The Lowdown (Dale Conley Action Thrillers Series Book 3)

by Erik Carter

  “Not anymore, you’re not,” Percy said. “The specter of death is in handcuffs.”

  “You think that matters?” He laughed a little, shaking his head. “I see now. You’ve been focused on me. Like I’m the head of this snake. I’ve done my part, and I’m proud. But this is so much bigger than me. And as soon as they’ve heard that you’ve brought me in, they’ll roll out the Great Contingency.”

  Dale took a step closer to him. “If you’re not in charge of this, who is? And what the hell is ‘the Great Contingency?’”

  The nasty sneer remained on James’ face. “I won’t sell out my brother knights, but I have no qualms about telling you the Great Contingency. I bet you thought this was your next great mystery to figure out. Let me save you the trouble. If this operation was ever to be compromised, all the drugs are going to hit the streets. At once. Every black community in New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile, and Pensacola. We’re going to flood this region. And it will be a glorious bloodshed.” He lowered his face, eyes locked on Dale, smile broadening, teeth baring.

  Percy and Dale exchanged a look. This had been in the back of Percy’s mind the whole time—that whoever was behind the drug deaths was testing out their system, and ultimately they would find a way to get out as many drugs as possible. The longer he investigated the case with Dale, the more he began to realize that it wasn’t about money. It was about death.

  “Speaking of my brother knights …” James said. He put his front teeth over his lip, sucked in a big breath, leaned his head back, and belted out a whistle.

  There were footsteps around them. Some from the the front. Some from behind. Some from the sides. Figures stepped out of the darkness. All white. All with guns. One had red hair, another brown, and the others were blonde. Percy recognized the brunette. He wore a paisley shirt. He was the man he and Dale had chased earlier.

  Percy’s pulse quickened. He looked at Dale. Dale was concerned but confident, almost slightly thrilled. The threat of imminent death. That crazy son of a bitch.

  “Did you really think I’d go out to that cemetery all by my lonesome?” James said. “Again, I think you’re really underestimating the Knights of the Golden Circle.”

  The men closed in from all sides. They were only feet away. Handguns pointed at Percy and Dale, inconspicuously, casually, from their hips. Percy and Dale were circled.

  “We’re a block and a half from a New Orleans Police station,” Percy said.

  “That’s right. Which is why we’re all gonna go our separate ways. No harm no foul. Take a look at these boys’ faces. Take a good look. We don’t care. We’re out in the open now. Because the Great Contingency is upon you. Now go ahead and put those hands up.”

  Percy and Dale put their hands in the air. Dale grimaced as he did so. He hated taking orders.

  James stepped away, his hands still fastened behind his back. The other men began walking backwards, slowly leaving, guns still aimed toward Percy and Dale as they slipped away into the shadows. James joined them.

  “We’ll see you soon,” James said. “Real soon.”

  Chapter 26

  It was still early in the morning. Bright and sunny. Cool, still, but moist and humid.

  Luanne watched through the window, the one over the desk in her bedroom. Vehicles were parking outside the pole barn in the back. Cars and pickup trucks. Lots of them. Men got out of them, went into the barn.

  This was the first time something like this had happened during the day, and it was the first time it had happened when she was home. The other times were at night, and she wasn’t supposed to have known about them. She and the boys were always told to leave so that Dylan could have a poker night with his buddies. He made it adamantly clear that he didn’t want them around. When Dylan was adamant about something, she didn’t argue. But she did always find it strange. Who were these buddies? Dylan didn’t have friends that she knew of, only acquaintances. He had such a disdain for people—her family, the people on TV, the people he encountered in town. She just couldn’t picture him laughing at a poker table with a bunch of guys, smoking cigars and drinking beer.

