“We did,” Bob said. “A Tahoe, seventy-two thousand miles and it smells funny and the tranny sorta grinds, but, what the hell.”
“Why don’t we grab a bite in a half hour or so,” Rae suggested. “Talk about what we’re doing.”
Lucas nodded. “Sounds good.” As he walked away, he half turned, and said, “Good to see you guys. Glad to have you here.”
“Glad to be here,” Rae said.
CHAPTER
TEN
Lucas, Bob, and Rae got a snack in the hotel restaurant, caught up with one another. They talked for an hour; Rae wouldn’t discuss her recent heartbreak and Bob said that his relationship with a local gym teacher might be developing into something serious. “Girl is smart and nice-looking and she could throw a cow over a barbed-wire fence. I’m saying she’s in shape.”
“And cow-throwing is a much-needed skill set,” Rae said.
“You know what I’m saying,” Bob said.
“I know exactly where you’re coming from,” Rae said. To Lucas: “Andi’s got the best ass in Louisiana. That even includes my ass, which ain’t exactly chopped liver.”
* * *
—
AFTER EATING, they rendezvoused in Lucas’s room, so Lucas could lay out the problem. He told them about the initial threat and what he’d done so far, about his request that Charlie Lang and Stephen Gibson do some research for him, and how he’d gotten all beaten up that afternoon.
“That’s one lucky lady,” Rae said, when he finished. “Shootin’ at cops, and still alive. If I’d been there, I’d have killed her.”
“Yeah, I expect you would have,” Lucas said. “She might be the least of my problems here. I’m looking at six more groups. One of them is another prison-linked gang, and to tell the truth, after what Tabby Calvin said, this White Fist group might be the same deal as Controlled Burn. I mean, think about it: how many geniuses have you met in prison gangs?”
“Not many,” Bob said. “They mostly couldn’t figure out how to sign up for welfare, much less overthrow the government. That’s not exactly in their thought processes, most of them being complete dumbasses.”
“Exactly. Then, there’s this Forlorn Hope group,” Lucas said. “Whole different thing. I’m told that they like guns, they’re probably dangerous, and the scary thing is, they are definitely crazy. They’re pro-rape, for Christ’s sakes.”
“You don’t hear that every day,” Rae said.
“No, you don’t. The impression I got from the ANM guy is that they hate everybody, and they see themselves as people with nothing to lose. They’re dead-enders. Might as well die now because there’s nothing to live for. Can’t even get laid.”
“What about the other groups?” Bob asked. “Lotsa guns?”
“Some of them could be armed, not all of them. The ANM guy thought Patriotus might be the most likely to set up the 1919 website. They’re anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-whatever you got. They do work the politics, though. They leaflet, they march, they propagandize, they call their congressmen.”
Rae said, “Since we’re mostly worried about shooters, let’s go see this Forlorn group first thing.”
“One thing that bothers me,” Bob said, “is that we’re not really getting at what the 1919 site is set up for. They want somebody else to do the shooting. Even if it turns out Forlorn Hope or one of the others set up the website, that doesn’t get at the potential shooter.”
“That worries me,” Lucas agreed. “If it’s a lone wolf, somebody out there nursing his paranoia, how in the hell do we stop that? We do have some Secret Service coverage—a few people assigned to get the kids to school. They’ve scouted out places where a potential hit might start and are covering them.”
“That’s good,” Rae said.
“Gotta think about all of this,” Bob said. “They’ve taken down the website, right?”
“Yeah, but if you want to read it, I made a copy before it was taken down,” Lucas said.
“Send it to us—maybe we’ll come up with some ideas.”
“I will. And I’ll send you the files on all these groups. Read through them, see if anything strikes you. I’m not seeing much.”
* * *
—
AND THE NEXT MORNING, Rae asked Lucas, over waffles, “Did you actually read the stuff about Forlorn Hope?”
“Yeah, I think so, I sort of skimmed some of it,” Lucas said. “What about it?”
“This Mark Stapler guy, the leader. He lives in the back of a coffeehouse and the front of the place is like a clubhouse for the Forlorn. We might be walking into a whole bunch of assholes who like guns and don’t like us.”
“You want to pussy out?” Bob asked.
Rae gave him the heavy stink-eye: “You know what I think about that word.”
“I was using it in the non-vaginal sense,” Bob said. “A synonym for fraidy-cat.”
“Oh. Okay, then. No, I’m not trying to pussy out, I’m just pointing out that the files say they like guns and there may be a whole bunch of them.”
“Not so likely early in the morning,” Lucas said.
“I looked the place up and it opens up at six a.m.,” Rae said.
“But how likely is it that they have club meetings at six in the morning?” Lucas asked.
“Not likely, but maybe more likely at eleven o’clock, which is about when we’ll get there, at the pace we’re moving.”
“Then drink your coffee and let’s go,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
THE WOKE CAFÉ WAS IN DOVER, Delaware, a few blocks from the Dover International Speedway, according to a Google map on Lucas’s iPad. Bob said the speedway featured NASCAR races a couple of times a year, but neither Rae nor Lucas knew anything about NASCAR so they didn’t care about that.
