Chuck goes to the door, gives a thumbs-up to Pat, then returns to Jimmy and the guard. Jimmy has lifted him up into his chair. Chuck pulls cable ties from his pockets, hands them over. “Sieg Heil?” he says, laughing.
Jimmy winks at him. “Adding some color to the scene, man. Figured it would complement Pat’s new tattoos nicely.” Jimmy binds the guard’s ankles and wrists with the cable ties, pulls a gag from his pocket and forces it into his mouth.
Outside, Pat has gone back the way they came, returned to the van, to let Al know things have gone as planned, and to pull the van around front.
Using the guard’s keys, Chuck and Jimmy get the main gate open. Al, with Pat riding shotgun, pulls the van in, turns it around, reverses it back inside the warehouse through the opening. He’s wearing his mask now.
Pat jumps out of the van, runs inside with Chuck and Jimmy to start loading it up with bags of fertilizer. They take as much as they can carry.
They’re all dressed the same. All-black sweaters, trousers, boots, masks. They are uniform. With one exception. Pat is in short sleeves. On his right arm is stencilled a swastika. It looks like a tattoo. In reality, Pat does not have any tattoos.
Finished, they close up the van, close the roller doors, kill the lights, lock the door the security guard came out of. The van pulls out, containing Al, Chuck, and Pat. Jimmy closes the gate again, locks it. He takes the keys. They’ll dump them out the window somewhere.
All four inside, Al drives off. He doesn’t speed; there’s no need. It went off without a hitch.
As they get out of the district, back onto the main roads, they take off their masks. Chuck turns around, to Pat. He nods at the swastika. “You show that thing off?”
“Yeah,” Pat says. “Paraded it around right under the cameras, made sure they could see it from every angle.”
“You sure?”
“Certain.”
“Good.” Chuck sits back, satisfied. Jimmy passes him the keys they took from the guard. He throws them out the window, toward some bushes; then he calls ahead, lets Dix know they’re on their way. That everything went exactly as it should.
5
Michael Wright looks around the room.
Present, at the round table in his basement where they conduct their business, are the elders of the Right Arm Of The Republic. Beside him is his co-founder, his right-hand man, Harry Turnbull. His oldest friend.
Directly opposite is Ronald Smith, their elder statesman of sorts. At fifty years of age, he is the oldest member of the group, and the most experienced. He’s run with many other cells in his life, long before the inception of the Right Arm, and has even had a brief run with the Klan. By now, his bald head is more the result of genetics than of his taking a razor to it. His body is going soft now, his chest and his stomach beginning to sag where they were once firm and strong, but his face remains as hard, as fearsome as ever. Ronald has been known to silence rooms with merely a raised brow. He may be getting older, but no one underestimates him.
To Michael’s left is Peter ‘Terminator’ Reid. One look at him leaves no doubt as to the reasoning behind his nickname. Peter is their enforcer, and he looks every inch of it. He wears a vest that shows off his bulging, steroid-enhanced muscles, as well as his ink. The 88s, the swastikas, the Norse gods. On his left pectoral, above his heart and mostly obscured by the strap of his vest, a right-handed fist proudly holding aloft an American flag, swastikas where there should be stars – the unofficial symbol of the Right Arm. Out of the four men, Peter looks the most worked up. His fists clench and loosen, clench and loosen, atop the table. His knuckles go bone white each time.
Michael looks at these men, and he knows each one of them is loyal. They’re loyal to him; they’re loyal to each other; they’re loyal to the cause.
And thus he knows that not one of them would have tipped off Anthony, sent him racing off into the night. He knows, too, that it was sheer luck they neared the house just as Anthony and his pregnant spic girlfriend were racing out of it, making their escape. Knows that if they hadn’t reached the house just as they did, they would never have been able to take another road, one that didn’t directly follow them out of Harrow but instead met up at the town’s limits, that they wouldn’t have been able to intersect them just in time. That if they hadn’t gotten there exactly when they did, Anthony and the bitch would be long gone, just an angry memory by this point.
And he knows, too, that none of these men present would have called the police, either, alerted them to what was happening on that quiet road right outside town. They all know it has to have been a further betrayal. No one else knew they were there. No one had seen them. There were no other cars, there were no nearby homes. Someone had called the cops, sent them in that direction, told them there’d be something of interest they’d come across.
“Much as I hate to say it,” Harry says, looking around into everyone’s face. “There could be a traitor in our ranks. Someone told that son of a bitch to run. Someone sent the cops out looking for him, trying to cut us off.”
“Shoulda let me pull the trigger,” Peter says, shaking his head. “Shoulda let me just end it right then and there.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t expect him to up and disappear from the goddamn hospital now, did we?” Harry says. “Especially not in his condition. He sure as hell didn’t get up and walk out.”
“That’s another thing we gotta
