CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Sunday, September 15

My deathless prose jumps twice in the Sunday morning paper, from A1 to A8 and then across to A9. At one time, not so long ago, this would have been a problem. Newsprint was finite and expensive.

It’s no big deal these days. We don’t have as much space to fill as we used to, but we damn sure don’t have enough reporters to fill what we do have. I heard an assistant city editor the other day ask a reporter if she couldn’t pad her story out another ten inches or so.

The whole damn A section is mostly crime news, fluff pieces promoting anything the paper can come up with to make money (meet local authors, come to our food festival, listen to great minds tell you how great they are; only seventy-five dollars a head if you act now), and furniture ads. We in the fourth estate are grateful that people still actually look at newspaper ads when they get the urge for a sofa.

So when you have a piece that tells the readers we have some bona fide nut jobs in our vicinity planning to blow something up tomorrow, but nobody knows what or where, you get the green light. Sky’s the limit.

There is a sidebar quoting the governor and the mayor and the chief, telling people to be alert and maybe be cautious of suspicious packages. Leighton wrote that one. I have to say, she did a pretty good job. She managed to get some trenchant people-on-the-street stuff.

“I bet it’s them ISIS bastards,” one well-read individual said when approached outside a club down in the Bottom. Informed that the suspects are almost certainly red-blooded American neo-Nazis, the idiot took it in for a couple of seconds and then said, “Aw, that’s just fake news.”

We ran the photo of Randall Heil that appeared in the Post five years ago, and he hasn’t changed that much, so he shouldn’t be that hard to find, although he has added the tattoo since then. We put it on the web last night, and within an hour we’d had two people call us, sure they’d spotted the bastard. When I called L.D. at headquarters, he said they’d had leads from at least a dozen sharp-eyed citizens, none of which checked out.

“They damn near had a riot down at Poe’s Pub,” he said. “Some guys from one motorcycle club thought this asshole from another club sitting there drinking at the bar was Randall Heil.”

The “discussion” spilled out onto East Main, where a hapless driver in an SUV coming in from a hard day bicycling on the Capitol Trail hit one of the participants and broke the guy’s hip.

I tipped off Chuck Apple, who’s subbing for me on night cops. I was thankful to let someone else handle that bit of mayhem.

He came by later and said he’d determined that nobody was killed or even near death.

“Fuck it then,” Sally said. You’ve got to at least come close to killing somebody to make the paper, even with our present lax standards for what constitutes news. If it’s an accident, Sally says, it has to be a fatality to get in the paper. If it’s intentional, we sometimes let close calls count, but a broken hip stemming from a bar fight doesn’t make the grade.

Long story short, the whole town’s on edge. I ran the transcript of what was said on the DVD, so it’s like we’re waiting for a tornado, but we don’t know where it’s going to hit.

The governor has stationed guards around the capitol, one of our most stately and precious edifices. The place is already pretty well protected, as are most public buildings since 9/11, and the federal courts building and bank are even more impregnable than before.

Still, you can’t guard everything.

“Maybe they just decided to go underground,” R.P. suggested at brunch this morning.

Stella Stellar, who is back in town and came with Custalow, disagreed.

“Those bastards, they ain’t giving up that easy.”

There was a division of sentiment among the others at Joe’s. People at adjoining tables wanted to join in on the discussion, which caused our server to threaten to banish us if the crowd around us didn’t get the hell out of the way.

“Well,” Andy said, “at least you got them reading the paper.”

Yeah, that’s the sad truth. You want people to buy a damn newspaper, scare the shit out of them or piss them off. Fear and anger sell. All those feel-good stories we run on A1 make everybody feel all warm and fuzzy, but there isn’t much shelf life to a story about the guy who saved a pit bull from drowning, unless it’s your pit bull.

I am paid to agitate people. Granted, there’s plenty to get agitated about, but it does get wearisome, to say nothing of damn dangerous, to be the bearer of bad news, especially when “shoot the messenger” is not an abstraction.

The feds and the locals aren’t saying much, because they don’t have much to say. They did find that damn muscle car, abandoned on a street not far from Jordan’s Branch, but there wasn’t much in it that was of any use. They’ve identified Randall Heil and at least three of the other Purifiers, but finding them is another thing entirely.

When I told the assembled multitude that I had a meeting with some guys with guns at noon, we curtailed our second consecutive brunch day at Joe’s, limiting it to Bloody Marys and coffee.

“That’s OK,” R.P. said. “You can’t order the breakfast sandwich but so many times before it gets tiresome.”

I DROP Cindy and Abe back at the Prestwould. Stella Stellar has to go back to her place and pack for another gig. The Goldfish Crackers are hitting the road again, albeit mostly two-lane state highways.

“Big doings,” she says. “We’re playing Farmville and Bedford on consecutive nights.”

When I get to police headquarters, the place is humming. Nothing puts the fear of God into law enforcement more than the prospect of knowing bad shit is coming and they don’t know where.

They’re checking everybody who looks like he might ever have had a hard-on for Hitler or Jefferson Davis. Hell, yesterday they even shook down those old guys who pester everybody outside the Virginia Museum with their Confederate flags on Saturdays. Most of them look like they really are sons of Confederate veterans. Some of them have trouble lifting the flags.

“We think we have them on the run,” the FBI guy says. “We can’t see how they could possibly do anything now.”

Sad to say, but I’m inclined to think Stella Stellar has a better bead on the situation than this J. Edgar wannabe. I mean, we know all the places the Purifiers aren’t, but we sure as hell don’t know where they are.

“We’re pretty sure the Civil War monuments are safe,” the chief says, in a rare display of humor that seems to be wasted on the feds.

