“Hey,” I said quietly as I walked up.
He looked up and fastened those asymmetrical pupils on me. He didn’t smile, and he didn’t move. “Hey.”
“I just got out. It’s a bit early, but … you know, I needed to be here.”
He didn’t say anything, and I suddenly felt stupid. I turned to go. “I’m here with my dad and a friend, so —”
“You look better,” he said. “Are you better?”
I’d been practicing various answers to this question, but none of them would really work with X. He knew me better than anyone. “I’m an addict,” I said. “I’ll always be an addict. Being better is relative now.”
He said nothing for a long time, then nodded his head. “I’m glad you’re here, man. We all missed you.”
At that, my resolve sort of fell apart and I started to cry. “I missed you guys so fucking much,” I said. Then, remembering where I was, “I guess I shouldn’t swear on the steps of a church.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “God hears worse,” he said. “Let’s go find the others.”
I gestured at the notebook. “Working on something?”
His voice was low. “The bombing,” he said. “I may have something.”
I turned to him. “You really need to meet my new friend Jessie then.”
X arched an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“Brother,” I said. “She knows who he is.”
As I inhaled, I was hit with the smell of sour beer mixed with leftover pizza and human sweat. It was not a pleasant smell, but I’d missed it just the same. I was finally home!
After Eddie’s funeral, the Virgins and the remnants of the Hot Nasties — plus X and Jessie and me — reconvened in the practice space in the basement at Sound Swap.
I hadn’t been there for a long time, and it was pretty awesome to be back but also sad. The ramshackle drum kit that Leah and Eddie had shared was still over in the corner. It wasn’t hard to picture Eddie behind it, wailing away in that Keith Moon style of his.
I explained to Jessie that since high school, it had been our place — our safe Portland punk home. The owner of Sound Swap, an older guy named Steve, had said we could use the basement to practice for a few weeks until we found something else. Four years later, we were still there, churning out three-chord ranters about bad dates, teenage angst, and buying Slurpees at the 7-Eleven. It was where we hung out, jammed, drank beer, smoked dope, and talked about whatever.
At the moment, though, nobody was talking much. There wasn’t much to say.
Sam had put the Clash’s London Calling on a cassette player. “Clampdown” was on low, and nobody was talking. We just sat listening to Strummer’s familiar rasp.
I decided to say something, mostly because I can’t help myself. “That was rough,” I said. “Does anyone know how Eddie’s parents are doing?”
Sister Betty shrugged. “Better, I guess,” she said. “They seem to have accepted it.”
“That sucks,” I said.
Sam was watching X, who was quietly flipping through his little black Moleskine notepad. “What’s the next column about, X?”
X didn’t look up. His long hair hung down over his face. “All this,” he said, meaning the bombing and the aftermath.
I cleared my throat. “So, Jessie’s a drummer, folks. Comes from the Motörhead side of things, but she’s pretty good, I hear.”
Jessie, from her spot on the couch, looked mortified. “I am not!” she said, protesting. “I never said I was any good, Kurt! Jesus, you’ve got a big mouth!”
“I do not,” I protested.
Sister Betty and Patti laughed. “Oh, yes he does,” Sister Betty said.
“Whatever. But if you can’t play an instrument, you’re uniquely suited for punk rock,” I said. “Three chords, one beat, you’re good to go. That’s punk.”
Sister Betty nodded, smiling. “When Patti and I started, we knew two chords. So, we’d play ‘Roadrunner’ by the Modern Lovers for half an hour. D, A, D, A. Later, we learned G and started playing ‘Gloria’ and ‘Wild Thing’ for hours.”
“Nice,” Jessie said. “If you’re going to know three songs, those are the three to know.”
The Upchucks, Leah, and Jessie started talking about shared musical likes and dislikes, with Sam and Luke occasionally contributing, the Clash album playing a bit louder now. Everyone seemed to be feeling better, grateful to have left behind the sadness of the funeral. As they chattered away, I decided to use the opportunity to speak to X.
