Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  Most of all, there would be Order.

  Although it was clear that blacks were an inferior race, and that Hispanics were certainly blighted, even those who claimed some European blood, there’d be honorable places for them in the American culture. They’d be separate, not equal, but would have their own secure place.

  Eventually, he believed, they would, like his wife and cat . . . disappear.

  Jews, of course, were a different problem. They were the Other, intelligent parasites who lived off the work of the superior races, running the banks, the media, all those middleman jobs that chipped a few greasy percentage points off the hard work of others. And, of course, their real allegiance lay elsewhere, far from America.

  How to get to that new, clean, vibrant, and ordered America? Not through democracy, that was clear. Democracy had always been a danger, and even the Founding Fathers had recognized that. If everyone had an equal vote, what do you do when blacks and Hispanics became the majority, as they were sure to do, if allowed to breed as they wished?

  Dunn believed in the Fourteen Words; believed with his entire being.

  After Stokes got him to the 1919 website, and he’d realized the importance of the site, he’d spent several days thinking about it. As an engineer, he’d worked meticulously through several scenarios, just as he would with a housing site development, including a scenario in which the 1919 site was a fraud. That simply didn’t compute. The site had been carefully crafted to send a particular message and he’d received it.

  To make this omelet, Dunn had always understood, some eggs, even good eggs, would have to be broken.

  One of those eggs, if not an especially good one, was Randy Stokes.

  * * *

  —

  APROPOS OMELETS, he was making one, pushing cooked portions of the three eggs into the center of the hot pan over the steaming butter, tilting the pan this way and that until the eggs were thoroughly cooked, the size and shape of a large pancake. He dumped some pre-chopped ham, cheddar cheese, and onion onto half the frying egg, flipped the other half up on top to make a sandwich, let it heat for an extra moment, then flipped it onto a plate.

  He carried the omelet and a bottle of Miller High Life to the dining room, where he could look out over his back lawn as he ate.

  * * *

  —

  ONE PROBLEM WITH meaningful political action, he knew, was that the federal government was all over it. Dunn didn’t believe in the ZOG—the myth of a Zionist Occupied Government—but there was something ZOG-like about the way the government was passed back and forth, with much shouting and the expenditure of billions of dollars, between parties with barely discernible differences.

  But to step back: the FBI was all over the people who might demand real change. Open your mouth too strongly, and the next time your lawnmower threw a rock into a neighbor’s yard, you’d be looking at a federal felony.

  The only way you could best the feds at that game was to be truly harmless; to be a hobby Nazi.

  Or to keep your secret.

  The far right referred to people like Dunn as lone wolves. He liked the mental image that conjured up, the wolf, and that’s the way he wanted to remain. Let the alpha wolves and the betas get snarled up in alt-right politics, and their sex and power dreams. He’d remain alone.

  But that message in the bottle . . . that 1919 website.

  There could be only one reason for the message. Somebody, some serious group, was looking for political leverage and wanted an anonymous sympathizer to deliver it. The group’s basic philosophy would be an amalgam of all those political causes reflected in the texts attached to the website. In other words, something in the direction of fascism, even if they didn’t call it that. And they wouldn’t call it that—they’d call it “Americanism” or “The Restoration” or something similar. He’d know it when it came about.

  If somebody—a lone wolf—acted on their behalf, gave that group the leverage, gave them the ability to call up a senator or a Supreme Court justice and demand a vote, a nudge in the right direction . . .

  That would be a step toward a renewed America.

  * * *

  —

  DUNN HAD NO THEORETICAL PROBLEM with the idea of violence. Violence was built into fascism, had a purifying quality. But just because you were okay with the concept of violence, didn’t mean you were okay with getting caught committing it. That kind of thing was for the skinheads of the world, the doofuses who showed up for the riot with a shield and baseball bat and a funny-looking flag.

  If you were going to use violence, if it became necessary, you had to be logical about it. You had to think it out. You had to plan. You had to cut your liabilities. You had to engineer it.

  General George Patton had expressed it best: “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”

  Randy Stokes was a threat that would have to be cleared away before Dunn could take action. Stokes had put Dunn onto the 1919 website. If Stokes had left any hint of his identity on the website, and the FBI showed up at his door, he’d give up Dunn in a New York minute.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN DUNN FINISHED DINNER, he watched his backyard for a while—sometimes deer appeared from the neighboring woods, to graze on a bed of hostas that he’d laid out at the back of his yard. Hostas were the hot fudge sundaes of the deer world, and Dunn liked to watch them ghosting through the trees, and then delicately stepping out on the yard to browse. The deer were worth any number of hostas.

  No deer appeared this night and he washed and dried the omelet pan, the spatula, his fork and plate, cleaned up around the sink, put the beer bottle in the garbage and got another one from the refrigerator.

  Up in his office, he composed a letter on his computer using Microsoft Word. He labored over it, getting everything just right, about 1919 and his beliefs concerning the website. He printed three copies on Boise Cascade computer paper—the most common decent paper he could find. He would never touch this particular sheet of paper with his bare hands, because he knew all about DNA. He put the letters in three self-sealing envelopes addressed to three other men he considered serious possibilities for acting in the cause.

