Dead and Gone b-12

by Andrew Vachss

  Then she stood up, still facing away from me, pulled the panties all the way off, spun around, and sat back down in the same pose she’d used at first.

  “It is not the same chair anymore, is it?” she said. Shifting her hips slightly to underline every word.

  “No.”

  She came over to the bed. Bent at the waist and untied the drawstring of my pajama pants. Then she nipped at my thigh until I reached up and grabbed a fistful of her night-gleaming hair and pulled her closer to where I wanted her.

  “A little bit now,” she whispered against me. “Next time some more. And, some sweet night, Burke, the window that opens will be the one you wish.”

  I was afraid she’d want to talk about it the next morning, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was a demand for breakfast.

  Fair enough. I left her still half asleep, face buried in a pillow, and went into the living room to order from room service. When I saw the wooden chair standing by itself against the back window, I realized Gem had gotten up during the night.

  And when I looked at the chair, I could see … that she was right.

  Gem wanted to return to the poolroom and practice some more. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, thinking the same two clowns might be there, but she quickly pointed out that there were lots of places to choose from … and we weren’t in a hurry, anyway.

  That last was true. I couldn’t make a move until I heard from Byron. And we had the cell phone, so …

  We took a ride, just meandering, looking to stumble across the right place. South of Portland, I saw a sign that said we were entering Milwaukie. Wondered if it was a misspelling. A candy-apple-red Honda Accord coupe with mirrored checkerboard graphics angling across its flanks rolled up next to us at a light. It squatted on huge chrome wheels, with tires that looked like rubber bands, the sidewalls were so thin. It was major-league slammed, lowered so radically that I couldn’t see an inch of ground clearance. The driver had a knife-edged buzz cut, set off by wraparound orange-lensed sunglasses. He blipped the throttle, letting me hear his turbo kick in, cocked his head in an invitation.

  I was going to ignore him, but Gem pounded both little fists on the dash. “Yes, yes, yes!” she yelped.

  The road was clear ahead as far as I could see … but that wasn’t very far. I didn’t know how the Subaru would do off the line, but the Honda looked more like a canyon-racer than a dragster anyway. I returned the guy’s nod, switched my attention to the light, and gave the knurled knob next to the gearshift a quick twist to the right.

  We both launched an eyeblink before the green, but it was no contest—the Subaru’s tractor heritage showed as it out-torqued the Honda with a two-length leave. By the time the Honda got up on its cams and its turbo started to whine, I was already backing off in third gear, letting the engine brake me for the next light.

  The Honda driver pointed ahead through his windshield, then gestured for me to follow him. So he was a canyon-racer after all. No way I was going to try the twistees with that guy, especially in daylight. I tapped my wristwatch to tell him I didn’t have the time. He aimed a finger at me, cocked his thumb, mimed cranking off a round. Meaning: next time, he’d make sure we played on his field.

  “Aren’t we going to—?” Gem protested.

  “I don’t know where he wants to go, but this isn’t the time,” I told her. “The last thing we need is some law-enforcement attention.”

  “All right,” she pouted.

  “Hey, come on. We raced him like you wanted.”

  “I thought it would be longer.”

  “Maybe sometime.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise to try, okay?”

  “I … Oh, look! There’s one.”

  I guessed Gem was one of those folks who think the food’s better in a roadhouse.

  The joint had a long bar, bunch of square wooden tables scattered around, a couple of red vinyl booths, sawdust on the floor. But it was no honky-tonk—that was Garth Brooks coming out of the jukebox, not Delbert McClinton.

  It did have a pool table; one of those bar-size little ones with a slot for the quarters, designed for playing eight-ball and not much else. But that was fine with Gem—she said it looked just like the one in the bar near her home. Once I explained how eight-ball was played, she happily slammed balls all over—and occasionally off—the table, attracting some admiring glances, but no audio.

