Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  They were at the door by then. And a few seconds later they were out of my sight.

  “We ain’t the same,” Maxe said to me. Then he said, “You were right. They done it.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I left Maxe to keep an eye on things and walked to the general store and made two calls on the public phone: the Lassen Sheriffs Department and Joe DeFalco. Fassbinder wasn’t in but the officer I spoke to said he’d contact him; and DeFalco, sounding ecstatic, said he would take care of notifying the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. When I was finished with the calls I went and rounded up my car and drove it to the Northern Comfort and waited with Maxe for the law to show up.

  The Bartholomews did not try to run. Nor did they arm or barricade themselves inside their home. They didn’t do anything except maybe guzzle some gin, read the Bible, and curse me and my kind. I would have been surprised if they’d tried to run or to make a fight of it. It was one thing to take up weapons against what you believed was a coming race war, a kind of unholy war; it was an entirely different thing to flee from or take up weapons against White Authority. Particularly when in their warped way of thinking they really hadn’t done anything wrong.

  In a sense that was the most terrible fact of all: Ed and Ruth Bartholomew truly did not believe they had done anything wrong.

  They made their confessions to Fassbinder and the county sheriff himself at twelve-fifteen that afternoon. I wasn’t there when they opened up under questioning; Maxe and I were back at his garage, waiting there and mostly avoiding each other because there was nothing left to say. One of the deputies came and told us. But I did get to see the transcriptions of their statements later on, and each one made me glad I had not been present to see and hear the words spew out of their mouths.

  Ruth Bartholomew: They were making noise over in eleven, laughing and whooping, just having themselves a gay old time. Wasn’t anybody else staying with us that night, so you could hear them plain. I went on over to see what they was up to. A body has to be careful in the motel business. Sometimes guests get rowdy, break things, steal things, you got to watch them like a hawk. The shade was up partway and the window was wide open, they didn’t even have the decency to pull the shade or close the window all the way, and there they were inside for all the world and the devil to see, naked as the day they was born, laughing and rolling around on the bed, him with his big black member sticking straight up in the air. Well, I was never so shocked in all my life. Never seen nothing so lewd and disgusting. White girl and that big buck nigger . . . we never even knew she was with a nigger. Ed never seen him when they checked in and neither did I, not until I looked in that window and my eyes was seared by the sight of them, kissing and fondling one another on one of my beds, practically right in my own Christian house. Well, it just made me go off my head. Make any decent white person lose his senses, an abomination like that. I don’t remember going in for the pistol. Next thing I knew I had it in my hand and I was opening the cabin door, they never bothered to lock the door neither, and then I was right there in the room with ’em. I don’t remember shooting her. Him, though . . . two rounds right in the middle of his dirty black face. Oh, I remember that, all right. I’ll never forget that. Sorry? No, I ain’t sorry. Why should I be sorry? What they was doing, him and his white whore, they was sinning against the whole white Christian race, against God Himself. They deserved what I gave them . . . I was God’s own avenging angel, sent to smite them down. I’d do it again the same way if God give me the chance. I’d do it all again the same way!

  Ed Bartholomew: They was already dead, both of them, when I run in. Wasn’t much for me to do except clean up the mess and get Ruth calmed down. I wrapped ’em up in blankets and put ’em in the car. Mattress and sheets too, on account of all the blood. Hurt my back doing all that heavy lifting, my back’s been paining me fierce ever since. Then I took ’em out in the woods and dug a hole and put them in it. No, not too far from here, just a few miles over east. Next morning I got their little sports car from Art Maxe and put their belongings in it and drove it over to Eureka and left it there and come back on the bus. I guess that’s all. I ain’t sorry it happened neither. Like Ruth said, what they were doing was a sin and an abomination and she was the instrument of God’s judgment against it. I don’t see nothing to be sorry for.

  Bartholomew took Fassbinder and the sheriff to where he’d buried the bodies in a shallow common grave. I wasn’t there for that, either; there was no way I would have gone along even if I’d been invited. Nor would I go along when they went to arrest Frank Hicks and Ollie Ballard, though I damned well intended to press charges against both men for aggravated assault and, if it could be made to stick, intent to commit murder.

  Before the law left with Bartholomew, I got permission to quit Creekside for the time being. Later on there would be quite a party and I would have to be there for it. DeFalco had said he would grab a photographer and hire a plane and be up in four or five hours. And FBI and ATF agents and federal marshals would soon be showing up in bunches. Whether or not they decided to raid the Sentinels camp was a moot point at this stage; they had to act slowly and carefully these days, after the public furor over their screwups with the Branch Davidian in Waco and the Ruby Ridge shootout in northern Idaho. Whatever they did about Darnell and the Sentinels, Chaffee and the Christian National Emancipation League, it didn’t really involve me. I’d done my duty, and once I answered a battery of official questions, I would be out of it.

