“Gilman married her when she was sixteen.”
Now Matt lifted his eyes from the photo and stared at Snyder. “Is that even legal?”
The sound the agent made was not quite a sigh. “In forty-eight states of the U.S. The general age of marriage is eighteen, but there are exceptions in all forty-eight of those states that mean a minor can be married with the consent of parents or legal guardians, consent of a court clerk or judge, or if that minor is pregnant or has given birth to a child. In eighteen states, there is virtually no minimum age of marriage.”
“That’s disgusting,” Matt said numbly.
“Oh, it’s worse than that. In some states minors cannot legally divorce, leave their spouse, or enter a shelter to escape abuse.”
Outside the SUV, the line of armed men grew. And Snyder continued, “The Bible says man shall have dominion over the Earth and all the animals. Dominionists like Gilman take that to mean they have God-given dominion over their wives and children, too. But. The anonymous caller was female. So it’s possible that it was Gilman’s wife who made the call about Gilman’s threats.”
“Looking for help?” Matt asked. He felt a prickling of hope.
“In perhaps the only way she could. Abusers are very, very good at isolating their families from any support system. We’ve been watching the house, hoping to get a chance to talk to her. But for the last week, she hasn’t left.” He looked out the windshield. “For these many reasons, we’re here to surveil Gilman’s activity at this show.”
“Let’s go,” Matt said. It was all he could do not to grab the door handle that very second.
“Not together,” Snyder warned him. “We’ll look too much like law enforcement. Go on ahead. Keep your phone on. Just look for him. Don’t approach, don’t interact. Walk the exhibition hall and act like a customer. I’ll be nearby.”
The fairgrounds were already crowded and the asphalt radiated the heat of the day. Matt could feel it through the soles of his shoes as he walked toward the gate.
He scanned the crowd, estimated he was seeing ninety-five percent men, ninety-nine percent white.
He also realized exactly why Snyder had asked him to wear jeans and the concert T and hat. It was practically the uniform of the under-thirty crowd. And many of the older crowd, too. He saw tattooed bikers, jeans and black death metal concert T-shirts, camouflage wear, cowboy hats and boots.
He joined the entry line behind a guy in an electric wheelchair with a six-weapon gun rack on the back of the chair, and studied the array in disbelief while he worked out his cover story in his head. I’m a transfer student starting at Virginia Tech in the fall. I’m shopping for a Glock. It was a weapon he knew well from his law enforcement volunteer work, although he wasn’t about to say that part. Sure, I’ll take a look at something else if you’ve got it. Talk me into it.
At the ticket booth he declined NRA membership and paid the entrance fee, then wound his way through several food trucks serving burgers and pulled pork, heading toward the exhibition hall.
He stepped through the double doors—and braced himself against a glacial blast of air conditioning. He had to pause to let his eyes adjust to the dark, such a contrast from the blazing sun outside.
He was in a long tubular hall with rows and rectangles of folding tables set up for dealers, much like any county fair. But these tables were literally bowing under the weight of thousands of firearms. Boxes of ammunition stacked on plywood and sawhorse tables. Gunpowder sold in gallon jugs.
He’d had firearms training since age fourteen. But he had never seen so many weapons assembled in one place. There were more than enough to arm a small country.
He found his mind and his body rebelling against the sight, against the sheer scope of it. It was impossible to take in, rationally. The hall was filled with death.
He forced himself to move forward, to join the hundreds of people wandering in the aisles, looking over tables displaying rifles, shotguns, handguns, gun parts, scopes, knives, machetes, nunchucks, swords.
At one booth were stacks of survival kits with weeks’ worth of freeze-dried food, elaborate backpacks, camouflage suits and other wilderness survival equipment, all under a misspelled banner: Can you’re family survive the Apocalipse?
An elderly man walked by with a rifle slung across his back, a sign with the lettering “Ask me about my gun” on a sign sticking out of the barrel. As Matt turned his head to look at the man, he saw another man a few feet away carrying a similar long gun with a similar sign.
Matt’s internal danger alert shot up to “high.” In his criminal justice classes, he’d studied the “weapons effect”: the increased levels of aggression shown by people in the presence of weapons. The statistics were startling.
If the presence of weapons was a predictor of heightened aggression, he was in the psychological equivalent of a radiation hot zone.
A loud dinging went off, and everyone in the aisle turned toward a small stage at one side of the hall. A man in a ten-gallon hat stepped up to the microphone. “Hope y’all saved your entry tickets. There’s a number on that ticket, and in a few minutes we’re gonna be drawing the lucky winner of this brand new AR-15. Get ‘em out, folks, and get ready…”
As other around him dug in their pockets, Matt moved on, scanning the faces for Gilman.
At a table displaying AK-47s, a breakdown tutorial played on a video screen above the booth, which proclaimed itself YOUR ONE-STOP ASSAULT SHOP. Two hulking, obese young men, both younger than Matt, bellied up to hold the guns.
Matt turned away and almost collided with a young couple pushing a three- or four-year old boy in a stroller. The boy brandished a toy machine gun almost as big as he was. He pointed and “shot” at Matt. The clear plastic of the gun lit up with colorful flashing lights and the sound of gunfire.