  She finally pocketed the eight ball while I still had three stripes on the table, and rewarded herself with a brief “Hah!” of triumph. I was still congratulating her when a fat blond guy with a bad haircut and worse acne stepped up with a quarter in his hand, saying, “I got the winner.”

  Before I could say anything, Gem swung her hip into me to shut me up, said “Okay!” to the blond guy.

  He slotted his quarter, waited for the balls to drop, took them out, and racked them. “Your break,” he said to Gem.

  “Oh, you go ahead,” she replied, nestling against me.

  I didn’t move. Gem reached across her body with her right hand, grabbed my wrist, and pulled my arm around her neck. She turned her head until she found my hand, nibbled at it until she got my thumb in her mouth. Then she sucked on it, hard, her innocent eyes watching the blond guy.

  He miscued, missing the entire rack. Somebody laughed. His face mottled red. Without waiting for a response from Gem, he snatched the cue ball, set it up again, and, this time, slammed it deep into the rack, scattering the balls. Two solids and one stripe dropped. He pocketed two more balls before he missed. Gem slowly disengaged her mouth from my thumb, walked over to the table with three times her normal wiggle, and bent over the table a long time, studying her shot. Which she finally dropped in. But that was it—she was done, not another shot was open. Grinning, she whacked away at the cue ball, turning away to walk back over to me while the balls were still flying.

  “You made one!” one of the watchers advised her, pointing to the thirteen ball, which had slopped in off two cushions and a kiss.

  “Thank you,” Gem said politely. Then she sashayed back over to the table, where she tried the same trick. Only this time, no such luck.

  The blond guy shot carefully. He was strictly a barroom eight-ball player—good enough to win a few rounds of beers, but any decent pool hall with full-size tables would have picked him clean in an hour. He finished by dropping the eight ball in the corner, to a round of sarcastic applause from the people watching.

  “You want to try?” he asked me, face flushing, averting his eyes from Gem’s lipstick-smeared mouth, gone back to working on my thumb.

  “No thanks.”

  Gem wiggled against me, making “Go ahead!” noises even though her mouth was full.

  “Shut up,” I told her, smacking her bottom to underline the words.

  Which only got a giggle added to the wiggle.

  I raised my unencumbered hand in surrender. Gem let go of my thumb, giving it a last lick for luck. I put in a quarter, racked the balls for the blond guy the same way he had for Gem, stepped back to let him break.

  He did a good job, pocketing one of each and leaving himself a nice open table. He only had two striped balls left when he finally missed.

  “You gonna run out now?” he asked me.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.”

  “You wanna—?”

  “Yes!” Gem interrupted, before he could finish his offer to bet.

  He turned toward her. “How much?”

  Gem’s face was a mask of concentration. Finally, she said, “Five?”

  “You sure you want to go that deep?” he sneered at her.

  “You are correct,” she answered. “Let us make it for two, all right?”

  A couple of the men watching laughed.

  The blond’s flush turned angry. “Hey, you think it’s such a lock, maybe you—”

  “Oh, lighten up, Wally,” one of the watchers said.

&nbs
p; He slapped two singles on the table. Looked over at me. Gem reached in my jacket pocket like it was her own, pulled out my roll, extracted a pair of hundreds, put them next to the blond’s money. As she did, she looked down, said “Oh! You meant two dollars.”

  That threw the watchers into convulsions. I moved quick to head things off. “Stop playing around,” I told Gem, snatching the two centuries off the table, replacing them with a pair of singles of my own.

  “Hey, pal,” the blond snarled at me. “If you want to—”

  I ignored him. Stepped to the table. The balls looked as big as grapefruits, the pockets as wide as bowling alleys. I made all the solid balls disappear in a couple of minutes, then closed with a tap-in on the eight.

  I spotted two of the watchers high-fiving each other out of the corner of my eye. Gem slipped all four singles off the table and tried in vain to stuff them in the back pocket of her shorts.

  “Ah, Christ. You’re a pro,” the blond guy said, not mad anymore.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Gem, as soon I had the Subaru out of the lot and aimed back toward Portland.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you trying to start a fire?”