The café was two and a half hours from Washington, and they took the Marshals Service Chevy Tahoe, Rae driving fast through traffic, through Annapolis and across the bridge to the Delaware farm country on the other side. Lucas rode shotgun, Bob sprawled in the backseat reading the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, which they’d picked up before leaving the hotel.
“Woke means aware of societal injustice, usually referring to racism, but in this case, maybe sexual discrimination against men who are involuntarily celibate,” Rae said.
Lucas said, “Hum. Might also mean you wake up when you drink their coffee.”
“Could be a pun,” Bob said. “They’re outraged by the unfairness of being incels, and they also wake you up with the coffee.”
“You gotta look at it from their perspective. There is something corrosive in the inability to get laid,” Rae continued.
From the backseat, Bob flapped a newspaper page and said, “Rae, you ever look around on the streets? You ever look at some of the guys who actually have women? Remember Elliott Horton, for Christ’s sakes?”
“Who’s Elliott Horton?” Lucas asked.
“The biggest goddamned loser criminal peckerwood you can possibly imagine, on the run for counterfeiting. When I say counterfeiting, I mean running off twenty-dollar bills on a Xerox color copier and them cutting them apart with scissors,” Bob said. “Anyway, when we caught up with him, he was living in an unpainted concrete box on the banks of the Tombigbee, and his face looked like one of those old pictures of a witch, complete with a wart on his chin, and he had about one tooth, and he had two women. My theory is, show me a guy who doesn’t have a woman, and you’re looking at a guy who’s got some other problem than not having a woman. Probably a large problem. Psychosis—something that actually repels women.”
“You gotta admit, though, Horton’s women only sorta loosely fit the definition of women,” Rae said over her shoulder to Bob. “They weren’t exactly Stacys.”
Lucas: “Stacys?”
“Yeah, that�
�s incel talk,” Rae said. “The good-looking guys are Chads and they get all the good-looking women; the good-looking desirable women are Stacys. We should have given you a test on those FBI files.”
“I didn’t pay too much attention to that part,” Lucas said. “The incel part.”
Bob: “The problem the incels have, is not that they can’t get some woman, it’s that they can’t get a Stacy. In my opinion. They grow up thinking they’re gonna be nailing supermodels who’ll be doing everything they see on their favorite porn channel, and when that doesn’t happen . . . they’re victims. And they’re pissed.”
“And they got guns,” Rae said. “At least some of them.”
Bob: “We got two mass killers supposedly involved with the whole incel thing. We take them seriously, Lucas. We don’t do that ‘Hum’ shit, like you just did.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. He looked out at the countryside: it looked so normal. Where did all the flakes come from? How did you get whole collections of them, and in one place?
* * *
—
LUCAS HAD NEVER been in any part of Delaware. He knew Dover was the state capital, but driving through town to the Woke Café, the place seemed poorer than he’d expected, since state capitals were usually stuffed with well-paid bureaucrats. Maybe, he thought, Delaware didn’t well-pay its bureaucrats. Rae said, looking out the windows, “Lots of black folks around. I didn’t see that coming.”
The Woke Café was a half mile north of the speedway, in a low rambling brown stuccoed building set back from the Dupont Highway. There were three cars and five pickups in the graveled parking lot out front, and two more in the back, which they spotted as Rae drove a loop around the place.
“How do you want to do it?” Rae asked.
Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “The guy, Mark Stapler, supposedly lives in the back. Maybe we knock on the back door? Maybe Rae knocks on the back door?”
“She’s pretty much your basic Stacy,” Bob said from the back seat. “Probably let her in. Once she’s got her foot in the door . . .”
“Vests?” Lucas asked.
“It’s warm,” Bob said. “Wouldn’t be able to cover it up without looking a little weird.”
Rae shook her head: “No vests. That’s hostile. Let’s go in and talk—we’re not here to bust anybody.”
“Here to bust their balls,” Bob said.
Lucas: “Let’s try to keep the conversation away from the condition of their balls. They’re incels, remember?”
* * *
—
LUCAS AND BOB STOOD back and to the sides when Rae pushed the doorbell button on the back door. No reason to think anyone would come out shooting; not that it made any difference, because there was no answer, or any sign of occupancy, even when she leaned on the button.
“Do it the other way, then,” Lucas said, and they trooped around to the front. Inside the café, with Rae leading, they found a dozen people, all male, all white, drinking coffee, spread around five tables and three barstools, with a dozen more tables, all empty, stretching toward the back of the café. A newspaper rack sat to one side, with a few used magazines; three were gun magazines. The patrons all checked out Rae, Bob, and Lucas, and didn’t go back to talking.
A man in a white chef’s apron was standing behind a counter in front of a standard stainless steel coffee bar; a glass case off to one side held pastries, and a stack of Wall Street Journals sat on the counter next to the cash register.
The man behind the counter was short and not so much chubby as out of shape. He had a long sharp nose and expansive, feathery white hair sticking out from under an all-black logo-free trucker’s hat. “Can I help you?”
“We’re with the U.S. Marshals Service,” Rae said. “We’re looking to interview a Mr. Mark Stapler.”
