The Blood of Patriots

by William W. Johnstone

  The juice refused to go back down. Dickson did not like where this was going. “How did Mr. Fawaz take that?”

  “He seemed a little surprised, but grateful.”

  “Did he ask why Ward called you?”

  She shrugged. “I guess he knows I was their babysitter,” Angie said. “I listed Mrs. Ward as a reference on my job application.”

  “Honey, that’s got nothing to do with the money.”

  “I know, but I don’t have an answer!” she said. “Mr. Fawaz asked and I told him the same thing, I don’t know. I told him that Mr. Ward just asked me to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

  “The money wasn’t mentioned?”

  Angie shook her head.

  Ward was probably just fishing, then. Still, Dickson did not feel better. He wished he could take Angie to work with him, like he did when she was a little girl, so he could keep both eyes on her.

  “Do you feel up to going to work today?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said.

  “You were pretty upset last night,” he pressed. “Maybe you need a rest.”

  “I felt a lot better after I straightened things out with Mr. Fawaz,” she said. She managed a smile. “I’ll be okay.”

  Dickson wished Fawaz was as trusting, as naive as his daughter. He also wished he could roll back time.

  What have you gotten her into?

  “All right,” he smiled. “Just take it easy today, okay?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  It was with a feeling of great unease that the banker kissed his daughter on the forehead and sent her off to work. She felt as cold, as bloodless as she looked. Dickson finished getting ready. He was in a trance, going through the motions. He dimly remembered a time when he enjoyed going to work.

  As Dickson was about to pull from the driveway, his cell beeped. It was Gahrah.

  “There has been a serious breach,” the Muslim said without preamble.

  “I know,” Dickson replied. “I’ll fix it.”

  “It’s gone beyond that,” Gahrah replied.

  “Mr. Gahrah, listen to me—” Dickson said.

  “You will hire a new security guard,” Gahrah went on. “Hamza Zarif will begin working for you today.”

  “With so many qualified local men unemployed? How will I explain that to my staff ?”

  “You will tell them that I am your largest depositor and I wish someone to watch out for my interests,” the Muslim replied. “No one would question an oil company or car factory that came to Basalt and made a similar request.”

  “That’s different and you know it.”

  “That’s true. My stockholders are not bound by the SEC,” he said. “Moreover, Mr. Dickson, I promise you this. If John Ward comes back to the bank, or if anyone else tries to examine our business or discuss it with you, life as you know it will change. It will change most terribly.”

  “Look, I can’t control where he goes—”

  Gahrah hung up before Dickson could finish. The banker’s hand remained at his ear, still clutching the phone. His other hand was on the wheel. Both were trembling. He didn’t realize how tightly he was squeezing them until perspiration rolled over his thumb.

  The world seemed unreal, like a vision. He didn’t remember driving to the bank, or walking in, or even noticing Hamza until the Muslim approached his desk with a completed employment application. The big man wore a brown business suit and an ungainly smile; the expression was clearly unfamiliar to him. If it was meant to disarm anyone who saw him inside the bank for the first time, the effect was quite the opposite.

  Dickson made a show of looking over the application.

  “What are you really going to be doing?” he asked.

  “Guarding the bank.”

  “No, really,” Dickson said angrily. “Intimidating cops, watching me, or both?

  The man did not reply.

  “What am I supposed to tell the police chief when she comes in?” Dickson wasn’t asking Hamza, he was thinking out loud. “That I was impressed with how well you handled yourself trailing John Ward, that the bank has a new policy of minority hiring, of outreach to the Muslim community?”

  Hamza’s smile turned smug. “Minority? Just wait a few months.”

  Dickson felt as though ice water had been poured down his back. He lay the paper on the table.

  How did this happen? he wondered. Not just to me, to all of us ? To the country ... to the world?

  His worldview had instantly broadened. What had other nations done when faced with this same problem? How did they survive, and at what cost? What was he going to do? What was the nation going to do?

  Hamza did not appear to be thinking any grand thoughts. He simply assumed that his application had been accepted and went to stand in front of a potted fern a few feet from Dickson’s desk. As he crossed the carpeted lobby he was openly followed by one, then another set of eyes. The chill that had afflicted Dickson rolled through the bank like a cold mist, and everyone knew from the Muslim’s posture and the manager’s broken expression that it was no longer just a strip mall and a few foreclosures that had come under the control of something from the outside.

  Something malignant.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Vito Antonini knew there was no hiding his heritage.

  He was Italian, first generation, raised by Simona and Massimiliano Fabrelli of Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood, hung out with Italian kids, became a foot soldier for a powerful capo, and after his best friend was killed in a small war that broke out between Newark and Trenton interests, he got out. He did this the only way a mobster gets out except in a pine box: by wearing a wire and then diving head first into the witness protection program.

  But as his handlers knew, nothing screams “WitSec” like an Italian with a name like Bob Smith or Frank Jones. So he chose a surname from a Denver book—just so there would be others in the state, folks to whom he could claim kinship—and added it to his father’s middle name.

  That was thirty years ago.

