I patted the pocket with the automatic. "I'm betting this isn't registered, at least not to you clowns. I'm also betting I can get one of you a year the hard way for having it. Who wants to cover my bet?"
Rick said, "Don't say nothing, Tone."
"Tone? Tony, right?"
Greeter who might be Tony didn't say anything.
I said, "Tony, let me spell it out for you, no big words. You guys were stupid, going hand to hand with the cops back at the library."
Tony looked me in the eye now, memory dawning.
"But the piece, the piece is beyond stupid. The piece is getting to play drop the soap in a communal shower. Am I getting through to you?"
Tony was definitely sensing the drift of the conversation. "I wasn't anywheres near the gun."
"You fucking shithead."
I ignored Rick and said, "Where's Gunther Yary?"
Tony worked his mouth.
I said, "Twelve months is fifty-two weeks, three hundred sixty-five – "
Tony said, "He's out on the bridge."
"You yellow fucking – "
"What bridge'?"
"The Granite Ave bridge. The judge, the judge gave him public service."
"You're a fuckhead, Tone."
I pointed to Rick. "The guy with the broken nose thinks you're a yellow fuckhead, Tony. The guy who's supposed to be standing next to you, standing up for you. Think about that."
I left the place. In the car I unloaded the automatic. Two blocks later I dumped the gun down one storm drain and the bullets down another.
There were four men working on the surface of the bridge, a couple of orange barrels and a bunch of orange traffic cones keeping the passing cars at least three inches away from arms, hips, and legs. I walked up to the closest man, the only guy who didn't have a tarbrush in his hands.
He was wearing an orange safety vest with yellow X's front and back. Below the vest, patched corduroy pants and sneakers. Above the vest, a green, battered hardhat. He held a filterless cigarette between a thumb and forefinger, the thumb missing its nail.
I said, "John Cuddy. I'd like to talk with one of your men there."
"What's it about?"
"Case I'm working on." I showed him my ID.
"Lemme guess. The Nazi."
"Gifted, isn't he."
"Sonofabitch. Fucking judge don't got the balls to put a guy away so close to Christmas, that I can understand. But putting him on my gang, for chrissakes, don't they even think about that? Judge's got a criminal, what does he do, he sends him out to do my job.
How do you figure that makes me feel?"
"Yary been any trouble?"
"Nothing but. Guy opened his mouth about the Jews and the look, I'm not carrying the torch for anybody, get me? But I had to send this guy, Roosevelt Barnes, off with another crew. My best worker, and I had to send him off. You know why?"
"Yary?"
"Called Rosey a nigger. To his face. I mean, forget Rosey's about three hundred pounds, you don't say that to a black guy, not anymore. Took two a us to hold Rosey back. I'm not about to let a good guy like Rosey, got seventeen fucking years in, get bounced for dropping a piece a Nazi shit off a bridge abutment just because some fucking judge's got his head up his ass. So I send Rosey off for a few days while I get squat outta the Nazi. Go figure."
"I can't. Mind if I talk to him?"
He lowered his voice. "You gonna rough him up any?"
"Not planning to."
He shook his head, disappointed. "Hey. Yary. Yary."
One of the orange vests looked over at us as the other two stopped with their brushes.
My friend motioned him over with two jerks of his cupped hand. To me, he said, "Stay here and talk to him. I wanna spend some time with my guys."
"Right. Thanks."
Yary drew even with the foreman about forty feet from me and tried to ask him a question. The foreman just stayed in stride and walked on by.
Yary continued to me, the hardhat jiggling askew on the shaved head. He slowed before stopping about five feet away and reflexively touched a hand to his ear. "I don't have to talk to you."
"Monday night you sounded like all you wanted to do is talk."
"I would have. Till you and the nigger cops and kike money-changers – "
"Tell you what, Yary. You stop the slurs, and I won't fracture your skull. What do you say?"
He kept his distance. "Go ahead."
"What brought you to the library?"
"A bus. It was real big, see? With seats and windows and everything. "
I shook my head and sighed. "The foreman said he'd look the other way if I needed to get rough with you."
"You can't do that. You'd lose your license or whatever."
I sidled a little closer to Yary. He thought about backing off before deciding he couldn't and keep face.
"Just had a talk with a couple of the boys at the clubhouse."
Yary didn't reply.
"You know, Gun. Rick and Tone? They said to give you their best."
"How do you…" Yary squinted, then jammed his hands in his pockets, suddenly looking very young.
"They told me where you were, Gun. After a while."
"Look, I don't want no trouble from you."
"Little late for that."
"You don't understand. None of you understand us, the Trust, the Movement. We're just trying to get back what's ours, that's all. What the race mixers… what the government's let the others take away. One thing I learned from that, from Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson and their kind. You can win in this country if you just keep talking, just keep in people's faces so they can't believe that you're still around, bothering them, making them face what the truth is. About how everything's been taken away from people who earned it by people who didn't. Once I chased this big nig-once I purified the crew here, one of them started listening to me.
Hearing what I was saying."
"Why did you go to the debate?"
"To get some publicity, man. Free publicity. But even the TV and radio don't care about Andrus and her 'friends.' They're shoveling all this shit about the right to die. That's not the point, don't you see it? It ain't the right to die we got to worry about. It's the right to live, to take back what's ours from them that took it from us."
"You don't see Andrus and her crowd as a threat, then."
"Threat? Threat, shit no. Those assholes are just a distraction, get it? They're just being used to get attention for issues that don't mean shit so the real issues, the raping of our people by the others, don't get settled."
Watching Yary talk, become animated and sincere, I decided he scared me more than Rick with his automatic.
Finally, Yary said, "So what do you think?"
"What do I think?"
"Yeah. About the Trust, the Movement."
"I think from your rap sheet that you're not as nonviolent as you make out."
"That was then, man. This is now, you know? I learned my lesson, learned it real good. Now I'm into friendly persuasion."
"I think Rick and the others are thinking about taking the Trust in a different direction."
Yary clouded over. "The fuck you telling me?"
"When I visited the old clubhouse today, I got an armed response."
"Armed? With what?"
"A Colt forty-five."
"I don't believe it. I don't fucking believe it."
"Yes you do. You just don't want to admit it."
"They wouldn't do that. They're not that stupid."
"They're that stupid, Gun. Stupid and impatient. Not everybody's interested in waiting out the revolution."
Yary started to tell me how it wasn't a revolution, but just the people taking back what was theirs. I cut him off by walking over to the foreman, who had started toward us.
The foreman said hopefully, "He giving you any trouble?"
"Sorry. Model prisoner."
"Shit."
"Thanks for letting me take him for a while."
"Take him forever, you want to."
Yary walked by us, eyes straight ahead. As he rejoined the crew, he said something and laughed. One guy paid no attention, but the other laughed too. With Yary, not at him.