  There was plenty of time before the big party started, and I had no stomach for making my last call of the day from this ugly little village with its ugly little people. I wanted no more to do with it or them from now on than was absolutely necessary—any of them, including Lena and Mike Cermak and Art Maxe. So I drove to the Best Western in Susanville and made my last call from there. The hard one, the one I’d been dreading all day. The one to tell Helen McDowell, as Fassbinder would have to tell Rob Brompton’s parents, of the unconscionable evil that had destroyed a pair of innocent young lives.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Sentinels, organized unit and camp both, came to a sudden termination early Monday morning. The FBI and ATF were partly responsible, but in the main the bastards simply self-destructed. And it all happened more or less bloodlessly, much to the evident relief of local law, local residents, and beleaguered feds.

  DeFalco and I were both wrong about how the Sentinels’ brain trust would react when they found out the compound had been breached and a government raid was imminent. In the first place, those intellectual giants, Colonel Darnell and Reverend Slingerland, didn’t put it together until around noon on Sunday. And when they did figure it out, there was a sharp disagreement as to what to do about it. Darnell had wanted to fort up for a siege, all right, but his second-in-command was against it; Slingerland’s solution was to load up as much of the arsenal as could be crammed into the three large trucks they had available and make a run for it. The dispute turned heated, tempers frayed and snapped, guns came out, triggers got yanked, and when the smoke cleared, the Colonel was dead and Slingerland had a flesh wound in his left arm.

  The irony in this part was about as pretty as it gets. DeFalco even found grim humor in the shootout. A “black comedy in whiteface,” he called it.

  With Darnell dead, the camp was in a turmoil. Some of the Sentinels refused to leave, but most followed the good reverend’s lead. The boxes of weapons and ammunitions were hauled out of the armory and loaded into the three trucks, which around two A.M. set out along the escape road on a run for Highway 395 south of Creekside. They never made it. The feds had the escape route pinpointed by then and they’d closed it off; they were waiting with plenty of men and firepower of their own. Slingerland was in the first truck and evidently unwilling to risk death again for his cause: he surrendered at the first show of force. The rest of the runaway pack quit, too, without much more than a couple of warning shots being fired.

&n
bsp; A few hours later, just after another wet, gray dawn, the feds mobilized again and a hundred or so FBI and ATF agents and U.S. marshals, armed with federal warrants among other things, stormed the compound from both directions. They were met with token resistance. By that time only twenty people were left in the camp, and half of those were women and children; the rest had scattered into the woods. The remainder of the weapons stash was in government hands within an hour of the offensive.

  When word of this came in to the Sheriffs Department in Susanville, where DeFalco and I were waiting, he turned to me and offered another of his cynical comments. It was apt, though. It summed the whole business up in a nutshell.

  “With a whimper, not a bang,” he said.

  What with the vanquishing of the Sentinels and other matters, I didn’t get around to calling Tamara Corbin until late that morning, after she’d come in to open up the office. And that was a foolish mistake on my part. She was hurt and angry, and she had every right to be—for more reasons than one.

  “I sat around the whole weekend waiting on the phone to ring,” she said. “Po’ li’l black chile waitin’ to hear from the massuh.”

  I said, “I should’ve called—you’re absolutely right and I’m sorry. But there wasn’t anything you could’ve done, and things got to be pretty crazy up here—”

  “Yeah, I guess they did. I read Joe DeFalco’s story in the paper this morning. All about it in the fucking paper. I ought to be grateful you called up this morning, huh?”

  “Tamara . . .”

  “Listen,” she said, “it’s shit, you know that? It’s all shit and it’s never gonna be anything else. You hear what I’m saying to you?”

  “I hear.”

  “Whitey’s world. Now and forever, amen.”

  “I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either.”

  “No? You think the world doesn’t belong to whitey? You really believe it’s gonna be different someday?”

  “Someday, yes.”

  “So you’re satisfied with the way things turned out up there, right? All those big bad racist folks brought down. System works, justice triumphs again.”

  “Tamara,” I said, “I’m one man. I did a one-man job the best way I knew how—that’s all. No, I’m not satisfied. And you’re wrong if you think it doesn’t hurt me that Allison and Rob died the way they did, that I couldn’t do anything to save them.”

  “They never had a chance anyway,” she said bitterly. “Not once they took up with each other.”

  “You’re wrong about that too. It wasn’t just bigotry that killed them; it was circumstances. Circumstances kill people every day, no matter what color they are.”

  “Yeah, circumstances. They’d still be alive if they were both white.”

  “Or if their car hadn’t quit on them when and where it did. Or if they hadn’t been so much in love, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Or if a dozen, a hundred, other things had happened differently.”

