by Don Winslow
“She loves it here, Steve,” Neal said.
“She can always come back. You want to stay to dinner? I’m just going to throw some steaks on the grill.”
“I better not. I have stuff to get done.”
“Lot of work, being a mountain man. Well, come in and have a cup of coffee with Peggy, or you’ll get me in trouble.”
Peggy didn’t have any coffee on. She had a pitcher of sun tea, a bottle of vodka, a stack of magazines, and a firm intent to sit out on the porch with her feet on the railing while reading nothing more complicated than a photo caption.
“I figure it might be the last afternoon warm enough to do this. You can join me,” she said to Neal, “if you promise to speak in short sentences.”
“Thanks.”
“Good start,” Peggy said. She poured three glasses of tea over ice, topped two of them off with a shot of Smirnoff, and handed her husband the unloaded one.
“You’re a terrible woman,” he said.
“Hmm. Is our one and only off leading Jory Hansen on a merry chase?”
“Merry for her, anyway. Why, did you have something for her to do?”
“Well, she could toss a hand grenade into her room by way of cleaning it … but no, not really. Come on, boys, the porch awaits.”
She picked up her magazines and pushed the screen door open with her elbow.
“You two alcoholics go ahead,” Steve said. He drained his iced tea in one long gulp. “I want to check on the cattle for a minute. Are those magazines the ones that are mostly advertisements, with little perfume samples and articles about orgasms?”
“Yep,” answered Peggy.
“Well, save one for me,” Steve said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Neal followed Peggy out onto the porch. True to her word, she pulled up a deck chair, plopped the stack of magazines by her feet, and stuck her feet up on the railing.
“Tough day?” Neal asked.
“Not really. It’s just nice to have a chance to sit down and relax, this part of the afternoon. It’s my favorite time of the day.
She picked up a magazine, licked her finger, and started to flip through the pages.
“Cosmo,” she said. “Well, let’s see … how do high-powered young women executives get satisfaction? Nope, no pictures. Next story.”
Neal sat down, drank his tea, and watched the afternoon sunlight start to soften.
“So, Neal Carey,” Peggy said as she flipped through the magazine, “what’s happening at Hansen’s place?”
“I dunno.”
“Hmm.”
Neal hated her hmms. She could hmm him to death. Her hmms were her way of expressing skepticism. If Peggy Mills were a New York City police detective, every criminal in the city would break down and beg for the old rubber hose before enduring another one of those hmms.
“What does Jory say?” Neal asked.
“Jory says less than Jory usually says. Jory talks like one of those Indians in those old Jeff Chandler movies. Lotsa ughs and uhs.”
“Hmm.”
“Very funny. Well, something is going on at Hansen’s, and I figured because they’re just over the spur from you …”
“I thought you didn’t want a lot of conversation.”
Peggy looked up from her magazine and stared out at the trees across their lawn.
“Never mind me. Maybe it’s just that it’s late in the afternoon … and I’m late in the afternoon … and winter’s coming and my baby’s all grown up … and my husband has a big, weak heart …” She reached her hand out, took his, and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed it back.
“You’re just hitting your prime,” Neal said.
She squeezed his hand again and then let it go. “You’re a good guy, Neal. I know a few single women around here who’d die to meet you. You want to go with us to Phil and Margie’s tonight? Big Saturday night out? I’ll introduce you to some mountain women with shiny hair and long legs.”
“I don’t know how to dance.”
“I’m sure they’d love to teach you, honey.”
“I don’t know.” I don’t know, Peggy. The last woman who taught me ended up dead.
“Well, just come down around eight if you want to go.”
“Okay.”
Neal finished off his tea and got up. “Thanks for the drink. Tell Steve I needed to go, huh? Maybe I’ll see you tonight.”
He picked his pack up out of the truck, strapped it on, and headed back up to his cabin. He did have things to do.
If he was thinking of spending the winter here there was something he had to get resolved first.
