“That’s one thing I don’t need to worry about right now,” Chapel told him. It was a lie, but he felt this kid might respond to a little bravado. “I haven’t done anything to warrant being killed.”
“You come sniffing around our business, right up to our gate, you think we don’t have a reason to doubt your motives?” the boy asked. “By the sound of your voice, you’re no Westerner. Maybe back on the East Coast, people go barging in on each other’s business as a daily habit. Maybe you don’t realize how sacrosanct we hold private property out here. Out here, we shoot intruders. That’s our daily habit.”
Chapel smiled. The boy’s speech patterns were interesting. He didn’t look like a well-educated kid, but clearly he was a reader—or he’d listened to enough speeches to pick up a few turns of phrase.
“Where I’m standing, right here,” he said, “is public property. If you shoot me here, that’s homicide. I know enough about Terry Belcher to know he would never allow that. Is there some kind of holdup? Belcher should have agreed to meet me by now.”
In his ear, Angel’s voice cooed, “Over the horizon in thirty seconds.”
“Either let me in or call somebody who can let me in,” Chapel told the boy. “I’ve got work to do.”
The boy’s hand moved toward the pistol at his belt. His eyes were cold and empty, like a shark’s. Maybe he was trying to scare Chapel into drawing his own weapon. A lot could depend on who drew first.
Or at least, who the court believed had drawn first. “You’re armed,” the boy said, nodding at the holster on Chapel’s own hip. “Maybe after I kill you, I put that gun in your dead hand. Nobody out here to say it didn’t happen that way.” Moving a fraction of an inch at a time, the boy’s hand crept closer and closer to the pistol.
Chapel really didn’t want to have to shoot this boy.
“Ten seconds,” Angel said.
Chapel held his hands up in front of him, palms outward.
“Maybe I just say I caught you trying to climb our fence,” the boy tried.
“Maybe,” Chapel said. “If, as you say, there was nobody to say otherwise.”
In the desert stillness, he heard the whir of the propeller clearly, much louder than he’d expected.
“I’ve got you on visual,” Angel told him. “Nice butt.”
The boy ducked as an unmanned aerial vehicle—a Predator drone—came buzzing by overhead, not a hundred feet up. Chapel glanced upward and saw its straight wings, the bump of the camera housing on its nose. It seemed to hang in the air for a second, then veered to the side and started cutting a very wide arc over the compound, tilting up on one wing, as graceful and as weightless-looking as a paper airplane.
“What the hell is that?” the boy shouted.
“My insurance policy,” Chapel told him.
The boy’s eyes went wide. He started reaching for his pistol again, in earnest this time, but then he stopped at a sudden sound. Someone had rapped on one of the tinted windows of the pickup, knocking a ring against the glass.
“I think that’s for you,” Chapel told the boy.
CHAPTER SIX
The boy stared at Chapel, his eyes glistening with rage, until the rap came again on the truck’s window. The window rolled down a few inches—not far enough for Chapel to see who was inside—and the boy ran over and spoke with the truck’s passenger in low tones. He took a cell phone from the passenger and came back to the gate. “He wants to talk to you,” the boy said, holding the phone through the bars of the gate.
Chapel walked over slowly, his hands in plain view, and took the phone. He smiled at the boy as he lifted it to his ear. “Mr. Belcher?” he asked.
“That’s right. You’ve got my attention, Federal. Bringing a drone like that into my home—that’s got my whole attention. You sure you didn’t come to kill me?”
“The drone is harmless,” Chapel assured him. “It was in the neighborhood, looking for marijuana plants. You’re not growing any marijuana, are you?”
“No,” Belcher said, as if he were insulted by the idea.
“Then it doesn’t have to mean anything to you. Do you have a pair of binoculars? If you look closely at the drone, you’ll see it’s unarmed. No Hellfire missiles, no machine guns. Just a camera.”
“I’ve already looked,” Belcher told him. “Curiouser and curiouser. What exactly are you trying to do?”
Chapel shrugged though he doubted Belcher could see him. “I could have covered myself in skinhead tattoos and tried to infiltrate your compound. I could have shown up with a hundred ATF agents and black helicopters.”
“You could have tried something like that,” Belcher pointed out.
“Instead, I figured I’d be civilized and come ring your bell in person. We need to talk, Mr. Belcher. About Ygor Favorov and one other thing. The drone is there to make sure your people don’t just shoot me and bury me in a shallow grave out here. Its camera stays on me. But it doesn’t have any weapons, and it can’t hear anything we say.”
“Is that right? I’m not being recorded right now?”
“I’m wearing a hands-free device, and I have a phone in my pocket,” Chapel admitted. “If you like, I’ll leave them here in my car.”
“I like,” Belcher agreed.
“Then you will talk to me?”
“If only to figure out just who the hell you are,” Belcher said. “That is, I’d like to see if you’re just about the bravest son of a bitch I ever saw or just the stupidest.”
“Just in the interest of full disclosure—I have a sidearm with me as well. That I plan on keeping while I’m here. Is that a deal breaker?”
“Give the phone back to Andre.”
“Is he the one with the Hitler-mustache tattoo?”
“Yes.”
