Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  I’d been waiting for them: a sentinel for Sentinels. And now they were sitting in their trap waiting for me: Sentinels for the sentinel. Watchdogs, guardians of different sides of a societal coin, one representing the forces of order and justice, the other the forces of chaos and oppression. The irony was as bitter as camphor. But what made it easy to swallow was the knowledge that arrogance and stupidity would be their downfall, just as those things were the downfall of tyrants and knaves of every stripe. Sooner or later they all came crashing down into the rubble of their own arrogance and stupidity.

  I put the binoculars in their case, started the car, and drove back down to the highway.

  A wind was kicking up, strong and gusty enough out at the end of Spring Valley Road to buffet the car, turn the trees into a swaying chorus line. Ballard’s squalid homeplace seemed even more flimsy under the wind’s lash; when I negotiated the muddy access lane and left the car, I could hear boards and shingles rattling, creaking, moaning. A good big blow someday, I thought, and the whole damn shack would collapse.

  Before I went up onto the porch I paused to satisfy myself that Ballard didn’t have any more dogs lurking on the premises. If he did, they were mutes and passive besides: everything was quiet inside and in the dog run at the rear. I climbed the steps and tried the door. No reason for it to be locked way out here, and it wasn’t. Ballard had nothing to fear from neighbors or strangers. Hell, it was the other way around.

  I expected to find a junk-shop mess inside, but it wasn’t quite that bad. Mismatched garage-sale furnishings, a few unclean dishes, kindling spilled out of a wood box, a scatter of newspapers that looked unread (he probably used them to light fires in the old wood-burning stove) and a filthy dog bed with splinters of bone and bits of gristled meat clinging to the fabric. The place smelled of dog. And of wood smoke, dampness, dry rot, old grease-laden meals.

  One bare-wood wall was adorned with nude centerfolds probably torn out of Playboy and Penthouse and their raunchier cousins—all very white-skinned blondes and redheads with oversized breasts. Another wall was a sick paean to Ballard’s racism. White flag with the Aryan Nations symbol and the words “Jew Busters” underneath. Poster: Four crossed and rope-bound axes surrounded by Supreme above, White on the left, and Power on the right. Poster: USA Skinheads, and a swastika, and a knife-bearing male Caucasian giving the Nazi salute, and the slogan “Let’s Kick Some Ass!”

  Yeah, I thought. Let’s do that, Ollie, let’s kick some ass. Yours and Hicks’s and Darnell’s and Slingerland’s, for starters.

  I prowled through the front room, the kitchen, a narrow screened-in sleeping porch. In each I had to resist an angry impulse to trash what I saw—the symbols of hate, specifically. Mindless destruction was their game; I wouldn’t let myself play it. I opened drawers and cabinets, looked for hidey-holes, even got down and peered under the bed. It didn’t take long, as small as the shack was.

  I found two items of interest, both stuffed into a drawer in the kitchen. One was a blue and white felt triangle—Ballard’s very own Sentinels badge. The other was a three-page computer-generated list of names and addresses, both of individuals and business establishments, in Modoc and Lassen counties. About a third of the names were Jewish; another third were Asian; the rest could have been of any nationality but were almost certainly those of African Americans and businesses owned by African Americans. The Sentinels’ hit list. A few of the names had been roughly crossed out in ballpoint pen: targets already struck. One of those was a Vietnamese restaurant in Alturas, no doubt the same one DeFalco had told me about. I left the badge and the list in the drawer, reluctantly. By themselves they didn’t prove a thing.

  What I didn’t find was what I’d gone there for: a single piece of evidence connecting Ballard to either Allison McDowell or Rob Brompton.

  It frustrated me, because I’d read him as the type to keep souvenirs. There were examples scattered here and there to confirm that reading too: a twenty-year-old Oakland Raiders-Kansas City Chiefs game program, an array of shot glasses bearing the names of different bars and restaurants, a flyer from a KKK rally in southern Oregon, a business card from a member of the “Citizens’ Law Enforcement & Research Committee” of the Portland branch of the Posse Comitatus, even a pair of torn woman’s panties too old and too large to have belonged to Allison. If Ballard and Hicks had harmed Allison and Rob, with or without the damn pit bulls, he’d surely have kept some grisly little memento, wouldn’t he?

