“So, what’s your read?” Mac asked. “How much danger are we really in?”
Janet hesitated. “If I thought you were in danger, I’d pull the story,” she said. “If I thought you’d listen,” she amended dryly. Mac grinned.
“I think the danger is that Norton may decide this is the moment to move on Sensei,” she continued thoughtfully. “You may not be the target. Doesn’t mean that you couldn’t get caught in the crossfire.”
“Sensei worries me,” he agreed. “Shorty is pretty sure Norton is mlk4whites on Facebook. And when I get back, I’m getting that foul pseudonym booted off Facebook, no matter what it takes. But Shorty hasn’t spotted who Sensei is, other than to say he’s pretty sure it isn’t Norton or Malloy, and that he knows me.”
“Worries me too,” Janet agreed. “So, go up there, get the story, and don’t get dead. OK?”
“Sounds like a good plan,” Mac said.
The three of them batted questions around for a while, and Mac wrote them down in his notebook. He had a lot of unanswered questions, he thought. He wasn’t sure he had a story though. He said as much to Janet.
She shrugged. “You’ve got a profile about a constitutional sheriff,” she pointed out. “You’ve got a story about wilderness survival training that unites these men, and that two of them have recently gone off the deep end. You got that backgrounder that says this is a growing phenomenon and that matters. That it correlates with domestic violence. And that domestic violence almost always figures in the background of mass shooters and spree killers. So, you may not have the piece that exposes the players behind all of this. You may not get it either. But you’ve got a lot of stories that will help people understand that this is a threat we need to face. White supremacy is going mainstream.”
Mac nodded slowly. He wanted that exposé, he admitted. He didn’t just want to inform and educate. He wanted to take the bad guys down. You’re a reporter, not a vigilante, he reminded himself. But he’d been both last fall and with the Parker story as well. And it was much more satisfying than just an explainer.
“I hear you,” he said.
Janet’s eyes narrowed as she looked at him. He snorted. She knew him too well. He glanced at Angie, who was studying him carefully.
“So?” he asked her, with a half-grin. “Do I have a tell?”
She chewed her lip. “No,” she said. “And that’s scary. Because you just lied. And I couldn’t tell, even though I know you won’t be satisfied unless you expose the bad guys, and they go down for it. Only sociopaths are that good at lying.”
Janet started to laugh, and then couldn’t stop. She looked at Mac, and laughed some more.
“Whatever,” Mac said, resigned. It wasn’t the first time someone had called him a sociopath. Hell, he wasn’t sure they were wrong. The Marine Corps hadn’t been sure either. He’d been sent to a therapist more than once. Inconclusive, the last report had said. But well-adjusted within the confines of military discipline.
He knew what it said because he’d broken into the therapist’s office one night to read it.
“We done?” Mac asked sourly.
“Yes,” Janet said. She looked at her watch. “Take the rest of the day off. Go to the gym. Eat some lunch. Take a nap. You two have got a long, tense weekend ahead.”
Chapter 18
Mac picked Angie up at her apartment two hours later and added her backpack to his duffel in back. He drove to Marysville, listening to her chatter about office politics and newsroom gossip. He learned as much about her as he did about the Examiner. Her gossip was never malicious, but she was extremely curious — nosy, she called it. She connected the dots to make coherent stories about what was going on. And she laughed at the foibles of others, but also at herself.
It made for very good company.
His contributions to the conversation were negligible. Getting to Marysville in rush hour’s stop and go traffic required focus. And he’d never been great at small talk anyway. Angie didn’t seem to mind.
Craig Anderson’s gun shop looked just as grungy as it had the first time he was there. Angie looked at it. “I want some photos,” she said.
“Make him show you inside,” he advised. “Complete contrast.”
She nodded.
It looked like they were the last to arrive, Mac thought as they got out. Anderson saw them and came over.
“Heads up,” he called out. “We’ve got special guests with us this trip, courtesy of Sensei. This is Mac, he’s a reporter with the Examiner. Former Marine. And the news photog, Angie.”
“That’s a girl,” one guy protested.
“I bet she’s aware of that, Dag,” Anderson said dryly. Everyone laughed. Angie grinned at him, and he reluctantly grinned back.
Mac admired how Anderson had gotten everyone past that awkward moment. He looked at the 10 men who were standing around with an amazing amount of stuff. His eyes narrowed, and then he looked at Anderson. “You said you’d provide tents and sleeping bags, right?” he asked.
Anderson nodded. He looked amused.
“And it’s for two nights?” Mac continued, looking at the piles of gear.
Anderson nodded again.
“Then what the hell is all this stuff?”
Anderson laughed. “Let me see what you brought,” he asked.
Mac popped open the back of the truck, and showed him: Angie’s backpack, his duffel, and the gun case for the Remington. Anderson laughed some more.
“They’re new to all this,” he said. “They bring all kinds of things that I didn’t even know existed. It’s no biggie. We’ll carpool up to Sedro-Woolley and then we have vans. You want to take your own rig?”
Mac nodded grimly. He wasn’t going to be dependent on someone else to get out of there if things got weird.
“Good,” Anderson said. He hesitated, and then he added, “We’re going in farther than usual. I guess there’s been complaints about the noise from all
