The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “I guess we will,” said Lear coldly.

  “I won’t ask you where you stand, Ted. I already know. But I am here to tell you that you have a choice. You and your people in law enforcement in this county can stand aside. You can keep on protecting and serving as best you can while a civil war rages around you, but as much as is humanly possible, you’ll have to stay out of it. The NVA will give you every bit of help we can. We’ll meet you halfway. It will be a hard choice, terribly hard, and I understand that we’re putting you in a position that would be absolutely impossible if only the alternative wasn’t infinitely worse.”

  “And how would you suggest we go about standing aside while you guys are moving through Oregon like a death wind, gunning people down right, left and center?” demanded Lear heatedly. “How do you suggest I go about it, since I’m the one who will have to deal with the feds and the political establishment and the so-called community action groups and the Chamber of Commerce and God knows who else? I’m the sheriff, for God’s sake!”

  “The feds, yah, they’ll be a problem, for a while,” conceded Hatfield.

  “For a while?” asked Lear incredulously.

  “After a time, Ted, they’re going to have so many problems on their plate that this little county in rural Oregon will drop down pretty low on their list of priorities,” said Hatfield grimly. “This feebie crew that’s running all over town tonight like termites will be pulled back to Portland a lot quicker than you may think, because from now on, every day they’re going to have a whole new raft of things to investigate, not to mention more dead FBI agents to bury. A year from now, those two dead suits down the road on Highway 30 will be nothing more than a footnote. As to the local lefties and neocons and general Amurrican assholes who have been yanking your chain ever since you’ve been in office, don’t worry about them either. The Clatsop County Diversity Commission? We’re going to diversify their asses right out of here. The Hispanic Coalition? In a fairly short time from now, you won’t hear a word of Spanish anyplace in Astoria. The Gay Pride Association? Every bugger boy in the county will either get the hell out, or they’ll get a .44-caliber enema. They say that all politics is local. Well, one of the things that will happen during the Northwest revolution is that all these local PC pressure groups and special interest lobbies and whatnot that have been making normal people’s lives miserable and poisoning little towns like this with their crap will disappear, because the people involved will disappear. There’s nothing like a bullet in the head to make people shut the fuck up.”

  “And my department is supposed to do what, while you slaughter all your political opponents like this was Israel?” inquired Lear politely.

  “Do whatever you have to do to make sure that the real community here survives, the people who were here before we got discovered by the goddamned retiring baby boomers and the hippy-dippy granola crowd and the faggots,” said Hatfield. “The real people, the white people, the ones who used to do all the work before the Mexicans came. Just kick us with the side of the shoe, Ted, not the toe. We’ll be able to tell the difference, and we’ll reciprocate.”

  “So, let’s see—you’re planning to kill off or drive out the Mexicans, the blacks, the homosexuals, anyone to the left of center, the Jews of course, anyone who supports Hillary, anyone with a colored skin, and the Asians as well for good measure—did I leave anybody out?”

  “Oh, those will do to be getting on with,” said Hatfield with a chuckle.

  “My God, you’re serious!” breathed Lear in stunned amazement.

  “Oh, yeah. They’re all going to go, Ted. And if you try to stop us, you’ll go. That’s not a threat. As God is my witness I don’t want to do anything like that, not to you, not to your family, and certainly not to Julia. But I’m simply telling you how things will be, and if you should get lucky and succeed in killing me, then there will be more of us stepping forward to take my place. Always remember: you’re not just dealing with me. You’re dealing with the thousand men who are standing behind me. After a time, if you fight us, the level of backup you can get from the feds or the state will dwindle away as they’re whittled down elsewhere in places they consider a lot more important than an almost empty county on the north coast of Oregon. Any reinforcements going, any troops that can be pulled away from Iraq or Venezuela or Afghanistan, the government will send to Portland or Spokane or Seattle. Not here. In the end it will be just you and your remaining handful, and by that time you’ll be facing some very hardened and serious men whom you really, really don’t want to meet in a dark alley. That’s it, Ted. That’s the situation you’re confronted with. I’m damned sorry about it, but I can’t tell you anything else.”

  “Beautiful,” sighed Lear.

