by Andy Straka
“Then why do you think they killed your daddy?”
“ ‘Cause he must’ve found their hideout.”
“Their hideout?”
“Yeah,” he said. “C’mon. I’ll show you.”
He turned sharply and led me on a path perpendicular to the one we’d been on. We forded the stream and passed through a washout area of loose earth and large rocks. The night’s snow had turned the surface of the stones slick and I had to watch my footing, but the boy moved like a gazelle over the ice and the moss. After a few hundred yards, he turned off the faint path and we climbed uphill again, grabbing on to branches and rocks where we could gain a handhold to pull ourselves up, scrambling for several minutes until we reached the very top of the ridge.
“How far’re we going, Jason?” I finally asked.
“Just down there,” he said, pointing down the opposite side of the slope.
We now began to descend, which was even slower going than the climb, given the steepness of the hill and the lack of footing. About halfway down the boy stopped and looked up and across the slope to a spot about fifty yards distant where the ridge turned into an almost vertical cliff.
“Are we going to have to climb that?” I asked, thinking we would’ve been better off to approach from above.
“Ain’t that far.”
He scampered across the incline and I followed until we reached the bottom of the cliff. At the base of the rock wall where it turned straight upward was a stand of long tree trunks that had fallen together into a gigantic tangle perhaps a few years before. Jason waded into them.
“You got to bend down to get in here,” he said.
I wedged myself under a huge fallen pine trunk. On the other side, hidden from everything else around it, was a narrow opening in the rock wall. The boy went over and stood beside it.
“What is it?” I asked. “A cave?”
“Yes, sir. My daddy said they was going to cut a quarry or maybe mine something in this hill a long time ago, but they stopped. It don’t go in very far. I found it last year.”
“This is where you saw the masked men?”
He nodded.
“When did you see them?”
“Before daddy died.”
“How long before your daddy died?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“Was it a long time, like before your last birthday?”
He seemed confused for a moment. Then he said, “No, it wasn’t that long. You want to see inside?” He started to move into the opening.
“Wait,” I said. I stepped along the wall in front of the opening. “Better let me go first. I wish you’d told me earlier. I could’ve brought a flashlight.”
The boy said nothing.
The opening was quite narrow, barely large enough for a full-grown man to squeeze through. Just enough light filtered down from a crack in the ceiling overhead to see all the way to the back wall, maybe ten yards deep inside the fissure. I’d only taken a half step through the opening when it hit me: the pungent odor of ammonia, a telltale indication of a high concentration of ammonium nitrate. I stopped and held out my hand.
“What?” he asked.
I didn’t answer but squinted as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. Was there a bomb here? Not anymore. None that I could see, at least. No large containers of chemicals or wire or fuses or large man-made devices of any kind. Then I spotted something on the floor of the cave. A dead bird lay only a few feet to my right, its half-mangled carcass entwined in a patch of wet leaves. A mourning dove from the looks of it, or maybe a pigeon.
But there was more. A little farther along the floor of the cave I saw another dead bird. And another. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, among the leaves there was also the whip end of another tail transmitter. Was Elo, or what might be left of him, somewhere in here too? I took a half step forward then remembered what Toronto had told me about the plan to set up the Stonewallers by luring them into a deal to purchase bogus chemical agents. His contact had told him the Feds had a handle on all that. But the way things were going, what if it turned out some of those agents weren’t exactly counterfeit either?
“Jason, let’s go. We’re out of here.” I turned, grabbing him by the shoulder, and pushed him away from the cave, following closely behind.
“Why?”
“There’s something inside that might be dangerous.”
“What do you mean dangerous?”
“Well, it might not be all that dangerous to us.” Not unless someone knew how to rig a bomb together with it, I thought. “But it could be,” I said.
“I saw a dead bird,” he said.
“Come on. We need to call for some help.” I took him by the arm and led him back through the tangle of trees and down the slope a few yards. Then I took out the handheld GPS unit I’d acquired courtesy of the yet-to-be-met Mr. Connors, pushed the buttons and waited for the unit to triangulate its position with the nearest satellites to plot the coordinates on the screen. Once the device had displayed its results, I used my cell phone to dial Agent Grooms’s cell.
“Good morning,” I said when he answered.
“Who’s this?” he barked.
“Frank Pavlicek. You arrested my friend last night.”
“Damn right we did. And you’re lucky I didn’t have them take you into custody too. I hope you’re headed back to Charlottesville.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
I explained in very vague terms where I was and what I’d found. The string of profanity that spewed forth from him arose, I guessed, as much from his frustration over my failure to go away as the possibility that I just might’ve discovered something significant of which they hadn’t been aware.
“If this is all on the level, how’d you know about this place, Pavlicek?” he demanded. “What kind of game are you and your buddy Toronto playing now?”
“No game, Grooms.”
“We’ve got your pal for Chester Carew’s murder. We’ve got him cold. We know he and Carew had been to Ranger meetings. Our guess is your pals joined Higgins’s army as a Grade A recruit and that Carew got cold feet and maybe knew too much about their plans, so Toronto simply eliminated him. Don’t try to tell me he couldn’t have done it.”
