The Blood of Patriots

by William W. Johnstone

  It was around eight o’clock, when her father was having his nightly cigar on the enclosed patio, that Angie finally went to him. It was chilly, but there was a space heater. She switched it on. Her father was still wearing his work clothes, as he always did until he went to bed. Casual was not his style. He once told her that a banker was like a cop, never really off duty. He said that when banks were closed in Basalt they were open in Tokyo. That always made her father seem super-powerful to her, like he was plugged in to the world.

  The analogy with a cop seemed more than a little freaky today. Angie tried not to think about it.

  Right now Earl Dickson seemed unplugged. He sat in one of the two big wicker chairs, his head sunk in the pillow hanging from the cobra back. His hands were flopped on his knees, one of them full of cigar that was heavy with ash. Angie pulled the matching chair over, held the ashtray under the cigar and tapped. The ash fell in a solid lump.

  He smiled thinly at her. “Thanks, Ang.”

  “You’re welcome.” She sat back, her phone in her hand, her hand damp with sweat. “Are you okay?”

  Her father didn’t answer. He was staring through the screen, past the trees at the road. It didn’t look to her as if he was seeing any of it.

  “Dad?”

  He turned to her. His face looked pale in the ruddy glow of the heater, his expression waxy and lifeless. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?” This time he didn’t have a smile for his daughter.

  “I asked if you were okay. You seem a little—I dunno. Spaced out.”

  “I’m fine,” he assured her. They were words without conviction. Earl Dickson went back to staring out the window.

  “Can I talk to you about something?”

  “Sure, Precious.”

  Saliva pooled in Angie’s throat. She had always been open with her father, but that’s when she was the subject.

  “I have a problem,” she said.

  He remembered the cigar and put it in his mouth. He looked at her as he puffed mechanically, waiting. He lifted his other hand, offered it to her. “Talk to me,” he said.

  For a moment, at least, Dad was back. She grasped his hand gratefully.

  “Something happened while I was driving home,” she began. “I was about to make a drop-off at the McCreas and I had to brake to avoid a cat. Some of the stuff in the back of the van fell.”

  His grip tightened.

  “Ow,” she said.

  His hold relaxed at once, like a tendon had been cut. But his eyes were no longer soft. “What fell?” he demanded.

  “Y ’know, maybe this isn’t such a great time to talk,” Angie decided. She started to rise.

  Her father held her. “I asked you a question. What fell?”

  His voice was a monotone. It frightened her.

  “Bundles. I had to stop and pick them up and so I was late making my rounds. I didn’t want you to hear that from Mr. Fawaz that, like I was being lazy or something.”

  “Why would Mr. Fawaz call me ?”

  “Well, I figured he banks there ... he might mention it.”

  She gave her hand a tug and he released it, but he did not take his eyes from his daughter. She looked away. Her phone pinged. She ignored it.

  “You did that during dinner,” he said accusingly.

  “What?”

  “Barely looked at me. Why?”

  “I was thinking of things, of nearly killing the cat—”

  “Was there a cat, Ang?”

  She hesitated. That was as good as a confession.

  “What happened?” he demanded again.

  “I found the money,” the young woman said softly. She took the ensuing silence to mean he wasn’t sure what she meant. That was what she prayed. “The money in your laundry,” she added for clarification.

  Her father was silent a moment more and then he tossed his cigar to the floor, grabbed her shoulders, swung her toward him and dug in his fingers so hard he felt bone.

  “Dad—”

  “Why did you do that?” he hissed.

  “You’re hurting me !”

  “Answer me!” he yelled.

  She sobbed more from the verbal assault than the physical one. “A guy said you were in trouble—”

  “What guy? The cop? Ward? He approached you?”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Who else? Did anyone else talk to you?”

  “Mrs. Fawaz’s cousin saw me stopped, asked if everything was all right. He didn’t see the money, though—”

  “Jesus!” Dickson released her with a shove. “Christ Jesus Almighty!”

  Angie sat there crying, dimly aware of her mother appearing in the doorway. The older woman took a moment to figure out what had happened, then rushed to insert herself between her husband and her daughter. The short, petite woman squatted, looking at Angie, caressing her damp face.

  “Are you all right?”

  Angie nodded.

  Mrs. Dickson started to rise, taking her daughter’s elbow and urging her to her feet. “I think you should go to your room.”

  “No—I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid for dad!”

  Mrs. Dickson turned toward her husband. “Earl. Talk to her.”

  “I knew this would happen,” Dickson snarled, staring outside, oblivious to the presence of either woman. “I knew it.”

  “Is it true?” Angie wept to her mother. “Is Daddy in danger?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she said.

  “Like hell you don’t. Now we’re all in danger,” Dickson said despairingly, his voice drained of fire.

  “We’re not,” her mother told her. “Let me talk to your father.”

  “We are in trouble, I know,” Angie said. She stood and looked down at her father. “Mr. Ward says he can help you. I believe him. Please, we need someone to get us out of this.”

  Dickson remained silent and staring.

