Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  “What don’t you see?”

  “The connection you’re trying to make.”

  “Pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” He took a big swallow of his Sierra Nevada draft, licked away the foam clinging to his upper lip. “White woman and black man stumble into a town full of racists and get themselves blown away by a bloodthirsty mob. . . . Sounds like one of those crappy TV movies.”

  “I never said anything about a bloodthirsty mob.”

  “You might as well have,” Fassbinder said. “You make Creekside sound like some backwoods Klan stronghold, where everybody runs around in sheets, burning crosses. It’s just a village, like dozens of others up here, and most people who live there are law-abiding and no more bigoted than you or me. Sure, you’ll find a few racists if you look hard enough, just like you’ll find some anywhere else. But they aren’t very damn likely to commit a racially motivated murder in their own backyard.”

  “Not unless they figured they could get away with it,” I said. “Strength in numbers, Captain.”

  “Meaning the Sentinels.”

  “That’s right. You didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned the name.”

  “I wasn’t. We’ve had reports.”

  “What kind of reports?”

  “About that camp of theirs, their activities.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Fassbinder said. “The camp is on private property and they haven’t broken a single law that we know about. They claim to be a religious organization, the camp a religious retreat. This is still a free country—they’ve got civil rights and First Amendment rights like everybody else.”

  “Funny how it’s the people who want to deny others their civil and First Amendment rights who’re always up front yammering about their own.”

  “No argument there. But the fact remains—”

  “Yeah. What about this Colonel who runs the camp? You have an ID on him?”

  “No. First I’ve heard of him. As far as we know, a man named Slingerland is head of the Sentinels. Reverend Dale Slingerland.”

  “Affiliated with the Christian National Emancipation League by any chance?”

  Fassbinder nodded. “He’s the nephew of Richard Chaffee. But that doesn’t mean anything as far as the law is concerned. Chaffee isn’t wanted for any offense—has no criminal record of any kind—and the same is true of the others in his league. Including Dale Slingerland.”

  “So they’re all just a gaggle of Constitution-loving white supremacists.”

  “Like it or not,” Fassbinder said, “that’s right. Until we have proof to the contrary—”

  “Who preach a doctrine of purifying America of what they call race-mixing and mongrelism. So naturally they wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with an interracial couple loving up to each other smack in their midst, or ever even consider robbing a black man of his civil rights by killing him dead.”

  That bought me an even stonier look over the rim of his glass. “Proof,” he said again slowly and distinctly. “You give me one piece of hard evidence, and my department—the federal boys too—will be all over the parties responsible like ants on a picnic lunch.”

  “One piece of hard evidence. I’ll hold you to that.”

  “On the other hand,” he said, “if you break any laws in my county, kick up the kind of trouble where somebody gets hurt, we’ll be all over you like ants on a picnic lunch. Strike you as reasonable?”

  “Sure,” I said, just as tight and hard. “I have great respect for the law and for the rights of others. Victims’ rights in particular.”

  “So do I. Whether you believe that or not.”

  We watched each other for a time. Fassbinder ended the staring contest by lifting his glass, draining it. “I’ve got to get home. Wife’s expecting me.” He slid out of the booth.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  “You do that. And you remember what I said.”

  After he was gone I sat brooding into my still-full glass. There was a simmer of anger in me, but none of it was directed at Fassbinder or the laws he was sworn to uphold; he was only doing his job the best way he knew how. It was anger at intolerance, persecution, tyranny—all the stupid concepts embraced by stupid individuals.

  If those concepts and those types of people harmed Allison and Rob, I thought, they’re not going to get away with it. Whatever it takes, whatever happens, I won’t let them get away with it.

  I ate a lonely dinner in the grill half of Ron’s and then drove back to Creekside. It was nine-fifty by the dashboard clock when I swung off the highway and in along Main. A couple of dozen vehicles, mostly pickups and four-by-fours, jammed the street in the vicinity of the Eagle’s Roost; jukebox noise and loud voices filtered out from the false-fronted tavern. Friday night in the boondocks. How many Sentinels, how many league members, were in there celebrating? I wondered. The thought made me feel even more cut off from my world, even more alone.