  “I only wanted to race. I thought it would be fun.”

  “Uh-huh. So, when I cut that short, you …”

  “Oh, don’t be so foolish. I would never do anything to endanger you.”

  “No? Well, you’ve got a pretty bratty way of playing, then.”

  “Oh, you liked it,” she said, bending her face forward and nipping at my hand on the gearshift knob.

  We were in the middle of keeping my windows closed when the cellular trilled next to the bed.

  “Damn!” Gem hissed over my shoulder. “I should have—”

  I thumbed the phone open, said: “What?”

  “We got the gen,” Byron said.

  “And …?”

  “And it wants analysis. Doesn’t speak for itself. At least not clearly.”

  “When do you want to—?”

  “We’re way south of you. How’s breakfast tomorrow work?”

  “Perfect.”

  Somewhere in space, a satellite synapse snapped, leaving the phone dead in my hand.

  “Do you remember where we were?” Gem whispered. “My … mind does. But—”

  “I can fix that,” she said, pivoting on her knees and sliding toward me across the sheets.

  “The one on the left is Robert Alton Timmons,” Brick told us, tapping the photograph on the table. It was one of the surveillance shots, now hyper-digitized, as sharp as a studio portrait. “His partner’s Louis B. Ruhr.”

  “You had them on record?” I asked him.

  “Half the agencies in the country probably have these two on record. Timmons served two terms for arson.”

  “A pro torch? Or a pyro?”

  “Neither. He was a cross-burner. Graduated to synagogues and individual dwellings back in the days before we called stuff like that ‘hate crimes.’ He was AB on the inside, but that doesn’t mean much—white guy locked down anywhere in California better link up, he wants to serve out his whole bit.

  “Timmons is a floater, a maggot looking for fat corpses. He’s been with the abortion-clinic bombers—still a suspect in a major arson of one in Buffalo—but he’s also put in time with the Klan, survivalists, the common-law courts people, couple of those bizarro true-white religions. Even claimed to be a Phineas Priest for a while—”

  “What is that?” Gem interrupted.

  “Phineas was a Biblical character who killed a race-mixing couple,” Brick said, his eyes on Byron, “so it doesn’t take a genius to see what their program is. The thing about them is that they operate as individuals, not in groups, so infiltration has been next to impossible. The ‘priest’ thing is a self-awarded title. Like the spiderweb tattoos for skinheads that’re supposed to signify you killed one of the ‘mud people.’ Or a Jew. Or anyone gay.” He took a breath. Let it out. “The original Nazis tattooed their targets so they could always find them later. The new ones tattoo themselves. So we can find them. Hitler’d be ashamed of the morons.”

  “You make Timmons for a hustler?” I asked Brick.

  “Could be. When it comes to extremists on either side, it’s always hard to separate the true believers from the profiteers. He’s never stuck anywhere, but he’s been everywhere. Held rank in one of the Identity religions, worked security inside a couple of compounds. You’d think they would have made him for an agent, as many groups as he’s joined and left. But I guess his torch work’s been the credential—no undercover’s going to burn down a building with people in it, and they know it. Besides, he’s a fanatical polygamist.”

  “What’s that got to do with—?” Byron asked.

  “I know what you’re saying,” Brick cut him off. “You can be into polygamy without being a white supremacist. Sure, there’s all this ‘Breed an Aryan baby for the race’ stuff, but they’re not the only ones practicing.

  “The thing about Timmons is, he’s supposed to have shot one of them over the guy’s daughter. Timmons claimed the girl had been ‘promised’ to him, so he wanted her handed over. The father said she wasn’t old enough yet—she was around twelve—and Timmons blasted him and tried to snatch the girl.”

  “He wasn’t prosecuted for that?” I asked. Not suspicious, just trying to add it up.