  Vito was sixty now. He lived with his wife in the house they had purchased in 1982 and ran the business he had opened that same year. He didn’t walk with the same shouldery swagger as then, the eyes weren’t as sharp and the knuckles were arthritic. But Papa Vito’s had changed too, for the better. It was more than just a pizza parlor. It was an informal town hall, a place for the jobless to commiserate and network, a bank where everyone’s credit was good. For six months, ever since the Muslims had started buying up Basalt, there was also a cardboard cut-out below the Coors sign over the bar, a familiar silhouette with the words Alamo written in red marker. Antonini owned this corner of the strip mall and had refused lucrative offers to sell—all of them from guys with surnames as revealing as Fabrelli. Names like Al-Jubeir and Alireza and bin Hamad.

  Business had always been good, especially for the customers who could play pool a little better than their buddies. Business still was good, though from the 11 A.M. opening to the 1 A.M. closing the place was crowded less with diners as with men who had nowhere else to go. They were truck drivers and tour guides, farm hands and public works employees, forestry specialists and construction workers. They were jobless in record numbers without prospects for future employment. They were kids who couldn’t afford to go to college and couldn’t find enough lawns to mow or trash to haul. Ironically, a lot of the public work was being done by community service cons who used to be grocery store clerks and department store checkout personnel who got caught with not-so-nimble fingers in the till.

  The pizza parlor crowd reminded Antonini of how the older goombahs used to describe the docks, when stevedores would show up at dawn hoping for day-work. There, at least, ships were coming and going and the prospects for work were no worse than fair. Here, the only real traffic coming in and out of Basalt were Muslims.

  Half the drivers and carpenters refused to work for them. They did not blame the newcomers for what had happened t
o the town, to the economy. But they did feel they were exploiting the situation, grabbing cheap properties and paying off-the-book low hourly wages. One barely employed accountant said that if a government institution tried tactics like that they’d be hauled before a congressional committee before the week was out. Another man, Ethan Ford, who owned a concrete company that hadn’t poured a driveway or a foundation in months, put a finer point on it. He said it was like being an illegal immigrant in their own land.

  The grumbling ebbed and flowed, not hate but frustration, not bias but disbelief that any group was permitted to push so hard without push back. And Papa Vito’s was one of the few places where all of it could be voiced safely, among brethren.

  It was shortly after noon, when paying customers fractionally outnumbered the people with nowhere else to go, when pizza outsold pitchers of beer, that Scott Randolph came in with John Ward.

  The door opened and the two men were black shapes against the bright noonday sun. They were not quite human forms, both of them slightly bent; Randolph was leaning forward as his neck healed and Ward favored the left side, the one with fewer broken ribs. But they walked in gamely and there were heartfelt cries of welcome and a few raised mugs as the men entered. The cheers were mostly for Randolph, who all the men knew. Chairs were freed up around the long Formica-topped table. As they made their way through the crowd, Randolph introduced his companion to the locals. Some of them knew him from the news, others from local gossip, still others just because they didn’t know him and figured out who he must be.

  Antonini came over with a pitcher of beer.

  “On the house,” he announced with the kind of flourish that was another reason he never could have passed for anyone but a Sicilian.

  Both men thanked him, though Ward did not touch the glass that was poured for him. He laughed inwardly at that bit of restraint; he never drank at all when he was working, unless he was in a bar and it would blow his cover. He did not have the badge any longer but his mind was still deep in the game. This was a case and he was working it.

  Everyone knew what had happened to Randolph and he had to assure them that he was okay, and that insurance would cover the loss of his pigs once the investigation was completed. But few knew what had been done to Ward. They also had not heard about Debbie. Not a lot of men had reason to eat at the inn but a few of them had dated her.

  “If this was Jersey, those punks’d be in the Hudson,” Antonini said as he drifted toward the phone to take an order.

  “We got a river,” someone offered.

  “I got cement,” Ethan Ford added.

  “Yeah, then we’ll bring our dirty clothes to Fawaz and let him wash away the evidence,” said another.

  “Yeah, like that Roald Dahl story where a woman killed her husband with a leg of lamb then served it to the constable who was investigating,” said Boyd Guinness, an unemployed librarian.

  No one let that literary reference kill the buzz. They went on, wondering if it would be an honor or sacrilege to wrap the bodies in prayer mats.

  Ward’s PC gag-reflex was still functioning from years on the NYPD. He had rarely allowed himself to think thoughts like that, let alone say them—even off-duty, among friends. You never knew when someone from Internal Affairs was listening.

  This was liberating. People who couldn’t vent, who had to watch every word for any minor offense, were people who became National Socialists when a Hitler came to power, pouring years of spleen and repression against a single target.

  “So what do we do?” a man asked from somewhere in the crowd.

  “Nothing,” Ward said.

  His single, soft-spoken word quieted the restaurant. That was a buzz kill.

  “Uh-uh,” said a voice in the crowd. “We’ve gotten good at that, spent too much time doin’ it.”

  “Yeah, and we don’t like it,” yelled another from a corner. “Brennan doesn’t have enough of a force to run an investigation.”

  “I know Officer Joel Hawks,” someone muttered. “The police chief doesn’t have anyone except him and a few traffic cops.”

