An Obvious Fact

by Craig Johnson

  “That should do it for now.” I paused at the door. “If we don’t make it back before the DCI guys get here, just park their vehicle in front of the shed door and try and get them in there as quietly as possible.” I reached out and handed him the pink-gripped revolver. “The first thing I want to know is the caliber of the weapon that did the deed.”

  He stared at the S&W. “You think it was this?”

  “If it is, your friend in the back better get used to eating off trays.”

  The Bear was already in Engelhardt’s Tahoe, and I fired the thing up, drifted out of town, and then, gaining speed, turned on the emergency lights.

  He buckled his seat belt and settled in. “We are official now?”

  “For better or worse.”

  “Are we going to return the sheriff’s car or break and enter first?”

  I accelerated toward Moorcroft, figuring the more highway we had, the faster we could go. “In my experience, when you are committing a misdemeanor it’s better not to do it in a purloined police car.” I left the sirens off so that we could talk. “Why kill Post?”

  He answered with the obvious response. “They found out he was ATF.”

  “We could find out where he was staying and see if he left any notes on what he was working on.” I took the on-ramp and headed east. “Corbin had a point, though. Why would he reveal himself to us? In my experience, those guys are loath to do anything like that with anybody.”

  “Perhaps he was worried.”

  “Turns out he was right to be.”

  “Whatever he was looking for he discovered it in Hulett.”

  I thought about it. “Billy ThE Kiddo is involved in this. I’m not sure how, but he’s involved.”

  “How long can you hold him?”

  “As long as Nutter Butter is with us. I can press charges myself, if need be, and we can get the court to set bail so high that he has to mortgage his motorcycle shop to walk.”

  “Well, we know he will not be sitting comfortably for some time.”

  When we got to the Pennington County Jail, it was still dark, and my eyes were feeling like a sand pit. I pulled the sheriff’s car into the entryway of the impound lot as a young deputy, assuming his boss was arriving, snapped to attention in the booth at the gate.

  I rolled down the window as he approached. “Hey, troop, we need to make a trade.”

  He stared at the sheriff’s unit. “For what?”

  I nodded toward the muscle car nearest his booth. “The Duke of Hazzard in there.”

  He looked dejected as he went back and retrieved a clipboard from his tiny lodgings. “Bummer. I was kind of hoping that one would go to auction.”

  • • •

  There were three streetlights in the parking lot of The Chop Shop, making it impossible to get anywhere near the front of the place without appearing center stage.

  “Remind me again why we are doing this?”

  “It’s the only outstanding lead we’ve got.”

  He studied the building in front of us. “Name the un-outstanding ones.”

  “Lola, which seems to be a dead end other than the fact that we are in possession of her vehicle.”

  “Along with a dead agent.”

  I ignored him. “Then we have Bodaway himself, who is in the hospital in a coma.”

  “There is the rich guy who lives on the golf course.”

  I nodded. “Yep, but I’m thinking that’s just a personal thing between Bodaway and the daughter.” I stared at the building across the lighted expanse of parking lot. “And the establishment in front of us.”

  “I think we should go around back.”

  “Agreed.” I fired up the Challenger and listened as its exhaust trumpeted, heralding our every move. “I hate this car.”

  Taking the long way, we put in an extra block with the lights off and came up on a chain-link fence in the back enclosing what looked to be a salvage yard with a fair amount of rusting American chrome.

  “I do not see a gate.”

  I looked up at the spiraling razor wire that looped its way around the perimeter. “I’m not climbing that thing.”

  He gestured toward a parking spot next to the building. “Slip in there.”

  I did as he said and watched as he whirred the window down and shimmied out, first standing on the sill and then the top. There was a brief thump as the sheet metal bent, and then he disappeared.

  I turned off the obnoxious engine and sat there thinking about how we were supposed to be heading back home today, but that the death of Brady Post had changed all of that. We were now committed in numerous ways, and if I didn’t play this correctly, I was placing my friend, my brothers in blue, and myself in a prickly situation with the feds. I hoped that while we were involved in our covert operations, Mike McGroder was getting information that might make the nature of Post’s investigation more clear.

  I heard more noise as the Bear walked on the roof of the cycle shop; then the chain-link rattled, and I turned to see Henry standing on the other side of the fence. I slipped out of the Dodge and joined him, still looking for a gate and still not seeing one.

  “There is an electronic security system.”

  “You’re kidding. In this dump?”

  “There is a seven-space keypad for an entry code at the back door.”

  “We’re never going to be able to guess the code.”

  “In my experience you get three tries within a one minute period before the alarms go off and alert the authorities.”

  “So, our odds are three in, say, a million?”

  He shrugged.

  “I hate to sound old-school, but what about just breaking a window?”

  He turned and walked toward the back door. “If they went to the trouble of installing a keypad, they probably included the windows in said system.”

  Feeling in my jacket for Bodaway’s cell phone, I whispered after him, “You want me to call Corbin and see if we can get Kiddo’s birth date or phone number?”