  “The guy he shot wouldn’t testify. Said it was an accident. And Timmons never got away with the girl, so there really wasn’t any pressure. Or any publicity. But it sure convinced them all that he wasn’t working for ZOG, you know?

  “Anyway, he’s not the boss of that two-man team. That’d be Ruhr. Straight-up pure; hardcore, not some poser or wannabe. Timmons sports the typical ‘88’ tattoo, but Ruhr, the only number on his skin is ‘14.’ You following me?”

  I nodded. The “Fourteen Words” of David Lane, a former leader in The Order. Right now he’s serving life-plus for murder and racketeering in pursuit of an Aryans-only America: “We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for White children.” Words so sacred to some White Night soldiers that they added “14” to their own signatures.

  “Ruhr proved in with a prison homicide almost twenty years ago. It was a face-to-face shank job, one on one, so he only pulled time in the hole for it—that’s the way it was then.”

  You think it’s different now? I thought to myself, but kept quiet as Brick continued:

  “He’s a hit man. But not freelance. Only kills for the cause. We have it confirmed that he’s worked overseas. Trips to the U.K.—he’s a suspect in the assassination of an IRA official—and France, and Germany, for sure. Maybe others.”

  “So no way they’re connected to the skinhead kids who tried to grab Gem?” I asked.

  “We can’t say that,” he cautioned. “They’re not on the same level, no question. But every contract hitter has to make his bones sometime. Ruhr wasn’t any older than the kids you described when he started whacking people.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Looks like he grew up Inside.” I pointed to the swastika tattooed on the side of his neck. “That’s a jailhouse job. And an old one—see how blobby the ink is?”

  Brick just nodded agreement.

  “And the connection to the Russians?” I asked him.

  “Well, they’re not Russian Jews, so they wouldn’t be excluded, necessarily. You know, for years we’ve been hearing about a Stalinist organization, but nothing specific ever shows up.”

  “You mean inside Russia?” Gem asked him.

  “No. I mean, sure, there probably is something like that going on there; who knows? But I was talking about outside the country. Didn’t you ever wonder? Stalin was a bigger murderer than Hitler ever was. A greater fascist. Plus, he won. He survived it all, while Adolf snuffed himself in a bunker, sniveling to the end. How come Stalin never gets the kind of freak-worship Hitler does?”

  “He wasn’t about race,” Byron said. “He was abou
t power.”

  “So?”

  “So what appeals to lowlife, beady-eyed, chinless, inbred, failure-flunky trash is the idea that they’re genetically superior to the rest of us.”

  “And the cream will rise to the top?”

  “Sure. Once they scrape off that crust of mud.”

  “This isn’t about politics,” Brick reminded us. “It’s about what a pair like Ruhr and Timmons are doing in the picture.”

  “You’re going to ask around your—”

  “Sure,” he told me. “But our agency’s not supposed to be working Stateside, remember? Our intel on home-grown Nazis isn’t as good as … Well, you understand what I’m saying.”

  “I do,” I told him. “Thanks.”

  “What’re you going to do now?” Byron asked me.

  “I got places I can look, too,” I said. “But I have to go home to start.”

  “How safe would that be?” Brick asked. Telling me that Byron hadn’t kept anything back from him.

  “I’m dead,” I answered. Then I told them both about Morales’ message.

  “That I can check,” Brick told me. “If you’re not listed as dead on the law-enforcement computers by the time I get back, I’ll get word to Byron, and …”

  “I’ll reach out for you, brother,” Byron finished.

  Our last night in the Governor, the window opened again. Gem was sweet and smooth about it, sliding off my limpness as if she’d finished herself, anyway.

  “It happens to most people when they’re … under great stress,” she said, gently. “With you, it is the opposite, yes?”

  “I … think so.”

  “It’s not dissociation, is it? I mean, you know where you are and—”

  “Yes. It’s just the way you described it. I can see everything I’m doing, but I can also see myself seeing it. Like I’m watching. Then a little box opens. And the more it gets filled, the bigger it gets. Until that’s all I can see.”