Midnight Lullaby

by James D F Hannah

  “It’s me. How are you?”

  "I'm great, Henry. Never fucking better."

  “What about the girls?” I said.

  "They’re scared, but they’re fine. Rachel and I, we're trying to keep them calm, telling them they’ll be home soon. Tell Bobbi she can expect big therapy bills someday."

  "How are you and Rachel?"

  "We're terrified. Probably more than the girls are." She laughed. "These two are out of their minds, if you hadn't figured it out. And they're fucking shitty hosts, too." There was a noise like a body blow, and Doria grunted.

  I cringed. Everyone in the room stared at me with fear, apprehension, wondering what I’d heard. I waved my hand, trying to convey “Everything’s good.” It was a lie, but lies were what I had at the moment.

  Things were quiet again and Monica Mayhew got back on the phone. "Are we pleased?"

  "Yeah, we're goddamn awesome."

  "I'm so thrilled you're happy. Nothing brings me greater pleasure."

  I worked to keep a rising stream of anger from erupting. I gritted my teeth and my hand tightened around the phone.

  "You know the Feds are ready to storm the compound," I said. "You have no issue in letting the government kill your own people?"

  "That action will be on a group of peaceful individuals defending themselves against the ire of an illegitimate government," she said. "It will be beautiful to watch the media play it out for weeks on end. It will feed that resentment, that frustration, there underneath the surface and waiting for the slightest provocation. There will be righteous action, as white citizens rise up, timed as we flood the cities with weapons, and crime goes rampant. This nation will take arms against the mongrel hordes, and all right-minded white people will see the ignorance of allowing the purity of our race to be erased. We will wash clean the niggers, the queers, the feminists, the spics, the Muslims, all the people who would turn us into some big brown stew of homogeneousness, and wipe the white race out from the nation we founded."

  Monica Mayhew was, without a doubt, so far out of her goddamn mind that reality was a fairy tale she heard as a bedtime story at night. She very well could get the money and still kill everyone. She might just do it as a point of amusement.

  "Where do you want me to bring the money?" I said.

  She named a restaurant in town, a mom-and-pop diner where miners and families came in to eat. It was always busy.

  "Be there in an hour," she said.

  The line fell dead.

  I shoved the phone in my pocket. Different faces looked up at me, expressions varying from curiosity to apprehension to fear.

  I turned to Simms. "I need you to make calls and make them quickly."

  39

  The Riverside Cafe had been there as long as anyone could remember, on the corner across from Walgreen's and down the street from the hotel where railroaders stayed between trains. The booths were all original, and the vinyl had the cracks and duct tape repairs to prove it. In no small amount of irony, the Riverside Cafe was three blocks from the river.

  The crowd was sparse, shoveling away orders of fried eggs and bacon. A waitress moved table to table filling coffee cups. The old man at the register beside the door whistled and read the newspaper.

  I sat in a booth in a corner furthest from the door, with a gym bag next to me. I tapped the fingers I had left across the linoleum tabletop and checked the door every five seconds.

  My left hand ached. It hadn't been more than eight hours since I'd woken up and found out what had happened. That morning seemed a lifetime ago. I wondered how Jack Bauer made it through a day.

  The bell over the door jingled and Jeremiah Mayhew walked in. The old man at the register said something to him, and he brushed him off, caught sight of me, and walked to my booth, sliding into the seat across from me.

  "Mr. Malone. Long time, no see. It seems you were unable to learn a simple lesson and to stay out of the business of others." He glanced at my hand. "How it that?"

  I raised my hand. "Barely notice it now."

  "What a shame. Certain losses should linger, so they are appreciated, and you understand what ignorance cost you." His eyes drifted over to the duffle bag. "That the money?"

  I moved my hand on top of the bag. "It is."

  "Mind opening it up for me?"

  "In fact, I do."

  The waitress came up to the table. The coffee pot was half full, steam rising from inside. She refilled my cup.