“Brother,” I said, “you need to talk to Jessie. She knows stuff.”
X looked at me. “So you said at the church. How?”
I looked at her as she chatted with our friends. “Her parents were hippie counterculture types, living off the grid and all that shit. She lived in small towns and worked after school at a library. That’s where she thinks she met him.”
“How does she know?”
“The stuff he said to her then, the stuff he did.” I looked over at Jessie and lowered my voice to a whisper. “This guy raped her, X. She remembers everything about him.”
X looked at Jessie, then back at me. “I’m really sorry to hear that,” he said, his pupils getting dark. “What’s the connection?”
“The things he said to her. He told her he was going to do something dramatic one day. Said he’d read this book, and he was going to blow something up. Fucking crazy shit.”
X was looking at me intently. “Which book?”
“She can’t remember. It wasn’t in the library where she worked, though. He told her it was a banned book or something, from the underground.”
“Was it called The Patriot Diaries?”
“I don’t know. You should talk to her.”
“I will.”
I could see that the Virgins and the Nasties liked Jessie. The bunch of them were laughing and smiling, talking about music and about the Clash.
Sister Betty looked up at me. “Hey, Kurt. You up to playing something? Sam and Luke want to jam with Jessie here, see how good she is. You up for that?”
“Fuck, yeah,” I said, clapping my hands, heading down the stairs, “I’m up for that.”
And that’s how Jessie came to drum for the Hot Nasties.
And how X learned the bomber’s name.
CHAPTER 23
“I think we’ve been going about this all wrong.” Detective Savoie sounded unhappy, as usual. Laverty could hear his labored breathing over the phone.
Laverty was in an interview room at the boxlike headquarters of the Portland PD, going through Tim Reid’s list again. A half-dozen Portland detectives buzzed around, working the phones. Savoie, meanwhile, was on the road, speeding around southern Maine in his Oldsmobile, a convoy of police following him. They were trying to track down the men — they were all men — who had contacted the United Klans of America in Alabama to purchase a copy of The Patriot Diaries in the past four years.
Reid’s list, however, was out of date. Most of the men had moved or, in at least two cases, had died. Not one still lived at the address indicated on Reid’s list.
“Are the names Reid gave us fakes?” Laverty asked.
“Not all of them,” Savoie said. He was calling from a pay phone at a Maine turnpike toll booth just north of Kittery. “We’ve talked to some neighbors who remember some of these douchebags, but they all say they’re long gone or dead. Chasing names on this list ain’t working, Laverty.”
“Well, we can’t give up,” she said, looking at a map of Maine and New Hampshire. “This is the first good lead we’ve gotten in weeks. Hell, it’s the only lead we’ve had in weeks.”
“I know,” Savoie said. “But this guy isn’t stupid. I’m willing to bet the bomber is one of the guys who used a P.O. box and an alias.”
Laverty looked down at the list, several copies of which were scattered across the table. “Yeah,” she said, “there are a lot of P.O. boxes on here.”
“Yep.”
T
here was a long pause. “Are we wasting our time, Savoie?”
“I don’t think so. But I do think we’re going about it the wrong way. I don’t think we’ll find him just by chasing old names on Reid’s list.”
“How then?”
“Two things. We know the bomber isn’t an old guy. The eyewitnesses say he looked young, almost like a teenager. So, he’s more likely to be one of the ones who bought the Diaries fairly recently.”
“Sure. Of course. And?”
“Reid said ninety-nine percent of the guys buying the book sounded nervous or scared. Like they didn’t want to get caught.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, the bomber is in the one percent. He’s young, and he didn’t wear a mask at the motel, at the Y, or at the truck rental place. It’s like he isn’t afraid to be ID’d. He drove that truck right up to the YWCA, in broad daylight. There could’ve been a hundred closed-circuit cameras around, even though there weren’t. The security guy, Cox, said he was wearing jeans, jean jacket, a trucker’s cap, right?”
“Right.”
“No disguise, no nothing,” Savoie said. “He was practically daring us to catch him.”