“You’ve got the wrong man.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”
I debated how much to tell him of what I knew.
“I’m putting out an APB on you, Pavlicek. This has gone far enough.”
“Not if you want me to keep feeding you this information, you won’t.”
“Is that a threat or something?”
“Do you know everything that’s happening with your situation, Agent? Do you believe that everything is for certain, that all the people you’ve staked this sting operation on are legit?”
“How the hell’d you know it was a sting?”
“You need a wild card in your hole,” I said. “Maybe I’m it.”
He said nothing at first, then muttered “Shit” under his breath.
I told him I’d call back again in a few minutes and give him the exact GPS coordinates of our location so he could send a team up to thoroughly check the place out. Which of course would give Jason and me a chance to clear out of the area first. Given enough time and the right resources, Grooms might have even been able to trace the approximate location of the source of my call, but he must have known I’d be long gone by then. I hung up and turned the cell off.
Jason stared at me as I stuffed the phone back in my jacket pocket.
“This is all my fault, ain’t it, Mr. Frank?” he said.
I put my hands on top of his small shoulders and made sure I had his complete attention. “No, buddy. It’s not your fault. Don’t ever think that. You understand?”
He nodded.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” I said.
As we turned to head back down the hill, I pushed another button on the GPS unit, scrolling through t
he list of the stored way points.
“Hang on a second.” I held out my hand for him to stop. I scrolled through the list again.
“Isn’t that interesting?” I mumbled to myself.
None of the saved coordinates matched our current location. The closest, while also on Chester’s land, was more than a quarter of a mile away.
26
Bo Higgins was in the process of closing a deal on a nice late-model Dodge pickup when I showed up at his car lot. Through the glass I could see him sitting with a young Hispanic man and woman in one of the offices in back. The fire-engine-red truck had been shined and detailed and was parked by the door to catch every possible gleaming ray of the sun.
The car-lot owner shot me a cold stare, which might have had something to do with my attire: a black ski mask I’d slipped over my head as I’d driven onto his lot. I’d also driven Betty’s Buick instead of my truck and swapped out her plates with a set of expired North Carolina ones I kept bolted to the inside of my truck’s bumper for such occasions, just in case Grooms had decided to put out that APB after all. The ATF agent’s mood hadn’t improved much when I’d called back to give him the coordinates of the small cave.
Another foray to the Connors bungalow on Chandler Road had yielded no sign of either brother. For all I knew, maybe they’d ended up like Chester, and Gwen Hallston, and Dr. Winston. I had considered slipping the back door lock and letting myself in the house, but since it was broad daylight the last thing I needed right now was a neighbor calling in to report me for a B&E.
Higgins was still staring at me. He didn’t move, maybe hoping his customers wouldn’t notice. I stepped across the showroom and climbed inside the unlocked Bel Air. Higgins stood up for a moment, but apparently changed his mind. He sat down again and went back to the business of obtaining the necessary signatures from his customers.
The car was a two-tone two-door hardtop. Tropical turquoise under arctic white. Original everything too, from what I could tell. Dual exhausts. Four barrel three forty-eight V-8. You could bury the speedometer at 120 and still have some jambalayas left. I could almost hear Chubby Checker shouting through the silent radio.
I wondered how Higgins’s clients might feel if they knew about his little sideline as commander of the Stonewall Rangers Brigade, if they might check out the odometer on that new vehicle of theirs a little more closely. Even white supremacist leaders have to make a living, I suppose.
“Help you?”
I turned to see a bald, muscle-bound man of about my age with gold-capped teeth, narrow deep-set eyes, and a small swastika tattooed on the side of his neck. He was packed into a dark tank top and blue jeans that looked like they were about a size and a half too small. No bone lay clenched between his teeth or anything, but give it time.
The window was half open. I rolled it the rest of the way down. “I’m here to see Higgins,” I said.
“You’re dressed like an asshole.” He folded his arms across his chest.
I shrugged. “I just figured this was the right uniform for all good Stonewall Rangers.”
“You’re full of shit is what you are,” he said under his breath, shaking his head. “What do you want to see Higgins about?”
“Looking for a new sports car. Lamborghini,” I said.
“Listen up, smart mouth, Mr. Higgins is in the middle of something right now. So maybe you ought to pack your tail on down the street to somewhere else.”
“Did you just grow on a tree around here or are you the product of some sort of chemical experimentation gone awry?”
“Say what?”
“It’s okay, Wayne.” Higgins was emerging from the office, the man and woman trailing behind him. “I’ll deal with him.”
Baldy worked his jaw around in a circle as if he’d lost his chewing tobacco in there somewhere then disappeared out the side door without a word.
Higgins turned to the couple. “Keys are in the ignition, folks. You need me to answer any more questions or go over anything on the truck, just give me a call.”
