Soul Survivor (A Leo Waterman Mystery Book 11)

by G. M. Ford

  “And where does one find these genetic wonders?” I asked.

  “Oh, they ain’t hard to find.” She pointed west. “You all just drive up to the corner, and instead of turning right to get back on the highway, you just keep going straight. That’s Grove Street. That Rodman kid inherited nine hundred acres from his dad. Used to be a federal Job Corps Center. You know . . . they took a bunch of city kids and brought ’em out here and tried to teach ’em a trade. When they finally shut it down, the land and buildings reverted to the tribe. Old man Rodman knew somebody on the tribal council and somehow finagled a ninety-nine-year lease from the tribe. Got a guard gate and a paved road runnin’ up the gully there to the other side of the bluffs. Real fussy about who they let in. That’s where they run around blowing things up. Ya can’t always hear it ’cause of the hill, but once in a while the ground shakes when they set something big off.” She shook her head in disgust. “Out-of-town idiots started showin’ up here yesterday. Gettin’ ready for their big shindig.”

  A self-satisfied look found its way to her face. “They don’t even drive through town when they come out here. They come in the back side. They know better than to expect anything outta Conway. Folks round here wouldn’t piss on ’em if they was on fire.”

  That got me to thinking how the gathering was a mixed blessing. On one hand, there were going to be a lot of strangers around, making it easier for us to get lost in the crowd. On the other, whatever security these guys had put together was going to be on high alert.

  I picked up the check and thanked the barkeep for the information, and we were halfway to the car when my phone began to vibrate in my pocket. It was Tim Eagen. I stopped walking. “Hey,” I said.

  “Got a preliminary report from the army on what’s missing from down in Salem, Oregon. Seems they’re light a hundred forty assault weapons, thirteen land mines, nine mortars, almost half a ton of plastic explosives . . . And get this: they can’t find three rocket launchers.”

  “And the army just figured this out?”

  “No . . . they been investigating for a while. I got the feeling that a whole shitload of stuff was missing and they weren’t about to admit it. They’re pretty sure it was a guy named Scooter . . . yeah, that’s his real name. Scooter Allison, worked there for about three months early last year, but they don’t have anything like enough to make a case, so they had to turn him loose. I emailed you his picture. What’s up on your end?”

  “We’re up in Conway. There’s some kind of skinhead gathering going on up here this weekend.”

  “I know,” he said. “SPD’s got about a dozen of them under lock and key downtown.”

  “For what?”

  He laughed. “For being racist assholes. We always give the hater crowd a little extra attention. So does every other police department I know of. If nothing else, we can keep their ignorant asses off the streets for seventy-two hours or so.

  “And that traffic ticket you thought your assailants got on Second Ave.? Dummy registration and driver’s license. No such number. No such zone. That’s why it took traffic six months to get back to me on it . . . according to them, anyway.”

  “Figures,” I sighed.

  Long pause.

  I finally said, “I’ve got an idea.”

  “God help us all.”

  “We’re the Christian Conscience delegation from Banks, Idaho,” I announced.

  Gabe laughed out loud and said, “Can’t for the life of me figure how you’ve lasted this long, Leo. You’re one rat-shit crazy dude, you know that?”

  I didn’t argue, just tilted my head toward Ben in the back seat.

  “Yeah,” Gabe said. “That’s the rub, isn’t it? What to do about Opie here. We sure as hell can’t be taking him in there with us.”

  “What are we gonna do . . . just leave him here?” I asked.

  “I could shoot him,” Gabe offered.

  The kid’s eyes went wide.

  “Too messy,” I said.

  “Where’s Banks?” Ben segued quickly.

  “’Bout forty miles north of Boise,” I said.

