Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3)

by Gary Earl Ross

  “You alone?” he says.

  “Always.”

  Cropper sits, angling himself so he can keep an eye on both sides of the diner—the door, the counter with pink-topped stools, and the entrance to the bar and larger dining room. Few patrons are here this weekday afternoon in early February, but Cropper is still vigilant, gray eyes ever-shifting, scanning. He went into hiding before the home invasion and fled north after it. Using his middle name instead of the Joseph D that had contracted into Jody over his lifetime, Danny Cropper ended up in rural New York, working at a feed store and keeping to himself. Now that he is back, his fear is palpable.

  The veins in his neck pulse.

  For a moment neither of you speaks. Then you say, “Grant liked the onion rings here and the vanilla milkshake.”

  Cropper turns to you. “Okay, I’ll have those with a cheeseburger.” After a breath, he adds, “Nice fella. I’m real sorry about what happened to him.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once the server takes your order, Cropper begins to relax.

  “I didn’t tell nobody I was coming back this way.” He smooths his beard in what seems a not yet habitual gesture. “Last man I want to see is Wally Ray Tucker.”

  “He knows police are still investigating him.”

  “Why I expect most of his boys are staying close to home these days. But you can never be too careful with Wally Ray.” He shakes his head. “One crazy sumbitch—meaner than a cottonmouth pissed off he can’t wear shoes, and he likes to get even. Another guy told me once Wally Ray bragged about killing the sergeant who got him thrown outta the Marines. Waited till the man was discharged. I hear the body was never found.”

  “You didn’t have to drive all this way,” you say after a few seconds. “When you called I was…stunned. We could have talked on the phone.”

  “Like I said, I got a sick cousin in Richmond. Used to babysit me. Wouldn’t be right I didn’t see her one last time.” His face tightens. For a moment he looks off. “Wally Ray don’t know about her so I doubt he’ll be waiting outside the hospital.”

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “Also wouldn’t be right I didn’t give you a face to face after what they done to your husband. Kinda feel like it was my fault.”

  You say nothing as he looks down at his nail-bitten fingers before glancing at the door and then scanning the diner.

  “I was the one contacted him,” Cropper says finally. “You see, I got involved with Liberty Storm when it was starting out. I was kinda drifting along. Went to a meeting with one of my co-workers and left thinking it was a place I could belong. Be part of something.” He hesitates. “I worked with Brick at Westfield Montgomery, in the Sears stockroom.”

  “The man I killed? He took you to Liberty Storm?”

  “Yeah. His mother couldn’ta picked a better name for him. A real doofus but always pretty decent to me.” He gazes about the diner again. “We had no idea what to do with our lives. The stockroom was good for guys like us, me leaving college one month in, him barely getting out of high school. But Sears wasn’t secure. Always losing money, always talking about closing stores. Then there was our supervisor, Jerry. Nasty little bastard. We both hated him, but Brick used to talk about hanging him from a tree.”

  “Was Jerry black?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Cropper gazes right into your eyes. “I’m gonna be honest here. I was raised to think coloreds are worth less…than whites. My father’d say stuff like, don’t end up like a ni—like them. Shiftless, criminal, and begging for a handout. A white man’s pride in his work is all he got left.”

  You want to say most of America’s thirty million black adults have never been unemployed or arrested but you bite your tongue—literally—to keep from interrupting.

  “I guess I was ready for Liberty Storm long before it came along. I went to meetings with Brick and ate their food and drank their beer. All it ever cost me was listening and reading pamphlets and talking bad about people like Jerry.” Cropper chuckles. “But I got to having second thoughts. Nasty as he was, Jerry had a job, responsibilities, a picture of his wife and kids on his desk in the stockroom. He pushed people like me to work hard for the company. But all Brick ever saw was a colored guy telling him what to do. He went deep into Liberty Storm and even said once we should take Jerry away from Bethesda, cut his throat, and bury him in the woods. I talked him out of it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Brick was dumb but not too dumb to know his limits. I told him there were cameras all over the mall and parking lots and highways. Regardless of what we thought, I said, the law considered Jerry a human being so we’d go to jail. Brick said he’d have to give the idea some more thought.”