  One night, she’d had to return to the trailer. Tyler had forgotten his favorite toy. She left the boys watching a movie at Maria’s and came back for the toy. When she got to the trailer, she’d seen a dozen cars parked outside the barn and light coming from the cracks around the barn’s big sliding doors. It would have frightened her had she not recognized one of the vehicles as her cousin’s, Jesse Richter’s. Jesse and Dylan had spent a lot of time together in the last year, so it made sense that his vehicle was there. But what didn’t make sense was the fact that they were in the barn. Dylan had told her that the card game would take place in the trailer, and he’d said there would be “four or five guys.” There were a dozen vehicles at least parked outside the barn. Before she’d gotten Tyler’s toy, she looked across the yard, squinting to see what she could in the crack of the barn. There were people in there. They were dressed in metal. Like medieval knights. Feathers came out of the top of their helmets.

  It was certainly bizarre, but she didn’t give it much thought. She figured it was some strange hobby of her husbands. Medieval reenactment, perhaps. They did that sort of thing in Pensacola, though her husband wasn’t a history buff that she knew of.

  Today, though, the men entering the barn were dressed plainly.

  There was a tugging at her pants. She looked down. It was Tyler. Both boys were behind her.

  “Mommy, can I have some chocolate?”

  “You know you can’t,” she said. “You want something sweet, you get an apple.”

  He pouted and walked off. Caleb stepped closer to her, put his head against her side. There was a look of concern on his face. She put her arm around his shoulder.

  “What’s going on out there, Momma?”

  Luanne shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But Momma’s gonna find out.”

  Chapter 27

  Dylan shoved him against the side of the pole barn, and the metal made a loud sound that shot up and down the wall. They were on the backside of the barn, and Dylan could hear car doors shutting, people talking as they went into his barn for the meeting. Jesse looked at him with shock and a bit of fear.

  Dylan backhanded him, hard, against the side of his face. When Jesse turned back to Dylan, his eyes were raging as his hand went to his cheek. A drop of blood came from the corner of his mouth. It was demeaning to slap a man like that, and it made Dylan feel good. Really good. He’d wanted to do this to Jesse Richter for a long time.

  “Now we gotta use the Great Contingency plan because of you and your stupidity,” Dylan said. He shoved Jesse again, back into the wall. Another loud metallic bang.

  “But I’ve done more,” Jesse pleaded. “We can salvage this. I got us a connection. With the Grizzly. He runs the whole area surrounding the French Quarter.”

  “Ohhhhh. You hooked us up with a black drug lord. Congratulations. Don’t you get it, you stupid hick? The Great Contingency ends this. All this is over because of you.” He grabbed Jesse by the shirt. “You think you got your position in the KGC because you did a good job? The only reason I gave you the power is because I’m married to your idiot cousin.” He put his hand over Jesse’s face, squeezed into his bones. “But you’re out now. You got that? The Great Contingency will be the hallmark moment of the Second Knights of the Golden Circle. And the second Jesse James will not be a part of it. Whatever plans we develop afterward, however we decide to proceed, you won’t be a part of that either. You’re done, Jesse.”

  Jesse looked at him, his eyes wet. “I can do better.”

  “I told you, you’re done.” Dylan almost laughed. He gave Jesse’s face a little slap. “You gonna cry? Are you gonna cry, Jesse Richter? Just like your little bitch cousin.”

  Another slap. Harder.

  Jesse’s eyes still burned, still glistened. He put up his fists.

  “Oh, look out, now!” Dylan said. “You gonn
a use that kung fu of yours on me, Jesse?” He put up his own fists and assumed a dramatic, Bruce Lee-esque position. “Yeeeooowww! Weeeeyahhhh!”

  He laughed at Jesse.

  Then he reached his right hand into his pocket. With his other hand, he threw a punch at Jesse, going intentionally high. Jesse made one of his martial arts moves to avoid Dylan’s blow, as Dylan knew he would. Dylan moved to the right and pulled his hand from his pocket.

  Jesse’s eyes went wide. His body lurched forward. He landed against Dylan’s chest. Dylan felt Jesse’s whole body lose its strength. The knife had entered him below the rib cage. Jessie’s cheek was on Dylan’s shoulder. He breathed deeply, rapidly.