Laverty was unconvinced. “Why the Thomas Jones pseudonym then? Why just totally disappear? If he was unafraid, like you say, why not do another bombing?”
Savoie grunted. “I dunno. All I know is he’s not afraid, but he also doesn’t want to make it easy for us.”
“Where are you going with this?” Laverty asked, feeling tired and frustrated. She hadn’t slept since Reid gave them the list two days earlier.
“I think he just got in that stolen Marquis and drove away. He observed the speed limit, didn’t do anything to attract attention. But he wasn’t really hiding, either.”
“And?”
“And,” Savoie said, “I had the guys go through the tape for one of the toll lanes near Kittery.”
“We’ve looked at all of those tapes before.”
“Not all of them. Not the trucks-only lane. We didn’t check that.” He paused. “Laverty, we’ve got tape of a young guy driving a Mercury Marquis on the morning of the bombing, going through the trucks-only lane.”
“Really?” she said, standing up. Chief Chow stopped what he was doing and walked over to stand beside her.
“And,” Savoie said, “he slows down, stops, and pays the toll, and then he does something really fucking weird.”
“What?” Laverty said, louder.
“He looks right up at the closed-circuit camera,” Savoie said, “and he smiles.”
The two boys were fishing. They’d taken off their running shoes and were astride a big fallen tree at a spot where the Androscoggin River slowed down. Very close to where the Marquis was, just beneath the dark water’s surface.
Thomas M. Jones took aim.
Through the scope of his stolen rifle — a Winchester Model 70, which he considered the best deer-hunting rifle ever made — Jones could see that the boys were likely in their early teens, having fun and totally oblivious to his presence. He was maybe three hundred feet away from them, hidden in the shadows at the mouth of the woods.
He watched as they chattered away, enjoying the unseasonably warm spring day. Fishing, laughing, skipping rocks. From where he was, Thomas M. Jones could see that they hadn’t caught anything yet.
The older boy had longish blond hair and was wearing a KISS T-shirt and cutoff jeans. The other boy — smaller, slighter, but also blond — wore a Star Wars T-shirt, with his jeans rolled up so he wouldn’t get them wet. Through the scope, Jones thought they looked to be related. Maybe brothers.
When he was around their age, in places not far from Errol, he’d fished, too. But he was always alone. There had been no brother to fish with. There should have been, but there wasn’t. Remembering, his index finger moved on the trigger, just a little.
He had hauled in smallmouth bass, brook trout, brown trout, rainbow trout — a few times, even landlocked salmon — and felt the rush of victory, the triumph that follows the long wait. But there had been no one to show the catch to. His father was almost always away, bartering for eggs or lamp oil or whatever. And his mother was always in the little shack — no running water, no electricity — recovering from whatever had been her latest setback. She was weak.
Thomas M. Jones would trek back through the woods, his catch flopping around in the bottom of a plastic bucket. His mother would see him and smile and beckon, asking to see what he’d caught. He’d place the bucket at her feet, wordless, and then stalk back into the woods.
He could always feel her hurt eyes on his back. And, as he stepped out of the clearing where they camped out, and into the woods again, he wondered if she was crying. Again.
He had hoped so.
The boys, Jones noted, weren’t very good at fishing. They talked too much, too loudly — and skipping rocks across the water’s surface probably didn’t help, either. He placed the scope’s crosshairs over the head of the younger boy, who looked intensely happy, totally indifferent to whether they caught any trout or not. Thomas M. Jones disliked that. What was the purpose of hunting or fishing if not to triumph over some wild thing? He was mystified by that attitude. It irritated him.
He moved into a shooting stance. Still within the shadows of the trees but with a better view of his target, he controlled his breathing and brought the Winchester up.
He did not miss.
CHAPTER 24
By the time he stepped out of the woods — hands up, a copy of his finished manuscript in one hand, a copy of The Patriot Diaries in the other — Thomas M. Jones looked ready.
We watched it unfold on TV. The whole fucking world watched it on TV. It was his big coming-out party.