  "Get you anything, honey?" she said, twisting toward him. She jerked awkwardly as she moved and the coffee pot came loose from her hands and flipped through the air. Coffee flew from the pot and splattered across him.

  He screamed and jumped, his knees ramming into the table. He glared at the waitress and brought his arm back, fist ready.

  My right hand dived into the gym bag and came back out with a nine-millimeter pistol. I leveled it at his chest. He stopped screaming and dropped the fist. His eyes focused on the pistol.

  "What are you doing?" he said.

  "I'm taking my own hostage," I said. "Or I might shoot you because I want to. Could go either way."

  He shook his head in that slow, deliberate manner that meant he thought I was full of shit. "We're in a restaurant full of people. Even you aren't that kind of stupid."

  There was the sound of the hammer on a pistol being cocked. Jeremiah Mayhew cranked his head to the side. The waitress had taken a shooter's stance, pistol in hand and aimed straight at his head. Every other noise in the restaurant dropped and the only sound was each person breathing.

  I leaned in closer across the table. "Jeremiah, buddy, you don't know what kind of stupid I am."

  "You're marking a very poor life choice."

  "Won't be the first one, and sure as hell won't be the last. But the way I figure it, you should be worth something to Monica Mayhew."

  His mouth flickered into a grin. "She won't give them up for me. My sister is far too determined to cave to that simple of demands."

  "Is that the thing you want to bet the farm on? Because I suspect the reason she sent you is because she wouldn’t trust anyone else but her own flesh and blood with the cash. That in mind, I’m also confident she’d prefer you’re alive."

  Jeremiah Mayhew must have figured I’d already pieced it all together. Maybe he thought it was common knowledge. For whatever reason, he didn’t respond. He seemed more concerned about the waitress with a gun in his face. She was a wisp of a thing, and you would have thought the weight of the pistol would topple her over. She looked more comfortable holding the gun than she had the pot of coffee.

  Mayhew's eyes shifted between her and me. "Why the fuck is this bitch holding a gun on me?"

  "I’d watch your language. She’s a sheriff's deputy, as is everyone else in here." I pointed to the register. "Except him. That's my dad."

  At the register, Billy held a double-barreled shotgun he’d brought out from underneath the counter.

  "You all aren't the only ones to drag family into this nonsense," I said.

  Jeremiah Mayhew rested his palms flat on the table. He had an eerie stillness, his mouth flat and even, his breathing steady.

  "What do you believe is going to happen next?" he said.

  “That you'll take me to your sister.”

  "And if tell you to fuck off instead?"

  "Then I drive you somewhere and I put a bullet through the back of your skull."

  His stare would have put holes in sheet metal. He kept it focused on me like laser beams. Nothing registered on his face. Fear, nervousness, anticipation. Absolutely nothing.

  "She will kill them, you know," he said. "The women, the children, they will all die. This is a matter of principle to her. How prepared are you to carry that with you for the rest of your life, however short it will likely be?"

  “I guess the question for you is how prepared are you to be dead? She can kill me and those women and those kids, and you'll still dead, won't you?”

  He sh
ook his head. "You're threatening my life in front of a sheriff's deputy. You are a fresh kind of stupid."

  The waitress leaned forward and pressed the barrel of her gun against the side of Jeremiah Mayhew's head.

  His eyelids fluttered ever so slightly, and he swallowed hard.

  I set my own pistol on the table. "If I don't kill you, someone else in here will. You put one of their own in the hospital, so you don't have friends in this place. If you feel the cause is worth dying for, we can make it happen. Plus, your sister doesn't get her money, and she kills four innocent people. Tough to rally around that. Don’t look for a big uprising among your close-eyed kinsmen, since even they don’t cotton to murdering women and children."

  I patted the gym bag with my free hand. "Play the scenarios however you like. You won't get out of here alive unless it's with me next to you."

  Jeremiah Mayhew nodded.

  "Also, I wouldn’t count on your sister’s principles too much," I said. "She’s using heroin, most likely in withdrawal, and no one makes good decisions at that point."

