Fury sang through Omar’s nerves. “What’s he using?” he demanded. It had to be an upper, from the way Knox was always jumping around. “Damn it,” Omar said, “I searched this boy!” Omar tore through Knox’s belongings—upended the toiletry bag, flipped through the pages of Hunter, tore the lap-top computer from its foam packing—before he thought to open the big, heavy 500-count bottle of aspirin that had fallen out among the toiletries, and shake out the Crusader’s drugs. There was a set of needles and a syringe—the works were real doctor’s issue, not the sort found on the street and made from an eyedropper—along with a fire-blackened spoon and a baggie of brown substance, presumably heroin. There was another bag of pills: black mollies, methedrine. A third baggie with a minute amount of white powder remaining. Omar opened the baggie, tasted the substance. Crystal meth.
Speedballs, Omar thought. The classic speedball was a mixture of heroin and cocaine, but working-class stiffs used heroin and methedrine instead. You could go for days on the stuff until you hit the wall and crashed. The meth was acidic and ravaged the veins, and that would have produced Knox’s impressive rows of needle tracks in fairly short order. Though it was possible he shot only the heroin, and snorted or swallowed the speed.
“Damn it,” Omar said. “Why didn’t I see this?” Knox’s fidgeting, his slapping out rhythms on his knees or his chair, the way he kept talking, the words spilling out, the theories and the diatribes and the history and the fantasy, all run together, all confused…
Knox was deep in drug psychosis, wandering around the country, jabbering about revolution and race war while he robbed banks and spent the money on scag and crank. Omar wondered if the other Crusaders were junkies as well, if this was some kind of heavily armed, mobile drug posse. Jesus. David had been around these people. David had fallen for their line, had wanted to join them in their underground, follow this drug-addled psychopath as he lurched from one crime to the next.
“What do we do, Omar?” Jedthus demanded. “We can’t wake him up. We can’t arrest him.” He paced around the little store. “Do I go back to the camp? Do I do the—the operation without him?” Omar stepped away from Knox. He wanted a breath of fresh air, wanted to get Knox’s stink out of his nostrils.
If Knox wasn’t present to run the operation at the camp, Omar thought, then Jedthus was in charge. Omar, however, wasn’t inclined to trust Jedthus’s judgment. The boy was on the right side, but bone stupid. Yet if Jedthus wasn’t in charge, then Omar was in charge. And if Omar was in charge, then deniability went out the window.
Besides, he wanted Knox in control of eliminating that camp. Even if Knox was a psycho, he’d get the job done.
Knox was a weapon, Omar reminded himself. Made just for Spottswood Parish. And when his job was over—when the weapon had been fired—there would no longer be any reason for him to exist. Omar took a breath. “Wait for Knox to wake up. Bring him some coffee and some food.”
“But Omar,” Jedthus said. “He’s OD’d!”
“He’s crashed,” Omar said. “Speed freaks do that. They run for days, but they can’t live without sleep forever.” He looked around the Shoppe, at the sleeping bags, blankets, pallets, and belongings of the other Crusaders scattered around the dusty floor.
“Do you think they’re all users?” Omar asked.
Jedthus thought about it. “They’re not all as speedy as Micah, but sometimes they’re hyped. Yeah. We’re all on twelve-hour shifts; I wondered how they held up so well.”
Omar walked to Jedthus, put a hand on his shoulder, and lowered his voice. “These people are not reliable,” he said. “Knox is a psycho. I wouldn’t trust any of them behind a dime.” Jedthus nodded. “Yeah. I understand, Omar.”
“These kids are going to crack sooner or later,” Omar said. “And that will be bad for us. Real bad. So just be ready—we’ll have to do something about it.”
There was a moment of silence while Jedthus processed this. Then he licked his lips. “You mean—”
“I mean that action will be taken. But not now. We’ve got to deal with the camp first. Okay?”
“Yeah.” Jedthus tipped his hat back, passed a hand over his forehead. “Yeah, I understand.” Omar moved back to the table and began to stuff Knox’s paraphernalia back in the aspirin bottle. “For right now,” he said. “Just get Knox on his feet. Give him enough privacy to pop his pills or whatever. Then get out to the camp and do the job.”
Jedthus’s eyes turned hard. “I understand,” he said.
“I’m going back to the courthouse and cover y’all’s asses with the authorities, just like I planned.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“No. I’ll walk. You stay here with Knox.”
Omar stepped out of the shop and a lance of sunlight drove straight through his brain. He swayed on his feet.
This is going to be over soon, he told himself. Over.
And then he’d feel better.
“Head for that gate,” Nick said. “Fast as you can. Stop only to pick up guns and ammunition. Once you’re out, get in among the cars. Some of you are going to have to run for those roadblocks.” The young men looked up at him, nodded gravely.
“Don’t stop,” Nick said again. “We’re counting on you.”
I am telling them how to commit suicide, Nick thought. He wondered if they knew that. He had a military force of sorts, composed of almost all the able men in the camp, along with some of the women, all recruited overnight by the various camp committees. Nick was a kind of general, at least insofar as they all were supposed to be following his plan. They were divided into three groups. The Warriors—younger men and women, mostly—would hold off the bad guys while the others made their escape. The Home Guard—older but able-bodied—were supposed to look after the women, children, and old people, and escort them to a place of safety while the Warriors held off any pursuit. The third group were the ones Nick had called the Samurai, though he privately thought of them as the Kamikaze. They were the ones who were trusted with the camp’s meager store of firearms, because they professed themselves good with guns.
Their job was to kill guards. They said they were ready to do this. The odds said they would probably die trying.
It was small comfort that they had all volunteered.
“Don’t forget,” Nick said. “Keep moving. Don’t get bogged down. We’re counting on you.” His father would know just how to do this, Nick thought. His father had been trained in how to send people to their deaths. How to act. How to think about it all.
Just thinking about what was going to happen to his little army made Nick tremble at the knees. He’d talked to all of them, he thought. The afternoon sun was burning down on him and making his head throb. He needed something to drink. The deputies still hadn’t come.
His father would quote Sun Tzu, he thought. Chinese military strategy was one of his passions. Cold analysis, life and death, marches and battles, but written all in poetry.
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the zenith of achievement. His father loved that passage. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the zenith of achievement. We’ve already lost the chance not to fight, Nick thought. And one victory in one battle is all I ask. Okay, Sun? he thought. Okay, Dad?
Nick gave his doomed soldiers the floppy-wristed home-boy handshake—My God, he thought at the touch of palm on palm, we are surely going to die—and then he hobbled to the cookhouse. Pain throbbed through his kidney at every step. Drank his glass of water, then poured another glass over his head in hopes it would cool him off.