“I’m Mark,” the man said. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties. “What did I do?”
“We don’t think you did anything,” Rae said. “We’re doing research on a whole bunch of organizations in the Washington area, trying to make some important connections. We understand you’re the, uh, president of a group called Forlorn Hope?”
“That’s correct, but we haven’t broken any laws, we haven’t done anything that would interest you guys,” Stapler said.
Another man stood up from one of the tables. As Lucas turned to him, he said, “I’m in Hope, and so is Jason here.” He nodded toward a man still seated, who raised his hand. “What’s going on?”
The man who’d stood up stepped over to the bar. He was wearing a long-sleeved plaid shirt despite the warm day and the shirt was worn loose. When he bumped the back of a barstool, there was a distinct clank. Bob asked, “Sir, are you carrying a concealed weapon?”
The man said, “Yup, and I have a license for it.”
“Please keep your hand away from it,” Bob said.
“What is this?” Stapler demanded.
“We need to talk to you about an ongoing investigation,” Lucas told him. “It would be best if we did it in the back, you know, for privacy reasons.”
Two of the men sitting at a table to one side stood up and one said, “We’re leaving, if that’s okay.”
Rae said, “Sure,” and they left.
“You’re messing up my business,” Stapler said. He was getting red in the face.
“Let’s go talk, no reason there should be a problem,” Rae said.
“Who’s going to watch the counter?”
“You’ve got two guys here from your group, they could keep an eye on it for a few minutes,” Lucas said. “They can call you if somebody comes in.”
Stapler looked at the other two men standing by the bar, and said to the man with the gun, “Ron, could you watch it? We’ll go in the back. I’ll make it quick as I can.”
* * *
—
A LONG NARROW ROOM full of coffee-making supplies, a desk, and file cabinets sat behind the café’s main room; Stapler led them through a second door into his living quarters, a two-room apartment with a couple of decrepit couches and a monster TV in the main room, with an unmade bed visible to the side. The walls held several antique guns, flintlocks and caplocks, mounted on pegs. The mounted head of a deer looked down from over the bathroom door.
Stapler didn’t sit down. He stood, with fists on his hips, facing Bob, Rae, and Lucas, and said, “So tell me.”
Lucas: “What do you know about a group called 1919?”
“Nothing. Well, nothing but what I seen on Fox. That redheaded chick talking it up.”
“You haven’t heard anything about it from your organization’s members? No speculation about who might be behind it?”
“Nope. Not a thing,” he said. “Just a minute.”
He went back to the door that led to the café, opened it, and called, “Ron? Come here a minute, will you? Jason, could you watch the counter?”
The man with the gun stepped through the door and said to Stapler, “Nobody coming in right now.” He was a bulky man, something not right about his left eye, which was watery and a bit inflamed.
Stapler nodded: “Okay. The marshals want to know if the members have heard about 1919. I told them I seen it on Fox.”
Before he could reply, Bob asked the bulky man, “What’s your last name?”
“Linstad.” To Stapler, he said, “A couple guys were talking about it last night, after that Fox show. Nobody ever heard of them before. They had pictures of kids belonging to politicians . . . like some kind of threat, I guess.”
Stapler said to Lucas, “That’s what I heard, too. You done some research on us, I’d guess, so you know what we’re about. You would think we would have heard something . . . but we haven’t heard anything.”
“How come you come to us?” Linstad asked.
“Because you’re somewhat . . . out there . . . in your poli
tics, and you seem to like guns.”
“We do like guns, for self-defense,” Stapler said. “Nothing illegal about that.”
“How about that whole rape thing?” Rae asked. “About how, sometimes it might be a reasonable activity?”
“That’s all theory,” Stapler said, flapping one hand dismissively. To Linstad, he said, “Go back out front, watch the register and send Jason back here. Let’s see what he has to say.”
Linstad went, and a moment later, Jason came through the door. “What’s up?”
Rae explained, and Jason said, “Doesn’t have anything to do with us. I saw that girl on TV, that’s about it.”
Lucas pressed them: they didn’t move. They knew nothing about 1919.
Stapler said, “You know who you oughta talk to, is that Stacy chick on TV.”
Lucas: “That Stacy . . .”
Stapler waved again. “Whatever her real name is. She’s been all over the media. You guys are running around trying to find 1919 and you wanna know what? The only one making anything off the whole 1919 thing is her. I’m in the coffee shop all day with that TV going on the wall and she’s all over it.”
“She does this thing with her mouth,” Jason said, running his tongue around his upper and lower lips. “Like she’s dying to give us all blow jobs. Course, she won’t be giving them to the likes of us.”
“Easy,” Rae said. “She’s a teenager.”
“Name only,” Stapler said. “She’s coming on like she’s hot to trot and then she’s all, ‘I’m a victim fighting back,’ and she gets those teary eyes. Bullshit. I bet she’s pulling down more money than I’ll make in ten years running this place.”
Another man came through from the front, a hulk, a lard-can head, shoulders a yard wide in a plaid shirt, all of it set above hips barely a foot across, with spindly legs dangling below. He had a voice like a bass guitar: “What the hell? Ron told me you was back here.”
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