  “Even now I’m protecting you, Jesse,” Dylan whispered into his ear. “No major organs.” Dylan yanked his hand back, and the knife came out of Jesse’s side. Jesse screamed out. “Now get yourself to a damn hospital and never step foot on my property again. You hear?”

  Jesse stumbled away, his hands on his wound. His face was white, and he was hunched over. There was hurt in his eyes, and he looked at Dylan with a mix of bewilderment and angered confusion. He quivered with a wave of pain then turned and hobbled off, bent in half. A hunchback.

  Dylan smiled.

  He looked at the knife. It had been a trusty friend for some time. A four-inch switchblade with a cherry handle. The blade was covered in blood. Dylan was wearing a dark blue flannel shirt. That would hide it. He wiped Jesse’s blood away.

  Dylan stepped in front of the group. It was so odd seeing them in broad daylight. They wore street clothes not their armor. They were confused, looking around the room. They sat in folding chairs facing him.

  Dylan spoke. “I told you all to leave that knight shit at home because this here’s our last meeting. We’re moving forward with the Great Contingency.”

  They were murmurs from the other men, concerned looks.

  “And that means—”

  Dylan stopped. He’d seen something. Movement in the gap of the door. And in that briefest of moments, he recognized who he’d seen. It was a woman.

  It was Luanne.

  He’d known it was a mistake to allow her to stay in the trailer during the meeting, but she’d been gone when he did the planning for the impromptu gathering, and he hadn’t had a chance to tell her to leave. And now there she was, looking through the crack. Not that it really mattered. She was an idiot. No threat whatsoever. More important was the fact that she hadn’t listened to him. Again. This pissed him off. Pissed him off bad. He would have to take care of this situation.

  But then a thought came to him.

  He remembered how his desk had looked disrupted, like someone had been going through his things.

  Luanne?

  Was she up to something? Was she trying to figure out what he was doing? Maybe she wasn’t such an idiot after all …

  But as quickly as the thoughts had come to him, he pushed them away. He couldn’t delay even for a moment. The meeting had to continue. “The Great Contingency. We’re dumping everything. Tonight. All the cities. Every last one of you is out on the streets tonight, getting the shit out. And do not use our bags. Use anything you can find. Randomly. Whatever’s available. Nothing with the symbols.”

  He looked out at the hillbillies and realized that if this was to be the last meeting, he needed to make it impactful. They were looking for leadership, after all, a sense of identity and purpose. If he was going to get the rest of the drugs out with the Great Contingency tonight—which he needed to do to keep the investors happy while he and Henderson worked on their side plan—he needed to get the most out of these idiots.

  “Everything you’ve worked for has led up to this moment. This is a historic moment for the South. When I look out on you men, I see a proud bunch. It’s time that we do our part to take back the country that God ordained to us. You’re soldiers. You’re heroes. You’re knights. So tonight, make this a date that will long be remembered. The Second Knights of the Golden Circle’s biggest triumph.”

  He said the last words with conviction, smacking his hands together. This brought a ruckus response from the knights. They cheered, whooped, slapped each other on the shoulders.

  Propaganda. Works every time.

  Morons.

  Chapter 28

  “Allie, I stand corrected,” Dale said. “This is … amazing.”

  He sat at the table in the office at the NOPD station with Allie and Percy. At the desk behind them, turned away, was Ervin, who was reading a magazine. Dale had been pouring over the Knights of the Golden Circle materials. Whereas yesterday he’d only looked at a couple of the books Allie had shown him—which he had utterly rejected—he was now looking at photocopies of actual letters from the collection of Lincoln’s correspondence with direct references to the KGC. He held one of the copies in his hand.