Focus, Matt told himself. Find Gilman.
Chapter 27
I-95, Virginia - June 2005
Cara
She drives steadily and tries to calm her buzz.
It is quickly replaced by anger.
She knows that her senses are heightened by the moon. It has always been so, and the moon will be full tonight. She also knows it is the collective effect of the freeway harassment she has been experiencing throughout the country that has led to this final straw.
Why should men like this be allowed to terrorize the highways?
Not today, she decides. Today they lose.
She pulls off the highway at a wooded turnoff to wait for the truck. She does not think she damaged it enough to slow them down much.
She spots it again within ten minutes, a red blur, flying by the turnoff. It is definitely the truck. The same group of men. The same Stetsoned driver, the same sweaty round-faced man with his wire frame glasses, the one who’d caressed the shotgun.
She lets the truck pass. And she follows.
The truck leaves the interstate at a Richmond exit with signs pointing toward a fairground. As the truck approaches the complex, she sees banners and bus stop billboards announcing a gun show.
Of course the red truck slows to join the line of vehicles turning into the parking lot. Of course.
Guns.
A parking space opens right in front of the gated entrance, and she pulls into it to think. She turns off the engine and watches the red truck drive through the gate into the parking lot.
A dilemma.
Her loathing for firearms is huge and visceral. And the vast majority of the vehicles entering the fairground are men. She cannot follow her attackers into this place. She has no desire to sit waiting for them to reemerge.
And yet she is feeling no urgency to leave.
So she puts on her cap and a hoodie, grabs her backpack, and gets out of her truck. She joins the foot traffic to walk through the gate onto the fairgrounds, into an enormous parking lot.
There are hundreds of vehicles parked: cars, motorcycles, SUVs, and trucks. Truck after truck, not a few with Confederate flag bumper
stickers. Dozens of them are as big and red as the one that tried to run her off the road.
But she finds the truck easily, the red monstrosity, parked and empty. She can see the scrape she herself put into it, cut into the driver’s side. She slips between it and the truck parked beside it, two massive walls of metal, neatly concealing her from the eyes of anyone passing by.
The red truck is an older Ford, like many she has driven in her desert joyriding. Easy to jack.
Which makes her decision that much easier.
She never travels without her kit: pliers, knife, screwdriver, coat hanger. She removes what she needs from her backpack and when there is no one walking past, she gets to work with the wire.
Chapter 28
Richmond, Virginia - June 2005
Matt
He’d found him.
Gilman stood right across from him at a large island of display tables, four tables long by three wide.
In the photo Gilman had looked grim and menacing. In three-dimensional reality he was rotund, apple-cheeked, wet-lipped, wearing a prissy pair of wire-framed glasses. He was in his forties, but Matt could still see the bullied Mama’s boy he must have been as a child, and felt a surge of contempt. This would-be hero with a gun fetish. An accountant with fantasies of shooting his way through a millennial Apocalypse.
And if he couldn’t have his fantasy, he’d take down as many people as he could fire at. Starting with his child wife and kids.
Matt no longer felt sick. It was something else entirely.
Fury.
He stepped up to the nearest corner of the booth, pretending to browse so he could watch Gilman.
Glancing down at the display, he was taken aback to see the tables were crammed with hundreds of items of Nazi memorabilia, from cheap modern swastika flags to Nazi-era toilet tissue in a yellowed brown paper wrapper with the word Edelweiss printed in German lettering.
Behind the tables, an enormous man overflowing his wheelchair and a younger, more conventionally burly man were doing a brisk business.
The younger vendor shot a look at Matt. Matt forced himself to stay still and play customer. He perused a layout of antique Third Reich daggers and watched out of the corner of his eye as Gilman began a furtive conversation with another of the dealers, a large tattooed man in motorcycle leathers, wearing a bandanna.
Matt positioned himself so that he could see more clearly, and picked up a dagger, hefting the weapon, all the time keeping one eye on Gilman.
The bandannaed dealer nodded to a door with a clearly posted sign: NO ENTRY. He moved toward it. Gilman followed, and as the bandannaed vendor slipped through the door, Gilman was right behind him.
Matt circled the table, keeping up his pretense of browsing. He couldn’t very well walk through the door after them—
Then the dinging bell went off again, and everyone turned as they had before, focused toward the small stage.
Without stopping to think, Matt used the cover of the momentary distraction to slip through the door.
He found himself in a long maintenance corridor, with work lights giving off a sickly glow. The door shut behind him, closing off the exhibition hall.
The tunnel was dim and vile, smelling of sour milk and trash and rubber, a whiff of rotting hot dogs and old popcorn. Matt was alone. No sign of Gilman or the bandannaed vendor—
Even as he thought it, there was a sudden, live rustling beside him. He twisted around…
A grotesquely large rat waddled out from between piled black trash bags.
Matt moved quickly away from it, revolted.
There was only one way to go: a ramp sloping down to an underground level.
He started quietly downward, sticking close to the wall to create less of a target, as he’d learned in tactical classes.
