Definitely worth worrying about. And it made him want to heave.
It was after three, and time to get to bed. Tomorrow he’d pay a courtesy call at Ivinson Memorial, then chain up the county’s Blazer and go out in the snow looking for Shane Parker.
Chapter 15
The Stay-at-home Soldiers
It was snowing a foot an hour, and they’d closed I–80 west of Laramie. Bobby Helwigsen had left Danny Crease to tip the waitress and sent Arthur Stopes off to get some motel rooms while he went to the pay phone at Foster’s Country Corner. He could have used his cellular telephone (he was an oil and gas lawyer in Casper, and the firm had insisted he have one) but he never used it when he was out on maneuvers with the Unknown Soldiers. He assumed that the computer geek at Whipple, Hipple & Abernathy must have been ordered to wire everybody’s phones to be able to listen in, to make sure all the employees were doing things that were billable but minimally actionable. He knew W, H & A, like all law firms, didn’t give a gopher’s ass for attorney-client privilege or any other kind of confidentiality when it came to billing employee hours and covering their pin-striped butts.
Number One answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he whispered.
“Is somebody there?” Bobby whispered back.
“My grandchildren are watching The Lion King in the den,” said Number One.
“I love The Lion King,” said Bobby.
“Report, Number Two,” Number One whispered impatiently.
“We’re in Laramie, it’s snowing, and I sent Arthur to find some motel rooms,” Bobby reported. “As soon as I hang up I’ll take Danny and Dirtbag and go debrief Shane.”
“Use numbers,” hissed Number One, a reactionary millionaire Teton County rancher named Elroy Foote, who had recently decided they needed more anonymity in the militia he was bankrolling.
“I can’t keep the goddamn numbers straight,” said Bobby.
“No profanity,” warned Elroy. “The Unknown Soldiers stand for God and Freedom.”
“Whatever,” said Bobby, who had signed up chiefly in the hopes of getting a reasonable quantity of Elroy’s money, and hated it when Elroy talked in capital letters. “Anyway, they’ve shut down the interstate, so we can’t get to, uh, where we’re going tonight anyway. Shane, er,” he racked his memory, “Number Sixteen carried out his first mission today, but we don’t have any idea what he’s got, so we have to go find out.”
“I don’t like the motel-in-Laramie idea at all,” Elroy said in a flat voice Bobby was supposed to find menacing. “Somebody’s bound to notice the trucks and wonder what you’re up to. You could divert to Little America.”
“Right. Like every speed-freak trucker in the world not to mention the Wyoming Highway Patrol wouldn’t notice our trucks, and besides, by the time we could get there, if they haven’t by some miracle shut down the interstate east of here, there won’t be a motel room left this side of Nebraska.”
Bobby wasn’t all that tickled about it himself. He hated being seen in public with the Unknown Soldiers. He could always count on one or more of them for some kind of outburst. There’d been plenty tonight, that completely unnecessary business with Dirtbag at the gas pump, and Danny looking like he was about to wig out on the waitress. Bobby had kept his hat and sunglasses on, his eyes on his plate, and his mouth shut except when he was shoveling in steak and potatoes. He was not all that eager to be made as a member of Elroy’s goon patrol. After four nights of freezing his ass off in a tent in the Laramie Range, just so Elroy’s boys could say they were tough enough to defend Wyoming from invaders who had the bad sense to attack during the winter, he’d a hell of a lot rather have been hammering down for Casper, a good hunk of a bottle of scotch, and his own bed.
Elroy said nothing for a moment, and Bobby could hear “Circle of Life” faintly in the background. He hummed along in his head, knowing Elroy would give his order quickly because he thought every telephone call over two minutes long was recorded by the FBI.
“Go debrief Number Sixteen and then call me from the motel. For God and Freedom!” he whispered fiercely and hung up.
Bobby shook his head. Sometimes he wondered how he’d gotten into this Unknown Soldiers idiocy. He was not a right-wing antigovernment conservative or a biggovernment liberal or anything else for that matter. Privately, he described his politics as “acquisitive.” Less than a year ago, he’d been down in Cheyenne during the legislative session, schmoozing and drinking and moaning about the crushing burden of state tax and regulatory laws. Bobby had been working out of state for the past few years, but had come back to Casper to take the job with W, H & A, and he was trying to make connections.
