“Then why didn’t you get more?”
“It was a virgin meet. He was feeling us out.”
“Why didn’t you ride him?”
“Our informant advised no. Ables only deals with Aryans. Our cover story was too thin to ride out a long relationship.”
Banish just nodded. He was taking a long, burning look around his small office, fighting off some of the same dizziness he had felt when he saw the Pabst. Again he had the sensation, like a farmer stamping out locusts, that things were getting away from him.
So it had been a headline bust. Taking guns away from white hate groups always made the national wires. Must have been nearing budget appropriations time at Treasury. State highway patrolmen refer to it as “getting their period,” the rush to meet citation quotas at the end of each month. Every agency was susceptible. Every branch of law enforcement had numbers to crunch.
Banish wanted to invite Riga and Crimson outside. He wanted to show them how their one-gun pinch was working out. But it was all bullshit. Because the past didn’t matter. A federal marshal was dead. There were criminals and hostages and lawmen all over the mountain, and the welfare of each and every one of them ultimately fell onto Banish’s shoulders. Mitigating circumstances equaled hallway chatter, and Banish put it right out of his mind. He would not allow himself to be dissuaded or distracted from doing his job.
Bronco
Blood didn’t like watching Paradise Ridge shrink in his rearview mirror. He was worried that something might happen without him being there. Not that he mattered even a whisker to the overall operation. But he could admit that he was caught up in it. Like a baby-girl-trapped-in-a-well story on TV. You didn’t want them to bring that baby up without your being there to see it. Especially if there was a chance that baby might have a gun.
So he was hooked — as were others, by the look of the satellite dishes on the TV trucks they passed out beyond the bridge. That was after driving through the protesters who rushed at the Bronco, hammering on the hood and kicking the car doors as Deke Belcher waved from the passenger seat, their fists pounding on the windows, open-mouthed faces bellowing. The old man smelled of a dull, dirty-sour odor that offended Blood in ever-increasing waves. Out on the interstate Blood rolled down his window. He loosened the plastic wrapper on the pine-scented cardboard tree swinging from his dashboard lighter. Then he pulled the plastic wrapper all the way off.
“You taking me to the pokey?”
That aggressive, mangle-toothed smile. He showed it off to Blood the way children hold up their dirty hands to be washed. Blood had the Bronco up to seventy.
“Can’t arrest me,” said Deke. “What for?”
“I’ve got some paperwork to do on you,” Blood said, trying to speak without inhaling. “Things that need your signature. Then you’re free to go.”
Deke nodded and kept smiling and watching out the windshield, content as could be. “How about them federal boys?” he said, shaking his bewildered head as if to say, Hoo-ee. “They don’t even know what they started. Can’t see what it is they’re into. You know,” he said, turning his head then, “I’ll lay a wager it was you that called them in the first place. I’ll bet that.”
Blood didn’t care to bite.
“Because Chief Moody is a man who knows how to handle things around here. You always seem to need help getting things done. Such as, I know you got elected, and you been sheriff here two years — but where’s your support now? A sheriff who’s Indian? Like putting a rock in charge of a forest, I say. People don’t know their place nowadays. But it’s happening all over. The country’s changed. A cigar-store Injun, a wooden statue, all of a sudden wants to move inside and own the whole damned store. You see there? It’s as screwy as that. You might even agree with me. What about them deaths, for example, those Indian boys? Nothing ever came of that, right?”
Blood held his face steady. The back of his neck flared.
“You take an Indian boy who had too much to drink and then goes out walking in the middle of the road. That’s hit-and-run, but who could blame a driver for not reporting that? A drunken Indian who walks in front of your car? Who’s to blame there? Fact is, your kind favors imbibing, which is a simple thing of nature, and these things just happen.”
More bait. The old mountain fool might have been craftier than he seemed. But Blood played his part as Deke rattled on, chewing words.
“You got a pretty good job there anyways. Least you ain’t one of them Indians always crying about his homeland. I give you your credit for that. Saying the white man stole it. Hell, we did steal it. We fought you off pretty easy and took your land right out from under you. Because we could, because that’s the law of the land. But now here’re these Indians trying to change all the laws and take back all the land, and you know who’s behind it. The Jew lawyers whispering in their ears, that’s who, who could turn a copper penny off near anything. Indians’re just too slow to come up with this themselves. You natives should all just be quiet and honor those original treaties. We didn’t have to section off those reservations, you know. That was purely generous.”
Blood said, “You also capitalized ‘Indian.’ ”
“Do you think, for a second, that if someone couldn’t take over this land today, they’d do it? And believe me, they wouldn’t go run us off and change the whole country completely around, and then all of a sudden feel sorry for us and change all their new laws and give it back. They’d take it and they’d keep it for their own. And that’s what is happening here, right now. That’s how we have to stay strong, to preserve ourselves. Sure enough — we could go the way of the red man. Federal government has declared war on the white Christian race. Glenn Ables is just the tip of that iceberg. But don’t you think you and your ancestors wouldn’t scalp and fight like all hell if you got a second chance? Thing is, there ain’t no second chances. That’s the way this is. We’re preserving our race here and preserving it now. You probably understand that as good as anyone.”
Blood wiped a stripe of sweat off his thick upper lip. “I understand you perfectly,” he said.
They arrived at the station and Blood turned into the gravel lot. Except for the flag flying high, the place looked closed for the season. It was as though the building had been shut down for high quarantine. As though a fever had broken out across the county.
Deke moved anxiously in his seat. “Just sign some papers?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Then I’m free to go.”
“That’s right.”
“Then you’ll ride me back on up to Paradise?”
Blood put the Bronco in park and turned off the ignition. He grabbed his hat off the dash and worked the door latch and stepped out quickly, standing on the gravel drive and breathing in the open air. He fixed his hat tightly upon his head and turned around to look back through the open door at Deke.
“Then,” Blood told him, “you’re on your own.”
Paradise Point
Now it was dark. Fucking stars again, and fast-moving black clouds. Night wind fluttering the trees. Fagin looked out and saw his sharpshooters crouched all around him, black forms against the tall black trees and purple night. Other men in the woods too, Bureau agents, in duck boots and down jackets from fucking L.L. Bean. They were working at various stations around the cabin perimeter, making a lot of noise, clanking things, and Fagin was pretty sure he knew what they were up to, and it pissed him off. But fuck it if he’d ask. Banish would keep him in the loop or else.
At least the music was off again. Fagin heard the garbled bullhorn barking and started through the dark trees toward it. On his lunch break he had commandeered an outside line and hit up an FBI contact for info about his new friend, Special Agent John Banish. It seemed that Banish had taken the entire year of 1991 off for compassionate leave six months more than normally allowed for bereavement — and it was halfway through that when the psycho chick plugged him in the hospital. The circumstances surrounding that incident were vague — purposefully fucking vague — but she put a round so far into his gut that he was nearly fitted for a colostomy bag. He’d been at an inactive one-man Resident Agency somewhere in the middle of Montana since getting out of the hospital, just marking time to retirement. The whole thing stunk. It reeked of meddling and preferential treatment and string-pulling and sticky fingers and all the things about the Bureau that Fagin fucking despised.