  “Go,” her mother said to her. “We’ll talk later.”

  She started to leave and her father grabbed her wrist, startling her. “I’m told Mr. Ward has gone back to New York. He can’t do any more damage. But you can make this worse if you tell anyone else, even your brothers. You’ve got to promise to say nothing.”

  Angie looked from her father to her mother. She got no help there. Mrs. Dickson looked as dismayed as her daughter felt. Sniffing up a new round of tears, the young woman nodded then left the patio and ran to her room.

  Closing the door, Angie sat on the floor by the foot of her bed and hugged her knees to her chin.

  What have you done? she asked herself.

  Her phone rang again. It was John Ward. She answered.

  “Angie, I just wanted to make sure you’re all right—”

  “Don’t bother me anymore,” she said. She was angry, now. Angry at everyone, but mostly at herself and John Ward.

  “Why? What happened?” he asked.

  “My dad went off on me—he said I would screw things up even worse if I did anything else.”

  “That’s not true,” Ward said. “You need to listen—”

  “I don’t need to do anything!” she said. “You’re gone and I just want my life to get back to the way it was!”

  “Angie, I’m not gone,” Ward said.

  “What are you talking about? My dad said—”

  “I’m not going anywhere until we fix this,” he said. “Just tell me—do you still have the photos?”

  The young woman’s mouth twisted angrily. “Jesus! Is that all you care about, the damn Muslims!”

  “No, Angie. What I care about is you and your family—”

  “Yeah, right. Screw you.”

  “Angie—”

  She held the phone in front of her, opened the file, and deleted the pictures. “I don’t have the photos anymore,” the young woman told him. “Now I want you to leave me alone, leave us alone!”

  “What did you do?” Ward asked.

  “I got rid of them.”

  There was a long silence.
The dead air felt good. Angie had regained a little composure, a little control.

  “All right,” Ward said. “Look, I’m sorry I upset you. If you or your family needs anything, call me anywhere, at any time.”

  “I told you what I need,” she said. “Good-bye, Mr. Ward.”

  Angie snapped the phone shut.

  She couldn’t believe what she had done. She’d hurt her father, a man who had always been so kind to her, based on the say-so of some crazy Islam-hating loser from New York. There was probably a good reason her father was doing whatever this was. He was a smart man, a successful man.

  You should have trusted him, she reprimanded herself.

  She thought for a second, then flipped her phone open. She scrolled down her phone list, found a number, and placed a call she hoped would set everything right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  John Ward sat in the newly rented red Volvo, watching the Dickson home from three houses down the street. It was as close as he could get without sitting under a street lamp. And he still had a good view of anyone who came or went along the street, or of anyone who left the home. Unless Angie herself went out, he would stay put. She was the one he’d put in danger. She was the one he’d watch.

  He didn’t know if anyone had been watching him at the airport. He presumed he was followed, but, the ban on profiling be damned, it was not a place where a swarthy kid or a woman in a scarf wanted to hang around just looking at something.

  Ward was too busy mentally hammering himself to worry about who-saw-what. He had managed to piss off the only person he had who was nominally inside, and as a result she had deleted a lead. He was not sure how else he could have played this; Angie was scared going in and, quite naturally, she ended up choosing personal security in her house and circling the wagons with her family rather than trust a man she didn’t know, someone who could not even leave town honestly.

  Still, he felt an obligation to keep an eye on her, at least for tonight. He still didn’t have a bead on how worried or reactionary Gahrah and his people might be. They were still relatively new at the idea of empire building. Reading online archives of the local newspaper had told him there was a reclusive imam attached to the community center, a seventy-six-year-old named Bagher Kharrazi. The Internet had virtually nothing on the man, not even a photograph, but Ward had to imagine he was given this post for a reason. The Muslims did not need financial help, they had plenty of that through the MRI office in Chicago. But it would stand to reason the cleric had at least some experience in the tactics of stealth jihad, the undermining of a non-Islamic system from within.

  His phone vibrated around nine p.m. It was Joanne.

  “Hey,” he said. She’d probably heard he was leaving. This would probably make him wish he had.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Long story.”

  “Can’t you answer a simple goddamn question?”

  Ward sighed. “I’m in Basalt but everyone thinks I’ve gone back to New York.”

  “Still the undercover cop.”

  “I guess.”

  “Your daughter heard from a classmate that you were given a police escort to the airport.”

  “I did, but that was just for show.”

  “For show. What are you, a freaking Lipizzaner ?”

  “Cute.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny! Is Megan still in danger?”

  “That’s a little strong,” Ward said. “As long as the bad guys don’t know I’m here, she’s safe and all you need to do is make sure she’s not alone or doesn’t take any Korans from strangers.”

  “This is a joke to you!”

  “No, Joanne. I’m just trying to nip your fuse.”

  “Big fat flop, John.”

  “Well it used to work, when you didn’t have me in your sights.”

  “It worked when I was twenty-four years old and you were my husband and you had some common sense,” she said sharply. “Not when I’m thirty-five and you’re an ex who has morphed into some kind of loose-cannon vigilante!”