  “The North was crawling with KGC!” Dale said. “Listen to this, from a letter to Lincoln about concerns in Philadelphia.” He read from the letter. “Allow me to suggest to your excellency the propriety of using a portion of the secret service money placed at your disposal to discover the parties connected with a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle. There are strong suspicions of their existence in this City. This was in 1861. The first year of the war.”

  He looked up from the letter—slack-jawed, wide-eyed—at Allie and Percy. Allie just shook her head with mild exasperation. He’d always had a tendency of not listening to her, and this time, she’d more than proved him wrong.

  Dale rapidly flipped through the photocopies in front of him. “Look at all this!” He was so stunned by the amount of data before him that he could hardly form words. “I just … it’s incredible. Why has no one heard about this?” He grabbed another one of the photocopies, one he’d looked at a few minutes earlier. “This one is about my beloved Indiana, from a colonel in Indianapolis writing to Lincoln and Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War. Dated 1863, right in the middle of the war. He says there were KGC lodges in every county in Indiana and that there were 92,000 suspected members in Indianapolis alone.”

  Allie gave him a wry look. “You always used to say that only great people came out of Indiana.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dale said with a smile, not breaking his concentration from the letter. “The colonel talks about signs and oaths and handshakes. He said there were five-pointed copper stars that could be hidden under a coat and revealed to Confederate prisoners or, potentially, invaders to reveal that a person was a KGC supporter of the cause. And …” He poured over the letter, a treasure-trove of information. “It goes on and on and on. And this is just one of the letters! These are primary sources.”

  “Primary sources?” Percy said.

  “Actual historic documents,” Dale said. “Books and articles about history are secondary sources.”

  Dale put the photocopy down and eagerly reached for a book, one of the ones Allie had shown him the night before.

  “That means these books you showed me yesterday might not be B.S. after all, Allie,” he said.

  “Oh really?” Allie said with dripping sarcasm, putting her hand to her chest. “That is such a relief. Thank you, Mr. Historian.”

  Dale opened the book. “This claims to be the journal and diary of John Surratt, but I still have my doubts. It reads a little sensationally, and its editor is credited as the author of Booth, The Assassin.” An important methodological component within the study of history was the ability to filter out the bias in one’s sources.

  “And who was John Surratt?” Percy said, looking even more confused.

  Dale started to answer, but Allie cut in. “He was one of the conspirators during the Lincoln assassination,” Allie said.

  “‘Conspirators’? Multiple?”

  “There was an entire conspiracy surrounding assassination,” she said. “It wasn’t just about killing Lincoln. They were going to kill the president, the secretary of state, and Vice President Johnson. Of course, Booth succeeded in
killing Lincoln, but the man who tried to kill Seward, the Secretary of State, was unsuccessful, and the guy who was going to kill Johnson chickened out. History remembers it as being a single assassination, but the intent was to fully decapitate the Union government.”

  Dale had been looking at the book while they were talking. “And if this text is to be believed, John Surratt was KGC. Listen to this description of the initiation ceremony. He goes into a mysterious building with a friend. They’re stabbed with a blade by someone saying, ‘Those who would pass here must face both fire and steel.’ He’s taken to a separate room; his friend is gone. He waits. Then he hears a voice, and the room is darkened. He’s grabbed by ‘gauntleted’ hands, the clothes are torn off his chest, and he’s blindfolded. He’s pulled through a series of doors. More voices, questioning if he’s to be trusted. Then he’s pierced with a blade again, and he hears the same phrase as earlier, about passing through fire and steel. They make him kneel. One of his hands is on something cold, the other is on a book. He’s made to say an oath that he claims is ‘terrible, horrible, and appalling.’ Then the voices remind him that the penalty for breaking his oath is death. They scream this. Death! Death! His blindfold is torn off, and while he’s blinded by light, he’s pierced again with blades, all over his body. He sees a group of men around him in chain mail and helmets with red and white feathers. He discovers that his right hand had been resting on a Bible the whole time … and under his other hand was the face of a corpse. When he looks further back, he sees that he’d been kneeling on an another corpse.”