  He didn’t answer but studied the keypad and then punched in some numbers; evidently, we were now on the clock. He stood there for a moment, and then there was a soft buzz and the sound of a latch being thrown. He pushed open the door and walked in.

  Unprepared for this development, I skittered around the exterior of the building, looking all the world like a felon, and soon found him holding open the front door to allow me entry. “What the heck?”

  “The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company was incorporated on September 17, 1907.”

  I slid in, and he closed the door behind me. “Hmm . . . 9171907. I’ll be damned.”

  “What one man can invent, another can discover.”

  “Oh, shut up.” I followed as we moved through the office back into the bays of the old service station.

  “I wish we had a flashlight.”

  I pulled a mini Maglite from my hunting jacket.

  “What else do you have in there?”

  I held up three fingers. “Be prepared.”

  He took the flashlight and directed it toward the bike that Kiddo had been working on, focusing on what looked like modifications around the gas tank. “What do you think he was doing?”

  The Cheyenne Nation stooped, carefully reached under a lip near the back of the tank, and, pulling it up, revealed a hidden compartment about half the size of a small shoe box. “The seams would be covered by a leather strap that goes across the tank.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I do not know. Leaping to conclusions before one has the facts is the mark of a true amateur.”

  “I warned you about that Sherlock Holmes stuff.” We studied the tiny space. “It has to be drugs.”

  “Need I remind you, Agent Post was investigating guns.”

  “What gun could be so important th
at you couldn’t just carry it in a saddlebag or on your person?”

  He straightened and sighed, as perplexed as I was. “I do not know that, either.”

  We moved past the vehicle bay where there was a newer addition and a door that read PRIVATE that was padlocked. I studied the thing. “Too bad we don’t have a key.”

  Henry pulled down a pair of bolt cutters with three-foot-long handles from a tool rack on the wall and stepped past me. He placed the clasp of the lock between the jaw-like blades. “This should do the trick.”

  Before I could say anything, he bit the thing in two, and we both watched as the lock fell on the floor.

  I picked it up and stared at him. “How do we explain this?”

  He shrugged and pushed open the door. “We do not; we simply take the lock with us and let them think somebody either lost it or did not secure it.”

  Shaking my head, I stuffed the padlock in my pocket, walked inside, and scanned the walls as we went deeper into a world I’d hoped didn’t exist.

  The extension that had been added on to the back was poured concrete with reinforced metal beams above—a bunker, in more ways than one. The walls were festooned with Nazi memorabilia and black-and-white photos of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and Franz Stangl, Paul Blobel, Josef Kramer, and Reinhard Heydrich, to name a few of the other maniacs. There were propaganda posters for the Third Reich with blond-haired, blue-eyed Nazis extolling the virtues of the party, and more cartoon ones expressing the distrust and loathing of Jews and other so-called mongrel races.

  There was a large stage at one end draped with assorted Nazi flags and a podium with a swastika.

  Along one wall were event tables stacked high with printouts, paper cutters, and pamphlets supporting the KKK, Aryan Brotherhood, and National Alliance. There were books like The Turner Diaries, the self-published, apocalyptic, white-supremacist novel that had been found on Timothy McVeigh, and The Coming War, a graphic novel of the same ilk, which came with an accompanying DVD. “Looks like we’ve stumbled into George Lincoln Rockwell’s man cave.”

  The Bear picked up a copy of The Coming War and leafed through it, pausing at a point where the white protagonists were hunting Indians with rifles from open Jeeps. “My oh my.”

  “I guess they’ve decided to use comics to speak to their intellectual demographic.”

  “Hmm.” He grunted and stuck the graphic novel and DVD under his arm.

  “Think we should take a few samples for the FBI?”

  He gathered some more. “I do not think they will be missed.”

  I glanced around the room, unafraid that my flashlight would be seen since there were no windows. “You know what I don’t see?”

  “Weapons.”

  “Yep.”

  He looked at the tables of propaganda. “I do not know if this is not more dangerous.”

  “The way a lot of these organizations get operating capital is from drugs.”

  “And gun sales.”

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—you can’t carry enough guns on a motorcycle to make it profitable.”

  I looked around some more but couldn’t see any trapdoors in the concrete floor or hidden doors in the walls. “But we’d better get out of here.”

  The Cheyenne Nation followed, giving the room one more look-over before closing the door behind us. “Why would a Native like Bodaway be trafficking with these people?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know.”

  “My experiences lead me to believe that this sort are not very secretive in their political beliefs.” He let me out the front and handed me the Nazi propaganda. “I will return the way I came and reset the alarm system.”

  “See you out back.” Skirting around the building, I glanced across the parking lot and didn’t see any lights on in the adjacent buildings. Feeling relatively assured, I made the corner at the alley and walked directly into the extended barrel of an S&W .357 Magnum.

  “I just wanted you to see how bad planning feels.” Engelhardt holstered his revolver. “Got a call about a half hour ago from Mrs. Hirsch, who lives across the way here. She’s got an irritable bladder condition and happened to see a large man walking on the roof of this building and another large man entering through the front door.”