  On his own hook, he would. Hicks might be smart enough to have prevented it.

  And what about Hicks? Would he have kept a memento?

  I glanced at my watch. Not quite five yet. I had plenty of time before the pair of them realized I was not going to show up at the Oasis—at least an hour, possibly as much as two before they gave up on their trap. Enough time to scrounge Hicks’s address, see if I could turn up anything incriminating at his home.

  Except that he might not live alone, might have a family. Except that he hadn’t struck me as the pack-rat type. Except that I wasn’t up for any more frustration.

  Except that I was no longer convinced Hicks and Ballard were guilty.

  Of crimes real and planned against me, yes. Hard-line racists capable of murder with guns or pit bulls or any other lethal instrument—no question. No question, either, that they had to be aware of whatever had been done to Allison and Rob. But they did not have to be the perpetrators. There was another hand in this business, possibly more than one; if blood had been spilled, it might just be that those other hands were the stained ones.

  I had an idea whose they were too.

  The problem was the same as with Ballard and Hicks: proving it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was no way I would spend this night, or any more nights, in Creekside. I drove back through it in a hurry, out to the highway, and then straight down to Susanville to a Best Western I’d noticed on the outskirts. In my room, with the door locked, I took a quick shower, used the complimentary coffeemaker and two packets of french roast to brew a strong potful. When it was ready, I poured a cup and called Kerry at the condo. I needed to hear her voice—needed it bad. So it was relief as much as pleasure I felt when she picked up.

  “You sound depressed,” she said. “Things not going well up there?”

  “Depends on your point of view. I made plenty of progress today, but it isn’t the good kind.” Not where Allison and Rob were concerned.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Not until it’s finished.”

  “You’re all right, though? I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. Don’t worry.”

  “How much longer will it take?”

  “Hard to tell. Not too long.”

  “That’s good, because I miss you.”

  “Me too you. Big-time.”

  “Shameless misses you too. He keeps running around looking for you. And giving me accusing looks, as if he thinks I might’ve done something to you.”

  “Nothing you could do to me that he wouldn’t like.”

  “Well, maybe one or two things.”

  We talked for a while, neutral topics that mattered only to us. It wasn’t until after we’d rung off that I realized I had neglected to tell her about Eberhardt’s call. More evidence that I was not ready at any level to deal with him again. I wondered briefly if I ever would be, if I would bother to return his call before Sunday, or at all.

  I drank coffee, feeling blue and lonely again, the anger simmering underneath like hot sulphur and brimstone. Should I call Helen McDowell? I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She would be hurt and anxious if she didn’t hear from me . . . I still couldn’t do it. I was afraid something in my voice would give away the bleak suspicions that had piled up, their almost certain validity. Robbing her of the last of her hope before I was positive was a far greater cruelty than silence.

  I did call DeFalco. He’d get antsy if I didn’t, decide something had happened to me,
and likely take matters into his own hands. As it was, once I finished filling him in on the day’s events, he began lobbying for an immediate call to the FBI’s San Francisco district office.

  “Not just yet, Joe. I need a little more time.”

  “You can’t sit on it,” he said, “not now. It’s too hot. If that weapons-stash guard told Darnell about you, he knows the camp’s been breached.”

  I admitted that I may have botched things as far as the Colonel was concerned. But then I said, “If he was told and the fugitive warrant is his top priority, he’s already long gone. I don’t think that’s the case, though. He’s a tough mercenary soldier as well as a racist; I can’t see him cutting and running and leaving all that artillery behind. Which he’d have to do. There’s too much to move out in a hurry, and too much distance from the Corner to anyplace that would be safe.”

  “You’ve got a point,” DeFalco agreed. “Darnell’s more likely to fort up and make a fight of it. Another Waco or Ruby Ridge.”

