by Candice Fox
‘What drawings?’
‘I don’t know!’ He shrugged. ‘Sketches. I saw them in a letter.’
‘When?’
‘Maybe two weeks ago. I was standing outside Schmitz’s cell. I gave him a letter, he opened it up and unfolded it, and I saw there was a sort of sketch in there. He saw me watching him and folded the paper back up again.’
‘What were the sketches of?’
‘Boxes. Blocks. Lines.’
‘You’re not helping me here, Joe.’
‘What do you want me to say? I saw a flash of shapes. That’s it. It could have been anything,’ Brassen sighed. ‘It could have been the layout of Pronghorn. It could have been a map or . . . I don’t know. I’m telling you, Celine, I don’t know, I swear to god! Maybe you could put me under hypnosis, see if it’s in my brain somewhere.’
‘Hypnosis is bullshit,’ Trinity said from the kitchen.
‘Joe,’ Celine said, ‘you have to do what Trinity’s asking you to do. You have to make contact with them somehow and tell them you need their help.’
‘If I make contact with these guys, they’re going to laugh in my face,’ Brassen said. ‘It’ll be completely obvious that the marshals are pushing me to get in touch so that they can hunt them down. They probably won’t even answer.’
‘You have to try. You have no choice.’
‘What am I going to say?’ Brassen spread his hands wide. ‘That you guys found out I’m the inside man and, what, I want to become one of them now? Grab me a pointy hood in a large size, fellas! I’m all outta friends over here!’
Celine caught Trinity’s eye and nodded towards the porch. When they went outside, Celine saw that the big, ugly dog was lying on its back in the sunshine while Keeps rubbed its taut grey belly.
‘He’s right,’ she said. ‘He can’t just call them up.’
‘Not literally,’ Trinity said. ‘We tried the number of the cell phone he gave Schmitz and, as expected, it’s been dumped. No activity since the breakout. But there are ways we can get their attention. The FBI have been monitoring a bunch of websites known to recruit members of The Camp.’
‘The Camp?’ Keeps asked.
‘Schmitz’s particular subgroup of unhinged losers,’ Trinity said. ‘They trawl the internet looking for angry, young, white male virgins everywhere you’d expect to find them. Sites related to mass shootings, revenge porn, serial killers. Stuff like that. They message potential members with pseudonyms and start filling their heads with junk about race wars and how that’s going to make them kings of a new world.’
‘I get that,’ Keeps said.
‘You do?’ Trinity jutted her chin at him.
‘I mean, I get the strategy.’ Keeps stood, making the dog groan with sadness that its belly rub was over. ‘You want to hook someone, you make them feel special. Make them feel seen. Like you understand them and what they’ve been through, and the pain they’re experiencing right now, and you offer them a safe place away from that pain. Because they’re the chosen one. They deserve it. They’re different. These groups are just finding directionless people and giving them a direction. Same things cults do.’
Celine watched Keeps’s eyes, which were blank and distant with thought.
‘You gotta give Brassen what he wants,’ Keeps said quietly. ‘Make him feel special. Yeah, okay, you can keep threatening him with torture and life in prison or whatever. But if you make him feel like a hero, he’ll work harder for you. And you gotta give these Nazi assholes something that they want, too, or they’ll ignore him, just like he said.’
‘So what do they want?’ Trinity said. ‘That they don’t already have?’
‘They want to know their plan is safe,’ Celine said. ‘Whatever it is. But that’s the thing, we don’t even know there is a plan. The whole breakout was staged to get Schmitz out of prison, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they wanted him out so he could stage another shooting.’
‘We’re betting they’re going to stage another shooting,’ Trinity said. ‘It’s almost Christmas. It’s a good time for shooting people. So many gatherings.’
Celine felt a ball of pain gather in her throat. Trinity flicked her eyes up from her phone briefly. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Whoops.’
‘What?’ Keeps asked.
‘Nothing,’ Celine said.
Keeps and Celine watched Trinity. She was leaning on the porch rail, her long-lashed, dark eyes cast down to her phone screen, casual and slightly bored, the way she always was, as if preventing mass death was just part of the job.
