John Oxford lived on a low hill, in a broad two-story white house with an open front porch and a well-kept, sweeping lawn that ran down to the highway. A middle-aged woman wearing jeans, a long-sleeved blue shirt, and a straw hat was driving an orange riding lawnmower across the lawn, and when Lucas turned up the gravel driveway, she lifted a gloved hand in greeting and kept cutting.
Lucas went to the top of the hill and found a parking pad to the left side of the house, with a three-car garage in back. He parked and walked around to the front door. A screen door was closed, but the interior door stood open, and he could hear a television playing inside. Lucas pushed the doorbell. A dog started barking and a hulking old man with a gray beard, using an aluminum cane, came trudging toward the door, followed by a sleek gray dog the size of a German shepherd.
The old man stepped up to the door, peered through the screen, and said, “Well, goddamnit anyway. You’re that marshal. Davenport. I’ve seen the pictures of you.”
Lucas nodded, and asked, “How are you, John?”
“Not as good as I was one minute ago, in there watching the TV.” The screen door was held shut with a simple hook and he unhooked it and pushed it open and said, “You better come in.”
Lucas followed him into what, in an old farm house, would have been called the parlor, a small side room with a couch and two overstuffed chairs; Oxford pointed at one of the chairs with his cane and dropped onto the couch. The dog lay down by his feet and closed its eyes. The screen-covered window was open. The lawnmower continued to drone up and down the yard, and Lucas could smell the fresh-cut grass.
“You have a hip problem?” Lucas asked.
“I have an age problem, as you’ll find out in twenty-five years or so. Hip joints are okay, but there are a couple pieces going bad in my lower spine. Not much to be done about it.”
“Sorry about that,” Lucas said.
“I’m not going to tell you a hell of a lot about the militia except there’s nothing illegal about it,” John said. “Bunch of friends out politicking.”
“From what I’ve seen, there’s more to it than that,” Lucas said.
John frowned and said, “Let me see. You were down at Milton’s place, but you wouldn’t have gone there if you already knew about me. Milton didn’t tell you anything, so you must have tracked his phone call to my phone. Some of the boys said we should all have those cheap phones—burners?—but I thought they were an unnecessary expense. Guess I was wrong about that.”
“Well, you know . . . technology. It’s hard to keep track of,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to arrest you. Not yet anyway.”
Oxford grunted and said, “Not yet.”
“The government doesn’t have much information about your group. You’ve covered it up pretty well. But there are rumors about you and the rumors somewhat fit what we know about that website that I asked your Washington guy about.”
“What do the rumors say?”
“That you might not be afraid to use guns.”
“That’s horseshit,” Oxford said. “We might shoot in self-defense, we might train for that, but we’re not cold-blooded assassins. That’s all we were training for out at Milton’s place, self-defense. We were making a point about self-reliance.”
“I heard there was some sniper training going on.”
“I didn’t go out there, so I don’t know,” Oxford said. “Even sniping can be self-defense.”
“Depending on how you define self-defense,” Lucas said.
“Probably about the same as you do,” Oxford said.
“Or maybe a bit broader? People who hurt other people, maybe deserve to get hit?”
Oxford grunted again, and said, “We don’t think that somebody’s going to pass a law we don’t like, up in Washington, so we oughta kill a kid. That’s crazy.”
Lucas noticed that he’d evaded the question. “But you do have relationships with right-wing groups that might be a little crazy. Nazis, KKK, all that.”
Oxford lifted his chin and scratched his neck for a moment, then said, “We have not much to do with them. A little maybe, mostly by accident. Here’s the thing, Davenport: a group calls for a political protest on some point where we agree. We notify our folks, and if some of our members want to go, that’s up to them. Then the Nazis and the KKK show up, and we all get thrown into the same pot. You know, you get a rally over on the left side, say, pro-choice, or maybe gun control. The Communists and the anarchists and the socialists and the mainstream Democrats, they all show up, but the media doesn’t call them all Communists. That’s what they do to us. The fuckin’ Nazis, I hate those guys. The KKK, the same.”
Lucas looked at him for a couple of beats, and Oxford looked back, and finally Lucas said, “Suppose I buy all that, everything you said. I’m not sure I do, but maybe. My job is to find the people who put up that website and find out what the hell they intend. It sure looks like a threat of the worst kind. There are people in Washington, with the FBI, who see your group as their best candidate. It would be a good thing for you to put the order out on your networks that your people, whoever they are, help to locate that 1919 group and give me a name and address.”
Oxford continued to stare for a moment, then said, “Two things here. We’ve outlawed, in our group, the word ‘orders.’ We don’t give them and we don’t take them. We do what we call ‘asks.’ We can ask an individual or group to help out, but I can’t order anything. The second thing is, we’re not cops. We’re not going to investigate for you.”
“I’m not talking about being cops. I’m talking about self-defense,” Lucas said. “A senator’s kid gets killed and you’re gonna get torn up, because nobody’ll want to take a chance that you might be innocent.”
