by Todd Borg
Stein took a deep breath, his nose whistling. “I think the best defense is to understand the breadth and depth of those who would like to put us back into the ovens. A man like you would probably think that I should have a private investigator’s license. But I know the requirements. I stay just this side of that line. And I report all that I learn to Special Agent Ramos up at the lake. You probably know who he is.”
I nodded. “Have you seen any videos of O’Connell?”
Stein shook his head. “But I saw videos that mentioned him. He had a reputation in the drug and militia underground. He sounded like the devil. He was some kind of a knife expert. One comment I read was that he liked to cut flesh. But he wasn’t a leader. More of a second-in-command.”
I tried to remember who else had said that about Nick O’Connell, but it didn’t come to me.
“No loss to the world with O’Connell gone,” Stein said. “The men who follow these leaders and who engrave their bodies with the hateful tattoos, they are to be reviled,” Stein said. “But the leaders, the would-be Hitlers who build these groups and shape their hate, they are pure evil. David Halstead. Nick O’Connell. I believe in and support our system of jurisprudence, but these are the people we can do without.”
Stein said it with such venom that I again wondered if he had a little vigilante blood in him.
“Do you know how I can contact the Red Blood Patriots?” I asked.
Stein narrowed his eyes. “A phone number or email? No. They are much too secretive. But Halstead has a tract of land in the foothills where the Red Blood Patriots do their military exercises. There are some buildings there under the trees. They’re well-hidden, but you can just make them out on the Google satellite photos. We believe some of the Patriots live there. Others live in the surrounding countryside. But if you go there and your disguise isn’t very good, you might get yourself killed. Then I would have that on my conscience.”
“Dr. Stein, I’m an ex-cop. Twenty years SFPD. I’m experienced, cautious, sensible. You can tell me the location.”
He shook his head at me as if to say that I was a fool. “We believe that the Red Blood Patriots have killed three people who poked into their business. One was an ATF agent who disappeared a few months ago. He’d been working undercover on the gun show circuit in Nevada. He was last heard from as he was following some men in a pickup. They had left a show in Reno and were headed west into California.
“Another likely victim was a member of a rival militia group in Oregon. We think he went in under cover as if to join the Red Bloods but in reality had a darker purpose. We don’t know what. Steal weapons? Try to join up, influence other members, and stage a coup? All we know is that he was seen going into the compound and he never came out. The boys in Eastern Oregon where he was from have been talking about attacking. Like some damn horde of infidels coming out of the north. Unbelievable.”
“Who was the third person you think they killed?”
Stein gave me a hard look. “A reporter from Sacramento. A free-lance writer who has done features for The Reno Gazette Journal, The Sacramento Bee, The Chronicle and others. She contacted me for information. I didn’t tell her about the Red Blood Patriots, thank God. She got that information somewhere else. Anyway, one of the editors – I won’t say at which paper – had given her an assignment to write about the militias. Militias In Our Midst was her working title. She was seen in the area asking about the Patriots. Then she was never seen again. Later, a tourist passing through the foothills said he overheard some guys in a foothill bar. They talked about the reporter bitch and how she really put up a good fight.” Stein looked down, his face dark.
“If you won’t tell me where the Red Blood Patriots hang out, I’ll get the information from someone else.”
Stein reached into his briefcase and pulled out a notebook. He flipped through the pages.
“There is an auto shop called the Good Fix Garage that is owned by Halstead and his brother Harmon. Harmon runs the garage. He’s a bit of a dimwit and isn’t an important figure in the Red Blood Patriots. One way or another, you can get in touch with some of the Patriots through Harmon. I’ll write down the address of the garage.” He wrote on a Post-it and handed it to me. “The Patriot land is a quarter section – one hundred sixty acres – roughly north of the garage and west of the highway, but it is not on the highway. In the public records it is described as having no legal access. Which means you’d have to explore the local logging roads to find a way to drive in there.”
“Thanks.” I stood and shook his hand.
