Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  I said, “Fair enough. Just tell me how to get to Timberline Road and the Duquesne ranch.”

  He told me. And that was all he had to say until he’d ushered me outside. Then, with a kind of self-mockery, “Peace, brother,” and he shut the door in my face.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Joe DeFalco said eagerly, “Sentinels, eh? Son of a bitch. Sounds like you’re on to something up there—something that could be big.”

  “Yeah. Name ring any bells?”

  “One little chime. Title of the monthly bulletin Chaffee puts out in Modesto is The Sentinels of Light. Could be a coincidence, though. White supremacists love names like Sentinels, Watchdogs, Guardians.”

  “Or there could be a tie to the Christian National Emancipation League.”

  “That too. These buggers are always splitting off and forming new cells, like goddamn amoeba germs.”

  A gust of wind blew rain in against the side of my face; I hunched deeper inside Pac Bell’s plastic shell. I’d tried to call DeFalco from my car phone—I was damn sick of the Creekside General Store—but the weather and the mountains and the distance made it impossible to get a clear connection. Even on this public phone his voice sounded far away and now and then a word or two would be lost in crackling static.

  “See what you can find out, will you?”

  “Damn straight I will,” he said. “Let’s have the rest of what you know about the paramilitary camp.”

  I repeated the gist of what I’d gotten from Mike Cermak.

  “How long has it been operating?”

  “About a year and a half, evidently.”

  “Population growing? Recruiting locals on the QT?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “That’s how Butler got started in Hayden Lake. And the Aryan Brotherhood at Whidby Island up in Washington State. Indoctrination centers and militia and terrorist training grounds. Your source give you any idea who’s in charge up there?”

  “Somebody called the Colonel. No name yet.”

  “Description?”

  “I can’t be sure,” I said, “but I think he may be about our age, neck like a bull’s, craggy features, long hooked nose. Probably ex-military.”

  “No surprise there. Lot of anarchists came out of one branch or another.”

  “They got the land they’re using from a local rancher—” I broke off because a four-by-four with its high beams on had come along Main and was turning in next to my car. Ford Bronco, black, with a curled-back CB antenna. “Hold on a second, Joe.”

  “Why?”

  “Company.”

  The driver was the Bronco’s only occupant. He was fat, bareheaded, bald, and familiar—Frank, the blowhard who’d tried hassling me in the Eagle’s Roost on Tuesday. He slammed the door, looked at my car, squinted up at where I stood, then climbed up next to me and looked at me some more, the way you’d look at a pile of manure on a hot afternoon.

  Ah, hell, I thought, here we go again. I shifted the phone to my left hand and watched him watch me. “Something you want?”

  “Why’d you come back? You ain’t wanted here.”

  “I like the friendly atmosphere.”

  “Don’t fuck with me. I’ll rip your face off.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “Try me and see, dickhead.”

  I laid the receiver on the little shelf under the phone, wiped my hands along the front of my coat. “Time to crap or get off the pot, Frank.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Go ahead, make trouble, see what you can do about ripping my face off.”

  He didn’t like that; he wasn’t used to challenges any more than he’d been used to being put on the defensive. “I told you, don’t fuck with me. I got ten, twelve years on you, pops.”

  “And fifty pounds, all of it lard. Well? Make your move.”

  “Listen—”

  “What’s the matter, Frank? Afraid it’s your face that’ll get ripped? I’ll bet you don’t like seeing your own blood—a lot of your own blood.”

  He tried a lip curl and a snarl, took a sudden step toward me with his hands up like a boxer’s. I didn’t move or flinch. The uncertainty that had stopped him Tuesday night stopped him again now. He made an effort to stare me down, but that’s a game I’ve played too often, with men twice as tough as him. He couldn’t have won if we’d locked eyes for an hour.

  He gave it up pretty quick. “The hell with you,” he said—another lame exit line—and clumped away into the store.

  I picked up the receiver. “Still there, Joe?”

  “Still here. What was that all about?”

  “You heard?”

  “Some of it. ‘Go ahead, make trouble.’ Christ, you sounded like Clint Eastwood.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the only language assholes like this one understand.”

  “Who the hell was he?”

  “Somebody else who objects to me poking around. I’m not making any friends up here. Where were we?”

  “Sentinels,” DeFalco said. “Some local rancher they got the land from.”

  “His name’s Duquesne, George Duquesne. That mean anything to you?”

  “Not offhand. I’ll check him out. What . . .” The rest of the sentence got torn up by a burst of static.

  “I didn’t get that.”

  “I said what about the local authorities? You talk to them yet?”

  “Not about the Sentinels. Couple of discussions with the Lassen sheriffs captain in charge of the missing persons investigation.”

  “Get along with him all right?”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Then you’d better go talk to him again.”

  “I intend to. But I don’t think he’ll want to get into it yet. There’s no proof to tie the Sentinels or the Christian National Emancipation League to the disappearances, and he’s the type who’ll demand hard evidence before he acts.”

  “So then what do you do?”

  “I don’t know yet. Keep stirring the pot.”