Neal heard the bullet smack into the tree behind him as he dropped to the ground. He didn’t feel any pain, wondered if that’s what instant death was like, then checked himself to try to find the gaping hole in his body.
“You’re a dead kike,” Cal Strekker said as he came out from behind a boulder. He lowered his rifle and grinned.
“That was too goddamn close, Cal,” Neal croaked. “Live ammo.”
“You oughta be more alert,” Strekker said.
“I didn’t know the training session had even started,” Neal answered.
“We’re always in training, Carey.”
Well, you are anyway, Neal thought as he looked at Strekker. He was decked out in a tiger camouflage suit, replete with parachute pants, webbed belt, and combat boots. His face was striped with cammy paint and he wore a combat fatigue cap.
Even from my position groveling at your feet, you look stupid, Neal thought. He didn’t say that, though. Instead he said, “Well, you owe me new underwear, Cal.”
That seemed to mollify him, judging by the lupine grin that parted his mustache and beard. Then he got all man-to-man earnest. “You’ll thank me for this when it saves your life one day during the End Time.”
The End Time—the period foretold in Revelations that would see the final battle between good and evil, the last struggle between the chosen people and the hordes of Jews, niggers, and race traitors.
“Boy, for a second there I thought it was the End Time,” Neal said.
Neal got to his feet and offered his hand to shake. Strekker took it. Neal clamped his left hand over Cal’s wrist, lifted his arm up, spun underneath it, and pivoted, which locked Cal’s elbow up around his ear and going in the wrong direction. Neal took two long steps forward and pushed on Cal’s wrist, which took the bigger man off his feet and slammed him hard down on his back. Neal threw a punch that stopped a millimeter from Cal’s nose.
“We’re always in training, Cal, huh?”
He let go of Cal’s wrist and backed away. “You taught me that throw, Cal.”
Yeah, you taught me all right, Cal, Neal remembered. You threw me to the ground about five hundred times, always a lot harder than you had to, always giving my wrist that extra little twist. You always picked me as the “kike” in your hand-to-hand demonstrations. The choke holds, the elbow locks, the hip throws. You’ve been a good teacher. But I know seventy-year-old, five-feet-three, one hundred-pound Chinese monks who would dust your ass without looking up from their rice bowls.
“I’m going to take you to school, boy,” Cal growled. He got to his feet, drew his knife, and went into his combat stance.
Neal picked up his rifle and cocked a round into the chamber. “We’re all in our places, with bright shiny faces,” he said.
Cal started to circle him, passing the knife from hand to hand, making feinting jabs.
Neal braced the rifle stock against his cheek and focused on placing the bead right on Strekker’s alleged heart.
He almost did shit his pants when the sound of the gun exploded in his ears. He whirled around to see Bob Hansen standing there, his smoking rifle held at high port, a group of about ten men forming behind him.
“That’ll be enough, you two,” Hansen said sternly.
“Yes, sir!” Cal shouted.
“Yes, sir,” Neal croaked, his head still rushing from the thought that he
had accidentally killed Cal Strekker.
Then Hansen’s face broke into a delighted smile.
“Do we have us some tigers here?” he asked the group. “They’re just spoiling to fight. I almost pity the ZOG race traitor who has to fight one of these fine men! Well, almost.”
The men behind him began to chuckle obediently. Cal looked like a German shepherd having his chest scratched. Then Hansen got stern again and frowned.
“But good white men can’t afford to fight each other, men. That’s what the enemy wants us to do. Let’s save that hatred for ZOG, all right?”
ZOG—Neal always thought it sounded like the monster in a low-budget Japanese horror movie, sort of a poor man’s Godzilla, but actually it was an acronym for Zionist Occupation Government, the white supremacist name for the federal government in Washington, manipulated by the Jews for the suppression of the true chosen people.
“Now shake hands,” Hansen ordered.
Neal gave Cal an ironic smile and stuck his hand out like he was Mickey Rooney coming back to Boys’ Town. Cal took it, gave it a hard tug, and stared into Neal’s eyes with an unmistakable this-is-a-long-way-from-being-over look.