One of the senior partners had introduced him to Elroy, an old Harvard buddy and a very important client of the firm. “Young Helwigsen,” whispered the partner, “suck up to Mr. Foote from Teton County. He has more money than God and less sense than your average hunting dog.”
Bobby Helwigsen was six-foot-three, two hundred pounds of Nautilus-perfect muscle, blessed with sincerelooking blue eyes and a winning smile. He looked just like the kind of guy Elroy Foote imagined must be an icon of patriot virtue, like Ollie North, really, only bigger and more handsome.
Several Johnnie Walkers into the evening, after working the Harvard connection right into the ground, Bobby had figured out that Foote was a wacko. This made him very optimistic that a savvy guy like himself could lighten the old man’s wallet. Within a month, Foote was insisting that Bobby handle all his legal affairs, and within two, Bobby was also handling some things that might not have quite met everyone’s prosaic definition of legal. Being an Unknown Soldier was stupid, but at least it was billable.
Through Elroy, Bobby met some guys who had gotten no closer to Harvard than the college pennants on the walls of the weight room at Elroy’s ranch—or in one case, the federal penitentiary at Attica, New York. Elroy was backing a secret militia operation that called itself the Unknown Soldiers, or U.S., as Elroy called them in fond informal moments. They were dedicated to defending the cause of freedom, religion, and Elroy’s expansive property rights, as far as Bobby could tell. Most of the Unknown Soldiers were intellectually challenged good ol’ boys and mentally rearranged Vietnam vets who thought for various reasons (too many wilderness areas, too many missile silos, the advent of bad cappuccino at the local Diamond Shamrock) that foreigners and the federal government were engaged in a secret plot to take over Wyoming. Bobby figured that if he had to at some point excuse himself from the U.S. and enter the witness protection program, they would be way too dumb or insane to find him once he was established as a Cuban émigré corporate lawyer in a posh seaside suburb of Miami.
Some of the others, however, gave one pause. Number Three, a.k.a. Arthur Stopes, looked like a small-town schoolteacher, which was what he had evidently been, in a small Powder River Basin town, until God had spoken to him. God told Arthur that he should give up his position as a minor bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was, in case Arthur hadn’t noticed, being taken over by liberals who thought blacks could be saved. Even those who still claimed to cling to true religion had gone nuts for money and basketball. The next Revelation, God told Arthur, would come directly to Arthur, somewhere on a mountaintop in the state, but only after Wyoming had been liberated. Shortly after this, Arthur had been having lunch at the Burger King in Casper when he’d happened to see a tabloid Elroy Foote was publishing, featuring some of Elroy’s impassioned writing about black helicopters and U.S. Forest Service employees and other threats to Wyoming. Elroy could come close to orgasm while denouncing the horrors of the federal government, even though, as Bobby knew well, he’d made his hideous fortune gravy-training government contracts and sucking up every federal subsidy in the West for the last forty years.
Sitting in that Burger King, eating a Whopper, wiping a splotch of ketchup off the now-precious tabloid, Arthur Stopes told Bobby, he had been so moved that he’d driven straight to Teton
County to find the author, who had instantly recruited him for his militia. Arthur was a skinny, pale-haired, goose-necked man with very thick glasses. He looked harmless until you got close enough to see his eyes. He had been Number Two until Elroy found Bobby, so Bobby flattered Arthur and tried not to get too close.
Then there was Howard “Dirtbag” Robideaux, who had played on the defensive line of the Dallas Cowboys during an era in which being a lineman described what you put up your nose as much as who you disabled on Sunday afternoon. Dirtbag had done some of both, on and off the field, and had managed to get himself sentenced to three years in prison for several errors in judgment. There he had learned all about race from some Aryan Brothers who referred to him fondly as “Soap Boy.” Dirtbag was not the brightest of the Unknown Soldiers, but he could bench press a car and would do anything his superiors told him was necessary to beat back the encroaching power of (fill in hate term for ethnic group here). Even though he had been recruited early, he was automatically moved down in the numerical order every time somebody new joined up. Nobody wanted Dirtbag Robideaux thinking he was in charge of anyone else. He was currently Number Seventeen.
