“Is he capable of carrying out this assignment?”
“If anyone is.”
Kitteredge lapsed into silence.
When he started to speak, he put the tips of his fingers together in front of his lips in an unconsciously prayerful gesture. Ed knew that he had made his decision.
“Yes … ahhh … I despise these creatures, Mr. Levine. They are an offense to our flag, to our religion, and to our humanity.”
“Yes, sir,” Ed answered, ignoring the religious reference, or assuming it referred to a general Judeo-Christian tradition.
“Therefore I am authorizing your plan. Infiltrate them totally, ascertain the fate of Cody McCall, then destroy them.”
Ed felt a wave of relief sweep through him. Something else, too. Excitement.
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“Do have another shortbread.”
“I’m on a diet, sir.”
“I did think you looked a bit thin.”
Ed set his coffee down and heard the cup rattle in the saucer. He realized that there was a tremor in his hand.
“Sir,” he asked, “are you authorizing the use of terminal remedies?”
“If necessary,” Kitteredge answered.
In fifteen years with the company, Ed had never received, nor had he sought, permission to kill anyone.
Kitteredge selected a shortbread cookie, bit off a tiny piece, and chewed it twenty-eight times before swallowing. “And if it develops that any of these creatures are culpable in the death of Cody McCall, then a terminal remedy will be necessary. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Ed answered. I understand perfectly. We’re talking Old Testament justice here.
“Will you be staying the night or should I ring for the helicopter?” Kitteredge asked.
“I should get back to New York,” Ed said. He had a lot of work to do.
“Of course,” Kitteredge answered.
“Uh, sir … should I call Anne Kelley, or would you prefer to do that?”
“I don’t see any purpose to be served by terrifying Miss Kelley at this point, until we know about the fate of the boy.”
“Yes, sir. Uh, may I use the phone?”
“Of course.”
Joe Graham picked up the phone. He usually didn’t like calls, but this one came as a relief. The small room in the cheap SRO hotel was beginning to close in on him. The rug needed a shampoo, the mattress was mushy and the springs were shot, and about all he could see from his window was a fire escape and the doughnut shop and liquor store across the street. The guy in the next room sounded like he was going through the heebie-jeebies, the toilet was running, and a car alarm had been going off now for at least ten minutes.
“Hello,” Graham said sourly.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
“Get bent, Ed.”
“We’re operational.”
Graham sat straight up in the bed. “What?”
“We’re operational,” Ed repeated.
“How’s our boy?” Graham asked. If they were operational it meant that Neal had orders to take the operation into an active phase. A dangerously active phase.
“I haven’t heard from him,” Levine said.
Graham felt the sticky, nauseating anxiety come over him. He didn’t like this at all. I’m Neal’s handler, not Ed, he thought. Ed is good, Ed is thorough and careful, but he doesn’t know Neal as well as I do. Nobody does. And now the kid’s out there—he’s rusty and he’s hurried, and that’s a bad combination. You hurry and you make mistakes.
“Are you monitoring?” he asked Levine, even though the answer was obvious.
“Of course.”
“You—”
“I’ll let you know the second I hear. Get ready to move.”
You’re damn right, Eddy boy.
“Another thing,” Ed added. “We might be going in heavy.”
“How heavy is heavy?”
There was a pause. Graham heard Ed sucking on a cigarette.
“If our client is terminal … very heavy.”
Jesus Christ, Graham thought. This started as a simple custody bag job. Now Ed is talking about killing people. If the boy is dead.
Another thought hit him. “Hey … what if
our
boy doesn’t make it out? Do we still go in heavy?”
Another drag of smoke.
“No,” Ed replied. “That’s just the business, right?”
Graham hung up the phone. No, Ed, he thought. That isn’t right.
Neal Carey stood inside the gas station and fed nickels into a slot machine. His mind wasn’t on the game, it was on the telephone outside.
Finally it rang. He listened to it ring for thirty seconds before it stopped. He glanced at his watch. Thirty seconds later it rang again.
Once: ditch the operation, come back.
Twice: stay in place and wait.
Three times: destroy them.