  “So how come you had second thoughts?”

  “Your husband, ma’am, and strange enough, my father.”

  “You said you contacted my husband.”

  “I did,” Cropper says. “But let me tell you about my father first. See, Pop was quite a bit older than Mom but she died a long time ago. He got broke-down sick. There was nobody to take care of him. I’m an only child and didn’t make enough to pay for a home nurse. His younger brother was already dead—the brother whose daughter I’m gonna see in Richmond. His sister out in California hadn’t talked to any of us for years. So he went on Medicaid and into a nursing home not long after I joined Liberty Storm.”

  Pausing as the server comes near, he gazes about the diner as she sets on your table two cheeseburgers, two orders of onion rings, a vanilla milkshake, and a mint iced tea. When she leaves, he turns back to you and eats an onion ring before resuming.

  “About six or eight months after I started going to meetings, Pop took a real bad turn. It was obvious he wasn’t gonna be around long, so I went to see him much as I could. He was a mean cuss and beat me fierce when I was young but he was my father, if you know what I mean.”

  You nod, not to sympathize but to encourage him to continue. Memories of your own loving father flood your mind to wash out violent images of Cropper beaten as a child.

  “Well, I was there one day—turned out to be the day before he died—and he was talking awful to this colored nurse or aide or whatever she was. She was trying to feed him and he was calling her nigger this and bitch that and threatening to beat the shit out of her worthless black ass. She said, ‘I’m just trying to do my job, Mr. Cropper.’ I looked at her face—calm, patient, steady—and I saw the gold cross hanging round her neck. Then I looked at his face, twisted in a rage I knew too well, that my very Christian mother also knew too well. When the nurse was done, I went to her and apologized for him. I told her he was old and didn’t mean it. Her look told me she knew he did mean it, but instead of being mad she said, “You should pray with your daddy, son. Can’t be good to stand before God with hate dripping off your lips.’ After he died, I kept thinking about that. Here she was, just trying to do her job for a man who thought everybody like her was too lazy to work and she took a minute to worry about his immortal soul.”

  For a time you are both quiet as you tuck into your burgers, you with small bites, Cropper with larger chomps that guarantee he will finish first. You have half yours left when he crunches through his onion rings and takes long pulls on his shake. You decide to ask for a takeout box because everything about this late lunch—the sounds of chewing and slurping and talking, the smells of food and sugar-laden air near the soda machine and milkshake mixers, the pink and white décor—has begun to twist your gut. Grant’s favorite diner. Grant’s favorite junk food. Grant’s favorite confidential source, who inadvertently led to Grant’s murder. As you begin to think this whole meeting was a mistake, Cropper surprises you.

  “I’m sure being here’s gotta be hard for you…if he liked this place and all, so I’ll tell you how I came to contact him and I’ll give you what I came to give you so you can get back to your life and, I hope, your healing.”

  “All right,” you say quietly.

  “I used to read your husb
and’s columns in the Post,” he says. “I know, I don’t seem like the kinda fella reads liberal papers, but I used to deliver it when I was a kid. Guess that was my first job. I’m still pretty conservative, but I always liked the way he wrote. The way he talked about race without singing, ‘Poor me!’ The way he pushed personal responsibility, like conservatives on the radio. When Liberty Storm started talking about taking the war to the streets, I had second thoughts. Sure, take the fight to drug dealers and welfare queens and guys who make their living hitting corner stores. Do what the cops won’t do. But taking it to people like Jerry and that nurse, who had jobs and kids and were just trying to get by like the rest of us—that felt wrong. It was like my mother’s voice was deep in my head telling me it was wrong.”

  “So you contacted Grant.”

  “What did it was a column he wrote after one of the church shootings.”

  “The one that announced he was going to be doing a series on hate groups?”