Danny Crease, Number Four, was the one who had found Dirtbag back when they’d pledged him for Phi Beta Aryan. Although Danny had once been as big an opportunist as Bobby, his incarceration had transformed him into a devout neo-Nazi. He would have started the Fourth Reich in Colorado, where he’d grown up, but there were already too many Jews and homosexuals and Mexicans there. He required a rugged, potentially viciously Darwinist white man’s country like Wyoming as his heartland. All the other Unknown Soldiers knew what Danny believed, but they weren’t all that worried about it. Gleefully, they had told Bobby all about a little act of ethnic cleansing the previous summer, when two illegal aliens in a Ford Fiesta had blown a tire on the Snowy Range Road. When Danny and the others got through making their point about Wyoming being for Americans only, there wasn’t much left of the wetbacks. Too bad, huh?
Bobby knew that Danny had a brief history in Wyoming that predated his current affiliation with the Unknown Soldiers. Danny had told him the story to pass the time while they were shivering in the hills. Danny had once been a leg-breaker for a Boulder dope distributor. Many years ago, Danny and his fellow enforcers had driven up to Laramie to collect a debt owed their boss, and the chiseling bastard who owed them the money had skipped out and left them squeezed into an orange plastic booth in a pretentious restaurant. The boss had held the four of them responsible, and since the chickenshit bastard owed fifty grand, they each had to come up with $12,500. The Laramie guy hadn’t been the first or last chiseler to stiff Danny, but he was the only one currently alive.
Danny considered himself a thorough man. Therefore, even as he was working to purify the nation for the white race, he was awaiting the chance to capture, torture, and murder a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant Wyoming native whom Danny referred to as “a scum-sucking born-again law-abider.” Danny intended to collect, and soon. He figured that with sixteen years’ interest compounded daily, that amounted to pretty much the price of the guy’s life, to be paid one fingernail at a time.
Bobby didn’t take Danny’s vendetta very seriously, but at the same time, the Harvard lawyer didn’t much care for the Colorado cutthroat. Bobby was somewhat worried that he’d have to shoot Danny in the back before things got too far. The good news was that absolutely no one except Elroy would miss Danny, and Bobby knew he could handle Elroy.
Their current operation, Bobby knew, was the product of chance. A couple of the Unknown Soldiers had been drinking at the Torch Tavern in Laramie one Saturday night last August. They had run into Shane Parker, a local skinhead who was pounding down Seven-and-Sevens and raging about how he’d been denied his inheritance. He’d shown them a clipping from the Daily Boomerang about some broad who’d gotten some bogus job at the university, and they hadn’t paid much attention to Shane until he started yelling about how there were millions involved, and for some reason, the money really belonged to him. An old lady named Meg Dunwoodie had died and left a bundle, and Shane was her closest living relative. Old Meg’s father, who’d after all been the bastard who’d made all that money in the first place, would surely have wanted Shane to have it, because if Mac Dunwoodie had believed in one thing, it was that Wyoming ought to be a white man ’s country, of the white man, by the white man, for the white man. Shane’s own great-granddaddy, Shep Parker, Jr., was a cousin of Meg Dunwoodie’s and had been in the Klan with Mac Dunwoodie back in the ’20s.
Instead, the money was being wasted on charity, and some of it was going to a Jew whore who would get what she deserved before it was all over.
Shane moaned that he’d never have the money to hire a lawyer to get his inheritance away from the fucking university. But everybody knew there was a fortune in Krugerrands and who-knew-what-else buried on old Mac’s Woody D ranch in the Sierra Madre. If they could just get into Meg’s house and have a look around, they would probably find a map or some kind of clue to where Mac’s treasure was hidden. He’d been watching the house, keeping track of this Sally Alder bitch, and even, he said, snickering, fixing her wagon.