  “Hey, the chief is okay,” Randolph said.

  “She’s more than okay,” Ward added petulantly. “She’s working this as best she can.”

  “Then why hasn’t she busted those kids down the street?” someone asked. “Everyone knows they’re behind this. You can see it in their damn eyes—in their swagger.”

  “Because she can’t prove it,” Ward said.

  “That’s why God invented rope,” someone pointed out.

  The room got very quiet again. Obviously, that someone had carried things a little too far and these people knew it.

  “That’s no answer,” Randolph said quietly. “These guys need to hang themselves. He thrust a thumb at the Alamo sign. “Besides, you just whack at the guys who come through the gate, you’ll wear yourself out. You need to knock them off at the source.”

  “So we hang the imam,” a man said.

  “Any of you guys ever hear the word ‘martyr’?” Ward asked.

  That shut them up again. He knew it was only one or two men making those remarks, but their comments made him angry.

  “For those of you don’t know me, I got shafted by the system,” Ward said. “But I still believe in it, because I believe in us and I believe in this country. If we go ahead and uproot what makes us strong—our sense of fair play—then we become exactly what we’re fighting. Stopping these guys takes the law and that requires evidence. We’re going to get it, but not with cement boots and Muslims wrapped in rugs.”

  There was a general murmuring but no further discussion. The men returned to the chat and drinking in which they’d previously been engaged.

  Randolph leaned toward him. “You really believe that?”

  “Trying real hard to,” Ward admitted.

  “Me too,” the farmer said with a grin.

  Ward and Randolph huddled around their small corner of the long table. Ward leaned as much weight as he could on his right forearm. The crowd gave them their privacy.

  “I tell ya, these used to be some of the kindest and most generous folks on the planet,” Randolph said.

  “We’ve all had the crap brutalized out of us,” Ward said.

  “Some of us more than others,” Randolph noted.

  “But it’s tough, man.”

  “What is?”

  Ward looked out at the townspeople. “Practicing what I just preached. Remember that gunrunner in New York I told you about, the one who went free when I couldn’t finish testifying?”

  Randolph nodded.

  “I needed to build a case against him, piece by piece over seven months. Even as we did it, everyone on my team knew the world would’ve been better off if we’d just taken him out and some of them argued we should just do it. We could have pulled it off, too, made it look like one of his own sales had gone wrong. Funny thing is, if I’d done that I’d have probably gotten the same reprimand, been in the same damn place, as I am for having roughed up that Muslim crook.”

  “Except that you would’ve known the difference.”

  “Yeah,” Ward said.

  The men were quiet for a long moment. “You want to go see your daughter before we head up?” Randolph asked.

  Ward shook his head. “I’m going to leave them be.” The detective rotated his left arm. “Let’s hit the road. I need to get my body working again. And apparently, I need to learn how to ride a horse.”

  “That you do,” Randolph said, patting his forearm. “I’ll get some pies to go. Do you care what’s on ’em?”

  Ward shook his head and the pig farmer headed off. Ward noticed the lighted menu behind the counter and wondered, in passing, if he would order sausage or ham.

  There was a lot of moral ambiguity circling inside his head like flies, tough to pin down and more pesky than intrusive. However, Ward was certain of one thing: this approach was right. However much he wanted to lash out for what was done to him and especially to
Debbie, who was blameless other than to have given him her number, patience was the correct response.

  Even, as these men had demonstrated, if it was not the easiest.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Seeing the Rocky Mountains from the foothills did not prepare John Ward for being among them. And nothing had prepared him for riding a horse.

  Their first stop was Dunson Ranch. Matt Dunson was in the stables where he kept his dozen horses. Ten were recreational, one was a stud, and one was a ribboned participant in the Indian Relay competitions.

  “That’s more a celebration of the riders and their courage,” the white-mustachioed Dunson explained as he limped to the stall on the end to admire the Appaloosa. “It’s bareback riding around a track. The rider demonstrates his skill by leaping from horse to horse during the race, against competitors. It takes a lot of training just to keep the horses from startling each other.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be doing any of that,” Randolph laughed.

  “I wouldn’t let you,” Dunson explained. He pointed to his hip. “Caught between two horses seven years ago during a relay, mashed my hip. And I knew what I was doing.”

  “Doc Stone wants him to get the hip replaced,” Randolph chuckled, “but Matt likes people asking about it. When they’re too polite, like you, he tells ’em anyway.” He turned around, showed Dunson his bandaged neck. “I caught a tire iron across the vertebra. John had a boot in his ribs. You know what the difference is?”

  Dunson frowned, shook his head.

  “At least the horses didn’t mean it,” Randolph said.

  “No,” Dunson agreed, his voice grave. “You can’t hate a horse.”

  Ward stood a little apart from the two, leaning against a wooden upright to take the weight off his side. He was taking it in, quiet admiration in his expression. He appreciated the NYPD Mounted Officers who managed to keep their steeds under control in traffic and during protests. But this, out here, was an entirely different way of thinking, of living. Forty-second Street might well be the crossroads of the world but it clearly wasn’t the world. That was easy to forget back there.