  “Clint Eastwood on the prod,” he said. “Listen, if this crowd is the Hayden Lake or Whidby Island kind, they don’t mind killing people. May already have gone that route . . . you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. If you’re trying to tell me to take it easy, don’t do anything reckless—I hear you. I’m not Eastwood and I’m not suicidal. You be home tonight?”

  “After nine. Interview I can’t back out of after I leave the Chron. I’ll be home all weekend too—me and my trusty Compaq, taking trips down the information highway. And don’t call just to pump me. If this thing is as big as it sounds, I want a chunk of it. Another exclusive like that Chehalis business last fall.”

  “I figured.”

  “Okay. One more thing before I let you go—”

  “Hold it, Joe.”

  The fat guy was coming out of the store. He stopped again a few feet from me, at the head of the steps, and mauled me with his little pig eyes while he opened a package of cigarettes. I mauled him in return. Silly, all of this macho crap, but circumstances make it necessary sometimes. Each situation has its own set of rules; you learn to recognize and adapt to them.

  Frank fired up one of the cancer sticks, threw the burning match in my direction. When I didn’t react, he went down to his Bronco and slammed himself inside. He made a lot more noise driving off.

  I said into the phone, “Okay now.”

  “Same guy as before?”

  “Same guy. Go ahead with what you were going to say.”

  “It’s a question. And you won’t like it.”

  “Just make it quick. I’m freezing my fat here.”

  “You have a chance to get in touch with Eberhardt?”

  Eberhardt again. “Goddammit,” I said. “How’d you know he called my office?”

  “Tamara. She talked to him right before she buzzed me this morning.”

  Thank you, Ms. Corbin. But there was no reason she shouldn’t have mentioned it to DeFalco; sh
e knew he and Eberhardt had once been friends too, that Eb had shut him out in the same cold way he had me. The only reason we could figure for it was that the three of us had once been tight, in the days when we’d made up part of a weekly poker game, and Eberhardt had decided he might as well burn more than just one bridge. Not all his old bridges, though—not the link to Barney Rivera. Just the ones that didn’t do him any professional good.

  I said shortly, “I haven’t had time.”

  “But you are going to call him?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “What do you figure’s on his? After all this time?”

  “What am I, a mind reader?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re not curious.”

  “Not as curious as you seem to be. Why don’t you call him?”

  “Not my place. Maybe he . . .”

  More static. When it cleared, I said, “I got to get moving. Later tonight, Joe. Or early tomorrow.”

  “Anytime. Listen, I mean it about getting back to Eb. I think you . . .”

  Crackle, crackle. I took the opportunity to mutter a good-bye and hang up.

  I made one more call, this one from the car phone because it was short distance. Ralph Fassbinder was on duty and came on the line right away. But he was busy, he said, and couldn’t talk for long. I told him that what I had to say was better laid out in person anyway, and that it needed to be soon—later this afternoon or sometime this evening. He made an effort to put me off until morning, but when I insisted, he agreed to meet me at seven o’clock, at a tavern called Ron’s, where he liked to have a beer before he went home. I said I’d buy.

  I got the car started, drove back to the Northern Comfort. I was chilled and my clothes felt damp; I wanted a shower, and the feel of fresh underwear and my last clean shirt and pair of slacks. The only car on the lot was the Bartholomews’ tired old Buick, Ed having made it home from Susanville. With a fresh load of gin for mama? I wondered if he lapped it up too—the two of them sitting in there night after night, waiting for customers, waiting for summer, drinking gin and reading passages aloud from the Bible.

  The crusty old plumbing didn’t let me have much hot water, as per usual, and what there was of it was discolored by minerals. The shower still felt pretty good. I put on the dry clothing and lay down on the bed under the off-center painting of Christ with his crown of thorns. I thought about calling Kerry, just to hear her voice, but it was too early for her to be home and I didn’t want to bug her at the office, where she was probably still tearing her hair over the “Shirt Happens” account. I thought about following DeFalco’s advice and contacting Eberhardt too, but not for more than ten seconds. Instead, I got Mrs. Bartholomew on the phone and gave her the In the Mode number in Lafayette.

  Keeping my promise, that was all: I had nothing I was willing to tell Helen McDowell yet, nothing she’d want to hear anyway. The conversation lasted about two minutes and didn’t do either of us any good. I wondered as I hung up if Ruth Bartholomew had listened in. She was the type. But if she had, she was disappointed. All she’d heard were expressions of pain, emptiness, and fading hope.

  I lay for a few minutes listening to the rain beat on the roof. The Sentinels . . . Creekside . . . the disappearance of Allison and Rob. The three were interconnected—I was sure of it. But in what way exactly? Those two young soldier types Cermak had seen talking to the kids, I thought. They could’ve come back later that Saturday night, or on Sunday morning in time to follow the MG out of town and waylay it someplace else. Or they could have reported the presence of a white woman and a black man to the Colonel, and he’d dispatched other soldiers to do the waylaying. Mindless, knee-jerk racial violence, either way—and all too possible if the Sentinels were what they seemed to be.