“That sounds about like our government,” Oxford said. He said in a new voice, quoting, “Another horse, fiery red, went out. And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword.”
“Who said that?” Lucas asked.
Oxford sighed and said, “Never mind. All right. I’ll put out an ask, heavy-like. I hate doing it, but I will. One of the things I hate about you guys, you government people, is that you put an innocent man in a box and make him do things he doesn’t want to do, isn’t required to do either legally or morally. It’s like the sixties with the draft. Government fights an immoral, unnecessary war in Vietnam, that all the politicians knew was wrong and unwinnable, fifty-eight thousand boys get killed, and what happens if you don’t want to go? You get your ass slammed in prison and your life ruined. I hate it. I hate every goddamned inch of it.”
“So hate it,” Lucas said. “But do your ‘ask’ anyway.”
The old man stroked his beard, once, and said, “Shit.” And, a moment later, “Goddamnit, I’ll send out your ask.”
“Thank you.”
“You better be on your way,” Oxford said. “If Marty finishes her mowing and comes in here and finds out who you are, she’ll tear a strip off your back.”
But the lawnmower was still going, so Lucas said, “I read the papers from your PR lady. You don’t seem nuts, but how the hell do you think the world would run without governments?”
Oxford shrugged. “We don’t. We do think the government should be a lot smaller. Maybe . . . ten percent of what it is. We’ve got two million people in the military, counting the reserves. You really think we need two million soldiers? When we’ve got missiles and hydrogen bombs? Who’s going to invade us? We’ve got all those soldiers because we’re poking our noses into other people’s business. Let them take care of themselves. There are almost a million cops. You think we need a million cops? There are one-point-three-million lawyers, all sucking on the government tit in one way or another. You think we oughta need one-point-three-million lawyers to get through our lives? We have no probl
em with a government that builds roads and bridges and sewers and water plants and such. But two million soldiers and a million cops? More than a million lawyers? And listen—I could go on a while. Don’t get me started on how all our tax money gets pissed away.”
Lucas: “From our point of view, us deep-state people, it looks like it might help your cause if you had some leverage over the people who run the government, who pass the bills that do all the things you don’t like. Leverage you could get from a site like 1919, if a kid gets shot.”
“Bullshit. How in the hell would we keep track of that?” Oxford asked. “We’d need a hundred over-ground people in Washington to figure out what’s going on in Congress and who’s voting for what, and when. We’re not that kind of group. What we are, is, we’ve got an idea and we’re pushing it. We’re growing, slow but steady. We’ve got more people with us than anybody knows. Smart people, too. Not crazy.”
“All right, but you’ve still got those alt-right contacts,” Lucas said. “John: call me.”
They talked for a few more minutes, and John pushed Lucas into admitting that he thought that government was often overbearing and wasteful, and that maybe there were too many cops and soldiers and lawyers.
“See,” John said, “You’ve got some potential to think for yourself. Maybe already been doing it.”
Outside, the lawnmower shut down and Lucas said, “I guess I better run.”
“Guess you better.” Oxford pushed himself up from the chair and followed Lucas to the door. He said, “You’ll soon enough find out what you’ve done here and it really gets me down, as a personal thing. Really bums me out, as us old hippies used to say.”
Lucas stopped and turned: “What have I done?”
“You’ll find out.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Elias Dunn had been so shocked by his murder of Rachel and Randy Stokes that he called in sick the next day and the day after that and spent most of his time lying facedown on his bed with a killer headache crawling up the back of his head, a headache that neither Advil nor Aleve could touch.
He couldn’t eat, couldn’t hold anything down. He lived on tap water. It all had been too close, too personal, much more bloody than he’d expected. He hadn’t done it efficiently—he’d even shot himself.
That shot had traveled between his buttocks, cutting a shallow groove in each of them. He’d bled through his clothes and onto the car seat, but the seat was made of some kind of leather-like plastic and was easily cleaned.
The wounds were not easy to treat, because he couldn’t see them well. Even in his floor-to-ceiling dressing mirror, he had to bend over and peer at them between his legs, which was not only painful, but humiliating. He washed the two wounds with soap and water, then slathered them with disinfectant ointment, covered them with stickless gauze from a first aid kit, and then, because he didn’t have enough actual medical tape in the first aid kit, used duct tape to cover the layers of gauze.
The first night and the following day he couldn’t leave the house because he couldn’t drive with the headache. When he stood upright, or sat upright in his truck, clusters of bright blue specks flickered in front of his eyes like neon gnats. He called his survey crew, told them he was sick, told them he’d pay them full wages each day until he was back on the job, and he’d call them the night before they should come back to work.
The second night, he managed to get out to a Walgreens, where he bought a heavy-duty first aid kit including some disinfectant ointment that incorporated a painkiller. He rewashed and re-covered the wound, following instructions he found on the internet, and the pain eased a bit.
He woke on the next morning with a lingering ache at the back of his skull, but no gnats in front of his eyes. He crawled out of bed, nearly fell, staggered to the kitchen and ate a whole box of raisin bran with one-percent milk. He managed to keep that down and walked unsteadily to his computer and out to the Fauquier Now website, which covered Fauquier County and Warrenton. He poked around there, found nothing about any murders.