‘If we know anything about terrorists like Schmitz, it’s that they like momentum,’ Trinity said. ‘Once we announced to the press that we believed Schmitz was behind the whole thing, activity in the neo-Nazi online world went ballistic. The Camp and groups like it will be swarmed with recruits, and those recruits are going to become bored quickly if there isn’t a follow-up event. Schmitz can’t go into hiding in some farmhouse in rural Texas now. It would be cowardly. Their new members will want another demonstration of power.’
‘So how do we make Schmitz feel as if all that is under threat?’ Celine said.
‘Easy,’ Keeps said, smiling. ‘We pull a con, of course.’
The shouting was so loud and frenzied that Kradle couldn’t pick out individual words, but he knew what they were. He’d heard them dozens of times before, when shake teams busted into his cell for surprise searches, when officers responded to inmates getting violent or trying to trash their cells. Get down. Get down. Get down on the ground. Hands on your head. Don’t move. He went down, as he was told, flattening on the floor with his hands on the back of his head, fingers interlocked, the dive an almost automatic thing. His cheek hit the plastic seam between the floorboards and the dining room carpet. Kradle felt the carpet against his temple and tried to think of the last time he’d touched carpet anywhere. He focused on the tiny loops of wool near his nose so his mind wouldn’t tumble downwards, as it wanted so desperately to do, into the black abyss of knowing that it was over.
It was all over.
A cuff snapped on his wrist.
‘Shit,’ a voice above him hissed. ‘Shit. Shit! Reed, come here. Look. It’s John fucking Kradle.’
Kradle’s wrist was dragged behind his back. Shelley and Tom were out of their seats, clutching each other.
‘Oh, man! We gotta call for backup.’
‘No way. Let’s get him back to the station ourselves. We’re gonna be fucking her—’
Kradle felt the second cuff loop around his free wrist, but before it could click shut the floor shuddered with a concussive boom.
Another boom as Kradle twisted to see what had caused the commotion.
His face was sprayed with dirt and blood. It was the smell that told him it was buckshot. Cordite. He saw the second cop, Reed, fall against the table Tom and his mother were struggling to hide underneath, squeezing into the space like frightened mice. Reed had a huge hole in her chest.
Kradle tried to get up, but the cop who had pinned him had taken the second gunshot blast in the face and collapsed onto him, headless and dead as a stone.
Homer Carrington stood in the side doorway with a sawn-off shotgun hanging from one hand, assessing the damage through the gun smoke. He turned and looked at the spray of blood and brain matter on the wall beside Kradle’s head.
‘Stop yelling,’ Homer said, and Kradle realised that Shelley Frapport was screaming so hard her throat was grinding, making the sound like a high growl. Sounds were returning to his ringing ears. The black dog was guarding the couple under the table, barking at Homer, and Tom was shouting pleas, and Homer was raising the gun to blast the dog and the boy and his mother all at once.
That’s when Kradle lost it.
He rose and smacked the barrel of the gun upwards just as Homer pulled the trigger. The blast took out a massive chunk of ceiling, spewing dust all over the pair as they struggled for control of the weapon. Kradle had fought Homer once before. He knew his f
avourite move – that huge arm that came from outside his peripheral vision, sweeping towards him like a snake, trying to hook him into a deathly hug. Kradle let go of the gun, bowed, and slammed his shoulder into Homer’s rib cage, sending the huge man backwards into the kitchen counter. Kradle kept on, reaching for the gun with one hand, sweeping the counter for weapons with the other, pushing his body against Homer’s chest, trying to avoid that big arm with its constrictive embrace or haymaker fist always threatening, always there, a yacht boom swinging in an unpredictable tide. Homer dropped the gun just as Kradle felt the smooth, wooden handle of a chef’s knife in a block brush against his knuckles. Homer grabbed his whole face in one of his big palms, and Kradle’s fingers barely grasped the knife. Homer pushed with that gigantic hand, and Kradle’s whole head snapped back and he fell against the floor, tucking the butt of the knife against his body just in time for Homer to fall on it.