Stein looked at me. “It is a mark of how dangerous these guys are that they attracted a shark of the magnitude of Nick O’Connell. You go into their lair against my advice. It’s best to let groups like us watch from the outside. We keep the sheriff informed, and he responds as he sees fit.”
“I appreciate the warning,” I said and left, with dark foreboding in my mind as I walked back across campus.
Thankfully, my car hadn’t been towed. Spot was still inside.
THIRTY-ONE
The address Professor Stein had written down was in a foothill town near Highway 49 between Placerville and Auburn. Gold Country. Home for tens of thousands of good people who willingly pay their taxes and respect their government and its laws even if they disagree with some of them. And, apparently, also the chosen home ground for the Red Blood Patriots.
I got back on 80 and drove west out of Reno, up the canyon to Truckee, over Donner Summit and down the long glide to Auburn. I pulled off the highway and found a walk-up taco restaurant. I ordered four beef jumbo tacos.
“Have you eaten here before?” the pretty young brown-skinned girl said in native-born American English. “Because if not, I should warn you that our jumbo tacos are really big.”
“No problem. I’ll have really big help eating them. I’d also like two milks and a large bowl of water.”
“I’m sorry, you want, like, water in a bowl?”
“Please,” I said. “A large bowl. It’s for my dog.” I gestured over my shoulder toward Spot, who had his head out the window, nose and pointy ears perked up and aimed toward the taco smells.
The girl gasped when she saw Spot, then broke into a huge grin. Her teeth were crooked, but very white.
“But we don’t sell water. And we don’t have bowls. I don’t know what to say. They trained me to take special orders, but they never said anything about dogs.”
“How ’bout a hose? Do you have one of those?”
“No. We took it in for the coming winter.”
“A faucet?”
“Of course! You have to have a faucet to put a hose on!”
I was so obtuse.
“May my dog use your faucet?”
The grin came back. “Yeah, sure!”
So Spot and I fortified ourselves, then headed south on the Gold Country highway.
The rundown town was two-horse in size and one-horse in pretensions and probably no horses lived there. The fanciest building was the Good Fix Garage, an old gas station with peeling paint that no longer sold gas. I parked and walked in through one of the two open garage doors.
The garage was dusty and musty and hot and smelled of oil and cigars and beer and something else that I recognized but couldn’t place. I turned around, looking for any staff. There was a late ’70s Bronco up on the lift, its two rear wheels off and leaning against a large red tool chest. On the other side of the chest was a door that led to the office. I stepped over an air wrench and hose and compressor and stuck my head in the office doorway.
It was a small room with an ancient counter on which sat what was probably the original cash drawer and Skoal rack from the 1950s glory days of gas stations.
The walls had been papered with gun posters, glued edge-to-edge wherever there weren’t windows. Assault rifles, big-bore sniper rifles, and hunting rifles. Gatling guns, Tommy guns, MAC 10s, Uzis. Revolvers, pistols, semi-automatics. Zip guns, air guns. Next to the door was a poste
r that showed pictures and listed the features of bullets from tiny .22s on up to .50-caliber rounds that were closer to artillery shells than bullets. Exploding bullets, armor-piercing bullets, tracer bullets, incendiary bullets.
I realized what the smell was that seemed familiar.
Gunpowder.
No doubt the Red Blood Patriots liked to load their own ammo.
Behind the counter was a more ominous poster. It detailed the features of shoulder-launched assault rockets, small, finned missiles that could be carried in your pack yet had the power to blow a house into splinters.
At the back of the office was an old green metal desk. Sitting behind the desk, talking on the phone, was a rugged, handsome man in his fifties. He had thick gray hair that looked like a movie star’s.
The man raised a finger in acknowledgment. I nodded. He kept talking about the shocks on the Bronco.
Behind the man was the only non-violent poster in the office, a map of the surrounding area. It was part topo map with the lines that show elevation, and part history map that showed old gold sites. The map had been marked with black Xs and arrows and small notations that I couldn’t read from where I stood. I looked for a square labeled Red Blood Patriot Country, but they’d forgotten to put it on the map. In the corner of the map were two numerals.
