The deputies operating out of the Rockbridge Sheriff’s Office spent their off-duty time in two places. The more abstemious ones were to be found at a diner on old Route 60. Those more likely to require liquid support before or after work would be found at Benny’s Sport Bar and Grille, AKA the Cop Stop, a few clicks east. Billy and Essie assumed that Frieze would probably frequent the latter and that is where they headed.
They left Picketsville toward evening and the twenty-minute drive from the office to and through Buena Vista went by in frosty silence.
Billy plastered a smile on his face. “So, is that new perfume? You smell nice.”
Essie riding shotgun, stared straight ahead. “It’s soap…Dove bar.”
Billy realized he needed to deal with the chill in the air. He also knew this wasn’t normal coming from the usually voluble Essie, and therefore, it could not be good. “Oh. Well, it’s um…nice. Say, what’s eating you, Babe?”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That Ike ain’t dead.”
Billy made an effort to rearrange his face into something resembling incredulity. Billy had never been good at covering his emotions, which explained why he was such a bad poker player. He failed at this as well. “What makes you think…wait a minute, why you asking something like that?”
“Look, Ma didn’t need help watching them babies. You and Frank talking about everything else ’cept Ike, and everyone acting so smug and cheery. There’re only two possible reasons for that. First, you don’t care he’s dead and for sure that ain’t the case, so second, he ain’t dead. You all thought that if I knew about him being alive I’d tip it to anyone who mighta been watching. Am I right?”
“Well, yeah, but you have to understand—”
“I don’t have to understand anything. You all treated me like…Listen, I’m part of the office, right? We’re a team. So teammates trust each other. If they have a problem, they hash it out. They don’t go jumping to conclusions like you and Frank did.”
“Essie, I’m sorry, but it was so important that nobody know. Not then. Not now. So—”
“So…okay, at first I would have, you know, tipped off anybody who could have been sent to check, I mean, but now I had time to think about it, I wouldn’t have. I am not stupid, you know. So, how about I come back to work full-time? I’m going crazy out at Ma’s.”
“Yeah, Okay, I guess. Talk to Frank. Here we are. Jesus, what a dive. Okay, remember, we are just being cool. If we’re asked, we just want to share our sympathies about a fallen brother and all that. Otherwise, we’re grabbing a quick beer on our way to work.”
“Got it, but I ain’t done with this.”
The bar was crowded with off-duty cops, firemen, truckers, and the town layabouts. There is an aroma that identifies bars where desperate men drink—somewhere between stale beer and fear. Well not fear, exactly. Something that signals danger anticipated and/or avoided. Whether going on duty or coming off, there was an exhalation of that distinctive scent—cop pheromone. Essie excused herself and cut through it on her way to the restroom. It was a “lady thing,” she said. Billy found a high-top near a pair of cops and ordered two beers. Essie emerged from the restroom and a man whose moustache suggested he was a devotee of American Chopper sidled up to her and offered to buy her a drink.
“You got plans for tonight, honey?” he asked.
“Sure do. How ’bout you, sugar?”
The guy hitched up his jeans to show off the horseshoe-sized rodeo buckle. “Mebee we could do some of that planning together.”
“You think? Well, here’s the thing. I got two little kids to home. I got number three in the oven, you could say. I ain’t got rid of the belly fat from the second and there’s a road map of stretch marks the whole way round. And, oh I forgot, my husband is mean as a snake and packs a .357 Magnum. You okay with all that?”
Moustache drifted away. Essie pulled up to the high-top.
“What was that all about?” Billy said.
“He wanted to know if I wanted to romp in his playpen. Then he changed his mind.”
“Yeah?”
“I told him you packed a .357 and were the jealous type. That caught his attention and he asked to be excused.”
“Wow. You still got it, Babe.”
“And don’t you forget it. What did you learn so far?”
“Not much. The two dudes at the next table were sort of friends with Frieze, not real close, though. They thought he was weird. They said he belonged to some right-wing survivalist thing and kept at them to sign up. I kinda think that might be important, but I don’t know why.”
“We should buy them a drink, don’t you think?”
***
Charlie Garland finished his call to the drone vendor and hung up the phone. He shuffled the papers on his desk and drummed his fingers. Martin Pangborn. His eyebrows converged. He knew that name from somewhere. Where or when? Not recently, but not that long ago. He yelled for Alice to come in. He needed her to run a complete scan on Martin Pangborn.