  The Northern Comfort offered more loneliness—a dead-looking oasis in the wet night. I was still the only paying guest; the courtyard was deserted except for the Bartholomews’ wreck, and no lights showed in any of the cabins. The light in the office window was a pale, cheerless rectangle blurred by rain that had slackened again to a fine, windblown drizzle.

  The rear of the motel grounds, where number eleven waited, was ink-black outside the burrowing cones of my headlamps. When I stopped the car and shut the lights off, it was so dark I could barely make out the contours of the cabin a few feet away. The hair on my neck pulled a little, for no reason except that this kind of deep, almost subterranean black, in a place like Creekside, in a situation like the one I was up against here, combined to make me edgy and extra alert. Before I got out I mated my hand with the 38 in my coat pocket. And while I locked the car, exchanged the car keys for the door key and turned toward the cabin, I keened the night in that animallike way soldiers and lawmen learn from experience.

  The excess caution accomplished two things: it allowed me to hear the two of them coming, even above the skirling, rattling sounds the wind made in the nearby evergreens, and it gave me just enough time to set myself against the attack. If they’d been professionals, I would not have heard them at all. But they were amateurs, and in their haste and cowards’ fear they made noise.

  I swung around toward them, bracing my body against the cabin wall, trying to yank the .38 free; but there wasn’t enough time for that, and just as well too, because in darkness and at close quarters the gun would not have done me any good. In the next second they were on me—black shapes, two of them, bulky, one with something upraised in his hand . . . grunting, one giving off a thin giggling laugh, the other spitting words like a snake’s venom, “Teach you, you son of a bitch!” . . . both smelling of sweat and dry wool . . . jumbled impressions in the two or three heartbeats before it got wild and crazy. Then the one with the weapon swung at my head, and the rest of it seemed to happen at warp speed.

  I ducked under the swing, kicked that one in the leg; he yelled and stumbled away from me. The second man hit me a glancing blow over the heart that didn’t hurt much, didn’t do any damage. I had my right hand out of the coat pocket by then, empty, and I jabbed at him and missed and jabbed again; my knuckles struck bone and the shock of impact was like an eruption in my armpit. But it didn’t hurt him either. He grunted, swore, tried to drive his knee into my crotch. He didn’t have enough leverage, but I did; when his knee came up I turned my body and side-kicked his other shin. The blow was solid enough to stagger him. I managed to smack him somewhere in the face with my fist, another solid connection that knocked him down, mewling like a cat.

  The first man came charging back hard and fast. Whatever he was swinging caught me on the left shoulder and the arm immediately went numb. He pulled back to club me again; I had just enough time to twist my head and body out of the way. The damn thing made a noise like a thunderclap when it smashed into the wall above and behind me. His
arm was up where I could see it; I got a grip on the woolen sleeve of his coat and yanked the arm down hard, at the same time bringing a knee up to meet it. I heard and felt his wrist break. Heard him scream with the pain, heard the club clatter on the wet ground.

  I shoved him away, scraped rain out of my face so I could look for the second one. But he’d had enough of me. For a few seconds I saw the shape of him—getting to his feet, swaying like a sapling in the wind—and then he merged with the blackness and I was listening to the pound of his shoes on the gravel, running away.

  The one with the broken wrist yelled in a high-pitched voice, “You dirty bastard, you fuck, I’ll get you for this!” I yelled back at him, “Come on, then, come on come on,” but he was all through too. He lurched away, fell, scrambled up, and was gone.

  Like a damn fool I gave chase, my numb left arm flopping uselessly. I fumbled the .38 out, and in those first few rage-fueled seconds I would have used it if I’d had a target to shoot at. But all I had was darkness and a confused clutter of sounds. The ground underfoot was flat and carpeted with pine needles; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did—twenty or thirty yards—before I tripped over something, sprawled headlong.