  Cropper nods. “He said it was crazy to hurt people you could ignore and avoid if you hated them so much. He said, why not let God sort it out?”

  You remember liking that column, praising Grant for it, making love with him that night. Now your gut twists even more.

  “I got a cheap burner phone I hid under my spare tire. I called the paper and asked to speak to him. I didn’t dare use my own cell or email, in case somebody got hold of my Samsung. When they put me through, I told him I had information about a group in Maryland that wanted to get guns from out of state and might be planning to do something to a colored church or synagogue. He agreed to meet me. That’s how it all began.”

  “Were you the one who tipped off police about the guns from Georgia?”

  “No, ma’am. Your husband did that after I gave him the details, a few weeks after we started talking.”

  A reporter to the end, Grant never shared the specifics of his interviews with sources and never made any story about himself. He abhorred self-important journalism. But you are not surprised he stepped into the story long enough to alert Maryland authorities to a load of guns being brought into the state. As Dr. Clay might explain it, he had a duty to warn. Now you imagine your husband on the telephone, refusing to identify himself or his newspaper but insisting that his information was solid. He must have been persuasive—well, that was his nature—because the car was seized and the driver arrested. Before you can suppress the thought, you think of the irony: by taking those guns out of the equation, he made his own death more painful—and your survival possible.

  “Your husband helped me see a lot of things different,” Cropper says.

  “Like what?” you say, a lump in your throat.

  “Once I said the Civil War wasn’t about slavery but states’ rights.” Cropper shrugs. “That’s what I was always taught. But he made me rethink it by asking questions. A state’s right to do what? When I said determine its own destiny, he asked what destiny that might be. To keep traditions. He said, what traditions? Their way of life. He said, what way of life? I finally had to admit everything depended on slavery.”

  You say nothing.

  “We used to meet in out-of-the-way coffee shops in DC. We’d sit on counter stools so we could see the door. It was rare that guys in my circle came into DC, but we had a signal worked out in case it happened.” He bites his lip and lowers his head. Then he raises his eyes to yours, squinting as if embarrassed. “If I saw somebody who knew I was Liberty Storm, I was supposed to jump up and say, ‘Don’t touch me, nigger! Law says you can sit by me. Don’t mean you can touch me.’ Then he would say, ‘Sorry, man, it was an accident,’ or something like that. I would leave like I was steamed and call him later from my burner.” He shakes his head. “Half-assed spy shit.”

  “Did you ever have to use any half-assed spy shit?”

  “Yeah. One Saturday afternoon when we were both off, Brick showed up with this girl he liked. Surprised the hell out of me. He said later she dragged him into the city to see some boring museum. I jumped up on cue. I thought I convinced him. I mean, it was Brick, right? But I was wrong.”

  “You were his friend. Do you think he turned on you?”

  “Must have. Wally Ray left me a phone message that left no doubt he knew all about me and your husband. That’s why I made myself scarce while I made plans to go north.” Burger gone, he pops his last onion ring into his mouth. Then from his inside jacket pocket he withdraws a business envelope and a CD in a plastic sheath and lays them on the table. “This is all I know about Liberty Storm, most of what I planned to give your husband.”

  You open the envelope and pull out several sheets of paper stapled together. You unfold the papers, and a red flash drive slides onto the table. You scan the top sheet, which is single-spaced with abundant typos and only two-paragraph indentations. The second page begins with a list that confuses you. “Bird? Mars? Copperhead? Duke? Stony? Pirate?”

  “We all had codenames, thanks to Wally Ray. He had all the meetings at his place, ten to fifteen guys each time, but there’s almost fifty names there. Nobody knew everybody except him. I haven’t figured out his system yet but his codename is War Tee.”

  “Warty?”

  Cropper taps the paper to show you. “War Tee…War for Wally Ray, Tee for Tucker. That one I figured out.” He taps the page again. “Brick was Buckshot, for his initials, BB. Andy Carey has a snake tattoo on his arm. He could be Copperhead. For some reason I was Dusty.” He taps a third time. “Pirate I learned after he got busted for bringing the guns into Maryland.”