Hansen stepped back into the center of the group. He wore plain khakis with cuffed slacks and a black baseball hat. He had a webbed belt with a holstered .45 Colt.
Neal had come to know the rest of the men during the past few weeks. There was Strekker, of course. Levine had pulled the file on him—sergeant in the army, ranger certified, dishonorable discharge for beating up a trainee. Served two years in the Washington State pen for knifing a man in a bar fight. Member of the Aryan Brotherhood in prison.
His cell mate had been Randy Carlisle. Rape. About five-six, black hair, mustache. A perpetual expression of feral cunning, the kind of twisted leer that your mother was talking about when she asked you if you wanted your face to freeze that way. A coyote to Cal’s wolf.
There was Dave Bekke, the chunky, bearded man Neal had met in his first encounter with Hansen back on the ridge. Part-time mine worker, part-time ranch hand, full-time loser. He had a fat wife he was scared of so rarely saw. He was a follower looking for something to follow, and he found it in the white supremacist movement. No prison but some jail time for DUI and petty theft.
Bill McCurdy was a cowboy first and a cretin second, but it was a close race. He was a runty, bowlegged little bastard with a giggle that could have made Gandhi slap him in the mouth. Neal had never seen him without his cowboy hat, which was a mercy, because the brown hair that hung below his ears hadn’t been washed since Jimmy Carter was popular. But the boy was transformed on a horse. On horseback he became a centaur, an idiot savant of the saddle.
Craig Vetter was something else again. A tree with clothes. Six-five with broad shoulders, sinewy legs, and muscles that wouldn’t quit. Short blond hair and blue eyes and a face as open as a Bible on Sunday. Guiltless, guileless, fearless. Didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, or chase women. There was a wife and five kids back in St. George, Utah, and Craig would still be with them if he didn’t feel duty bound to fight for God and the white race. He sent his pay home, though.
And then there was John Finley, tall, skinny, with sandy hair and shit for brains. Finley was a California surf boy who had his cocaine jones and his ass busted in the LA County jail. He’d found religion for comfort and the Aryan Brotherhood for protection and joined the True Christian Identity Church shortly after his release. Carter had shipped him out to Hansen’s ranch to keep his nose clean.
The Johnson brothers were bespectacled, benighted behemoths. Neal supposed they had first names other than Big and Little, but he never heard them. And Jory was Hitler’s poster boy.
There were a couple of others Neal didn’t have a line on yet, but they were pretty much the same type—men who saw an America that never existed slipping away from them, whose childhood horrors, or adult disappointments, or desperate need for pride had been transformed into a hatred for ethnic scapegoats.
Neal had all sorts of cheap psychoanalysis and snotty Freudian concepts to attach to his new playmates, but basically he thought they were scum. These were the men Bob Hansen had brought in to work his place, to turn a model ranch into a survivalist hovel.
Well, that’s his problem, Neal thought. I have my own. Come on, Bob, it’s dark enough. Let’s get going.
It was a night training exercise, because, as Bob Hansen had joked, “that’s when night fighters fight.”
“One technique you can use,” Hansen said, “is to leave out some fried chicken, and when the nigger smells it, he’ll smile. Don’t fire until you see the whites of his teeth.”
The small group gathered at the base of the spur chuckled. Neal joined in the laughter, but his stomach was fluttering.
Enough with the jokes, he thought. Let’s get on with it.
“Seriously,” Hansen continued, sounding like a fascist nightclub comic, “we’re very likely to do a lot of night fighting during the End Time. And even sooner, when we begin the shooting war against ZOG, which should be soon now, we’ll favor night attacks to make up for our lack of numbers. We must learn to be swift, silent, and lethal. So no firearms tonight, gentlemen. Just hand-to-hand combat.”
They broke up into two teams for a nocturnal, violent version of hide-and-seek. Neal hoped that his luck would hold out long enough to put him on the “hide” side, which would make what he had to do a whole lot easier.