The serial killer wrapped two hands around Kradle’s throat. Kradle remembered the cave, the sick, detached look in the other man’s eyes, the feel of his body above him, and all the vicarious horror the weight and smell of him brought – of young women struggling under his grip, scratching helplessly at the air, inches from his smiling face. But this time was different. Homer had a knife handle sticking out of his chest, and his hands were weak and growing weaker, and Kradle could just repress the animalistic urge to buck and jolt and twist under the crushing pressure of those hands so he could see the darkness crowding into Homer’s vision.
‘You were supposed to be my friend,’ Homer yelled, defiant, trying to load the pressure back on, his thumbs pinching down against Kradle’s windpipe like a clamp.
Kradle surged upwards, flipped Homer’s weight, took the knife out and shoved it immediately back in.
‘I was never your friend, you idiot!’ he snarled. He couldn’t believe the words as they came out of him, that he was having this conversation with a man as he murdered him. That it had come to this; to convincing a psychopath that he wasn’t the victim, that his life was being taken not due to betrayal by a loyal companion but as a reaction to him killing two innocent police officers only seconds earlier, and as a denial of him taking further lives. It wasn’t personal. It was for the greater good. Kradle let out a hard, exhausted, angry laugh, just one, and then stabbed Homer in the heart a third time.
Homer grabbed Kradle’s wrists, blood-soaked and warm, and Kradle expected some further admonishment of his performance as a fugitive compadre, but only dark blood poured from the corner of Homer’s mouth as he tried to speak. Kradle heard sirens in the street. Tom and Shelley Frapport were holding each other under the table, their heads tucked together, their bodies racking with frightened sobs.
Kradle was looking at them when he heard the ratcheting sound of his loose handcuff as it closed on Homer’s wrist. The killer let the cuff go, smiled and then died, chained to his betrayer.
CHAPTER 27
Reiter had got himself into some fixes in his life, but nothing like this. The trouble for him had traditionally come from women, and part of that was his fault, he was man enough to admit. He liked women who answered back. Women who fought and challenged him. He liked to go into a bar and tell a woman her shoes looked stupid with her outfit and see what her reaction was, and the woman who threw a drink in his face was usually the one he took home. It was like finding a wild horse that bucked and yanked and kicked, and grinding it down and down until it was tame, until it came trotting up for the bridle happily, as if being a kept beast was all it had ever wanted out of life. Other men liked to shower women with gifts when they were courting. Call them up. Leave them messages. Take them places and open doors for them. Reiter liked the rage he saw in a woman’s eyes when he let a door slam in her face, or when he threw the dinner she’d cooked on the floor. He liked to play games. Throw petrol on fire.
And then, after a while, the reactions softened and the rage subsided, and the women learned all his moves and started ducking his swings. Reiter usually got bored then and shuffled the women on. A smooth ride wasn’t his desired mode of transportation. And he should have guessed that enough years messing around with wild women was going to get him kicked in the jaw some time or another.
But this. This was something else entirely.
Reiter sat against the wall in the van with his wrists chained to a bolt in the floor and wondered if what was being done to him was just. Because Reiter was under no illusion that Burke David Schmitz had brought him along for the ride simply because of the spitting incident on death row. He’d seen the raw amusement in the white boy’s big, blue eyes as the spittle landed on his prison-issue white sneaker, the look that said, Just you wait. He saw it again after Reiter ran with the crowd out of the gates of Pronghorn, through the shadows in the back of the van, two big, blue eyes full of amusement. You waited. Now your time has come, they said. But Reiter believed in fate, and this wasn’t supposed to be his fate. He’d ended up on the row for trying to tame the wrong woman, pushing her too hard one night after a few too many cheap tequilas and accidentally crushing her skull against a concrete step in the backyard. But to end up in the middle of a plan like this, just for spitting on the shoes of a Nazi asshole, seemed like getting slapped in the mouth for telling the truth.
