CHAPTER TWELVE

The guy called about seven thirty, which leaves me with a lot to do in a little time.

I call Cindy and tell her she needs to pack her bags and move in with her sister for a couple of days.

“Was it something I did?” she asks.

I explain, making it sound as unthreatening as possible.

“I’m just worried, you know. Nothing serious, but they do know where we live.”

“Nothing serious? What the fuck, Willie? If it wasn’t serious, you wouldn’t be sending me to my damn sister’s house. What the hell have you gotten us into?”

I explain that I am trying, for once, to do something good.

“And Custalow needs to go over and stay at Stella Stellar’s for a couple of days.”

“She’s on the road,” Cindy says.

“He has the key to her place.”

I tell her to let me speak to Abe, who’s probably getting ready to watch Thursday Night Football.

“Do you need help?” he asks when I tell him what’s going on.

I explain that my next call is to L.D. Jones, who should have rounded up a posse of state and federal cops by now. He passes the phone back to Cindy.

“If you get your ass killed,” she says, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

THE CHIEF calls me as I’m about to phone him.

“You need to get down here,” he says. “Right now.”

You don’t know, I explain to him, how much I need to get down there.

I’m expecting to hear from my anonymous caller sometime soon. I explain this to L.D.

“You did what?” he shouts. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? You’re way above your grade this time, Willie.” Then he asks me for the number of the guy who called my cell. I’m sure it will turn out to be a burner phone.

“But this guy, from Purity or whatever the fuck, he’s going to call you back?”

I explain that he could call at any time, probably on another burner phone, and that this is one call I definitely need to take.

“Well, hell. Get your ass over here, and if he calls you on the way, you can take it in the car.”

The chief tells me what any fool would already have figured out. We don’t know what, when, or where, and the clock is ticking.

“Why the fuck do you think I’m doing this?” I ask. “You think I’m doing this for my health?”

I tell Sarah, who’s the night adult supervision, what’s going on, and how Chuck Apple or somebody else will have to deal with whatever carnage Richmonders visit upon each other for the rest of the evening.

“You’re an idiot,” Sarah says as I’m leaving. She walks me to the elevator, turns to see that no one else in our near-empty newsroom is looking, and gives me a quick kiss on the lips. “Be careful,” she says.

I tell her I’ve never been so pleasantly sexually harassed. She gives me the finger as the door closes.

MY CELL buzzes on the car seat beside me as I’m looking for a parking space next to police headquarters. I flout the law by answering while circling the block, then pull into a no-parking space.

“Here’s the time and place,” the same voice from before says. “Make sure you get it right, and you better make damn sure you’re alone.”

He reminds me again that he knows where I live.

“Might just have to blow up the whole damn building if you fuck with us,” he says, throwing in a racial pejorative for free.

I can’t imagine the Prestwould imploding onto Franklin Street. Wouldn’t McGrumpy be pissed?

The address he gives me is not far from the house where Stick was murdered. Actually it’s only a stone’s throw from the place above the subterranean Jordan’s Branch where I found those two bricks and the DVD. The house is on a part of West Franklin Street far from my downtown digs. The street where I live gets cut off by the Downtown Expressway and then picks up again headed farther west.

The voice tells me to be there at nine P.M. tomorrow.

“Got that?”

I reply that I do.

“Damn well better,” he says and hangs up.

Inside police headquarters, I’m directed to a big-ass conference room where the cream of law enforcement from our area code seems to have gathered. I’m introduced to none of them, but they already know who I am, compliments of L.D. Actually “insults of L.D.” probably is more accurate. I assume the ones in suits are feds of various sorts. The state police contingent is in uniform, as are L.D. and several of his minions.

When I tell them the Purity guy gave me a time and a place to meet, they seem put out that I didn’t somehow keep the guy on the phone long enough for them to figure out where he was calling from.

“You really ought to leave this to the professionals,” one of the suits advises. I advise him to smooch my nether parts.

The chief explains to the now-offended suit that I’m an asshole, but that we all need to work together.

“And, like it or not, this idiot is all we’ve got.”

“So,” one of the state cops says, “are we going to let him go out there?”

They speak among themselves for a bit, talking around me as if I were a piece of inconvenient office furniture.

“What if they just kill him and take the DVD?” one of the detectives asks. He doesn’t seem saddened by that scenario.

“Obviously he won’t have it with him,” another fed says. “That would be crazy.”

“They probably won’t have the money either,” a third one throws in.

So, I ask, interrupting this discussion of my future, what should I do?

Thinking about the mess these fuckers made of Whit Charles and Gino, to say nothing of Stick Davis, I opine that I am somewhat concerned about my personal safety.

“Of course,” L.D. says, “we’ll be tracking you.”

“How do they know that you aren’t just setting them up?” one of his detectives asks me.

“Beats me. But do you have any better ideas?”

They don’t. They’re already pretty sure that the phones the bad guys used are lying in a ditch somewhere by now, and the only other people Purity has contacted about getting their purloined property back are currently dead. Like it or not, I’m it.

What the assembled brain trust agrees on is that these guys probably see me as a money-grubbing dirtbag trying to make a buck, rather than a civic-minded citizen.

“And Willie’s had kind of a checkered past,” the chief helpfully throws in.

I point out that three divorces and a fondness for booze and Camels don’t exactly make me Public Enemy Number One.

“Yeah, yeah,” L.D. says, waving away my indignation. “We might know that, but an outsider, checking up on you, might see you as somebody that could be compromised. And these guys have obviously checked up on you.”

One of the feds tells me things I already know about Purity and some that I don’t.