  Automatically I threw my right arm out to break the fall, and when I landed, hard and jarring, the gun went off. No damage, bullet into the ground, but the recoil and the flat, too-loud report broke the wildness in me, kick-started the rational part of my brain. Stupid. Stupid, stupid. I hauled back on my knees, struggling to hear something over the wheezing plaint of my breathing. Rushing gurgle of water: the creek must be close by. But that and the wind were all I could make out.

  It was over. For now.

  Lucky, I thought as I staggered back toward the cabin. Lucky I hadn’t fallen on the gun when it went off. Lucky I wasn’t lying on the ground in front of the cabin with a busted head. Lucky the two sluggers had gotten away into the night before I could shoot one of them.

  I found the car first and leaned against it with my face upturned, sucking at the moist air. My chest felt tight, hot. The hissing blood-pound in my ears was like surf in a storm.

  Distantly a car engine roared to life and tires bit squealing into pavement. So long, you bastards, I thought. If you’re thinking about coming back later with reinforcements, you’ll wish you hadn’t.

  Some feeling began to return to my left arm, a hot tingling that put a throb in my fingertips. Pretty soon I could move it all right, hands and fingers too; nothing broken. I fished out my car keys, unlocked the driver’s door. The other item I keep clipped under the dash is a six-cell flashlight; I yanked it free, leaned back out, and relocked the door. I had lost the cabin key sometime during the skirmish and it wasn’t likely I could find it unaided in the dark.

  Even with the torch, it took me almost five minutes to locate the key: it was half hidden in a puddle. I also identified the thing the one slugger had tried to brain me with—a three-foot length of stove wood. The rain had quickened again and the wind had gone gusty; the storm’s racket shut out all other sounds. But there had been plenty of noise in the past few minutes; and plenty of shifting arrows of light from my flash. Yet neither of the Bartholomews had put in an appearance. Whatever they’d seen or heard, they hadn’t wanted any part of it or its aftermath. Mrs. Bartholomew: Lord’s business, not mine. Yeah.

  Shivering, I keyed open the cabin door. Warm enough inside but I turned the space heater up anyway, as high as it would go. I locked the door, wedged the only chair under the knob. I was on my way into the tiny bathroom for a damage check, when reaction set in.

  Dizziness, nausea, a flare of pain in my shoulder that radiated up into my neck. I sat on the bed with my head down between my knees, breathing slowly, waiting for it all to ease. I’d been through this before, too many times, and I knew it wouldn’t take long. Four or five minutes this time before I felt steady enough to get back on my feet. And once I was upright I was all right again, except for a shaky feeling that would linger awhile longer.

  The fight damage wasn’t bad. Scrape on my neck, gathering bruise on my shoulder, a painful swelling on one knuckle. But my topcoat was ruined: rip in the sleeve and another application of ground-in mud that would never come out. I stood under a hot shower for a few minutes to treat the shoulder soreness. When I came out I put on my robe and moved the chair under the window and sat there looking out past the edge of the shade, the .38 on the table next to me.

  I sat for a long time, nursing my anger, drawing energy from it. They didn’t come back. Nobody drove into the lot, nobody came out of the office building—nothing at all happened.

  The reason for the ambush was clear enough: I was getting too close to the corruption that lay beneath the surface of Creekside, too close to the truth about Allison and Rob. That giggling laugh from the one whose wrist I’d snapped . . . Ollie Ballard, no mistake. I’d pushed him too far this afternoon and he’d come shoving back with a vengeance. The other one could have been anybody; his voice had been robbed of familiarity by the wind and my own adrenaline rush. One thing sure: whoever the second man was, he, like Ballard, was a badge-carrying member of the Sentinels.

  Had the Colonel or one of his underlings ordered the ambush?

  No. Trying to bust somebody’s head in a two-man sneak attack is an amateur’s ploy, not a paramilitary one. If the Sentinels had already murdered two people, they wouldn’t hesitate to murder a third to protect themselves; and if they wanted me out of the way, they’d have sent trained soldiers to do it with guns or knives, not a couple of lowlifes armed with stove wood.