  With gloved hands, he applied self-sticking “Forever” stamps on the envelopes, put them in an unused brown business envelope and carried the package down to the front door and placed it on the floor. No DNA from mucus or skin or hair contact; no fingerprints; no return address. He would mail them the next day from Gainesville.

  The men who got them would have to make up their own minds about what to do.

  They’d have to decide whether they really wanted to go in.

  If they finally wanted to act.

  * * *

  —

  DUNN HAD THREE GUNS. The first was a Ruger SR9C, a compact 9mm semi-automatic pistol, his “house” gun. While small, the Ruger had an extended magazine that gave him the full seventeen rounds. The second was a Ruger 10/22, a .22-caliber carbine-style semi-automatic rifle with open sights, useful for killing small game, like rabbits and squirrels. The third was a scoped bolt-action Winchester Model 70 in .308, good for deer and other large game.

  He wasn’t highly skilled with any of them. He’d go to a local shooting range a couple of times a year to practice with the pistol, and occasionally to a three-hundred-twenty-acre tract of wooded land he owned in West Virginia, to shoot the rifles. He’d bought the land as a possible refuge when Barack Obama was elected president.

  He’d also bought a thousand rounds of ammunition for the .308 and another two thousand rounds for the .22. Things hadn’t collapsed, as he’d feared they would, under Obama. Since he hadn’t needed to shift to a survival status, he’d considered selling the land, but hadn’t gotten around to it. The tract had a small cabin on it and two ten-acre po
nds with panfish. In the back of his mind, he retained the idea that he still might need it someday.

  He’d bought all three of his guns under the loose Virginia laws, which allowed unregistered transfers at gun shows. Again, in the back of his mind, he thought it wise to keep his weapons purchases as private as possible, given the growing power of the deep state.

  * * *

  —

  HE THOUGHT ABOUT SHOOTING Randy Stokes and that sister of his who’d given him the website password. Imagined it, almost as a video, and re-ran it through his mind, over and over. At times, it seemed too crazy. Shooting, killing two people that you didn’t even care about? One that you didn’t even know?

  He considered other possibilities, including doing nothing about the Stokeses. If he took out one of the targets on the 1919 site, and if the FBI came around, he might admit talking to Randy Stokes but denying everything else. If he were careful enough . . .

  There were lots of reasons that wouldn’t work: there was simply too much surveillance to claim that he wasn’t somewhere a camera said he was. If Randy had told his sister about Dunn, which was perfectly possible, and if the Stokeses got suspicious and gave him up, and then if the FBI started searching videos for his specific face, they’d find him. There were cameras everywhere. But if the Stokeses weren’t around to give him up, if the FBI didn’t know what face they were looking for . . .

  * * *

  —

  HE RECOGNIZED THE RISK in killing the Stokeses, but trusted his planning skills. One step at a time. Details.

  And, of course, planning the killings, and then doing them, would be useful gauges of his physical and emotional capacity for murder. He wasn’t a crazy man. Not at all. Maybe, when it came to actually pulling a trigger, he’d find he couldn’t do it. Maybe he would falter—he saw that possibility in himself. That was something to be tested.

  * * *

  —

  AS A CIVIL ENGINEER, he occasionally did property searches to make sure that he wouldn’t be digging up somebody’s sewer line or fiber-optic cable. The day after Stokes had told him about the 1919 site, Dunn had gone to the Fauquier County courthouse. Stokes had mentioned that he’d been a renter, but had eventually been kicked out of his apartment and was temporarily living with his sister, Rachel, who owned an acreage around the town of The Plains.

  He found a Rachel Stokes on a six-acre property in a rural area three miles north of The Plains, a small town not far from Warrenton. He cruised the place—an old flat-roofed cracker box with two pillars holding up a porch roof, all of it badly in need of paint. Another house sat a couple of hundred yards away, but the weather was still warm, verging on hot, and everybody would be using air conditioners, which made effective silencers.

  He’d read that, anyway, or maybe had seen it on a TV show.

  After spotting the Stokes property, he’d gone back to his job site, talked briefly to the general contractor’s foreman, and then he and his crew continued laying out a series of cul-de-sacs. After a long discussion of drainage issues in the afternoon, he left an hour early, went home to shower and get his guts up for killing Randy and Rachel Stokes.

  He wouldn’t do it without regret. Randy would be a loss to no one, but Rachel might be a perfectly decent woman caught in a moment of political necessity. He’d always liked that name: Rachel, even though it sounded Jewish to his ear.

  * * *

  —

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS A SATURDAY, and he began moving from planning to action. He began by renting a car; he didn’t want his car anywhere near the Stokeses’ house. He cruised the house twice on Saturday, but never saw Randy Stokes’s car parked there. No matter: he wasn’t quite ready to kill. He noted that the road was most often empty.

  On Sunday, he cruised the house twice more. Still no sign of Stokes’s car, and that began to worry him. Had Stokes taken off for parts unknown? At home Sunday night, he prepped the Ruger 9mm, making sure that it was mechanically perfect, that all possible prints and DNA were scrubbed off the cartridges. When he was satisfied, he smelled somewhat of gun oil, but . . . so what?