He walked out and got into Peggy’s Volvo. He thought for a couple of minutes and then drove up to Karen’s house, where Peggy had assumed he was going anyway when he asked to borrow her car. He sat outside for a minute, got his nerve up, and knocked on her door.
She was wearing a gray sweater over old jeans. She was barefoot. She had her glasses on and a pen stuck behind her ear. He could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed.
“Did I give you my phone number?” she asked. “I’m in the book, anyway.”
“I’m sorry. I should have called.”
“Now that we’ve agreed on that, would you like to come in?”
“Just for a minute.”
He stood awkwardly in her living room, not knowing what to say or do, not knowing why he was even there.
“You interrupted my work,” she said. “You at least owe me a passionate embrace. Come here.”
He held her as tightly as he could.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Dark night of the soul?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“No fun. You wanna mess around?”
“I want to make love.”
“Darlin’, don’t you know it’s the woman who’s supposed to use the L-word first?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know much about this at all.”
She took him by the hand and headed for the bedroom. “Then it’s a good thing you got yourself a teacher,” she said.
They got up an hour or so later, she to go back to her work, he to go back to his.
The woman smiled her professional smile as she opened the door. “Hi, I’m Bobby, what’s—” She stopped suddenly as she saw that the three men in the doorway were wearing masks.
Neal stuck a pistol under her nose. “Hi, Bobby. This is a stickup.”
Randy Carlisle grabbed her, swept her out of the doorway, and put a forearm choke hold around her neck. The bouncer in the black hat and shades woke up and tried to get his boots off the footstool as he reached for his gun.
“Uh-uhn,” Cal warned. He was pointing his own pistol at the bouncer’s head. He stepped into the room and ripped the phone cord out of the wall.
The bouncer put his hands up. Neal walked over, took the bouncer’s cowboy hat and shades off, and pushed him to the floor. Then he stepped on the shades, crushing them under the heel of his boot.
“We just want the money,” Neal said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Bobby warned, “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re mobbed up, right?” Neal asked. “Isn’t everyone? Where do you keep the money?”
Bobby made a show of folding her arms across her breasts and clamping her mouth shut.
Neal pointed his revolver at the bouncer’s head and cocked the hammer. He smiled at Bobby and said, “Your choice.”
Bobby let out a disgusted sigh. “A safe in the office.”
“Show me.”
She led Neal down the hallway into a cramped office. He held the gun to her head as she dialed the combination.
“Put it in the bag,” he said as she pulled stacks of bills from the safe.
She did what he ordered but said, “You’re really getting into big trouble, cowboy.
“I’m terrified.”
“Y’oughta be.”
When they got back to the corral, Neal leaned over the bouncer and asked, “You live here, stud?”
“No.”
Neal put his boot down on the bouncer’s hand. “Maybe in a trailer out back?”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go.” Neal gestured to Cal. “Come on.”
The bouncer walked them back to a cheap aluminum trailer. Cal opened the door and pushed the bouncer inside. Doreen was asleep on a hide-a-bed. The bouncer shook her awake.
“We got company,” he said.
Cal covered them while Neal searched the trailer. He found what was left of his money, about three hundred dollars, on a shelf in the bathroom.
Doreen gave her boyfriend one withering dirty look when she saw the cash.
“They got the drop on me,” he explained.
“You was asleep, I’ll bet,” she accused.
As they marched the bouncer back out Neal heard Doreen mutter, “This ain’t no life for a white girl.”
They went back to the corral. Randy left as Neal and Cal covered him. Cal went out next—Neal didn’t want him shooting anyone just for laughs. With Bekke and Vetter covering him from the car, Neal backed out and then jumped in the front seat.
“Head west,” he said to Dave Bekke, who was behind the wheel.
“But—”
“Do what I tell you,” Neal ordered. “They’re going to figure the robbers came from Reno. Might as well oblige them. We can double back later.”
“Whooee!” Randy hollered. He was counting the money.
Neal asked how much.
“Looks like about eleven thousand!”
“Not bad,” Neal said.
“Not bad?”
“Not bad,” Neal repeated, “for a warm-up.”