An army of FBI agents and state and local cops were there to greet Thomas M. Jones, with guns drawn. The authorities hadn’t told any media about their big event, but a Portland CBS reporter had heard something on the police scanner and had hustled up the Maine turnpike toward Errol, New Hampshire, following the armada of cop cars. His live feed was picked up by every network in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, the words “EXCLUSIVE CBS LIVE REPORT” crawling across the bottom of the screen. We were all in the Upchucks’ basement, watching it on their old console TV.
The CBS guy hadn’t been allowed to get too close, but he was close enough that we could see Thomas M. Jones. “He looks triumphant,” I said, repulsed.
“He is,” X said, arms crossed. Everyone was there: Patti, Sister Betty, Sam, Luke, Mike the Biker, and me and Jess. “This is his big day.”
In fact, Jones looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. One of the cops was shouting and gesturing at him. So, Thomas M. Jones stopped moving forward, his arms still up, the two books still held overhead. He was wearing cargo shorts, well-worn hiking boots, and a T-shirt. The trucker hat Jones wore had an upside-down peace symbol on it. That, X told me, was the logo of the National Alliance. Bob Cox’s wife had told X that Jones had been wearing that same hat the morning of the bombing. It was the leader of the National Alliance who had written The Patriot Diaries.
We figure Cox had told the FBI about the symbol, too, and that Laverty would have figured out the connection right away. But only X had been able to figure out Jones’s true identity. He told us all how he and the guys had convinced Tim Reid, the Klan member-slash-informant, to give up the list of names of the men who had ordered copies of the book.
Looking pleased with himself, Mr. Reid had been extracting his room key from his pocket after the feds had left when he looked up to see X holding up a reporter’s notepad on which he had written, in black marker, the unlisted phone number of the Grand Wizard of the United Klans of America. “Give me what you gave Savoie and Laverty,” X told him, “or my friends and I are going to phone your boss in Alabama and tell him you’re a police informant.”
X had then pointed across the Holiday Inn parking lot to where Sam Shiller and Luke Macdonald were standing by a pay phone, waving. Sam was hold
ing a Polaroid camera and Luke was holding up some Polaroid snapshots — presumably of Tim Reid with an FBI special agent and a Portland police detective.
Reid promptly gave X what he wanted.
Reid’s list had contained the name, or alias, of every guy who had purchased The Diaries from the United Klans of America in Mobile, Alabama. For New Hampshire and Maine, there had been only two dozen names, give or take, along with addresses and phone numbers.
Beside some of the phone numbers, someone had written letters and initials in faint pencil. Beside the name Thomas M. Jones had used, Reid had written “NA.” The cops had probably thought it meant “no answer.” X knew it meant “National Alliance.”
And that’s how X had learned the bomber’s real name.
But as I later read in the Portland rags, Detective Savoie, to be fair, was the first one to spot Jones on video from the trucks-only lane at the Kittery toll booth. And then there were the two brothers who had been fishing in the Androscoggin. They told the cops where Thomas M. Jones was camping out. Apparently, that information earned them a ton of reward money.
Thomas M. Jones was an expert shot, and he hit his target. Using the scope on the Winchester Model 70, Jones had fired a single round at exactly the spot in the river where the Marquis lay submerged.
KEE-RANG.
The magnum round found its mark. It struck the big wraparound driver-side tail light sticking out of the water and shattered it to pieces. Some of the red plastic floated up to the surface of the Androscoggin River and started to float away.
The shot rang out like thunder, echoing for a couple of seconds. The youngest boy called out to his brother, terrified. They’d heard gunshots before. The older boy didn’t hesitate. He rushed to his little brother, put an arm around him, and then pulled him down behind a fallen tree. He said Jones then stood up and waved at them, smiling. “Sorry to scare you boys. Run home and tell your parents that you just saw Thomas M. Jones.”
The boys left behind their fishing rods and tackle box and ran like hell back home to tell their parents about the man in the woods. And their parents had immediately called the police.
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