They were listening. His voice was stabilized, though his insides were still turbulent.
“I know that many of us have come to like Jesse Stone, but that is part of his way. He is, at the very bottom line, a stooge for the state police.”
From the inside pocket of his field jacket, he took a Polaroid picture of Cissy and held it up.
“He has even circulated this disgusting piece of trash. I don’t know if any of you have received one; it is an obviously doctored picture purporting to be my wife. A man capable of that kind of deceit is capable of anything.”
Several of the men leaned forward trying to make out the picture. Hasty paused, letting his eyes rove slowly over the room, meeting the look of as many. of the men as he could. He let the pause build. After a long moment he put the picture back in his jacket pocket. His insides were set-fling.
He was heartened by his rhetoric. He had felt the satisfaction of revenge as he had held up his wife’s naked picture in front of the men. Bitch. He felt powerful. His voice was strong.
“He has to be stopped,” Hasty said softly.
Hasty paused again, looking slowly around the room.
Some of the men were nodding their heads.
“We will implement our plan to take the town hall.”
Hasty said. “We will take Jo Jo out of
there… and we will eliminate Jesse Stone.” ..
“You mean kill him‘?.” one of
the men said from th back.
“In a war of liberation,” Hasty said,
“we do what w, must. Our forefathers eliminated the British agents of re pression at Lexington and Concord. We’ve done this ex ercise often enough. We know how. Each of you shoul, report to his squad leader now. First squad will disabl telephone service from the town hall. Second squad wi see to the electricity. Third and fourth squad will deploy’t the town hall and establish a perimeter.”
The silence in the room was jagged with excitemen What had been a kind of war game had suddenly becom real and the mca felt frightened and heroic.
“It is our moment,” Hasty said softly.
“Paradise will b ours. Quietly, without fanfare, and without opposition, w can establish a free white Christian community. And bit b bit, community by community, with ever-growing force our communities proliferate and begin to connect, we wi. return this nation to its place of freedom and individu rights which our ancestors dreamed of when they threw of the British yoke.”
Lying on her stomach behind a folded canvas pool cove in the loft of the carriage house, Michell? Merchant listen?
intently. Her father and her brother were both Horseme‘.
She thought that all the rah-rah crap that Mr. Hathaw was spouting was really bogus, but she kind of liked th movement because it was antiestablishment the way sE was. And when her father got on her case she could sa that she was just rebelling the way he did. Her father didn like her knowing anything about the Horsemen, which w why she liked to hide in the loft during meetings and list in. It gave her ammunition when he would yell at her. Iq mother didn’t care.
Micbelle suspected that her moth liked it when Michelle got her father back, like her mother ‘wanted to, but was too wussy.
Below her the men had broken up into four groups. They checked their watches. Then two of the groups went out first. The other men waited. The tension was so strong that it even reached the loft and filtered through Michelle’s nearly impenetrable scorn. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The men kept checking their watches and after what seemed to Michelle a long time, the last two groups went out and the room was empty.
Michelle could feel her breath coming a little faster.
Were they actually going to attack the town hall and kill Jesse? Did they actually believe that crap about starting a free town, whatever that meant? That was total crap. Even if they killed Jesse and got Jo Jo G-chest out of jail, pretty soon other cops would know and they’d come and put all the dumb Horsemen in jail. Anybody knew that, for cris-sake.
She smiled for a moment at seeing her father and jerkface brother hauled off to jail. She could go visit them, like in th’e movies, and talk to them through the bars. Cool.
She was dying for a cigarette. The barn was empty. She sat up and lit a cigarette and took in a big lungful of smoke.
Her old lady would poop her pants, Michelle thought. She smiled in the dark loft and smoked some more. The only thing that bothered her was Jesse Stone. He was the only adult she’d ever met who hadn’t given her a load of bullshit when he talked to her. She kind of didn’t like him getting killed.
She didn’t want to spoil this thing. It was kind of exciting.
And she wanted to see what her old lady would do when Dad got arrested.
What kind of lecture would they give Michelle then, she wondered. She kind of liked Jesse, though. She finished her cigarette and lit another one.
With the tiny red glow of the freshly lit Camel Lig bing from the corner of her mouth, she slid out the 1 door and climbed down the back ladder and set her backyard.
Jo Jo said. Maybe found out about Hasty laundering cash for Gino.“
“You were the go-between?” Jesse said.