  “I’m not a loose cannon,” he said. Even as he defended himself, he knew it was pointless. “And for the third or fourth time, I’m looking out for your home, not mine.”

  “I’m sure you believe that,” she replied icily. “I know you, John, and what you’re looking out for is your shattered ego. Dammit, I’m not going to call again. Just let me know when this is over so I can take my daughter off the leash you put her on.”

  “Our daughter,” he said.

  She hung up.

  And you thought this relationship couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  Ward tucked the phone in his shirt pocket. He should have realized that when Joanne moved to Basalt as quickly as she did, all that remained behind was her husband. Their unfinished business went with her, packed in a trunk and ready for easy access whenever he showed up.

  The detective sat in the dark, in the cool night, missing the Prius. This seat was not as comfortable, and he could have kept the heater on without making any noise or smoke. He wished he had had one of those when he was doing all those stakeouts at Queens warehouses and Bronx factories and JFK cargo terminals.

  Alone with his thoughts for the first time in days, he asked, Is that part of your life really over? It seemed impossible. But he also didn’t see a road back, especially if an enterprising New York reporter ever came to Basalt to see what he did on his little vacation. Maybe I can become a spokesman for Angr y Unemployed White Judeo-Christian Men, he thought. There was a time when the implication of that label alone would have horrified him as a human being and as a member of society. Now it screamed of self-preservation, a necessary evil against the tide of special ethnic and religious interests. Though I can’t say AUWJCM is a particularly appealing acronym, he decided.

  Ward waited until midnight. The lights had been out in the Dickson house for nearly an hour and there were no signs of activity in the street. The detective hoped that he had overestimated the danger and that they were safe.

  That left Ward with his next big problem: where he was going to spend the night. In his car, of course, but he needed to put it somewhere out-of-the-way, a place none of the Muslims would pass it while he slept.

  A church parking lot?

  And that was when it hit him. Debbie.

  It was late, but the way Debbie had talked about the men in town he wasn’t likely to interrupt anything, and he was betting her job as a telephone fortune-teller kept her up at least this late. A lot of her business, like a lot of his, probably depended on the crazies who came out at night.

  He reached into his shirt pocket for her number, realized he had changed shirts, turned to grab his carry-on bag, then froze. The shirt the paper had been in was torn during the fight in the fan. The pocket had been ripped away.

  Something crept into his brain, slowly and terribly.

  No. No way.

  He thought back. He would never remember the telephone number but he tried to see the check, to picture the address she’d written. Experts had taught visualization as a matter of course in the NYPD so that officers could remember license plates, if not the numbers, and makes of car that they had only seen in passing. Everyone bookmarks each moment in some way. They had to imagine themselves back there, think of what impressed them about that instant, then walk from that dogear to the thing they needed to recall. He “saw” the back of the check, her bold printing with a black pen, the kind of printing a short order cook could see without pulling it from the carousel or counter. There was something related to New York in her address—

  Park Avenue. No—Park ... not Place, not Road ... Circle. Park Circle.

  Ward was punching the street into the GPS even as he remembered the number, thirty-three, because it was between her age and his.

  He hoped he was just being ridiculously cautious. But his driving didn’t reflect that as he tore down the street toward Homestead Drive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

/>   Hassan Shatri felt a kind of rage that had been unknown to him—until he met John Ward.

  The nineteen-year-old had experienced suspicion and even prejudice growing up in Chicago. But there was a Muslim community and it offered support and a sense of security. Here, in the Christian world, he was not learned enough to be a prophet in the desert. But in Basalt he felt repressed enough to be a slave in revolt, especially where that smug and arrogant New York cop was concerned. Shatri had run up against his kind in Chicago. There, he had to take it: each cop had a precinct to back him up. Here, the guy didn’t even carry any legal weight with the local police department. And they were cowards, anyway. Rather than fight their own battles and investigate their own cases, Angie Dickson said the police chief conspired to let Ward come back to town.

  That would prove to be his biggest mistake. Shatri smiled.

  As Ward had thrown himself from the van earlier that evening, his pocket had ripped in Shatri’s fist. The young Muslim found the dinner check in his hand, along with the outer fabric of Ward’s pocket. He suggested to his uncle that it might be of use to them. They had gone there and waited. Shatri and his three friends parked their minivan toward the end of Park Circle and, pulling on ski masks, walked back several hundred meters to number thirty-three. The lights were still on in an upstairs room. There was only one car in the driveway of the small home and it was not a rental. Wherever Ward was—Hamza had suggested he was probably watching the Dickson home—he wasn’t here. But he would be soon, Debbie herself would see to that. Because the heart of jihad was not just to win. It was to subjugate. As the imam had told them many times, defiance is crushed by putting bystanders in jeopardy.

  “There is no such creature as an ‘innocent,’” he had told them during his weekend sermon just days before. “They are complicit by their silence and no less deserving of destruction. Their pain discourages resistance. The man who would willingly accept torture will not watch as his daughter’s eyes are cut out.”