Chapel handed the phone back to the boy. Andre spoke to Belcher for a few seconds, then shoved the phone in his pocket. He nodded at Chapel and started opening the gate.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Angel wasn’t thrilled that he was leaving behind his only way to contact her—his phone—but they’d known it would happen this way, and she didn’t protest too much. “Just be careful,” she said, as he tossed his phone through the window of his rental SUV. “I’ll be watching,” she said, “but there’s not a lot I can do if things go bad, honey.”
“Understood,” he said, and took out his hands-free unit. That went in the SUV as well.
Andre the boy Nazi told him to walk ahead, down the path toward the compound. Andre kept pace with him, walking alongside, both of his weapons safely stowed. The pickup, with its unseen passenger, rolled along behind them, and Chapel knew there would be a rifle pointed at his head at all times. He tried not to think about it.
“I’m supposed to welcome you to Kendred, Colorado,” Andre told him, as they ambled down the path. “Though I can’t see welcome being the right word.”
“Nice place,” Chapel told him. As they got closer, he saw more signs of life among the white houses. There were children sitting out on porches, kids in T-shirts watching him with wide eyes. Occasionally, the curtains of a window would twitch back as someone inside a house peered out for a better look. “Not very exciting though, huh? I must be the most interesting thing to come along in a while.”
“You see these streets?” Andre said, pointing at the wide patches of dust between the houses, crisscrossed with old vehicle tracks that had baked to terra-cotta in the sun. “You see any litter there?”
“No,” Chapel admitted.
“You see any needles in the gutters, any of those little plastic bags they sell crack cocaine in? No, you don’t,” Andre said. “You don’t see any gambling going on, no dice games on those porches. No criminals hiding underneath.”
“No, I don’t see anything like that.”
Andre nodded. “I’ll take boring
any day over the exciting life of a ghetto. I been to Denver,” he confided. “I know what a mixed town looks like.”
Mixed as in mixed race, of course. Chapel had been to Denver as well, and he wondered if Andre had seen the same city he had. Chapel had thought Denver was a pretty nice place—quiet and low-key. Though not nearly so quiet as Kendred. “So this is what separatism looks like,” he said.
“That’s right.”
Belcher’s group, the Separatist Allied Front, was not technically a white-supremacist or white-power group though the distinction was academic as far as Chapel was concerned. He’d read a little of the SAF’s literature, as much as he could stomach, and gleaned the basic philosophy. The SAF claimed it was not a hate group, that its members didn’t hate anyone. They just didn’t want to live near any minority or ethnic groups or anyone practicing a religion they didn’t agree with—basically anyone but other white separatists. They advocated for repeal of equal-opportunity laws, so they could build their supposed paradise out West: towns just like Kendred, where every face was white, and they didn’t have to see a black or a Jew or a Latino all day long.
“How do you get around the laws?” Chapel asked. “The law says you can’t discriminate on basis of skin color when you sell houses.”
“None of these were sold,” Andre explained. “Every parcel of land here was a gift, direct from Mr. Belcher. The community came together to build the houses out of materials he donated. No money changed hands.”
“Clever,” Chapel said. “And awfully generous of him, to just give you everything.”
“We work for it, don’t you mistake me,” Andre told him. “We work in the factories over there, every day, like men. Not like moochers.”
“Making machine parts, right,” Chapel said. “And I suppose there’s some way you get around hiring anybody who doesn’t live here?”
“We’re not employees,” Andre pointed out. “Every man here is a shareholder in the company. When you come here, and he accepts you, he gives you a certificate worth exactly one share.”
“So you own the means of production,” Chapel said, not able to repress a small smile. Belcher had built something dangerously close to a communist society out here. Karl Marx might have loved it. Well, except Marx wouldn’t have been welcome in Kendred since he was the grandson of a rabbi. “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”
“We will abide by the laws of the United States until such day those laws are abolished,” Andre said, and now he definitely sounded like he was quoting someone. “We pay our taxes. If there were a draft, we would serve gladly in the military. And we vote.”
“Oh, I bet you do,” Chapel said. “What’s that building?” he asked, pointing at a large, ranch-style building in the middle of town. It was the only large building this side of the factories and warehouses.
“That’s our clinic, where our doctors work,” Andre said. “Keeping us healthy. Delivering our babies. We’re healthy here. Not a single case of sickle-cell anemia or Tay- Sachs.” He stopped walking and turned to face Chapel, who stopped as well. “I bet you hate seeing this. You must be choking on your bitter tongue, to see us living so good, huh, Federal?”
Chapel couldn’t help but laugh. It was just too strange—Ygor Favorov had said something almost identical, on the patio of his multimillion-dollar home on Long Island. “No, no,” he said, because Andre looked like he was about to reach for his gun again, “please, I apologize. I’m not laughing at you.”
Andre shook his head in angry dismissal.
“Does Terry Belcher live in one of these houses?” Chapel asked.
“That’s right. Just like the rest of us.”
Chapel nodded. He’d expected as much.
“Wait a minute,” Andre said. “You trying to figure out which one? Yeah, I get it now. You came here to figure out where he lives.”
“Why would I do that?” Chapel asked.