  I knew because Eagen had told me when he called me back an hour or so later. “We had ten of the skinheads in the cooler. Two of whom already bailed out. Everybody else had a warrant of some sort out on them. I had everything we took from the ones we still got brought up from the property room. My office looks like a fucking crime scene,” he’d groused. “None of ’em got the same things in their pockets, or in whatever they were driving, so there don’t seem to be any sort of universal ID they’re all carrying, but when I saw those two guys from East Jesus, Idaho, carrying the same word around in their wallets . . . that got my attention.”

  “What’s the word?” I asked.

  “RAHOWA,” he said. “The domestic terrorism guys tell me it’s short for racial holy war.”

  “They do have an ear for the language, don’t they?” Gabe chuckled after I filled them in.

  I turned in the seat and made eye contact with Ben Forrester. “Listen to me, Ben,” I began. “This is where the rubber meets the road. We go in there and they make us, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. We’re dead.” I paused to let it sink in. “They got nine hundred–some acres to hide our bodies in. They could burn our bodies, and nobody’d ever know. This isn’t journalism anymore. This isn’t a city council meeting. This is real life and death here. These assholes are probably a bunch of loser wannabes, but all that does is make ’em even more dangerous. With professionals you more or less know what you’re going to get. With these guys . . . anything can happen.”

  He nodded solemnly but didn’t speak, so I went on. “This is my personal little crusade I’m on here. Mostly it’s between me and me. Got nothing to do with you. You want to wait this out, nobody’s going to think less of you. We can drive you somewhere you can Uber yourself home from.”

  He looked over at Gabe and then back my way. “You guys aren’t really writers, are you?”

  Gabe laughed again. “Must be why he’s a reporter. Kid’s got a keen perception of the obvious.”

  He took half a minute to think it over. “I want to go,” he said finally. “But I’m . . . I’m not too proud to admit it . . . but I’m scared.”

  “That’s a good sign,” I told him. “’Cause this here is some scary, scary shit.”

  “You going with him?” he asked Gabe.

  “Where he goes, I go,” Gabe said. “My boss would be seriously pissed off if anything happened to him.”

  “What do I have to do?” he asked suddenly.

  Gabe’s eyes rolled. “Just do what we do, and keep it buttoned,” Gabe cautioned. “This here is gonna be a real loose-lips-sink-ships situation. Just keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. Go along with the program . . . no matter what.”

  The kid nodded but didn’t say anything. He sat back hard in the seat and closed his eyes. Looked to me like he was having a serious crisis of confidence.

  Gabe reached down to an ankle holster and came up with a little black Beretta.

  Gabe handed it over the seat. Ben looked at the weapon as if it were a viper.

  “Take it,” Gabe said. “Put it in your pocket.”

  Gingerly, Ben took the gun from Gabe’s hand. “I’m not sure I could use this on another person,” he said as he stared at the gun.

  “Things go to shit, you might want to use it on yourself,” Gabe joked.

  “You sure you want to do this?” I prodded.

  “I’m sure,” he said after another moment.

  I rolled down the window. “Christian Conscience,” I said. “Banks, Idaho.”

  He was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a heavy-metal band and the words ANGER WITHIN. He fingered his way through his clipboard for a minute and a half. “And you’d be . . . ?” he asked finally.

  I gave him the names I’d gotten from Eagen. Ben was Ezekiel Evers. Gabe was Bobby Jo McCalister, because it had a certain androgynous feel to it, leaving me, by
default, to be Forrest Hamner.

  “Where’s Boyd?” the guy demanded. “Supposed to be four of you.”

  “We got rousted down in Seattle. Spent the night in the can. Boyd got into it with some nigger in the holding cell. Nigger got a busted face. Boyd got himself some fresh charges added on. ’Fraid ol’ Boyd ain’t gonna make it.”

  “Those Seattle assholes arrested a whole bunch of the brothers,” the guy with the clipboard said. “Time’s a comin’,” he chanted. “They about to get what’s comin’ to ’em.”

  I figured this was the point where I oughta play my ace, so I said, “RAHOWA’s comin’.”