  “Okay, maybe. But I’m telling you, man, it’d still have been bad for them down the line. I know interracial couples. I know what kind of circumstances they can expect.”

  “If they’d loved each other enough—”

  “What’s this now, the love’s-the-answer-to-everything rap? You and Dr. King. Only they killed him too, didn’t they.”

  “So what’s the alternative, Tamara? Be a hater like James Earl Ray? Like the Bartholomews and Colonel Darnell and Richard Chaffee and the rest of them? Hate sure as hell won’t change the world.”

  She was quiet for several beats. “Love won’t change it either,” she said, but her anger seemed to have lost some of its intensity.

  “It’s already changing. Slow, too damn slow, but it is changing. It will change.”

  “Believe it when I see it.”

  “Just don’t turn into a hater until you do. Let the bigots and the fools rip themselves apart with it. Don’t you do it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean it, Tamara. Don’t go that route.”

  “. . . Matter that much to you, what I do or think?”

  “Bet your ass it matters.”

  A little more silence. Then, “Bet your ass you better call next time anything like this goes down. Otherwise you can get some other poor fool to do your scut work.”

  “Scut work, hell. I can’t get along without you anymore and you know it.”

  “Sure. Ms. Private Eye in training.”

  “A good investigator in training.”

  “So? Do I hear a promise?”

  “I promise. If there’s a next time, and I damn well hope there isn’t.”

  “Better remember that,” she said. Then she said, “It wasn’t just what was going on up there, you know.”

  “No? What else?”

  “You, massuh. I was worried about you, all right?”

  And she hung up on me. Not gently, but not too hard either.

  It was one o’clock that afternoon before I finished answering the last question, signing the last official document. They let me leave then, the not-very-grateful feds and the not-too-appreciative county law. I was weary, burned out, and I thought about staying over in Susanville for the rest of the day and night, as DeFalco was planning to do. But I was also fed up with this part of the state; I couldn’t talk myself into spending another night in the Corner. I needed to be home, to be with Kerry—had never needed either so badly.

  So I went ahead and made the long, long drive to San Francisco, stopping once for gas and once to feed my hunger. Thoughts and memories rode with me, and the worst of them was the sound of Helen McDowell’s tearful voice on the phone, and the last hollow words she’d said to me: “Thank you. You did all that anybody could’ve done—thank you.” The last hour and a half of the drive seemed as interminable as the official questions, but then it ended, as all things end, and I was home. And Kerry was there for me, as she always is when I need her most.

  There was quiet talk, and holding, and lovemaking, and afterward, lying close together, hands clasped, in her big, warm bed, I could feel the fatigue and sadness and anger easing, some of the darkness of recent events burning away. Love heals much more quickly than time does. It wouldn’t be long, not too long, before all that had happened in Creekside took on a distance, a remoteness, and the details faded, and it all became no more than an incident, one more difficult case among dozens of other difficult cases hidden away in that part of me that is walled against pain—or, anyway, walled against all but the sharp twinges stirred by an occasional memory. It wouldn’t be long, not too long, before things were back to normal, or what passes for normal in my world.

  That was what I thought then, just before I drifted off to sleep.

  But I was wrong.

  What made me wrong was circumstances. Direct and indirect, my actions and the actions of others known and unknown to me. The ripple effect. The old “what-if” game that could make you a little crazy, or even a lot crazy, if you played it often and long enough . . .

  I was sleeping hard and restless, fighting off dreams that were all bad feeling and no substance, when Kerry woke me with a combination of words and gentle shaking. I pried one eye open. Morning. She was still in her robe, but her hair had been combed and she’d applied about half of her makeup.

  “I was going to let you sleep until I left for work,” she said, “but there’s a call for you.”

  Groggily I squinted at the bedside clock. Seven-fifteen. “This early? Who is it?”

  “Joe DeFalco. He sounds upset.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He said he’d tell you.”

  I rolled out of bed, aching and stiff, eliciting an indignant yowl from Shameless, who had been sleeping butted up against my leg, and found my robe and slippers and hobbled out to the phone.

  “What’s up, Joe?”

  “I’ve got news. Bad.” He sounded upset, all right. As upset as I’d ever heard him. Emotion thickened his voice, gave it a phlegmy
quality.

  “Now what’s going on up there?”

  “Nothing. It’s not about the Sentinels.”

  “What, then?”

  “Sometime late last night, they’re not sure just when—” He broke off, and I heard him suck in a heavy breath. “Ah, Jesus, I hate this,” he said. And then, “Night-beat Chron reporter at the Hall of Justice just got word to me. Patrol car found him a couple of hours ago, out by Islais Creek.”

  “Found who? Joe, you’re not making sense—”

  “Eberhardt,” he said. “Eberhardt’s dead. Shot in his car, once through the head with a .44 Magnum.”

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