And that was exactly the attitude he took to Schmitz when he was hauled out of the van and brought into the house. He tried to look around as the young men dragged him across the short distance between the van and the front door, but someone smacked the back of his skull, so he kept his eyes on the gravel, the wood, the thin, dusty carpet. When he looked up and saw Schmitz standing there, freshly showered and rubbing his short blond hair with a towel, Reiter winced as the tape was pulled off his lips, and then blurted the words the first chance he got.
‘This ain’t fair.’
Schmitz laughed, and having heard their leader laugh, all the cronies did too.
‘It ain’t clever, neither,’ Reiter said.
‘It’s not?’ Schmitz asked.
‘It’s not,’ Reiter said. ‘See, I know what the plan is here.’
‘Okay.’ Schmitz took a beer that someone handed to him and twisted the top in his fleshy palm. He took a chug and said Ahh in the way Reiter had always hated people doing, then said, ‘Enlighten me.’
‘You gonna do another shooting,’ Reiter said. ‘Like the New Orleans thing. Open up on a crowd of innocent people. Only this time, you’re going to try the other route. You’re going to kill a bunch of whites, frame a Black man for it, try to start your big, stupid race war that way.’
Schmitz gave a delighted laugh, looked around the group sitting on the busted, tattered furniture or leaning in the corners of the room.
‘Has somebody been chatting to this guy?’ Schmitz asked.
‘I had a KKK guy for a cellmate in 2011,’ Reiter said. ‘I know all your schemes. You think one of these days you’re going to shoot or blow up or gas enough people that you’ll kick off a big man-on-man battle and, at the end of it all, you guys will be able to establish your . . . your new world order, or whatever you like to call it.’
‘This is amazing.’ A skinny girl, standing in the doorway to what looked like an old kitchen, laughed. ‘He’s taking us to school.’
‘I am. I am taking you to school,’ Reiter sneered. ‘So listen up, bitch. Learn something. You think you got this all worked out. That if you keep yanking and yanking on that cord, eventually the lawnmower is going to start up. You think you’re going to kill somebody from one side, and the other side’s going to retaliate. A shooting sparks a riot. A riot sparks a crackdown. A crackdown gets some fool killed in custody, which sparks another riot. Places get looted. People get beaten, raped, killed. It all gets filmed, and it all gets shared around. There’s turmoil in other countries. Enough sparks, you got a big-ass fire.’
The group nodded along.
‘And then, at the end of it all, when the military and the police can’t get everybody to calm down, they’ll b
e looking for someone else to lead. And there you are. Burke David Schmitz. President of the New World Order.’
Schmitz smiled.
‘Well, here’s the problem, assholes,’ Reiter said. ‘Your New Orleans thing didn’t work. And this here ain’t going to work either.’
‘Why not?’ Schmitz sipped and ahhed again.
‘Because you got the wrong patsy,’ Reiter said. ‘I’m not a mass shooter. I’m just some small-time guy from Reno who killed his girlfriend by accident and landed on the row for it. I didn’t even graduate high school. Before I got locked up I used to deliver linen for restaurants. Nobody’s going to believe I did all this.’
‘You’re underestimating yourself,’ Schmitz said. ‘You don’t have to graduate high school to know the world needs to change, and that we have the power, and the duty, to change it now. Some of the greatest men in the history of this country were everymen, just like you and me.’
Schmitz drew a breath, preparing to carry on his history lesson. Then the enthusiasm for it seemed to leave him. His shoulders relaxed with the ease of someone realising their efforts weren’t worth the trouble.
‘I can understand your anxiety about having a meaningful death,’ Schmitz said. ‘I had the same concern. I would have martyred myself at the scene on Dumaire Street if I had known for certain that what I’d done that night would have the impact that I’d hoped it would.’
Reiter looked around. All the Nazi losers were listening to their leader with fixed eyes and shallow breaths, quiet children. He felt sick.
‘And I haven’t failed,’ he said. ‘I—’
‘No, you haven’t, that’s the last thing you’ve done,’ a guy behind Reiter gasped. Reiter looked over his shoulder at the paunch-bellied, red-headed guy with a lightning strike brand just visible above the collar of his shirt. Lightning Strike didn’t seem game to go on. Schmitz looked torn between annoyance at being interrupted and gratitude at the encouragement.