The man and the woman stared at me for a moment, then thanked him and shook his hand. They went out and climbed into the Dodge’s cab. They started the engine, took a few seconds to get charged up on a few more whiffs of that new-car-smelling aerosol Higgins had probably sprayed throughout the cabin, then drove the truck off the lot.
“Nothing like free enterprise,” I said.
Higgins turned and glared at me. His face twisted a little in recognition. “Aren’t you … ?”
I held up my finger to my mouth to shush him. “Come on, Bo. Climb in here on the other side where we can talk.”
He went around to the other side, opened the door and climbed in, closing it behind him with a hollow thud. Nothing like the sound of that big fifties chrome and steel. I rolled up my window.
“Where’s your friend Toronto this morning?” he asked.
“Off on other business,” I lied.
“Uh-huh. So what, you just decided you’d come harass me by yourself?”
“Close. I’ve just come from Chester Carew’s land, not too far from where he was shot to death. Found some interesting evidence in a cave up there. Called the authorities and sent them up there to check it out.”
“Cave? I don’t know anything about any cave,” he said.
“I know you don’t. You don’t know who shot Chester either, do you?”
He leaned back in the seat, blew out a breath, and examined me with reptilian eyes. “What are you hustling, friend?”
“The cops are looking for me,” I said. “They think I might’ve done it.”
“Yeah?”
I couldn’t quite tell whether he bought it or not, but his posture seemed to slacken a little.
“Heard you were up there at the bombing the other night too.”
I nodded.
He scanned the windows of the showroom. “Then if you know I didn’t shoot anybody, what the fuck are you doing bringing heat down on me and mine for?”
He already had a lot more heat than he realized, but it wasn’t going to be my job, of course, to illuminate him about it.
“Toronto knows somebody you might be doing some business with.”
He sniffed loudly. “Is that so?”
“I just wondered if maybe you could put me in touch with the same person.”
“Really? Who says you even know what you’re talking about?”
I shrugged.
“How does Toronto claim he knows him?”
“Apparently they’ve done business in the past.”
“Uh-huh.” He stared out the window. “I don’t like the fact you suddenly claim to know so much about my business.”
“Word gets around. What can I say?”
“Word gets you killed too.”
I stared at him and smiled, feeling the weight of my backup handgun, a Kahr MK9, inside my jacket, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it.
“Sheriff’s deputy came around here earlier this morning,” he said. “He was asking a lot of questions about some veterinarian who got shot up last night.”
I didn’t like the way the tone of his voice seemed to be modulating. “Nolestar?” I asked.
“You’re a goddamn liar, Pavlicek. Probably some kind of nigger lover. Your buddy Toronto’s on ice in the Charleston city jail.”
I held up my hands in resignation. “It was worth a try, wasn’t it?”
“Look, buddy.” He reached for the handle on his door. “Get yourself the hell out of here before I really begin to get aggravated.”
The MK9 slid easily from its shoulder holster as I put a hand out to stop him. “Look, buddy. All I need is a face. A name.”
He eyed the weapon nestled between my fingers. “You know who Tony Warnock is, right? You’ve been talking to him.”
“I know who he is.”
“Tony’s got more details about who we do business with. He lives in South Hills. Why don’t you meet me over at his house later on this evening?”<
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“Right. So you and your goon army can snuff me out.”
“On the level, Frank. None of the rest of my people. No cops. No Feds. No wires.” He looked around at his showroom windows again as if he knew he were being watched.
It was a trap, of course. But if I was going to vindicate Toronto and find out what was really going on before the Feds sprang their sting, I just might have to walk into it.
“What time?” I asked.
“Does nine o’clock sound good to you?”
I didn’t answer right away. “All right,” I said finally. I slid the gun back inside my jacket but still kept my hand on it, like a man holding his broken arm in a sling.
“Great. Now get out of here,” he said, shrugging off my grip and turning the handle to push open his door. He climbed out and stood there looking down at me. “And take that fucking mask off your face before somebody else starts calling down the cops again.”
Time to take my leave. I sighed, pushing open my own door with my free hand, and began to slide out from behind the steering column. Man, how I hated to have to leave those wheels behind.
27
Climbing the dirt road to Felipe Baldovino’s mountaintop cabin in Betty Carew’s Buick wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it had been the morning before in my truck. For the FBI or anybody else to have come all the way up here in search of evidence must have taken some kind of planning, not to mention information intelligence.
Felipe’s Tahoe was still in the driveway beside the house, but instead of the Suburban Toronto had been driving, this time it was flanked by Damon Farraday’s old Scout.
Wondering what he might be doing here, I gave the horn a quick honk as I crossed the six-inch hay field that passed for a front lawn, just to let anyone who was inside know I was coming, although I realized that probably wouldn’t be necessary. The occupant or occupants most likely would have been able to hear me coming up the mountain long before I actually reached the place.
Felipe stepped out onto the porch as I brought the car to a halt, cut the engine, and climbed out. He appeared to be alone.
I climbed the rickety steps and shook his outstretched weathered hand.