  The guy looked up at me and grinned. “Your tech session is right after the orientation, over at the auto shop. Bay five.”

  The pistolero posers standing locked and loaded in front of the car stepped aside. Clipboard waved us in. “Time’s a comin’,” he said again as we drove by.

  I had a pretty good idea of the geography because Ben had managed to download an old schematic of the Job Corps Center onto his phone.

  From what we’d gathered from the Internet, the facility had been closed in the late seventies and had sat vacant until about five years ago, when a kid named Bertram Rodman showed up in town claiming his father had a ninety-nine-year lease on the property, which he’d, in turn, then leased to the U.S. Forest Service for the Job Corps Center. A lease that Bertram claimed had now expired. Turned out it was true.

  The years had been unkind to the road. Massive tree roots had wormed their way beneath the asphalt. We were bouncing up and down like a clown car as I followed a black Ford F-150 through a funnel of trees out into an open pasture they were using as a parking lot. Guy who looked like a member of ZZ Top was waving me in his direction.

  Probably twenty cars and trucks were parked in the clearing. Over in the shade a dozen or so motorcycles were lined up under the trees like shiny missiles.

  I parked the car as directed, and we got out. Couple of hundred yards north, smoke was rising above the canopy of trees. The smell of roasting meat drifted to my nose, and all of a sudden, I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog.

  The woods were wired for surround sound. From what sounded like twenty or thirty speakers mounted in the surrounding forest, the air came alive with a recorded message.

  “The white race is the only pure race. The white race is morally and intellectually superior to the mongrel dogs who have invaded our domain. That purity must be maintained at all costs. The white race is the only unadulterated race, and that purity is being endangered. We are the first soldiers of that war.”

  Clipboard #2 saw me wiping the corners of my mouth. “Grub’s over there,” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the smoke. “Mr. Marshall talks in an hour or so, so if you want to chow down, now’s the time.” And then he walked off.

  By my reckoning, we were somewhere near the middle of the property. Six or eight cinder-block buildings surrounded the central clearing. Guys were scattered around in smaller groups, drinking beer and shooting the breeze.

  “Shall we?” I asked.

  I heard the unseen speakers hiss to life again. “The white genocide has begun. These mongrel dogs flow across our borders like the sewage they are. They must be stopped. The only real race is the white race.”

  Trying to keep our profile as low as possible, I started off in the opposite direction of the food. “Let’s find the auto shop,” I said back over my shoulder.

  “You got any idea about what this so-called tech session is about?” Gabe asked the back of my head.

  “Nope,” I said. “Guess we’ll just have to show up at the appointed time and see what’s happening.”

  Ben was shaking his phone like a maraca. He looked over at me.

  “No bars,” he said. “No service.”

  “Guess we’ll have to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” Gabe quipped.

  We spread out over the road and started following the curve around to the left, making a big half circle toward the nearest building. The woods were dark and deep. Everything in sight was awash in pine needles, soft underfoot and vaguely fragrant.

  Way back when it was a job training center, it looked like they’d had the inmates fashion rustic wooden road signs, kinda like the ones you see in national parks. Problem was . . . somebody’d quite literally blown them to sawdust.

  And I’m not talking a few random holes here and there. I’m talking smithereens; somebody’d touched off enough ordnance to start a war in the Balkans. I was still taking in the scope of the carnage when, in one of those tricks of the mind, I suddenly remembered the first trip I’d ever taken to Europe. How somewhere in . . . I think it was Austria . . . I’d noticed an interesting phenomenon. The road signs were pristine. No holes.

  Not a single one. I was someplace way the hell up in the mountains, far enough off the beaten path where you could do just about anything you wanted and nobody was gonna know, and shooting holes in metal signs was simply not considered an artful amusement.

  It was memorable to me because that was the first time I’d ever had doubts about the American way of life. I remember standing there on a windswept mountain road wondering about the fact that nearly every road sign in my country was riddled with bullet holes, and I wondered what, if anything, that penchant for puncturing signs said about us as a nation and as a people.