  The corner of Jeremiah Mayhew’s mouth twitched. “You don't understand shit about her or our plans.”

  “I understand neither of you are as fucking smart as you tell yourselves you are,” I said. “If you’re the hope for the white race, we might deserve to go extinct.”

  Simms came out of the kitchen as I led Jeremiah Mayhew through the diner. Simms saw him and punched him in the stomach. Mayhew doubled over, giving Simms the opportunity to kick him in the face. It shattered Mayhew’s nose, and blood poured onto the floor before he could right himself.

  I grabbed a bunch of paper towels from a table and handed them to Mayhew. He buried his face in them. He soaked them in red within seconds.

  "Man's a bleeder," I said.

  "Wouldn't haven’t been worth it otherwise," Simms said.

  The plan came about in the time it took to realize Monica Mayhew had hung up on me. We emptied the diner of customers and filled it with deputies in civilian clothing in an hour. Simms hadn't been thrilled using Billy in the plan, but we were out of bodies and needed someone at the door.

  "Billy'll have a gun on him the whole time," I had said. "He'll be fine."

  Those hadn't been comforting words to Simms, but he’d agreed to it. He knew we didn’t have options or time to argue.

  Once Jeremiah Mayhew finished bleeding everywhere, he gave us directions to an old house out by McClusky Lake. He sat in a booth, his face covered in dried blood.

  “Can I at least see the money?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Sure.” I flipped the gym bag over and dumped the contents onto the floor. Socks and T-shirts tumbled out and scattered across the black-and-white tile.

  “Goddammit,” he said.

  40

  “You don’t look like you’ve ever suffered any debilitating head wounds," I said. "How did you end up buying into the ignorance your family sells?”

  We were in Jeremiah Mayhew's truck, Mayhew driving and me with a gun aimed at his midsection. His wrists were cuffed to the steering wheel, just to help keep everything honest.

  Jeremiah Mayhew drove an F-150 pickup scabbed in rust around the wheel rims. The shocks needed work, too, or else he intentionally hit every rut and pothole he could find, throwing us around the inside of the cab. Either way, we bumped our way up the old road headed to the lake house.

  He kept his eyes on the road. It was getting dark, and the sky was deep violet in the distance. The only light available was off his headlights.

  "You have issue with our cause?" he said.

  “Don't try to lump me with you on some 'our cause' nonsense. You stand on your own there. I have issue with you selling this ‘us versus them’ bullshit, turning everyone into an enemy. I want to believe people are better than what you give them credit for.”

  "You underestimate the simmering rage in this country. It's out there, and everyone hides it behind the politeness they teach you on Sunday mornings, but it's waiting, Malone, there for the perfect moment. When that moment comes, you'll be amazed at the anger, the frustration in people." His head twisted to give me an assessing once-over. "The sodomites march in our streets and get to call themselves ‘married,' and politicians pander to people who live in our country but don't even speak our language. You and I, we’re forgotten in the equation, and we’re the ones who made America great."

  “First things first, you and I are nothing alike. Second thing second, neither one of us have done jack to make this country great. We won two lotteries—genetic and geographic—by being born here. We ride on the backs of others before us, and you act like we have something coming because we burn easy in the summer.”

  He gave a dismissive snort. "Tell me how our country is better now than it was, when everyone understood their place. There was a time when white men decided and controlled the destiny of our world. Now we're nothing but a nation full of bullshit and self doubt. We stopped building our own future, and we became nothing but consumers. We decided that it was okay to let in every mongrel dog and stray animal off the street. We used to know occasionally you had to kill them, no matter how much it made the children cry. It was safer for the other animals, and the kids remembered who was in control."

  He was goading me, wanting to prove a point, trying to get a response. I wanted to prove I was better than that. Not to him, but at least to myself.

  "Keep the recruitment speech for the dropouts and the inbreds," I said.