  Ballard and his partner acting on their own hook, then. But it wouldn’t have been Ballard’s idea; he wasn’t smart enough to have an idea. A follower, not a leader. The other one was behind the attack, conception and set-up both.

  You don’t want to fuck with me. I’ll rip your face off.

  Frank Hicks?

  You’re gonna wind up damn sorry.

  Art Maxe?

  No use speculating. I didn’t know enough about either of them, or enough yet about anyone connected with the Sentinels or the Christian National Emancipation League.

  At midnight, fatigue drove me out of the chair and into bed. The .38 went too; I kept it close beside me like a cold, waiting lover. I was asleep in a minute or two, but it wasn’t a good sleep. I kept waking up every half hour or so, hearing things, imagining more menace that wasn’t there. By the time gray dawn crept in around the window shade, I’d slept a total of maybe four hours, none of it deep or restful, and I knew I was all through for this night.

  The anger was still with me. Hot and hurting and hungry this morning, like something waiting to be fed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The rain had quit by the time I came out at seven-fifteen, wearing my torn and mud-caked topcoat with the .38 tucked again into the pocket. But it was only a lull; the cloud cover was still low and restless and veined with black, and the cold air still had that moist ozone smell. There was wood smoke in the air too—gobs of it pulsing out of the chimney at the rear of the office building.

  Under a lean-to arrangement tacked onto the rear wall over there, Ed Bartholomew stood hunched and plucking three-foot lengths of stove wood from a winter stack. Source of the chunk Ballard had used last night, maybe. I detoured that way, walking slow in deference to the aches and pains I would have to live with that day. My left shoulder was so stiff I couldn’t lift the arm over my head. The knuckle on my right hand throbbed too, but the swelling had gone down during the night; bruised, not broken, as I’d feared at first. It wouldn’t hamper me much if I needed to use the gun.

  Bartholomew straightened as I approached, turned with an armload of wood. His movements were as slow and painful as mine, from whatever joint or vertebra problems plagued him. When he saw me he stopped and stood stiffly, his back bowed, waiting.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Morning. You checking out?”

  “No. I’ll be here awhile longer.”


  “How much longer?”

  “I can’t say. Depends on how fast things come together.”

  “What things?”

  “What things do you think, Mr. Bartholomew?”

  He wouldn’t hold my eyes. He said, “Your business, none of mine,” and started to turn away.

  I was tired of hearing that cop-out phrase; it stirred my anger. I stopped him again by saying, “Quite a commotion last night.”

  “Commotion?”

  “Over by my cabin. Around nine-thirty.”

  “That so?”

  “Didn’t hear the noise? Some of it was pretty loud.”

  “Didn’t hear a thing,” Bartholomew said. “Missus and me was watching a program. She don’t hear too good—had the sound turned way up.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “I got to take this wood inside,” he said.

  I let him get as far as the door this time. “Don’t you care what the commotion was about?”

  “No,” he said without looking at me.

  “Happened on your property. For all you know, it could’ve been bad trouble and I’m thinking of suing you.”

  “Can’t get blood from a turnip. All me and Ruth’s got is each other and the Lord God almighty.” And then he was gone inside. I heard the lock click as soon as the door shut behind him.

  The car started slow and balky this morning, the same as its owner, and the engine made knocking noises until it warmed up. I’d put a lot of miles on it lately, well over a hundred thousand in all the years I’d had it. Good car, but if I was going to keep it much longer, I’d have to have the engine completely overhauled. Maybe it was time to buy another set of wheels. Kerry thought it was—“something newer, with a little more pizzazz.” Newer, possibly, but pizzazz was for younger guys with image needs and psychological attachments to speed and sleek-and-shiny hunks of metal. Old farts like me didn’t need to bond with the thing we drove from point A to point B. All I cared about was that the hunk of metal could be depended upon to make each trip without adding any more hassles to my already disordered life.