  Naturally, I dealt with my doubts in precisely the manner we do with any of the things we don’t like to think about, like racism and poverty and death. Little matters such as that. I ran the dilemma through my circuits a couple of times, hit the usual brick walls, and then stuffed it right back under the bed with the rest of the great unanswerable and went on with my life.

  Adolf started in again with the recorded messages. “We must eliminate the race traitors who seek to usurp our rightful place. Those fools who seek to transform the moral order with things like race mixing, affirmative action, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Now is the time to put them in their place. Under our heels.”

  On the south side of the parking clearing, seven buildings were scattered around under the trees. Turned out four of them had long ago been deserted and were well along the path of composting back into the forest floor. We walked over and peered over a collapsed wall into what appeared to have once been a machine shop. Old concrete platforms with big bolts protruding up from the floor to anchor the machines. Somewhere in time, a huge spruce tree had taken root in the middle of the room. Somehow found a home among the cracks and crevices of the shattered concrete floor. A tree grows in Conway.

  Looked like some mythological monster, with its thick black branches spreading in all directions, hydra-like, pushing through the roof till it collapsed, oozing out the windows like an octopus trying to escape a cage, limber, alive, and desperate to shake hands with the sun.

  Nobody said anything. What we saw spoke for itself. These guys had set up a firing range worthy of an army installation. Spotting stations. Firing stations. Fifteen or twenty silhouette targets down at the far end. And from the look of the craters in an adjoining field, they’d been blowing things up on a fairly regular basis. Big things.

  It was the last of the old buildings that got our attention. Sitting at an angle to the others, all the way back where the paved road seemed to end in a cul-de-sac. You could back a truck right up to the doors. Long cinder-block structure, unlike any of the others, dug halfway into the ground. Stone stairs leading down to a set of new overhead garage doors. I was still wondering why anybody would dump several grand into a set of new garage doors for a derelict building when the roof caught my eye. Brand-new, red-metal roofing, not the old twisted shakes peeling off the others.

  Gabe stepped around me, moving along the south wall of the building. About three windows down the side, Gabe stopped, rubbed the dirt-covered windowpanes with a sleeve, and peered inside. I watched as Gabe used the same sleeve technique again, and again, before looking my way and motioning for me to come and ha
ve a look.

  The forest loudspeakers blatted out a diatribe I didn’t quite catch. Something about Jews not being white and how we were being sullied by our forced contact with other races.

  I picked my way among the rubble until I was at Gabe’s side. Gabe stepped to the side. I bellied up to the window, bent at the waist, and looked inside.

  Took a second for my eyes to adjust. U.S. ARMY was clearly stenciled on the mass of boxes filling the room from floor to ceiling.

  “Stuff from the armory in Salem,” Gabe said.

  “Jesus” was the best I could come up with.

  On his way over to have a gander, Ben tripped over a rusted-out five-gallon bucket and fell on his face in the underbrush. I bent over and pulled him to his feet.

  I watched as he dusted the bark and leaves from his clothes and then squinted in the window. “Holy moly” slipped out. “They’ve got enough military equipment to start a war,” he said after a minute.

  Gabe leaned in close to me and whispered, “I’m thinkin’ maybe we ought to get the fuck out of here. This ain’t what we bargained for.”

  The sound of voices brought me back to the here and now. Somebody laughed out loud. Half a dozen black-clad storm troopers, awash in weapons, were coming out of the woods. Felt like my lungs left town. Every joint in my body ached.

  The one in the middle. The one without a gun. With the curly hair. Felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut. I nearly doubled over. My legs began to shake. Wanted so bad to hug myself but sucked it up and forced myself to keep walking.

  I looked back over my shoulder. Gabe read my face, put one hand on the shiny automatic in the jacket pocket and the other between my shoulder blades, urging me forward. Ben was nowhere to be seen.