  “Here I thought we were being real stealthy.”

  “Hard to sneak by an irritable bladder.”

  “I’m going to have that needlepointed and put on my office wall.”

  We turned, and I followed him to the alley, where his Tahoe had us boxed in. He watched as Henry set the alarm on the back door, climbed up on the roof, stepped over the razor wire, and lowered himself to the top of the Challenger to join us.

  “If you don’t mind me asking . . .” Irl’s voice stayed low but grew harsh. “What the hell do you guys think you’re doing?”

  The Bear shrugged. “I needed some parts.”

  I handed the sheriff a few of the pamphlets. “Looks like Kiddo’s got his own little cottage industry.”

  Irl thumbed through the evidence. “Well, shit.”

  “Our thoughts exactly.”

  He gestured with the stack of propaganda. “You mind if I keep these?”

  “Seeing as it’s inadmissible evidence, sure.”

  The Bear plucked the DVD from the pile. “I would like to take a look at this.”

  Engelhardt nodded and then opened the driver’s-side door of his unit and tossed the stuff onto the passenger seat as I explained what we’d found. He stroked his chin and listened. “So, we’ve got a guy who’s acting as a mule for some neo-Nazis, but we haven’t got any idea what it was he was carrying?”

  Henry told him about Brady Post.

  “Holy shit.” He rubbed his chin some more. “ATF, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, it’s one of three things.” He made a face. “No firearms inside?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then they must have a place somewhere else.” He glanced around, taking in the dawn-lit horizon. “Like anywhere in western South Dakota, huh? Well, I’ve got a file.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “It sure would be easier if these feds would share their information with us.”

  “They seem to take that undercover thing pretty seriously.”

  He shook his head. “But this Brady Post just introduced himself to you guys?”

  “To me, but then Henry opened the door and entered the conversation.”

  Irl shrugged as he slid into his unit. “Let me dig out my files on these shitbirds, and I’ll give you a call.” He paused. “You know, my uncle was one of the first guys into Buchenwald. He never talked about it except to say one of the buildings they liberated was a stables that was built to hold eighty horses and that they’d had over twelve hundred men in there, five to a bunk. He said the smell was horrific.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you, if he was still around and knew these turds were in South Dakota, he’d get out his deer rifle and finish the job.” My fellow sheriff closed the door behind him and pulled the shiny black Tahoe into the empty streets.

  We slid into the Dodge, and I fired up the twin trumpet exhausts, slipping the muscle car into gear and pulling back out onto the main drag. “I’m hungry.”

  Henry nodded. “I am sleepy.”

  “We sound like the two dwarfs.” Looking for a place to eat, I drove toward Rapid City. “I’ll make you a deal: we’ll get something and then head back to the motel. I’ll wake Vic up and you can have the room.”

  “When are you going to sleep?”

  “When I’m dead.”

  • • •

  The food at Ron’s, not to be confused with Capt’n Ron’s Rodeo Bar, and specifically their world-famous pancakes, was just the thing, but I might’ve overdone it, ordering a stack as big as dinner plat
es. “You want some pancakes?”

  The Cheyenne Nation was doing his best with an order of biscuits and gravy that looked like it might feed two men and a hungry boy. “You ordered them, you eat them.”

  I cleaved off another chunk, dipping it in the syrup and forking it into my mouth. “Do you think we should bring something back for Vic?”

  “I do not think her stomach will be ready for solid food.”

  Sipping my coffee, I thought about a more pressing matter. “What do you want to do about Lola?”

  He stared at his plate and continued eating. “Meaning?”

  “How hard do you want to lean on her?”

  He still didn’t look up at me. “She has earned as hard as it takes.”

  “Have you considered that she might just be concerned for the welfare of her son?” His eyes came up and weighed on me. “Just wondering if you’ve considered it.”

  “I have and then immediately dismissed it.”

  “I know she’s manipulative.”

  “You do not know.”

  We stared at each other. “Look, I know she hurt your feelings, but do you really think she’s involved in the criminal element of this investigation?”

  His dark eyes went back to the table. “Why not? What, other than her gender, leads you to believe that she is in any way innocent?”

  I thought about it. “Umm, not much.”

  “Thank you.” He went back to his meal.

  “Still . . .”

  He carefully put his fork on his plate, placed his elbows on the edge of the table, and laced his fingers into a single fist. “When I strike you, I would like you to know why.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Yes, and you have said it enough.” He leaned back in his chair, the picture of restraint, his eyes closed. “You care.”

  “Yep, I do.”

  “It is one of your most annoying traits.” He opened his eyes, and the weight of them lay upon me like darkness. “Please do not ever lose it.”

  There was suddenly a strange noise, and I glanced around, his eyes still on me. “It is Bodaway’s cell phone in your shirt pocket.”

  “Oh.” I fumbled with the thing and looked at it, a trick I’d picked up from every other person on the planet. “It’s the Hulett Police Department. The guys from DCI must’ve arrived.” He picked up his fork and, instead of stabbing me with it, went back to eating.