  “Christ, I hope not with the same outcome or repercussions.”

  “Doubtful. The feds are under too much pressure and too media shy these days to get their asses in that kind of wringer again. Still, the situation could get nasty. Either way, it’s hot news.”

  “It’ll be just as hot if it goes down tomorrow.”

  “That all the extra time you want? One day?”

  “Less. Say until noon. I’m close to the truth about the kids—real close. I can feel it.”

  “You sure it wasn’t the Sentinels who were responsible?”

  “Reasonably sure it wasn’t Darnell or anybody at the camp. I’ve got a pretty good idea who. What I need is the right scenario and some hard evidence.”

  “And you figure you can get it by noon tomorrow?”

  “If I can’t, I’ll let the feds take over.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But if I don’t hear from you by noon, I’ll phone the FBI myself. That’s a promise.”

  I sat around for a time, drinking coffee and trying to assemble the bits and pieces of information I’d gathered into a cohesive whole. It was the chain of circumstances—where the crimes had happened, how, what had triggered them—that kept hanging me up. I was pretty sure I had enough pieces, but the key ones eluded me.

  At eight o’clock I gave it up and went out to the coffee shop adjacent to the motel, where I ate a tasteless coffee shop meal and lingered over two more cups of bitter brew. Back in the room I tried watching something on TV to give my mind a rest. But there was nothing in any of the flickering images and inane dialogue to hold my attention for more than a few seconds, much less to distract me. I shut the thing off and drew a hot bath and soaked in the tub for the better part of an hour. It didn’t help my thought processes, but it did relax me enough to make me drowsy.

  I crawled into bed—and I was wide awake again. I lay there watching the dark. Finally, somewhere around midnight, the jumble in my head settled enough so I could sleep.

  And dream. And dream . . .

  Churches. Old white one in Creekside, dark unpainted one in the Sentinels’ camp. Crosses outlined against gray sky. Crosses burning. Someone screaming. Black man wearing a crown of thorns, arms and legs torn and bleeding, spread-eagled on a cross . . .

  I woke up suddenly in a cold sweat. Four A.M. by the bedside clock radio. And my subconscious had worked to make it all clear in my conscious mind, the whole sequence of events as they must have taken place two weeks ago. Who, what, where, when, why . . . everything.

  And the worst of it was, the whole truth had been in my head, and under and over my head, for long days and longer nights. Monsters hiding in plain sight that I simply had not recognized for what they were.

  Christ.

  And thinking that was bad too, because He shouldn’t have been a part of it and He was.

  Creekside at five-thirty on a Sunday morning was a ghost town—a place where there were whispers and twitches of life, but a dying place just the same. The deserted main drag was layered with wind gathers of leaves and evergreen needles and Saturday-night litter. The closed-up buildings had a gone-and-forgotten aspect, like the ones on the two defunct farms far out on Spring Valley Road. Even the scatter of night lights seemed spectral, paled and fuzzed by the ceaseless rain and the predawn cloud cover.

  I rolled along slow with my headlights off, not trying to avoid any of the water-filled potholes. When I jounced past Trilby’s Hardware & Supply, the only light ahead was the one illuminating the Northern Comfort sign a block and a half distant. At the corner I turned into the side street that dead-ended to the east—the one I’d crossed on foot Tuesday evening, just before Colonel Benjamin Darnell’s Jeep driver had nearly run me down.

  Most of the block-long street was flanked with trees, those on the north running in an unbroken line and creating a thick screen that cut off any view of the motel cabins, even blotted out the light on the sign. One house, bungalow size, squatted on the south side near the corner; no lights showed in any of its windows. Another stand of pine and Douglas fir separated the house from the block’s second building, a sagging barn or large shed at the far end. Fifteen or twenty yards past the building, a rusted metal guard rail marked the street’s terminus.

