Still, Sensei was getting his message out somehow. He’d have to ask Shorty to help him figure out how.
Chapter 8
(Friday, May 2, 2014, 6 a.m. Seattle Examiner)
Mac wrote a follo’ to the shooting the day before. He made his calls. And when they were off deadline, he went across the street for coffee with Janet. Coffee for her and Mountain Dew for him. As always. Routines were comfortable, Mac thought. Until you became predictable. Predictable made it easy for your enemies to track you. Had he become predictable?
Janet drank the first sip of her coffee and sighed. Mac shook his head. He’d seen women get off with less expression of pleasure.
“Timothy called,” she said after the second sip. “He asked about you. Asked if you and Kate had broken up?”
“Did he?” Mac said. “Did he think we had?”
“No one seems to be sure,” Janet said, and laughed at the expression on Mac’s face. “Face it, gossip runs wild in church circles just as it does at the cop shop.”
“And the newsroom,” Mac groused.
A shadow passed over Janet’s face. “And the newsroom,” she agreed. “So... Kate?”
“I haven’t heard from her,” he said.
“She won’t call you,” Janet said gently. “It isn’t done.”
“Not even to invite me to Sunday dinner?” he asked, with an arched brow. “That seems passive enough.”
“You’re angry.”
He thought about that. Yes, he was, he realized. “I wanted it to be real,” he said out loud. “And it wasn’t.” He shrugged. “So yeah, I guess I’m done. So, changing the subject? This gun thing is bugging me.”
“Tell me what you’ve got.”
He walked her through it. The stable, ordinary men going off their rockers because they were becoming immersed in this cult of gun ownership and the coming crisis where society breaks down, and only the strong will survive.
“Have you read some of the studies done about the effect of Fox News?” she asked.
“College,” he said. “I remember the study that said Fox viewers still believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Al Qaeda was funded by Iraq.”
“Consumers of right-wing media like Fox and some of the online sites still get most of the current event quizzes wrong. They live in their own news bubble. It’s remarkably easy to happen,” Janet said. “It’s also remarkably easy to create for other people. Not unlike what my dad created for the people of Jehovah’s Valley.”
It was the first time he’d heard her mention her father since the events of last fall. He didn’t comment, didn’t know what to say. “You think that’s what the Sensei is doing? Creating an alternative reality, a news bubble where there is going to be a catastrophe of some kind and a breakdown of society. When SHTF — shit hits the fan,” he said slowly. “Create the filter, and modern news and events support it.”
Janet nodded. “It worries me,” she admitted. “The whole societal trend toward these bubbles. That’s what a local newspaper should bridge, it should tell stories that matter in such a way that engages people and brings them together, makes them see what’s really going on.”
She sighed. “Instead, the broad-based daily newspaper is dying. Especially the metros. And we need them.”
She shook her head. “Ready to go up and see the constitutionalist sheriff yet? Spend a day?”
“He’s in Skagit?” Mac said slowly. “That’s where they went for their wilderness training. And the guy from yesterday came back bragging about being blooded.” The term both scared him and made him roll his eyes. People watched too many movies.
“Did he?” she said thoughtfully. “Go see. Stay over if you need to. Take along that reading list I sent you. Bundy in Nevada is especially interesting. But you also need to do a deep dive into right-wing media and conspiracy theories. Start with Alex Jones and Breitbart.”
Then she grinned. “And you can play on Facebook some more.”
“Yay,” he said glumly.
Mac went home and packed a duffel to spend the night in Mount Vernon, the county seat of Skagit County. He looked at the map, and decided Sedro-Woolley was probably the jumping off point for the wilderness training. He might go up there too.
His phone rang. “Yeah,” he said.
“Mac? We’re sending a photog up with you. Swing by Angie Wilson’s place and pick her up. She says you know where she lives,” Janet said.
“What?”
“We’re sending a photog with you,” she repeated. “You’ve worked with Angie before. She’s very good.”
“I was planning on spending the night up there,” he said.
“Her boss knows. He’s freed her up for the next two days if necessary.”
“Janet,” he began. Stopped how to say it that didn’t sound sexist to a boss who wouldn’t appreciate sexist. At all. “She has a fuchsia streak in her hair. I’m going up to talk with good ol’ boys.”
“I’ll tell her,” Janet said. Someone shouted something in the background, and she hung up.
I’ll tell her? What did that mean? He shrugged. Guess he wasn’t going to Mount Vernon by himself. He hesitated. Then he found the box of condoms in his nightstand drawer and stashed them in the bottom of his bag.
Apparently, what “I’ll tell her” meant was that Angie didn’t have a fuchsia streak in her hair when he picked her up outside her apartment building 30 minutes later. Her hair was still damp, but it was now a uniform brown.
“Damn,” Mac said. “I liked the streak.”
She laughed. “Easy come, easy go. Easy to come back,” she assured him. “Thanks for the head’s up by the way. I really want to do this shoot, and I didn’t think about how that streak might be perceived.”
Mac stowed her small suitcase in the back of the truck next to his duffel bag. Her camera bag went into the front with her. Fair enough, he thought. His backpack was up front too.
“So, what do you know about this assignment?” he asked, before starting up the 4-Runner.
“Not much. Just that Janet