Nobody had found them yet?
He could hardly believe it, but that was apparently the case. He was tempted to search for the Stokeses by name, but decided that might be a security breach. He’d wait to hear.
* * *
—
HE SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER and went back to his bed and flopped facedown. He didn’t sleep—at least, he didn’t think he did—but when he went back to bed, it had been morning, and when he got up, it was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. The hours in between had been taken up with dreams not only of reruns of the shootings of Rachel and Randy Stokes, but also imagined videos of gunned-down children, police sirens, screaming politicians.
Eventually the reruns of the Stokeses’ shootings had faded and the imagined images of screaming politicians and urgent media coverage had come to the fore. When he got up, his bare feet hit the floor and he sat there for a moment, imagining CNN and Fox and MSNBC covering those future shootings.
He wasn’t a man given to a lot of self-analysis, but he recognized something he hadn’t felt before: he was now more important than he’d ever been, or ever imagined he’d be. He was now a man who could change the nation.
He walked up to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked bad, without a doubt, three days of whiskers, his hair in disarray, his face sallow, gaunt. He cleaned up, taped a piece of plastic bag over his buttocks to keep the water off, then stood in a hot shower for fifteen minutes. He needed to work out, or jog, but was afraid that either one would break open the wounds.
But the shower helped: he was better.
On the phone to the job foreman: “Bill? This is El . . .”
“Man, how you feeling?” Bill sounded like he actually cared.
“Better. Whatever it was put me on the toilet every ten minutes for three days, but I went out and ran this afternoon. No after-effects, far as I can tell. I think I got a bad salad. Not coughing or anything. Where’re we at?”
“You were running far enough ahead of us that we’re okay, but if you could work tomorrow, that’d be a good thing.”
“We’ll be there at dawn, we’ll work right down to dark and not charge you an extra nickel.”
“You’re a good man, El. I’ll see you out there.”
* * *
—
DUNN HAD NEVER gotten much in the way of email, and what he had, he caught up with, and then walked out and got his snail mail, his butt still throbbing as he walked. He found a couple of bills—he did bills every Saturday morning, so he was always current—and a first-class letter with his name and address printed on a laser printer. He carried the mail inside, opened the letter, and to his astonishment, found a copy of the letter he’d sent out to the three men he thought might use them.
The appearance of the letter fogged up his brain for a minute or so, until he realized what had happened. One of the original recipients of his letter hadn’t known where it had come from, but he had thought that Dunn might be somebody to send it to. Anonymously. Dunn didn’t know which man had passed it back, but he assumed that man might also have passed it to more people.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to shoot again.
Maybe somebody else would do it. If enough people saw that letter. He walked around with the letter in his hand, and then went to the bathroom, burned it, dropped the ashes in the toilet and flushed them. He sat at the kitchen table, looking out at the tree line along the backyard, and thought about it: and was surprised by the feeling of disappointment.
Somebody else was going to be important?
Wasn’t that a good thing? Setting himself up with alibis while the dirty work was done by someone else? Nobody would ever discover that he was the instigator of the whole thing.
His butt was bothering him and he got the idea that he had to keep moving it. He checked the wound, ma
king sure it was thoroughly moisturized and heavily padded and taped, then went out in the backyard and walked around.
The next-door neighbor waved and Dunn lifted a hand. The next-door neighbor was a golfer and a fan of every major sport he could think of, even including soccer. That’s all he thought about: the guy knew so many sports numbers for so many teams that even Dunn was impressed. Would that guy, the sports guy, ever think that the man standing in the next yard was planning to kill the children of U.S. senators? Dunn smiled to himself: the idea was ridiculous.
And the spark of secret power bit him again, the feeling of importance.
As Dunn had methodically built his political stance, he’d read everything he could find about the rise of fascism in Europe, South America, and Japan. Though he despised the stupidities of Hitler and his cronies, how they’d corrupted a political ideal with their moral depravities, he’d nevertheless read the standard works on Nazism, Italian and Spanish fascism, and World War II. As he walked in the backyard, pretending to inspect the turf, he recalled a historian’s theory that Good Germans had been able to kill men, women, and even small children by dehumanizing them.
That, he thought, was why he was so stricken by his murder of the Stokeses: he’d actually humanized them. He’d enjoyed Rachel’s company the night before the murders, had felt an attraction to her. Thought she might be attracted to him. Was that an error that could be corrected?
Yes, it was, he thought.
He could not allow himself to focus on his targets as humans. He not only had to harden his heart, he had to re-think his whole approach to his . . . symbols. They were meat, of no particular value. Ciphers. They simply weren’t important when they were walking around, but they’d be important in death. Not human. Not human. Not human.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, he got his laptop and went out to a laundromat—another security move—that was open until eleven o’clock and had free Wi-Fi. He signed on and began researching the children identified on the 1919 site.
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