88.
The man got off the phone.
“Help you?”
“Yeah. Looking for a guy named Harmon.”
“I’m pret’ near the only Harm these parts,” he said. “Ain’t saying fer sure, but far as I know, a guy want someone named Harm, a guy want me.”
I looked around. “This your garage? Cool. I always wondered if I coulda done this, fixing cars and stuff. Keeping people on the move.”
“It’s my brother Davy’s business. Only he’s not here much. He did real good with Harley Davidson stock. Timed every one of the five stock splits to the day. Now he’s semi-retired, and I mostly run the garage.”
Harmon didn’t yet know that his brother had been killed the previous morning. I took a moment to figure how to play my next move.
“Awesome,” I said. “See, I’s havin’ lunch at this taco joint up the road in Auburn? And I got talkin’ to this guy who’s parked next to me. He knows you… big guy in a red Dodge Ram half-ton. Ring a bell? Sweet paint job. You pro’bly know it. Got the blue pinstripe. Name’s Bob, I think he said. Innaways, we’re both deer hunters, and he say he nailed a twelve-point down these parts last fall. So I tol’ him that I’d never ask where he dropped such a trophy, but maybe he could just gimme a tip about good huntin’ in the area. You know, general locations where a guy might see some buckskin.”
Harmon frowned at me, a flicker of concern darkening his face. I was treading on sacred ground.
“So Bob,” I continued, “he say pretty much anywhere in Gold Country is fruitful. That kinda stuck in my ear. Fruitful. Ain’t heard no hunter talk like that. But there it was. Maybe Bob read books or somethin’. Innaways, Bob say to me that if me ’n my hound was headin’ south on forty-nine, I should stop at the Good Fix Garage ’cause ol’ Harm knows these woods better ’n anyone else.”
“Well, that’s true, and I can truthfully say there ain’t no good hunting around here,” Harmon said.
“You’re kiddin’.”
Harmon shook his head. Real serious. “Nope. Our hunters are good. They already got all the deer.”
“Well, hear me out if you got a sec.” I stepped to the side of his desk and pointed at the map behind his head. Harmon rotated his desk chair to see what I was pointing at.
“See how this area here got this big ravine goin’ through it, ’n this whole side is a west-facin’ slope? Well, I been studyin’ deer for better part of twenty year, and I made up a theory ’bout it. You know how a cougar will sit up in a tree and drop down on a deer, all stealth-like? The deer go into the trees for cover, but it turn out the worst thing to do. Bam!” I clapped my hands. “Jaws ’round the back your neck!”
Harmon made the tiniest of flinches.
“Innaways, any buck with a big rack has lived a long time and learnt how to stay outta the cougar’s jaws. So I think – this is what I call my theory of bucks – I think the big buck stay outta the trees. ’N where’s that? On the west-facin’ slope where the trees don’t grow ’cause the sun is too hot and the ground is too dry. A big buck’ll just stay in the tall grass. And if a cougar comes their way, that ol’ buck’ll pro’bly lower that rack ’n charge! If I were a cougar, no way I’d wanna be shish kebab on a buck rack. Whadya think?”
Harmon did a slow headshake and looked at me like I was nuts.
I kept talking. “So I’m lookin’ at this west slope.” I traced the topo lines with my finger, covering a wide area of country not far from the garage where we stood.
Harmon didn’t react.
I moved my finger to a new area. “Or this slope,” I said. “Or this one.”
“No, not that one,” Harmon said. “Don’t go there.”
“Oh, you hunted that area? Come back with all your ammo, did ya?”
I pointed to another area. “What about this place? You ever hunted there?”
Harmon thought about it. He stood up and pointed at the map. “I’d say this slope or the first two slopes you pointed at would be yer best bet. But this one? I know that country. I can state that I never seen a deer anywhere around there.”