  I pulled up next to the building—a barn decrepit enough to have once been a livery, the remnants of a Bull Durham sign painted on its near wall. I got out into the cold drizzle, leaving the engine running; hugged the shadows to the barn’s far corner and poked my head around it. Between the side wall and the end of the street was a section of tall grass and nothing else. No Bronco, no primer-patched truck, no vehicle of any kind. But one had been parked there not too long before: in close to the barn some of the grass was mashed down in a pair of ten-foot-long parallel strips. This was where Hicks and Ballard had hidden their wheels before Friday night’s ambush.

  I followed one of the tire tracks a short way, to test the ground. A little soft and muddy after the continual rainfall, but still firm enough so you didn’t need to worry about a car getting mired. I looked out beyond the guard rail. The creek flowed there, fast and noisy between low banks. It was maybe ten yards wide at this point.

  When I had the car pulled in alongside the barn, following the tracks in the grass, I unhooked the six-cell flashlight and slipped it into my left coat pocket. It made a clinking sound against the two screwdrivers I’d taken from the toolbox in the trunk before leaving Susanville. The weight of the .38 was a cold comfort in the other pocket.

  I slogged through the wet grass to the creek. When I glanced back I could barely see the car parked in the shadows. Fitting, by God. And nobody would know I was back in this miserable little hamlet until I wanted them to know it.

  I turned north along the near creekbank, followed its meandering progress into the woods. The earth grew spongy, almost boggy in spots; I walked slow to maintain my footing, in a hunch with eyes downcast, but I couldn’t see much except shapes and outlines. Even though it was nearing dawn and the sky was beginning to lighten a little, the tall pines cradled the darkness as if reluctant to let go of the night. Twice, when I encountered tree-root snarls and juts of rock, I had to drag out the flash and switch it on briefly, shielded by my hand, to find my way around the obstacles.

  It took me more than twenty minutes to work my way to where the trees thinned and I could make out the rearmost of the motel cabins. I veered away from the creek at that point, on a long diagonal to the back wall of cabin eleven, moving as swiftly as the footing permitted. Making noise was not a problem; the trees dripped rainwater in a steady cadence that was surprisingly loud in the early morning stillness.

  From the back wall I eased around to the bathroom window on the south side, laid my ear against cold glass. If there were any sounds inside, the dripping trees shut them out too. At the front corner I paused again, this time to reconnoiter. The grounds had the same dead-and-gone aspect as the rest of Creekside. The one visible window in the Bartholomews’ living quarters was lightl
ess, and I neither saw nor smelled wood smoke. Not even those two seemed to be up and around this early.

  I moved over next to the front window. The shade was up about six inches at the bottom—the way I’d left it?—but when I bent and squinted I couldn’t see anything within except a thick gloom. An ear to the glass didn’t pick up anything either. Chances were nobody was waiting for me in there, or I would have found Hicks’s Bronco or Ballard’s truck parked next to the barn; but I’d had enough surprises and taken enough risks. I drew the .38, held the cabin key in my left hand, worked the key quietly into the lock, and went in fast and low with the gun at arm’s length.

  Empty.

  I shut and locked the door, lowered the shade all the way to ensure complete privacy. A quick look around the room and the bathroom cubicle told me nothing, but I’d have given odds that somebody had been in there since my departure yesterday—checking after I failed to show up at Judson’s Oasis. The absence of my luggage, even though I hadn’t checked out and turned in my key, must have confused them, kept them from setting up another ambush. They couldn’t be sure I intended to come back.

  The room was packed with chill. And the cold rain and the long trek through the woods had left me wet, my fingers and toes numbed. I turned on the space heater to its highest setting, shucked out of coat and shoes and socks, used one of the threadbare bathroom towels to dry off. I laid the shoes and socks in front of the heater; sat on the floor with them until my blood began circulating freely again.

  The gun went into my belt, the first I’d let it out of one hand or the other since I’d entered. I took the flashlight and screwdrivers from my coat, did what needed to be done with them, and found what I expected to find. Then I pulled the chair over between the heater and the window, crimped an edge of the shade just enough to create an eyehole, and sat down to another wait.