  “I won’t ask you what your decision is,” said Hatfield, rising to go. “I know you’re going to have to play it by ear. Let’s hope it plays out okay for both of us.”

  “One last question, Zack,” said Lear. “This may sound irrelevant and probably silly, but does this have anything to do what happened with my sister and you? I mean, you know Julie. She’s going to ask one day.”

  Hatfield sighed. “You mean if we’d gotten married and I’d been able to get a real job, and we’d made a home and a family together, would I be doing this? Probably not, but don’t you dare tell her that. It’s not Julia’s fault, and I don’t want her blaming herself for a single second. None of it’s her fault. It’s the fault of my being born white and male and poor, with no hope of college, so there was only the draft. It’s the fault of the fucking U.S. Army for extending my unit’s tour in Iraq time after time, year after year, not even letting any of us come home on leave anymore for fear we’d desert. I can understand how she got tired of waiting, Ted. Frankly, by the time I got back I was so fucked up that I wouldn’t have made much of a husband for her or a brother-in-law for you. I’d ask you to give her my love next time you see her, but I don’t suppose that’s appropriate under the circumstances.”

  “No, it isn’t,” agreed Lear. “But I’ll do it anyway.”

  VI

  The Mami and the Monkey

  Listen, fair madam: let it be your glory to see her tears,

  But be your heart to them as unrelenting flint to drops of rain.

  Titus Andronicus—Act II, Scene 3

  “You back on the pipe, Kick?”

  “No, I’m not back on the pipe!” Kristin “Kicky” McGee snapped back. “I’m clean as a whistle, and I been clean for six months now!” She glared at Lenny Gillis, the man sitting across from her in the booth. They were in Gillis’ place of business, a rundown bar-cum-strip joint on 82nd Avenue in Portland, called Jupiter’s Den. The dive wasn’t open for business yet. The bartender was diddling with the settings on the stage stereo speakers, and their conversation was punctuated with the rising and falling blare of Indy rock and mindless thumping drum music, while the day manager tested the dancers’ poles and adjusted the footlights.

  “So why are you coming to me wanting dates again?” demanded Gillis. He was a small and scrawny individual, methamphetamine-lean, with lank dark hair and a football moustache, eleven hairs on each side. He wore a torn dark T-shirt and had a baseball cap stuck backwards onto his prematurely balding head.

  “Because I need the damned money! Why do you think?” demanded Kicky. She was a deceptively small and soft-looking girl with hazel eyes and honey-blond hair down to her shoulder blades; it wasn’t until someone looked into her face that they saw she was a hard twenty-four years old going on a harder hundred or so, her green eyes devoid of anything soft or feminine. She was wearing a halter top that showed off several tattoos, the obligatory barbed wire design around her left bicep, a strawberry with a bite taken out of it on the upper curvature of her left breast, a wild-haired Scottish kelpie or water sprite on her right shoulder, and an ancient Irish filigree design from the Book of Kells on her back. Between her right thumb and forefinger was a crude hand-inked tattoo, a circled X that, for those in the know, wa
rned off women’s prison lesbians with the promise of a violent reaction if they tried it on. “They cut off my Social Services check because they caught me driving the cab. I don’t know who ratted me out, probably that Hindu or whatever the hell he is in that turban, the new dispatcher. He promised me all the airport trips from Lake Oswego and the Pearl if I’d come in early each shift and suck him off in the can. I told him to go fuck himself, and next afternoon I come in and there’s that Jew bitch from Social sitting in the damned office.”

  “He thought you were a whore? Jeez, I wonder where he got that impression?” said Lenny with airy sarcasm. “And why should I give you any dates, after the shitty way you walked out on me last time?” Lenny touched his head; there was still scar tissue beneath the hair where Kicky had cracked a beer bottle over his skull on her last departure from his establishment.

  “Because I make you money,” said Kicky. “I don’t want to work the streets. It’s too damned dangerous with all these spuckies out there shooting people.”

  “Hey, as I recall, you’re still white under all those tats,” laughed Gillis. “Spuckies only shoot our darker brethren.”

