“How… ”
“I’ve got no idea how the Feds found the compound,” Christie retorted irritably. “After Atlanta all Hell broke loose. You should have told me what you were going to do!”
He left unsaid the thought that a sane man would have removed his family to a place of safety before he embarked on his latest and most egregious killing spate.
“You know this guy, Galen?” Christie’s guard asked. His tone was that of a man who felt he had been kept in the dark too long about something that might be life or death to him. Most people who had ever had any dealings with Galen Cheney ended up feeling exactly the same way.
“Yeah, I thought he was dead, Dan.”
“Me, too!” Christie interjected. “Heck, Galen, after you, I’m public enemy number one! You stirred up a Helluva hornets’ nest with that stunt in Atlanta!”
Galen Cheney was looking at him cold-eyed.
Christie thought he was a dead man.
Cheney was one of those ‘dangerous individuals’, or ‘dangerous madmen’ whose FBI file had been as voluminous as Dwight Christie had expected it to be when he had finally got his hands on it.
‘Galen’ was not his given name. He had been christened John Herbert Cheney into a Texas City family embedded in a small close-knit fundamentalist Christian religious community; some kind of ultra-puritanical Americana offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren. His father was a lay preacher, his mother a woman who ruled her brood — literally — with a rod of iron. His family was poor, dirt poor because his father was usually out of work, living off the charity of neighbors in and around Galveston Bay until the day he was expelled from the ‘communion’. That was when Cheney was about nine. Cheney senior had been accused of molesting the daughter of another member of ‘the communion’; an eleven year old girl. Subsequently, the family had travelled to New Mexico, then Arizona, Nevada and back to Fort Worth, Texas in the following years. The father had reinvented himself as some kind of archetypal whiskey preacher, or snake oil salesman or a flimflam man, depending upon one’s perspective. One of seven children — John Henry was the eldest of three boys but had two older sisters — the young ‘Galen’ had spent his teenage years being passed from pillar to post and ended up, aged thirteen, in a reformatory in Abilene. The one thing he clung to from those harsh childhood days was his eye for an eye, unashamedly brutal ‘faith’. God did not just exist; He was righteous and He was always looking over Galen Cheney’s right shoulder.
When he was fourteen Cheney had shipped out on a steamer running down to Panama, and sailed the world until he was twenty. Back in Texas he had joined the Rangers, in the Second World War he had signed up for the Air Force, serving in England and Western Europe as a military policeman. Back stateside after 1945 he joined the Federal Marshall’s Service; a grim, humorless man he would have probably been a Marshall until he dropped but for the Cuban Missiles War, for like so many other men who lived their lives on the edge of sanity, the war had robbed him of the one anchor in his otherwise joyless, dutiful existence.
The reason Galen Cheney’s pre-October War FBI file was so big was that he had killed four men in the line of duty, one when he was a Texas Ranger and the others during his service as a Federal Marshall. He had also killed a man in a fist fight in England during the 1945 war. He was a pathologically violent man whom, it seemed, courted danger and never flinched when the bullets started to fly. While everybody else went to ground he stood tall and blazed away until all the bad guys were down. He would have been an all-American hero but for his overly muscular religiosity and his habit of ‘preaching’ to his superiors.
The missile launched from Cuba which had destroyed Galveston Island and South Houston had obliterated his house on Texas Avenue and with it his wife of twenty-three years, Mary, his daughter May Rose, and his youngest son, Jacob. The small Navajo medallion which he normally wore with his black Bolo tie was for Mary, whose maternal grandmother had been a pure-blood Navajo…
“You knew where I’d be,” Cheney said, breathlessness catching each word. “You didn’t have to come here to tell me… ”
“I didn’t know where you’d be! How the fuck would I know where you’d be, Galen!” Christie objected angrily. “I guessed you’d be here now because the March on Philadelphia hits town next week! You could have been anywhere. In camp in Tennessee, or even back in Texas.”
“You should have told me about Mikey.”
“I just did! Getting caught trying to get a message to you when you’d fucked up and put us all in danger because you didn’t listen to a single goddam word I said to you,” the smaller man retorted, “wasn’t, still isn’t, dammit, at the top of my to do list!” The one thing a man never did with Galen Cheney was take a backward step. “Besides, being your fucking personal messenger boy was never part of the deal!”
Dan, Christie’s captor opened his mouth to speak.
Cheney raised a hand.
“You were with Mickey… ”
“No. If I’d been standing beside him when the sump lit off I’d be dead too! Trust me, he couldn’t have got out of the compound. The explosion took out a Huey and God knows how many agents and state troopers. What the fuck did you prime it with? It went off like a small nuke!”
Keep it simple.
Do not embellish the lie.
“The women?”
“They’re safe.”
“Where?”
“They won’t be safe if you or anybody else in this camp knows that, Galen,” Christie told him abruptly. He was tempted to add ‘if you or somebody from your fucking church had come back down to Texas after the Atlanta fuck up you’d have been a lot better informed!’
But he refrained.
Had Cheney sent anybody down to Texas to root around he would have worked out that it had been Christie who tipped off the FBI and ‘taken out’ Mikey to separate him from the women. The fact that Christie was still alive bore eloquent testimony to the Cheney’s cold-hearted desertion and betrayal of his family.
“What happened to blow the Texas organization?”
“Are you serious?” Christie exploded angrily. “After that stunt you pulled in Dallas what did you think was going to happen! I told you that if you poked the FBI too hard it would bite you back. After Dallas the agency closed down the Texas operation, just like they did in Georgia after the Bedford Pine Park shooting. And while we’re on the subject where do you get off killing hundreds of innocent civilians? King was a legitimate target. So were senior members of his staff. Nobody gave you permission to murder a whole lot of women and children, Galen!”
Cheney nodded at Dan.
“Wait outside, brother.”
Christie’s complaints had bounced off the big man’s impenetrable psychic carapace like pea-shooter rounds off an M-60’s cemented armor glacis plate.
“You through, Dwight?” He asked. Almost amiably.
“That’s up to you, Galen.”
“True.” With a long groaning sigh Cheney sank back onto his cot. “The Lord has tested us all with pestilence,” he muttered idly. “We lost some of the brethren to dysentery… Bad water. We think the flies carry malaria. That’s what did for the first brethren to settle these shores hundreds of years ago… ”
There was only the one cot in the tent.
Christie looked around for a chair or a stool; there was none.
He shifted on his feet, despite himself a little shocked to find the monster so obviously enfeebled.
“Malaria?”
“That’s what Dan thinks. He was a medic in the Pacific. Guadalcanal and places like that.” Cheney gathered his strength. “Why did you come here?”