The slope evened out into a narrower tunnel which branched in three directions: left, right, and straight ahead. There seemed to be a whole warren of concrete tunnels running underneath the exhibition halls.
He stood still at the crossroads and listened hard. Down the tunnel to the left he could hear the faint sound of male voices.
Matt felt for his phone and dialed Snyder. Instead of connecting, the phone simply cut off. He checked the screen, and saw no bars.
No reception underground.
He glanced back behind him at the ramp. He knew he should go back, find Snyder…
But by then it might be too late, he argued with himself. Gilman could be gone.
If he’d obeyed orders at Bishop Peak he never would have found Tracy. In fact, if he’d just stayed on the mountain instead of going back to check in like a good little soldier…
Not this time, he resolved.
He moved into the left-hand tunnel…. and froze at the sound of a sharp male voice.
“You’re late enough.”
Matt pressed back against the concrete wall. The voice had come from another corridor.
Another answered the first. “Little accident on the road.” Gilman.
Their voices echoed off the walls, an eerie disembodied effect. The first man said something indecipherable, and Gilman responded with something that sounded like,
“Some bitch driver…”
Matt moved silently forward toward the corner and peered into the connecting corridor.
Gilman and the dealer were walking toward the end of it. Matt dodged behind another black pyramid of trash bundled in plastic contractor bags. His shoe scuffed an aluminum can that had escaped from a trash bag. It clattered across the concrete floor.
Ahead of him one of the men growled, “The hell was that?”
Matt pressed his back against the cool hard wall, holding his breath against the stink. His heart thumped in his chest as he imagined the two of them staring back into the darkness.
“Rat, probably. There’s a shitload of them down here.”
“Hell, what’re we waiting for? Exterminate the bitches.”
Matt flinched as the voice exploded in the echoey halls: “BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM…”
That was Gilman, wasn’t it? Not good. The guy sounds like a psycho.
So don’t lose him.
Matt forced himself to move, to edge his head around the side of the trash bag pyramid.
The two men were far, far down the concrete corridor, now, headed for a set of double doors with a glowing red EXIT sign above.
Matt hovered beside the mountain of trash bags until he heard the slam of heavy doors.
They’re out.
He sprinted to the end of the corridor, came to a halt in front of the filthy industrial double doors with the glowing red EXIT sign above.
He paused, his hand on the release bar, his heart racing, his neck sweating.
And then pushed the door open.
The sudden sunlight was blinding. He caught a glimpse of a concrete ramp, leading down to a back lot…
Instinctively he dropped into a crouch, below the level of a slanted concrete wall lining the ramp. He had no idea if he’d been seen.
He heard the bleat of a car alarm, the cut-off sound of a door opening mechanically.
They must be parked right next to the ramp.
He pressed his palms against the concrete of the wall and eased his way up to look over.
Gilman and the bandannaed dealer stood beside a white van. The dealer pulled open the back doors of the van. Matt could see straight down into the vehicle.
Not just a few weapons. The whole van was crammed with gun racks and ammunition. Rifles, submachine guns, bulky cases that suggested far more ominous weapons.
Matt pulled out his phone and started surreptitiously clicking off photos.
The dealer slammed the doors of the van and handed Gilman the keys. Matt continued to photograph the exchange as Gilman got into the front seat of the van. The engine flared up, and Matt fumbled with the phone to dial Snyder’s number—
The door opened behind him.
Matt twisted around to find the bulky younger
vendor from the Nazi memorabilia booth, and another man in plaid shirt and duckbill hat. They stepped in to surround him. Armed and definitely not friendly
“Whatchu doing back here, boy?” the man in the duckbill hat challenged him. “This here’s restricted access.”
The bandannaed vendor moved up the ramp from the parking lot.
Three of them.
Matt looked straight at the bandannaed vendor. “I was following you.”
He could see the vendor was startled, but the man blustered, “You queer for me?”
People really talk like this? Matt wondered. They sounded like good ol’ boys from some seventies movie. But he wasn’t laughing. He was the only one there who wasn’t armed.
He was also pretty positive that his California accent wasn’t going to win him points with this crowd. He tried to channel his upstate New York cousins as he answered.
“I’m looking for something for my father,” he said. “Figured you wouldn’t be showing the best stuff out there on the floor.”
The vendor looked truculent and skeptical. “Best stuff? What ‘best stuff’ would that be, boy?”
Matt’s mind scrambled back to his high school history. “Dad’s nuts for anything Reichsparteitag,” he said, using the German word for the Nuremberg rallies. “Postcards, banners.”
“You want the good stuff, huh?” The bandannaed dealer’s eyes were a chilling blank. “Why don’t you take a ride with us, then? See if we can’t find the good stuff for your Daddy.”
Matt was pretty damn sure that a ride-along with the militia boys was not what Snyder had had in mind. But he’d approached them. He couldn’t very well back away now.
“What kind of stuff’re you—”
But before he finished the sentence, he felt a massive blow connect with his head.
And everything exploded in blackness.
Chapter 29
Richmond, Virginia – June 2005
Cara
She drives the hotwired truck out of the parking lot and double parks it beside her own truck, leaving the engine running.
Shadow Moon Page 11