  “Yeah, and they got every spic and nigger and Laotian gang-banger in Portland so pissed off they want to retaliate on some white working girl they pick up on Sandy Boulevard and take off somewhere nice and private to play Friday the Thirteenth with,” replied Kicky in exasperation. “It’s happened to some of the street girls. Use your head, Lenny! I don’t want to go on the street. I need you to screen my tricks for me, same arrangement as before, no spooks or spics or ching-ling-dings or other women. Just my old regulars to begin with. You know that even when I was on the pipe I was reliable, and I never tried to hold out on your cut. I’m an earner. If you’re still sore about my clocking you with that bottle, you shouldn’t have sprung that multi-racial threesome on me without asking, because you knew I would have said no.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I shouldn’t have called the cops on you. That wasn’t, like, playing the game,” muttered Lenny. “Then again, maybe if I wanted to jam you up I should have turned you in for hatecrime. I know you don’t like dark meat, but that’s prejudice, even in a whore.”

  “The term is sex trade worker, thank you,” said Kicky primly. “And it’s not prejudice, it’s a preference. Being a sex trade worker, I am in a politically protected category, sort of anyway, and I’m allowed to have preferences. Remember, no means no. Even for hookers.”

  “So why come to me?” asked Lenny. “Okay, so they cut your Social Services off. Big deal. You can still drive the cab, can’t you? And if you don’t mind sex trade working as you call it, you can pick up some extra green by blowing a customer or two in the back seat.”

  “I’m still driving the cab, yes,” said Kicky. “But Singh is gonna be on my case for not polishing his knob, waiting for me to put a foot wrong. He’s going to find some reason to fire me. If I started doing my fares he’d find out, and that would be his excuse. I want to keep the two jobs separate.”

  “Why the need for money, if you’re not back on the crack?” asked Lenny suspiciously.

  Kicky sighed. “The bastards are trying to take Ellie away from me,” she explained wearily. “That’s another reason they cut off my Social, to pressure me. They don’t give a flying fuck if Ellie starves or goes without shoes. They’re trying to make me sell her to It Takes A Village, but I won’t do it, so now they’re cutting me off and building a file on me as a bad mother so they can take her away from me, kick in the door of my trailer one morning at daylight and drag her away, like they do. I need a lot of money, fast. I need to build up a stake and get the hell out of Oregon where Child Protective can’t find us. Maybe up to Seattle, or Montana someplace. I was in Missoula, once. I liked it up there. Big Sky Country.”

  “Why don’t you just sell your superfluous by-product and be done with it?” asked Lenny. “Jesus, a little blonde girl like her? You could get a couple hundred grand for her easy, maybe more, and you don’t even have to cut It Takes A Village in on the action. It’s called a private adoption bond. I can set you up with this Jew lawyer I know, Fiegenbaum. It’s legal as hell, and you’d have enough cash to go anywhere you want, do anything you want.”

  “And what would be your cut?” demanded Kicky acidly.

  Lenny shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take it off Fiegenbaum’s end. How about it?”

  “No,” said Kicky firmly, not for the first time.

  “Why not?” asked Lenny, genuinely puzzled that she was turning down a fortune at the same time she was asking him to get back into prostitution.

  “I won’t try to explain it to you,” said Kicky with a sigh.

  “Ever consider implants? You could make even more money by dancing here, if you had some more rack on you and you didn’t have so many tattoos,” remarked Gillis with a leer.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t and I do. Look, you want to set me up? Yes or not? 50-50 split.”

  “Thirty you, seventy me,” said Gillis flatly. “Don’t tell me you can’t squeeze an extra cash tip out of a john.”

  While the two of them were haggling, a nondescript older model Ford Explorer pulled up outside Jupiter’s Den. It was a warm summer’s day, and the SUV’s two occupants had the windows rolled down. The driver was a tall and powerful man with a seamed boxer’s face, a shaved head and goatee beard. The pro wrestler look wasn’t Big Jim McCann’s personal choice, since he was a master electrician by profession, but he needed to alter his appearance because his face was on a few too many wanted posters, web sites, and television screens as of late. McCann was quartermaster of the NVA’s First Portland Brigade. His passenger was Jesse “Cat-Eyes” Lockhart, who after much debate amounting to a passionate argument between Tommy Coyle and Zack Hatfield, had been transferred from D Company to First Brigade A Company and put on sniper duty in the big city. As reluctant as Zack had been to let him go, and as reluctant as Lockhart himself had been to leave his old friends and comrades in Clatsop County, the fact was that Cat was running out of major targets in D Company’s area of operation, and he was too valuable a resource to waste out in the sticks plinking away at Mexican dock workers and the local Chamber of Commerce. In the short time he had been in Portland, the Jack of Diamonds had already bagged a city councilman, a U.S. Army colonel, the head of the African-American Democratic Club, another FBI agent, and several police officers. His presence in the city was known, and he was driving the local politically correct establishment into hysterics. “You want me to go in with you?” asked Lockhart.

