Ben had said he would use a condom, but she had been too embarrassed to check. Lena had been completely powerless when it came to protecting herself. The only pharmacist in town refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. As far as she knew, the pharmacy was still owned by the same man today. She bet the bastard had no problem selling Viagra to unmarried men at ten bucks a pop.
Not that birth control pills were a hundred percent effective. There was always that less than one percent chance, that one time when the pill failed and the condom broke, and then before you knew it, you were sitting on a hard plastic chair at a clinic in Atlanta, waiting for your name to be called.
Lena could still remember everything about that day – the texture of the chairs, the posters hanging on the walls. Hank had waited outside, mumbling to himself, pacing the parking lot. He hadn’t agreed with Lena ‘s decision, but in his fucked-up Hank way, he had supported her through the whole thing. ‘I’m not in any position to cast judgment,’ he’d told her. ‘We all make mistakes.’
Was it a mistake, though? Most everybody was quick to say that abortion was okay in cases of rape, as if the fact that the woman didn’t enjoy the sex negated any squeamishness they might have about the procedure. Lena ‘s relationship with Ethan was a lot of things: tumultuous, violent, brutal… but then sometimes it could be tender, loving, almost affectionate. The truth was that most of the time, she had willingly had sex with him. Most of the time, she had put her hands on his body, welcomed him into her bed. Could she trace back the conception of their mistake to a specific night, a specific time, and say whether or not it had been consensual or the other kind? Could she separate what it felt like to be beaten by him from the way it felt to be loved by him?
Could she really say that their baby had been a mistake?
Lena sat up in bed, not wanting to think about it anymore.
She made her way to the sink area and took her toothbrush out of her bag; she had not wanted to leave it by the sink last night. God only knew what people got up to on the cracked, plastic basin. The room was even more disgusting than she remembered; the carpet cupped the soles of her shoes as she walked across it and the sheets on the bed were so nasty that she had slept in her clothes. She had basically lay there all night, falling in and out of sleep, startling at any noise, afraid that the creepy night manager would use his passkey and try to catch her off guard. This was just the kind of place where that sort of thing happened.
She had slept with her gun by her hand.