“Hey, that’s a good tip,” I said. “Save me from wastin’ my time. I thank you. Now I can test my theory.” I shook his hand, moved to leave, then turned back. “Hey, you wanna take a break? I’d like to buy you a beer. You’re my kinda guy.”
Harmon shook his head the way he’d shake it if someone offered to let him hold their snake.
“Okay, Harm. But I owe ya. You ’n me ever end up in the same bar, I’m buyin’ a round for all your buds. Mark my word ’cause my word is better ’n King Tut.”
I walked out to the Jeep. Spot had his head out the window. I rubbed Spot’s head and said, “Bingo.”
THIRTY-TWO
I drove out of town in the direction of the area that Harmon categorically stated contained no deer. As I got close to the big west-facing slope I’d seen on the map, I pulled off the highway and drove forward into a short, up-hill dead-end that was thick with brush and overhung with Black oak trees. A young buck burst out of the cover and bolted up the slope above me. I gunned the Jeep under the brush, the branches making new scratches over the old scratches in my paint job. I stopped and set the brake.
I had to push hard to open my door against the pressure of the brush. I deflected brambles away from my face, went around to the right side of the Jeep where there was a bit more space, and let Spot out. He immediately ran toward the brush where the deer had disappeared.
“Spot!” I shouted in a low voice.
He powered up the steep slope a bit, then stopped, not because of my voice, but because the slope was closer to vertical than horizontal. Like many predators, he instinctively realized that deer have anti-gravity that makes them run faster the steeper the slope. And it was hot, the Mediterranean foothill climate unabated by the fall season. More nap-in-the-shade weather than run-up-the-hill weather.
I walked out of the dead-end and onto the highway. Spot followed, staying in the tall, dried grass at the side of the road, trotting with his nose down. Probably sniffing out militia members. I heard the sound of a vehicle from behind a curve. On instinct, I called Spot’s name and ran off the road toward a group of oaks. Spot bounded after me, always excited when I run.
We were under cover when the vehicle came into view. It was an old Chevy Blazer, painted camo, four guys in it, wearing camo. The windows were down. They were talking loud enough to be heard over the roar of the bad exhaust system. Based on the raucous laughter, somebody was very funny.
After they passed, we went back to the highway. A quarter mile down, I saw a foot trail that climbed up the steep slope at a gradual angle. Spot went first, exhibiting
the standard dog enthusiasm for trails. If he could talk, he’d say, “A path! Let’s see where it goes!”
I followed. In just a few minutes we were a hundred feet or more above the highway. Two cars and a pickup approached from the north. Just in case any of the vehicles’ occupants were leaning forward so they could look straight up through their windshields, I held Spot and we squatted down in the high grass. In another minute or two, we had hiked high enough that I didn’t think anyone would see us from the highway.
We came to a fold in the landscape, which provided a good view of the slope above. It rose up to a ridge. Along the crest of the ridge, just barely visible when I squinted my eyes, was a fence. I couldn’t make out the details, except that it seemed tall. I wanted a closer look.
I left the gradual trail and hiked straight up the steep slope toward the fancy fence. After half a minute, I turned. Spot stood on the trail below, looking up at me, wondering when I would come to my senses. I continued upslope. In places it was steep enough that I had to put my hands on the ground in front of me to help keep from sliding back on the slippery dry grass. A glance back revealed that Spot had decided to join me. He labored up the slope, his body language telegraphing his distaste at exercise for exercise’s sake.
The air was biting hot and full of nature sounds. Grasshoppers snapped their wings as they lurched through the air. In the distance came the buzzsaw racket of cicadas advertising some big event, maybe a sex orgy or their impending takeover of the world from humans. The crispy golden grass made crinkly noises under the pressure of a breeze so hot that the more it blew, the hotter you got. My panting was so loud that mountain lions from miles away would be perking up their ears and calculating the meal count a large dying animal like me would provide. The only sound I hadn’t heard was an agitated rattlesnake, which I knew were numerous in the foothills, but which no doubt had the good sense to stay indoors on such a hot afternoon.