The boys told Bobby about Shane and his problem when they passed through Casper on their way to Elroy’s ranch. They were hot to help out a fellow American, but Bobby thought it was typical U.S. nuttiness. He thought the likelihood of somebody leaving a treasure map (or the treasure for that matter) lying around an empty house, waiting for a stranger to move in and start snooping around, was about the same as the chance of the Unknown Soldiers ever doing anything except wasting a lot of Elroy’s money on trucks, fatigues, camping gear, and automatic weapons. Elroy, however, liked the idea of looking for the white man’s treasure and it turned out that his own grandfather had been in the Klan with Mac and Shep. So Elroy had a personal and nostalgic interest in the matter.
At Elroy’s urging, Bobby decided to check out the Dunwoodie story with Sam Branch, a real estate developer rumored to be next in line for the university’s board of trustees. He’d met Branch last year in Cheyenne during the annual bribe-the-legislature fest, and instantly recognized a kindred mercenary spirit. Branch would know, if anyone did, what was up. Bobby could hang on a little longer, at any rate. Elroy was clearly slipping and when he truly lost it and they had to have him declared incompetent, Bobby Helwigsen intended to be holding Elroy’s power of attorney.
Danny had gone to Laramie and returned to Teton County with Shane Parker, now known as Number Sixteen. Elroy had decided that Shane was to continue keeping the Dunwoodie house under U.S. surveillance, as the first step in an operation that would liberate Mac’s treasure. The Alder woman was a nuisance, of course, and a Jew. Shane assured his superiors that he would get her out of the way long enough to get into the house. He’d already done a couple of little things to try to get her attention: leaving a dead cat in her yard, messing with her brakes while she was out. He figured he could intimidate her by busting her car windows and giving her the swastika treatment, but she turned out to be too jaded to be scared.
The Unknown Soldiers were undaunted. Their ultimate goal, they agreed, was to restore Shane’s rightful inheritance as a white man, which he would then of course hand over to the Unknown Soldiers.
Shane had reported that he’d seen Alder and the boyfriend pack up and drive off that morning, and he was going to break in, steal whatever looked promising, and rendezvous with Bobby that evening to report and join the convoy. Sending the rest of the Unknown Soldiers off to find Arthur and the motel, Bobby, Danny, and Dirtbag got into one of the trucks and drove to a deserted trailer in a mobile home park in West Laramie.
There were no lights on or any other sign that anyone was inside, but when they opened the door they found Shane shivering on the freezing floor, smoking, surrounded by ground-out cigarette butts. He looked up sneering, doing a terrible job of covering up the fact that he was scared to death. Looking at Danny and Dirtbag, Bobby could understand t
he reaction.
Shane knew he’d blown it. He’d only been in the house half an hour, scattering papers and having very little idea of what he was looking at or for, when the old lady showed up. He waded in panic from pile to pile, stuffing things into his pockets. After running up the stairs and taking care of the housekeeper (his ankle was killing him— she was big) he had hightailed it for home.
Now the cops would start hanging around the Dunwoodie place. He also knew that Elroy Foote would be disappointed, Bobby Helwigsen would be disgusted, and Danny Crease would be displeased. He wondered how far out of Wyoming he could get and figured he could go home, pick up whatever stuff he needed and get halfway to California or Texas before they came looking for him.
But Shane was Wyoming-born and bred and he knew a Thanksgiving blizzard coming on when he saw one. The tires on the Pontiac were so bad he barely made it home. Besides, he still wanted that treasure. He knew now, after getting a look at all the shit in that basement, that finding clues in there was beyond his capabilities. Still, that didn’t mean the key wasn’t there, or that he and his patriot buddies couldn’t find it. He had a couple of things from the papers, including a letter from old Mac himself, a letter from somebody else in Wyoming, and a postcard from Capetown, South Africa to “Darling Greta” signed by somebody named Ernst. The U.S. was just going to need some professional help, and he figured he knew who to call.
Six years earlier, during his spectacularly unsuccessful freshman year at the University of Wyoming, Shane had received a passing grade in only one class, ancient history. The course had been taught by Professor Byron Bosworth, a man Shane considered the one non-phony bastard in the whole university if not the universe. Bosworth adored the Spartans and loved the Caesars, and he had been such an inspiration that at the end of the term, when Shane dropped out and sold his books back to the bookstore, he returned to steal the ancient history text.
Brown-Eyed Girl Page 13