  “Lester Pegg,” you say. “Pirate? Maybe from Peg Leg?”

  “Could be.”

  Dusty—maybe from crop duster, but you do not share the thought.

  “I wrote down the real names of the few people I knew,” Cropper says, pulling your attention back to him. “Mars, Duke, Bird, Ace, and the rest I still don’t know. Sorry.” He points to the papers still in your hand. “I put some meeting notes in there too and things Wally Ray liked to talk about. That jump drive has recordings of the Krieger podcasts.”

  “The what?”

  “Morgan Krieger, the guy who does the renegade internet podcast about white purity and the race problem in America.” He pauses as if waiting for you to acknowledge you’ve heard of Krieger. You’ve seen the name in Grant’s notes but you keep that to yourself, so Cropper continues: “Nobody knows his real identity but he’s real popular.”

  Nodding, you tap the CD. “What’s on this?”

  “The Squirrels,” he says, sliding out of the booth and standing. “Rock band popular with the movement. The Free Range Vampire Squirrels. Their lyrics say it all. I hope this helps the police find which of Wally Ray’s people did all this to you.” He looks about one last time and reaches out to shake your hand.

  You offer it hesitantly, trying not to cringe. “Thank you.”

  “Thanks for the lunch, ma’am. Good luck.”

  Then he is gone.

  That night an hour of internet searches surprises you about the extent of bigoted music—several annual festivals, video clips of various bands, girl groups, even a rap-style rivalry between neo-Nazi rockers the Snake Eagles and the Free Range Vampire Squirrels. Then you listen to the Squirrels. Though their song “Watermelon Slurp,” about French-kissing a black girl, got them removed from YouTube for violations of terms of service, you sit through the whole CD. You take notes, replay lyrics, stop now and then to take a breath and remind yourself why you are subjecting yourself to this. With songs like “Buchenwald Boogie” promoting dancing through death camps and “Bullets and Babies” detailing what’s necessary for white survival, the CD is full of stereotypes, racial epithets, and invective that crosses the line into mental illness. With lyrics like “Boy, this is my place/ you need to learn yours,” the song “No Dogs, No Niggers, No Jews” calls for founding a nation called AWE, for All White Ethnostate. “Hot Flash” says, “Not enough to leave his black ass swinging in a tree/ you got to burn the rancid meat to
get back to pur-i-ty.” “Bloodfucker” depicts a man dismembering his daughter for dating across racial lines. “Enemy of the People,” a diatribe about traitors in the media, almost makes you throw up. Other titles include “Still Gator Bait to Me,” “Squinty Squirmy Chink Chat,” “Lock and Load to Secure Your Abode,” and “Burn the Burka with the Bitch Still Inside.” By the time you finish you want to toss the CD into the fireplace, but you know you must keep it, for the sake of the book.

  Plugging in the flash drive Cropper gave you, you begin to listen to the podcasts. With a voice altered by technology that makes it sound robotic but with discernible inflections—a kind of Stephen Hawking lite—the podcaster may be male or female, young or old. But you think Morgan Krieger is a man because of his anger, as older and uneducated because of his speech patterns and word choice. The podcasts range from twenty to forty minutes. What you hear horrifies you even more than the noise of the Squirrels and the Snake Eagles, who, given time, will destroy each other before they destroy America.

  Krieger is different. Calm despite his anger. Engaging. Persuasive. Even intellectual. Bible verses justifying slavery, genocide, and the separation of races fall from his lips with the practiced ease of a preacher in a megachurch. He rattles off facts, figures, and historical anecdotes with a confidence that discourages fact-checking. His ethnic impressions in an electronic voice reverberate with stereotypical speech patterns and pronunciations designed to get laughs. He heaps vitriol upon public figures rooted in liberal politics or the entertainment industry. He quotes from books you’ve heard of but never read: The Clansman, which was filmed as Birth of a Nation in 1915, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, The Camp of the Saints, The South Was Right.