  And yet I couldn’t fit the MG’s abandonment in Eureka into that kind of scenario. Why run the risk of driving the car all the way over there? Too great a distance and too unnecessary; out of character for a paramilitary outfit. The Sentinels were covert but not all the way underground, not if they were more or less openly recruiting locals; and with nothing to tie them or their camp directly to the missing kids, there was no need for a fancy red herring. If they’d killed Allison and Rob, wouldn’t they have just buried or hidden the car along with the bodies, someplace deep in the wilderness?

  There was more to the disappearances than execution murder by a group of white supremacists. I felt it—the kind of strong, sixth-sense hunch a person in my business learns to trust—but I couldn’t come up with a scenario, given the facts I had gathered so far, that made any better sense. . . .

  I was still working with the facts, shifting them around like puzzle pieces, when an engine revved up loud outside on the courtyard. Tires crunched and slid on gravel. I hoisted myself off the bed and got to the window just as somebody hurried up and began hammering on the door. I peeled back a corner of the shade to see who it was.

  Art Maxe. Wearing an oilskin slicker, his dark face scowling under a plastic-covered hat. Behind him, slewed up at an angle, was a wide-body Dodge pickup. Even though the window glass and the truck’s windshield were rain-streaked, I could see a brace of rifles mounted conspicuously-deer-hunter fashion—inside the truck’s cab.

  I opened the door. Maxe said, “I hear you been looking for me.” His tone and his expression were both hostile, but it wasn’t the same kind of aggressive, hate-backed hostility as Fat Frank’s. Not yet, anyway.

  “Ballard tell you that? Or Johnny?”

  “Don’t matter who told me. What’re you after this time?”

  “Same thing as before,” I said. “You want to talk standing out there, or inside, where it’s dry?”

  “I ain’t gonna be here long. I already told you everything I know. So quit dogging me, you hear?”

  “Or else what?”

  His answer to that was no answer at all. “Shit,” he said.

  “Fact is, you didn’t tell me everything you know.”

  “Hell I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t tell me Allison’s boyfriend is black. And you didn’t tell me about the Sentinels.”

  Nothing at all this time. All he did was stand there with rain dripping off his hat, staring at me.

  “How about it, Maxe?”

  “How about what? The Sentinels? Why should I have said anything about that bunch? I got nothing to do with them.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “But you do belong to the league.”

  “The what?”

  “Christian National Emancipation League.”

  “Them neither. Listen,” he said, “I don’t belong to no group or organization, not even the goddamn Better Business Bureau.”

  “Have it your way. But you know what they are, the Sentinels and the league. You know which of your friends and neighbors belong.”

  “They mind their business and I mind mine. Why in hell don’t you do the same?”

  “My business right now is what happened to Allison McDowell and Rob Brompton.”

  “And you figure the Sentinels for that? Bullshit.”

  “She’s white, he’s black, and they’re a pack of racists. How does that add up for you?”

  “It don’t add up no way. Nothing happened to those kids in this town. Nothing!”

  I kept silent, prodding him with my eyes.

  Pretty soon he said, “Who told you about the Sentinels?”

  “I’m a detective, remember? And secrets in these mountains aren’t as hard to find out about as you claimed. Is Ballard one of them?”

  “. . . One of what? A goddamn secret?”

  “A Sentinel. Your old pal Ollie Ballard.”

  “Ollie’s no friend of mine.”

  “Two of you seemed pretty friendly the other night.”

  “A beer now and then, that don’t make us buddies. You think Ollie done something to those dumb-ass kids? Christ, he don’t have enough brains to zip his fly after he takes a leak.�
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  “You don’t need brains to hate or hurt somebody. Not when you own a couple of pit bulls.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Maxe said. “He wouldn’t put them dogs on anybody.”

  “No? He threatened to put one on me this afternoon. And what if somebody else was around to goad him into doing it? For instance, the fat bald guy who tried hassling me in the Eagle’s Roost.”

  “Frank Hicks? He don’t hang around with Ollie.”

  “Another Sentinel, though, right?”

  “That’s enough about the fuckin’ Sentinels. That’s enough, period.” Maxe turned on his heel, changed his mind before he’d gone a step, and swung back to face me. “You keep it up with your questions, keep hassling people, you’re gonna wind up damn sorry. I’m telling you, man.”

  “Who’ll make me sorry? You?”

  He answered that by hawking and spitting on the ground between us. Then he heeled around again, climbed into his pickup. The engine had been idling; he goosed the throttle until it roared, popped the clutch, and cut around in a tight turn that threw gravel and muddy water my way. I jumped back in time to keep most of it off me.

  You’re gonna wind up damn sorry. I’m telling you, man.

  Well? It wasn’t anything I hadn’t already told myself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’d been right about Ralph Fassbinder: he didn’t want any more to do with my unsubstantiated theories about the Sentinels and their involvement in the disappearances than he had with my earlier, nonspecific theories about the race angle. As soon as I started laying them out, in a booth in the bar section of Ron’s Tavern & Grill, I could see him retreating, closing off. And by the time I was done talking, he wore his stony cop’s face—the one they use on civilians they think have stepped over the line.

  “I don’t see it,” he said flatly.