AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Damn,” said Ed. He let his eyebrows slide back down into position and fired up a Kool. “What you make of that shit?”
I shook my head at him. “I don’t know what to make of it. I never heard any of it before. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might mean something. You can take coincidence only so far.”
“And you already there, Billy.”
“Yeah. Past there.”
Ed leaned back. He reached his hand all t
he way around the back of his head and scratched the other side, puffing on the Kool that dangled from his fingers of his other hand. “So you think maybe he wasn’t really Neighborhood Watch, huh?”
I shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he’s with Pinkerton’s and he thought I was Jesse James. But there was something about this guy.”
He gave me a lazy smile. “Uh-huh. Must be something, he get his gun in your ear like that.”
“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “The guy moved pretty good. He looked like he was in very good shape, knew how to use the gun, all that. But—” I stopped talking, because I couldn’t figure out how to say it.
I didn’t have to figure it out. The Kevin Costner lookalike sauntered over and dropped a folder on Ed’s desk. He looked at me, then looked at Ed.
Ed stared back without touching the folder. After a few seconds Kevin shrugged and walked away.
Ed sighed and opened the folder. After a moment he gave his head a slight nod. “Well, well.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be a third well? So it goes, ‘Well, well, well’?”
“Billy, you can have all the wells you want. You just hit a gusher.”
He flipped the folder over to me. It was a rap sheet for Phillip L. Moss. I scanned it.
Phil was a very busy guy. When he wasn’t helping out with Neighborhood Watch he was spending a lot of time eating public food. He’d been inside for assault, aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, attempted murder, and public nuisance more times than the whole local chapter of Hell’s Angels. He was also a known former member of CSA.
I looked up at Ed. “CSA? Like Confederate States of America?”
The famous Cheshire grin appeared. This was making Ed happy. “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.” He said it like it was the tag line for a sermon. “I’m not sure if they still in business, but we can find out.”
“I’m sure we could,” I said, “but why would we want to?”
Ed looked at me and shook his head sadly. “What we gonna do with you, son? You gettin’ all pathetic on me. CSA was one of the original white racist gun clubs, Billy. You know, crawling ’round in the mud with an AR–15 pretending you shooting at evil niggers trying to integrate your wife. Survivalism mixed with racism. You never hear about that shit?”
“Oh,” I said. I had a vague memory of something like that. “They had a commune in, uh, Mississippi or something.”
Ed pointed a finger at me and dropped his thumb: Pow. “Arkansas. Had a big spread up there to train for the survival of the pure white race.”
He turned and punched four digits into the telephone. I couldn’t hear what he said and he didn’t tell me. But a minute later a guy strolled over.
He was a very impressive-looking guy; about six-three, with the kind of silhouette you get only from a lifetime in the gym. He had a shaved head, an eyepatch, and a diamond in his left ear.
“Billy,” Ed said, “this is Detective Braun.”
I gave him my hand. He didn’t rip it off and eat it. But it throbbed for a while.
“Detective Braun here is our expert on the survival of the pure white race.” He showed Braun some teeth. “He don’t look Jewish, does he?”
“I was undercover last year,” Braun told me. He had a very soft, high voice. “You know the Stompers?”
I said I did. They were a bunch of smelly, overweight yahoos on Harleys. Even the other bikers avoided them.
“We got word they were in on a bank job. I hung out with them.”