  On Monday, he went to work, as usual. Stokes was there, leaning on his shovel. Dunn stayed away from him.

  At home that afternoon, Dunn put on a long-sleeved overshirt, worn unbuttoned at the front, which would conceal the pistol tucked into the small of his back, under his belt, but would be loose enough to provide easy access to the gun. For the trip over to the Stokes place, he put the Ruger, in a fabric holster, under the front seat of his car.

  When he was set, he checked the time: ten minutes after five. Way too early. Stokes was a regular, in the way only an addict can be regular, at Chuck’s Wagon. He’d be there as soon as he got off work, and would stay as long as he had money, or until the bartender cut him off. That might be as late as eight o’clock.

  A Walmart Supercenter and a Home Depot both had busy parking lots not far from Chuck’s Wagon, and after checking them out, he found a spot in the Home Depot lot from which he could see the bar’s driveway. He drove over to the bar to make sure that Stokes was there: and he was.

  Encouraged by the way his plan was working, in his head, anyway, he drove back to the Home Depot and parked. And waited. Longer than he’d hoped. People came and went from the Home Depot, and as far as he could tell, nobody paid him any attention. Six o’clock. Six-thirty. He began to get cold feet. Killing two people? What was he thinking? He almost left then, headed back home to think about it some more.

  He might have, if he hadn’t seen Stokes’s car pulling out of the parking lot . . .

  * * *

  —

  HE FELL IN BEHIND STOKES, who drove too slow, the speed that experienced drunks drive when they know they’ve had a few too many. They threaded through Warrenton, then out Highway 17 to the turnoff at Old Tavern, across I-66, through The Plains and then out of town on Hopewell Road and finally to Rachel Stokes’s house, where Stokes pulled into the driveway.

  As he did, Dunn honked his horn twice, then pulled into the driveway and half-climbed out of the rental car, tucking the gun in behind his belt, pulling the shirt over it. Stokes was out of his car, squinting into Dunn’s headlights.

  Dunn called, “Randy—it’s Elias Dunn. I thought that was you. This where you live?”

  Stokes called back, “Hey, El. Yeah. What are you doing out here?”

  “Got a client over by that Antioch Church. Anyway, I saw you, thought I’d honk.”

  Then, what Dunn had hoped for: “Hey, whyn’t you come in, have a beer? I’ll introduce you to my sister.”

  “Well . . . I gotta get over . . . well, maybe one beer. That can’t hurt. It’s been a long day.”

  * * *

  —

  THE EXTERIOR OF THE HOUSE was in bad shape, but the interior was surprisingly habitable, neatly kept, homey, in a latter-day-hippie way. Bead curtains and fabric art. Rachel Stokes was apparently a quilter or a quilt collector, with a variety of quilts on the walls of the living room, all neatly displayed, hanging off one-inch dowel rods.

  Rachel was in the back of the house, in the kitchen, when they walked through the front door, and Stokes called out to her, and asked, “You decent? I got a friend here . . .”

  Rachel came out to look, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and seemed a little surprised when she saw a neat, well-groomed friend. She was dark-haired and short, early thirties, Dunn thought, a few pounds too heavy but pleasant-looking, with warm brown eyes. “I’m Rachel,” she said.

  Dunn nodded and said, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I saw Randy turning in here, just stopped to say hello. I’m an engineer, we’ve worked on a couple of jobs together.”

  “An engineer? What kind?”

  “Civil engineer, ma’am. I lay out roads and the curbs and the lots and drainage and so on. Randy and I are working on that new subdivision over by Gainesville.”

/>   Stokes said, “I asked him to come on in for a beer.”

  Dunn: “You know, I . . .”

  “Oh, have a beer,” Rachel said. “I don’t drink and there are only two cans left, so that’ll be one less for Randy. I think he’s probably already had a couple more than he needed. And stop calling me ma’am. You sound like a cowboy in an old western movie.”

  “Come on, Rachel,” Stokes said. “I’m, like, totally sober.”

  “Whatever, I doubt one more or less is gonna hurt,” she said.

  That’s when he should have shot them, Dunn thought later. Rachel went to the refrigerator to get the beers, and Dunn slipped his hand under the gun stock at his back, and to distract them, he asked, “Did you make those quilts?”

  “That’s what I do,” Rachel said, from the kitchen. She came back out with two cans of Miller. “I’m Bear Wallow Quilts. That’s my business. Actually, I ought to talk to you about it. I’ve got this idea for quilts based on landscapes. You know, like you see from the air, all the different sizes of the fields and the way the woods ramble around, and the creeks follow the land . . .”

  Dunn blinked and his hand slid off the gun stock. An aerial image of the landscape around Warrenton flicked through his mind, and he was struck by the beauty of it, interpreted as a quilt. “Boy . . .” He looked down at his feet, then back up. “That really would be something else. They are a quilt, aren’t they?”

  Rachel picked up on that, and they talked around it at the kitchen table, and it was perhaps the most pleasant half hour Dunn had experienced in the past decade. He finished his beer, still feeling the cold press of the pistol at his back, but said goodbye, especially to Rachel, and left.