“Give me everything, Alice, his birth, siblings, where he went to school, girlfriends, boyfriends, imaginary or real, I don’t care. I want it all.”
***
“So, what was the name of that organization he was pushing you to join up with?” Essie asked.
When Billy was on duty, as opposed to relaxing with friends, he had one of those faces that defied reading, try as you might. If he chose to and unless he was very angry or in pain, one look at him and you would think there was absolutely nothing behind those brown eyes. “The lights were on, but nobody is home,” the expression goes. It wasn’t true, but it had always served him well.
Billy let Essie do the talking while he relaxed his expression into amiable stupidity and studied the two men at the other hi-top through the bottom of his beer glass. Essie opened her fringed leather vest, batted her blue eyes, and flashed her hundred-watt smile. She had a way of extracting information from men that was way different from his. At the moment, her way seemed to be working the best. Three beers and that smile would to do it. Essie was not another blond airhead, but she could convince anyone she was, if so moved. The two county cops were dazzled. That the beers were taking effect and they were a little tight made Essie’s job a whole lot easier.
“Shit, lady, I don’t know. It had something with a star in it, I think,” the first cop said. “So, who do you all work for again?”
Before she could answer, the second cop blurted, “There was a number in it, but it didn’t make sense. Like, something-star, twenty-one…no, bigger number, I can’t remember.”
“Fifty-one,” the first one said. “Yeah, that was it. He was a member of the Star Fifty-one. No, that’s not right. It was the Fifty-first Star. I thought it was a Masonic thing at first, you know. A lot of them lodges have a star in their name, so that’s why I thought that, but he said no way, it was a patriotic organization that had true patriots for members. I remember saying, ‘Well, of course it does.’ On account of, well duh, if was a patriotic gang, wouldn’t that be who’d be in it? I mean, it stands to reason.”
The other cop nodded. “Frieze was a nerdy kinda guy and I don’t think he was wrapped too tight either. Anyway he said things like, ‘There is patriots and then there is true patriots. True patriots respect the Constitution of the U. S. of A. and the others just wave flags but don’t do nothing when their country is under attack.’ I asked him who was doing the attacking and he listed a whole bunch of people and, you know, organizations and such. Didn’t any of it make much sense to me so I stopped listening. He was an okay guy, though, except for that. I mean nobody should take a bullet in the face like that. No way. Son of a bitch.”
“No, they shouldn’t. Cops put their lives on the line and deserve better. Right, Billy?”
“Right, they do. Son of a bitch.”
“Damned straight,” the second cop said. “Umm. Come to think about it, that group there, it was like a survivalist thing, only military. Like, they went off in the woods out west somewhere and lived off the land, took target practice, stuff like that. You’d think mandatory range duty here would be enough, but he said he needed time with automatic weapons and the big stuff.”
“Big stuff?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what he meant by that, I figured he was just blowing smoke.”
***
Sam removed the memory chips from the various surveillance devices she’d set around their cabin, loaded their images into her computer, and arranged them into a slideshow.
“That’s one of the guys at the gate,” she said and tapped the screen. “He seemed to be in charge. The rest were mostly spear carriers, you know—stood around fingering their weapons and looking fierce. Oh, and I think that one was too, but I can’t be sure.”
“Send that array to Charlie and ask him if he can put names to faces. Do you think any of these guys copied or took anything with them when they left?”
“Keyboard logger says no. They might have bypassed it by taking pictures of the screens but I doubt it.”
“We should be good for a day or two and then they’ll be back. I wonder what we should leave behind for them to find that might knock over a domino.”
Ruth sat up. “Say what? You want them to suspect something? We don’t have enough trouble already?”
“The fact that they felt a need to search this place means they are suspicious. What I want to do is satisfy their curiosity and confirm their suspicions, but send them in a different direction. I’m thinking of something that will divert them. Look, our cover story is pretty thin, right? I mean what is the likelihood the Gottliebs from North Carolina would come all the way out here to buy ranch land? Even if it were the truth, who’d believe that? It doesn’t smell right. Now, suppose we were to leave brochures and a prospectus about mineral rights and fracking lying around. Now, our ‘secret’ will be revealed. They will congratulate themselves for being suspicious in the first place and then smart enough to figure out what we were really here for. Since they know that we are not likely to do anything more than talk and poke around, they will leave us alone.”
“That is very devious.”
“My middle name. And then, because we are not really a threat to them, they will make allowances for our behavior which they might not otherwise do.”