The scenario was that a gang of marauding “mud people” were planning to attack the compound to get its food. The defenders would launch a surprise nighttime spoiling raid to scatter the marauders and track them down one by one.
Strekker said he would lead the defender’s team.
“I’ll be a nigger,” Neal volunteered.
“Figures,” Strekker commented.
“See you up there,” Neal said, pointing to the spur.
“Count on it,” Strekker answered.
You don’t know, Neal thought, just how much I’m counting on it, Cal.
Hansen made the rest of the assignments. Neal, Jory, Dave, and Craig made up the marauding band of blacks. Hansen, Strekker, Finley, Carlisle, and Big and Little Johnson were going to track them down and “kill” them.
“You have a ten-minute start,” Hansen said. “Make sure you spread out.”
You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, Neal thought as he took off at a dead run. I have to put as much space between me and everybody as I can in those ten minutes. Space equals time, and I’m going to need time.
He sprinted across the sagebrush toward the spur until he figured that no one could spot his silhouette. Then he turned right, running parallel to the base of the mountain. He trotted until he found a narrow ravine and dropped down into it. He hoped he had moved enough south to take him out of the main path of the exercise. He crawled out of his denim jacket and baggy canvas pants. Underneath he was wearing a black turtleneck and black jeans. He pulled a tin of black, water-based makeup out of his pocket and spread it over his face and hands. He put a black stocking over his face and then pulled a black watch cap over his head. He took two thin steel cables, each about two feet long, and tied them around his waist. Then he laid flat on the ground and waited.
He thought about chickening out, creeping back to his cabin and forgetting the whole thing. Then he thought about Anne Kelley and Cody and decided to go through with it.
He let a full ten minutes pass before he got up into a crouch and headed west toward the compound. He was hoping that no one would figure him to be this far south, and certainly not to be headed toward, instead of away from, his pursuers. He knew that Strekker was running like a greyhound toward the spur to find him and dispatch him in the most painful acceptable manner.
It took him twenty minutes to make it to the compound fence.
Graham, I wish you were here, he thought. I’m more than a little rusty and could use some coaching. Oh, well, it’s no different from breaking into a car lot or a warehouse. Except tha
t if anyone’s home here, I’m likely to catch a bullet in the chest while I’m sprawled out on the fence.
He wrapped the denim jacket around his waist and tied up the sleeves at his waist. Then he jumped onto the fence, dug a toe into the space between the links, and began to haul himself up. He was sweating not so much from the exertion as from the thought that a searchlight might hit him at any moment, followed shortly by a large-caliber, high-velocity bullet.
He made it to the top of the fence and paused to catch his breath, get a good toehold, and think about the next step. Then he untied the jacket and laid it over the top of the two-strand barbed wire. He took one of the cables from around his waist and looped it underneath the bottom strand, pulled it tight, and tied it off on top. He did the same with the other cable on the other end of the jacket.
When the wire was pulled up tight under the jacket, he took another deep breath and swung his left foot over the top of the jacket, pivoted his hips, and planted the tip of his left foot into a space on the inside of the chain link fence. Then he lifted his right foot over, balanced himself with his hands on the jacket, and pulled himself over the top.
He paused for a second to listen. He didn’t hear any footsteps, or barking dogs, or the sound of a rifle bolt.
Holding himself to the fence with his left hand, he reached up, untied the cables, dropped them, pulled the jacket off, and let it fall to the ground. Then he lowered himself another couple of feet down the fence, listened again, pushed off with his hands, and dropped to the ground. He landed perfectly on the balls of his feet, then fell over backward and hit the ground with his butt.
Rusty, he thought. Definitely rusty. But not bad.
He was still congratulating himself when he heard a deep growl.
It was a Doberman, of course. It was advancing slowly in a low crouch, the hair on its spine standing up, its fangs bared, tiny speckles of spit dripping from its mouth.