  “Naw,” said McCann. “Gillis is a nervous little cuss, and he might get spooked if he sees somebody he don’t know. I just need to find out from him where he’s got the stuff stashed, and set up a pickup so we can get the gear and pay him. Then we need to get you to the Mayflower Hotel.” It was time for Cat to change safe houses, and McCann had been the only transport available. McCann’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Yeah?” He listened for a few moments. “Okay.” He closed the phone. “That was our escort vehicle. Van Gelder says there’s a patrol coming down Sandy Boulevard, two units and an armored car. Unmarked, probably Portland Rapid Response, but maybe BATFE or FBI. They’re cruising slow. The way they’re coming, looks like they’re gonna turn onto 82nd in about a minute.”

  “I don’t think they’re looking for us specifically,” said Lockhart. “They’ve been doing that a lot lately, keeping goon squads on the street as rapid response teams, moving around, trying to cover the city so they can move in fast with a lot of firepower on any of our naughty shenanigans. Ace and me got chased by one of those crews last time out.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want them driving by and looking in here and recognizing you,” said McCann. “You’d better come inside after all. Just hang back at the bar while I have my chat with Lenny, and then we’ll move on after Van tells us they’ve passed.”

  “The truck all clean and righteous?” asked Lockhart. />
  “Yeah, should be, but if it ain’t, then that’s another reason we don’t need you sitting inside when they spot it.” Lockhart was reluctant to leave his cased rifle and gear in the vehicle, but he knew that what McCann said made sense. They got out of the car. Cat checked to make sure his 9-millimeter Beretta was firmly seated in the clip holster in the small of his back, under his denim jacket, and both men walked into the strip club. It was dark enough inside so the opening of the door cast light into the building, and that made Gillis look up from his booth at the far end. “Hang on a minute,” he told Kicky. “I got some business to take care of.” He got up out of the booth.

  Kicky turned around and saw one of the men who looked like a wrestler or a biker walk forward to talk to Gillis. They met at the end of the bar nearest to where Kicky sat in the booth. The other one, a younger man, not unhandsome, stayed at the far end of the bar near the door. He calmly checked out the room in a single glance, moving his eyes over Kicky, categorizing her and moving on, then he turned to the door, watching it. Reading men was a vital survival skill in Kicky’s lines of work both legitimate and otherwise, and with these two she immediately read muscle of some kind, heavy muscle. There was just something about the way they carried themselves, not with a criminal swagger or thuggish biker lope, but controlled and fast and efficient, no wasted motion. Both of them were wearing jeans and jackets in the summertime when everyone in Portland stripped down to shorts and tees, and Kicky would have bet a night’s fare receipts there were guns beneath the jackets. There was something odd about the younger man at the far end, something teasingly familiar.

  She got up and went to the ladies’ room, in a small corridor near the bar. After she finished she quietly slipped down to the door of the men’s room at the other end of the short hallway and studied the younger man in the long mirror behind the bar. The bartender brought him a diet soda in a can with a plastic cup, and when he turned to pour it Kicky saw his face and profile clearly. Damn, she thought, I know him from somewhere. Who is he? She ran over her long list of male personal and business acquaintances. No, not one of them. She rummaged through the past few years of her disorderly life. No, nothing. Was he on TV or something? Recognition suddenly slammed into her. Jesus H. Christ! she whistled to herself. It’s him! That sniper every cop and Feebie in the Northwest is looking for! Well, well! Lenny’s coming up in the world, looks like. What the fuck kind of business is he doing with the spuckies? Bet it’s guns.