“So when you know, you can signal your friends somehow, and they can dive-bomb the house with that drone of yours. Is that it?”
“The drone is unarmed. There are no bombs on it,” Chapel insisted.
“So it’ll just—it’ll ram the house, like a kamikaze,” Andre said. He had gone white—well, whiter—as if he’d suddenly realized that he’d become an accomplice in the murder of his leader.
“Andre,” someone called out, “don’t be a fool.”
Chapel turned and looked at the clinic building. Standing in its doorway was a man wearing a denim jacket and a broad-brimmed hat. He had a shotgun in the crook of his arm, cracked open to show it wasn’t loaded. “You don’t have anything like that planned for me, do you, Federal?”
“Jim Chapel.” He walked over and held out his right hand to shake. The man in the denim jacket—Terry Belcher—ignored it.
“Come inside, Agent Chapel,” Belcher said. “Get out of this heat a while.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“If it’s all the same, Mr. Belcher, I’d just as soon stay out here in the open,” Chapel said. He looked up at the sky and the drone that circled overhead.
“You don’t trust me,” Belcher said with a laugh.
“I’m afraid that feeling is mutual. And I doubt there’s much either of us can do to change it though I hope we can come to some kind of understanding.”
Belcher laughed again. “Andre, go get Charlie out of that truck. Looks like Agent Chapel here isn’t going to be sampling our hospitality today.”
Andre ran back to the pickup, which was parked in front of a house across the way. Its previously unseen occupant jumped down even before Andre could summon him. Charlie, who had been driving the pickup since they left the gate, was older than Andre but not much. He was, however, nearly twice the size of the boy with the mustache tattoo. He was as broad through the shoulders as a wrestler and as tall as a basketball player. His head was shaved, all the better to show the ink inscribed on every square inch of his scalp. Charlie had an image of his own skull tattooed on his face and head and neck, the ink disappearing down into the collar of the polo shirt he wore, then reappearing to cover both his arms down to the tips of his fingers. The sleeves didn’t show his skeleton, though—instead they were crowded with dozens of swastikas, eagles, daggers, and roses with bloody thorns. Both of his elbows were covered in elaborate spiderwebs, and his hands were inscribed with words Chapel couldn’t quite read from that distance. Only his eyes, his teeth, and the wedding ring he wore broke the pattern of ink.
Charlie didn’t seem to be armed. Maybe his appearance was supposed to be intimidating enough.
“In Illinois, about twelve years ago, Charlie there broke a man’s pelvis with his bare hands. You know how hard it is to break a healthy man’s pelvis?” Belcher asked, leaning close to almost whisper in Chapel’s ear.
Chapel did know, actually. He’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat techniques and knew all about such things. He did not answer Belcher’s question, though.
“Did his bit in a federal prison. No time off for good behavior, either. Look at him. An ex-con with that amount of ink. Anywhere else in the country, Charlie would have been on a very short road. He would have been despised every place he went, spat on, probably gotten into one fight too many and killed somebody if he weren’t killed himself.”
Chapel turned to look at Belcher’s face.
“Here, though,” Belcher went on, “here you should see him, with his family. He’s got a pretty little wife he could probably pick up with one hand. She’d giggle if he did that, not scream. They have two of the cutest babies. You see him with them, and he’s the gentlest, most loving thing in God’s creation. You’ve seen Andre’s tattoo. He’s still got some kind of anger in him, that boy. A fire that’s never going to go out. Here, he has a chance to do meaningful work. Maybe make something of himself.”
“You took them i
n,” Chapel said. “Gave them another chance.”
“That’s right,” Belcher said, nodding.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t write to the Pope and nominate you for canonization,” Chapel said because he couldn’t stop himself. “But—oh—you wouldn’t want that anyway. The Pope’s Catholic, after all. One of the many kinds of people in the world you hate.”
Belcher grinned, but it was a very strange kind of grin. It didn’t reach his eyes, for one thing. Chapel had been trained to read body language and facial gestures, and he knew the grin was strictly for his benefit—a performance, an act. He expected to read anger in Belcher’s eyes, but it wasn’t there. The man was hiding something, not just from Chapel, not just from anyone else who might be watching, but from himself. Chapel couldn’t get a good read on the man. Maybe that was intentional.
“I didn’t come here to convert to your cause,” Chapel said. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I speak plainly.”
“Out here in the West, we consider that a virtue,” Belcher replied.
Chapel nodded. “Okay, then. I need to speak to you, out of earshot of your soldiers there. I need to talk to you about Ygor Favorov. And the—give or take—three thousand assault rifles he sold you over the last ten years.”
“I assure you I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Belcher said. Chapel opened his mouth to speak again, but Belcher held up his free hand for silence. “But I’m happy to talk about anything you like. No harm in jawing, as my father used to say.”
CHAPTER NINE
Belcher stepped down into the dirt road in front of the clinic and out into the open. He looked up at the drone, then took off his hat and waved at the unmanned plane. “I hate to be uncharitable, but I question your style, Agent,” he said.
Chapel wasn’t technically an agent of any governmental organization, bureau, or department, but he didn’t bother correcting the man.
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