“They were there in Charlottesville,” he says. “They managed to get away without getting arrested, somehow, although some of them would have been if they hadn’t gone underground. They’re basically anarchists. They want the whole country to start killing one another, turn the blacks, the whites, the Jews, the Muslims, everybody against each other. Helter-Skelter shit. And then they think they’ll take over.”

They’re suspected in an attack on a black church down in North Carolina and in a bombing incident at the home of an African American mayor up in Ohio.

“Probably other stuff too,” he says. “But we hadn’t heard from them in a while. We kind of hoped they’d disbanded.”

“Or gone to hell,” one of his fed buddies mutters.

L.D. has filled them in on what I learned from Charles.

“It makes sense,” the state cop says. “They’ve been down there in the islands planning this shit all along. They probably want payback for Charlottesville. Like we’re not the ones who ought to be paying them back. Bastards.”

Two state police officers died trying to control that shit storm in Charlottesville when their helicopter crashed. It kind of got lost in all the furor about the poor woman who was killed by some neo-Nazi’s kamikaze car, but the state cops sure as shit haven’t forgotten it.

So they come up with a plan. They assure me that they will have their eyes and ears on me the whole time, from a few blocks away. We agree to meet again at police headquarters tomorrow morning to firm things up.

What could possibly go wrong?

I LET Sally Velez and Sarah know that I won’t be in for the rest of the evening.

L.D. suggests that I go somewhere other than home tonight. I assure him I will do so and that the other residents of my rented apartment are vacating the premises.

“So where are you going?”

I haven’t thought much about that. I was too concerned with getting Cindy and Abe to safety.

It occurs to me that I know at least one person who probably won’t be all tucked in before the eleven o’clock news is over.

R.P. McGonnigal, who changes boyfriends like most people change shirts, is hooked up with his latest in Rocketts Landing, a development along the river east of town, maybe a ten-minute drive from here. He’s always been an insomniac. When we were kids in Oregon Hill, he claimed he slept about three hours a day. He snoozes more than that now. He’s more of a late-to-bed, late-to-rise type, and I guess and hope his latest amour dances to the same circadian rhythm.

“Sure,” R.P. says without hesitation when I call and explain that I need a place to sleep tonight, without getting into the messy details. “We were just getting ready to watch a movie. You can sleep on the couch. I’m making popcorn.”

I ask him if popcorn goes well with bourbon. He says that apparently it does.

I keep an eye on the rearview mirror on the way out of town. If these assholes know enough about me to know that I might have the DVD they covet, they could be smart enough to be following me.

Nothing suspicious shows up, though, as I work my way down East Main past Millie’s and Poe’s Pub.

R.P. has a condo that, although it’s within smelling distance of the river, has no view of it. He introduces me to Brooklyn, who I am told is called that “because that’s where I’m from” in an accent that verifies the statement.

I tell my old friend and his buddy most of the rest of the story about why I’m here, not mentioning the meeting that’s set for tomorrow night. The cops, I explain, just think it would be good if I didn’t go back to the Prestwould until they busted these guys.

“Oh, I figured Cindy had kicked your ass out,” he says, and proceeds to give Brooklyn what I consider to be an overly embellished account of my matrimonial history.

“Jeez,” Brooklyn says, “I’ve always said they shouldn’t let you people marry.”

R.P. wonders, as any sane person would, whether I’m tracking danger into their cozy abode. I assure them that I wasn’t followed, and that this is a one-night stand.

“Well,” he says, “I guess if they break the door down, maybe they’ll just shoot you there on the couch and leave us alone.”

“Those fuckers don’t like gays, either, do they?” Brooklyn asks.

Probably not, I concur.

I CALL Cindy from their bedroom while they’re watching a movie where, it seems, nothing is going to blow up.

She says she’s safe and sound at her sister’s, and that Abe presumably is hunkering down at Stella Stellar’s. “Why do you get into messes like this?” she asks.

I explain that this one was forced upon me when I found Stick Davis’s body and became, for a time, Suspect Number One in his murder. Trying to clear myself seemed like a good idea.

“But if you didn’t hang out with people like that, you wouldn’t be all the time gettin’ your ass in a sling,” she says. “Why can’t you associate with nicer people?”

“I associate with you.”

“Well,” she says, “I’m not feeling so nice right now.”

She lowers her voice and tells me that her sister and brother-in-law apparently aren’t getting along that well.

“They got in a big argument right in front of me. I appreciate them keeping me, but I’m as uneasy as a whore in church. I miss my own bed. I miss you in it.”

On top of that, she says, her worthless son, the Chipster, e-mailed her today trying once again to get her to throw some of her money down the rathole he calls his latest effort to become a restaurateur.

I tell Cindy that we’re hoping to wrap this whole mess up tomorrow night. I don’t tell her that wrapping it up entails me going into a strange house full of racist neo-Nazis who obviously would kill for an object they only think I have.

No point in spoiling her beauty sleep.

As for my own forty winks, I get maybe twenty of them. The sofa bed works better as the former than the latter. And R.J. and Brooklyn get bored with the movie halfway through but are wired enough afterward to expend the rest of their energy in their king-sized bed, making noises I won’t be able to un-hear for some time.

In addition, my mind keeps coming back to my present situation. No number of leaping sheep can prevent me from walking through various scenarios in my mind and posing unanswerable questions.

What if these bastards shoot my ass as soon as I get there, cops be damned?

What if the cops get a little careless and let the bad guys carry me off to parts unknown?

What if some trigger-happy flatfoot or G-man just goes into “let God sort ’em out” mode and starts shooting indiscriminately?

Sometimes an active imagination can be a curse.