  "Nothing I say will change your mind, Malone, You're too far gone. You try to live in the same stinking lie everyone else tells themselves. It’s why you said what you did in the restaurant, about Monica—"

  “Check out her eyes,” I said. “Check her skin. She may have liver damage. You won’t find track marks on her arms, but I look between her toes, or behind her knees. And I get you want to believe she’s above something so base, but isn’t she risking an awful lot for three hundred thousand dollars? She’s flushing away your entire drug network, initiating this bullshit race war plan, a cop could still die, she’s holding four people at gun point—” I let my voice trail off. “What’s the benefit here? You get three hundred grand Walters stole from you. Percentage wise, how does that compare to how much you’ve made, or how much you’ll make?” I turned my attention out the window and gave some silence for effect. “Something’s not right, Jeremiah. You know that.”

  Jeremiah Mayhew, for once, kept his mouth shut, only looking forward and driving.

  In the headlights I saw the lake house. It was an old two-story that rested at the end of a gravel road. There was a grove of leafless trees to one side, fanning out until they reached the hillside. On the opposite side was McClusky Lake, the moonlight reflecting off of its water, paper-thin sheets of ice floating in the stillness.

  About a hundred feet from the house, I had Jeremiah Mayhew stop the truck. "Keep the headlights on," I said as I got out and walked around.

  There were lights on inside the house, and I saw movement through the windows. The light was dim, probably battery-powered lanterns. Jeremiah Mayhew told me the property had belonged to one of the Brotherhood's true believers, left to the group in his will a decade prior, but nothing had ever been made from it. The wood was gray, rotted and worn. The shutters hung onto the windows with something akin to prayer. The yard was the size of a postage stamp, nothing but mud and weeds. It was still better than my place.

  I opened the driver's door and blared the truck horn. A window opened, and I made out a silhouette standing at it.

  "Monica!" I said.

  The silhouette moved, and another one took its place.

  "Mr. Malone!" Monica Mayhew called out from the window. "This wasn't our agreement. And it's 'Ms. Mayhew,' if you please!" She pulled someone close to her. I couldn’t make out the shape, just the struggle. "Since you're violating the terms of our deal, who do you think I should kill first?"

  I unlocked the cuffs attached to the steering wheel and u
sed them to pull Jeremiah Mayhew out of the truck. I pressed the barrel into the side of his stomach. He grunted.

  "I'm voting that I blow your brother away," I said. "How's that sound?"

  The two shadowy figures vanished the window. The front door opened and shapes exited and came into the moonlight. It was Doria, led by Monica Mayhew. Mayhew held a gun underneath Doria's chin. Their movements were awkward, Monica Mayhew a half-foot taller than Doria, a painful dance as Mayhew hunched over to keep the gun in position, her other arm wrapped around Doria.

  "Stop right there," I said.

  They did.

  Everything was silent. The only sound was winter birds that didn’t have sense enough to migrate, rustling branches of dead trees and singing midnight lullabies.

  In the glow of the truck lights, I made out the image of Monica Mayhew's face. It was nothing but a fist full of anger and barely concealed fear. She lacked the charm and reserve she used for the talk shows. This was the skull beneath the skin, stripped of muscle and sinew and civilization. She tapped the gun barrel against Doria’s face.

  "Let him go or I will splatter this bitch’s brains into the woods," she said.

  Doria kept as good a facade of cool as I'd ever seen on a human while having a gun pointed at them. Better than I’d ever done. She seemed more annoyed than scared. The woman had brass cojones. If we survived this, I might have to ask her to marry me.

  "No, you won't," I said.

  "Is that a test you want me to take, Mr. Malone?" Monica Mayhew said. "I will kill her and I will have my men inside kill the others."

  “No, you won’t, Monica, because there aren't any other men." I dug my gun deeper into Jeremiah Mayhew’s ribs. "It's just you and your brother here. Because this was always just about the three hundred grand."

  I pulled Jeremiah Mayhew another step forward. He snarled at me. Monica Mayhew startled. Her gun hand trembled, and Doria dropped that steely resolve for a heartbeat to let the fear show, then she went back to hardcore mode.