“But we’re only going to rob from vice mongers, Jews, and race traitors, right, Neal?” Craig Vetter asked anxiously.
“You bet, Craig,” Neal answered. He and Cal exchanged amused looks.
Craig added, “Otherwise it would be immoral.”
“We sure wouldn’t want to be immoral,” Cal said.
The occupants of the car broke into laughter, yells, and whoops of general merriment as they rolled down the highway.
Thus the Sons of Seth struck their first blow against the Zionist Occupation Government in the form of a low-rent cathouse, and Neal Carey touched off the great north central Nevada crime wave.
I
t was modest at first. They did another shabby cathouse down by Liming, then hit an after-hours card game in Battle Mountain. They found a marijuana runner in Elko and hijacked his truck on a switchback at Antelope Pass. A long weekend in Reno netted them a pimp’s money roll as well as the worldly wealth of a pickpocket whom Neal lured and then followed back to his stash.
They chose victims unlikely to complain too much to the cops and who were themselves engaged in some form of evildoing, at least in the minds of True Identity Christians. They worked fast and clean and used enough force so that they didn’t have to resort to actual violence, a condition Neal enforced because he was “not going to do any more hard time just because any of you guys get scared or trigger-happy.”
As the money came in, Neal’s stock rose. He was becoming what he needed to be to get on the inside: a necessity. He was getting the group hooked on money. What had first seemed like a windfall was becoming an expectation. They were becoming junkies to his pusher.
It wouldn’t be long before he had enough on them to put them all away. Having lured them into committing crimes they never would have thought of, he would then turn state’s evidence, testify, and disappear again. But not yet. He still had to make the crucial connection between Hansen’s boys and C. Wesley Carter. Ed wanted the whole enchilada.
And of course there was Cody. Or there wasn’t Cody, more to the point. Through the weeks of planning, practicing, and carrying out the robberies, Neal had seen no sign of the boy. He could be anywhere. Farmed out to some Identity family in northern Idaho or Washington State or Arkansas someplace, or left in the care of somebody’s loyal woman in a dingy trailer court anywhere west of the Missouri. Or he could be dead.
Neal didn’t want to accept that possibility, although he knew that Strekker and Carlisle, at least, were capable of killing a child to cover up his father’s murder. But it seemed too much, somehow. Too much to deal with, too much to believe and still keep going on. And he had to keep going on.
He knew it was only a matter of time before the boys in the bund brought him into the inner circle. Only a matter of time, and not much time at that before they’d give anything—even their secrets—to keep the money flow coming in. But time was an enemy to young Cody McCall, if he were indeed alive.
And time is certainly an enemy when you’re undercover, and Neal soon came to realize that he was under a kind of double-cover, living one life with the Sons of Seth and another with the Mills and Karen Hawley.
It was a tough thing to juggle, working with Steve then sneaking over to Hansen’s for a training session or a lecture. Going to Brogan’s for a beer and trying to ignore the gang in the corner. Having dinner at Wong’s with Karen, then making some excuse for leaving so he could run with the wolf pack that night.
There were a few close calls, like the time he was in Strekker’s pickup headed to Reno and just saw Peggy’s Volvo coming the other way from a shopping trip to Fallon. Or when Karen had slept over in the cabin for a change and the boys had come to get him at six in the morning for a little dawn training patrol.
Then there was the time he showed up at Phil and Margie’s all bruised, stiff, cut up, and bowlegged from riding that damn horse.
This particular beast’s name was Midnight, and it was black all right, all the way down to its malevolent soul.
“Why do I have to learn to ride?” Neal asked as he sat on a corral rail. Midnight stood in Gandhiesque tranquility next to him.
“Might need to someday,” Bob Hansen answered cryptically. “Besides, Midnight here is the gentlest gelding we have.”
Midnight looked up at Neal and whinnied softly in reassurance. He did look gentle, Neal thought. He was small as horses go, and skinny. And he had soft warm eyes.
Neal lowered himself into the saddle. Midnight turned his head and looked back at him and nuzzled the rein.
“Take him for a spin, Neal,” Billy McCurdy urged as he smiled his cretinous smile at the rest of the gang.