I point out that the DVD meant for future dissemination said Purity had inflicted mayhem on Virginia, not just the city of Richmond.

“Well, we’ve got people on the lookout everywhere,” one of the state police guys says.

On the wall calendar behind the chief, there’s a big red circle around the sixteenth. Less than twelve hours from now.

They’ve included me in this tea party because I’ve obviously crossed the line and become part of the story. I didn’t plan it that way, but I’ve been hip deep in this mess since I found Stick Davis’s body. Sometimes you just get swept out with the news tide.

Everything that’s discussed today is, of course, off the record, at least until they either do or don’t catch the Purifiers before they wreak hell on us.

An hour or so of this and I’m ready to move on. One thing I’ve been meaning to do the last few days is revisit Terri McAllister. It might occur to the Purifiers that Stick could have told his last girlfriend something about their plans, although I’m not sure even Stick knew all the details.

She’s at home, and she agrees to let me in.

She has spent the morning slinging hash at another of the seven million places that do brunch in Richmond. I am not sure the grocery stores even sell eggs to civilians anymore.

“That was some crazy shit,” she says, referencing my story in today’s paper. “It blows my fuckin’ mind that Stick was hanging out with those creeps down there in the islands. He just didn’t seem like that kind of guy.”

I tell her that it’s possible Stick was on the side of the angels, that he meant to blow the whistle on the Purifiers, in good time, while trying to make a buck out of the deal with his ill-fated tell-all.

“He did hide that disc, and tell me how to find it, eventually. If it wasn’t for that, nobody would have had a clue about any of this,” I tell her.

“Well, I’d like to think that ol’ Stick had a heart of gold and all that.”

I tell her that we should think of him that way at least.

She says that she never heard Stick say anything that might have indicated that he knew what exactly his island buddies were planning.

“If he’d known for sure, I don’t think he’d of kept it a secret.”

I’m not sure. Apparently Stick seems to have been pretty good at keeping secrets.

I call in to the newsroom from my parking spot on Floyd Avenue, to advise that I’ll have something for tomorrow’s rag, even if it’s just to say that the authorities don’t know anything. I’m sure little Leighton is working her fanny off trying to get something on this for A1, mostly the public panic angle, but I still get to be the guy who talks to the people with guns and badges.

“Big doings here,” Sally Velez says.

“On a Sunday? I thought I had the only story in town today.”

“This one’s probably bigger to us than to the general public, although I’m sure the goddamn TV folks will be all over it, assuming they have anybody to do anything on a Sunday.”

“What?”

“Sarah shot the fucker.”

Yes, she really did it. Sally gives me the somewhat amusing details, although I doubt Luther Gates thinks they’re so goddamn funny right now.

Gates apparently wasn’t satisfied with just killing Sarah’s dog and trying to kidnap her.

Still on the lam, he managed to get into the company parking garage this morning. The security cameras showed him slipping past the barrier shortly after nine, not long after the hard-working Sarah came in to begin another seventy-hour workweek.

Gates must have followed her there. The creep had to have been watching her house. Nothing else makes sense. You wouldn’t assume that a sane person would come to work on Sunday morning after pulling a fourteen-hour shift the day before.

Sarah didn’t stay in the office long. She reentered the parking garage about twelve thirty. That’s when Luther Gates made his ill-conceived move.

“She said she saw something in her side-view mirror when she was getting ready to unlock the car. She said she wasn’t sure at first that it was Gates, but she got her gun out of her purse anyhow.”

Yeah, having somebody kill your dog and then try to carjack you will make you a bit more aware of your surroundings.

“She said that, by the time she could hear his footsteps, she had the gun out. When she turned around, there he was. She said he had a tire iron in his hand.”

Never, ever bring a tire iron to a gunfight.

Sarah apparently shot him three times, once in his right arm, once in his left leg, and once in the nuts.

“He’s going to live,” Sally says, “but I don’t think he’s going to be much interested in going after young girls anytime soon. Not that there’s going to be any, where he’s going.”

Sarah’s actually a pretty good shot. I know from experience. She saved my bacon out on the Middle Peninsula back in 2016, and I doubt she’s gotten worse in the interim. I almost always advise against civilians carrying loaded firearms, having seen the tragic consequences more than once. I’ve got to admit, though, Sarah did good.

“I doubt there’s going to be any charges against her,” Sally says.

I HEAD for the paper. Outside, between the front steps and Franklin Street, I see that some concrete barriers have been put in place. Too bad they didn’t put some guards around the parking lot entrance earlier today.

It’s kind of amusing to me that our publisher must think a daily newspaper is important enough to be blown up by nut cases. Well, Sarah can testify to the fact that we still have enough clout to piss some people off.

Wheelie’s in the newsroom when I get there. I stop by and ask him if I can turn in the hours I spent as a guest of the Purifiers in that Scott’s Addition warehouse as overtime.

He says he’ll check into it.

“Think about all the life-insurance money I saved the Grimm Group by not getting my ass killed,” I point out.

I stay in touch with the local, state, and federal law-enforcement folks the remainder of the day and night, but there isn’t much to write beyond what we’ve said already: The Purifiers seem to have disappeared, and tomorrow’s the sixteenth. Gird your loins.

There is one big near breakthrough though.

Late this afternoon, the feds thought they’d caught a break, but it didn’t pan out. They were able to trace the Purity gang to an abandoned farm up in Hanover, based on that rare tip that actually bore fruit.

When they got there, though, all they found was a bunch of empty beer cans and fast-food wrappers, plus tire tracks that they could tie to one of the cars that was at the warehouse. Wherever the Purifiers were, they are still one step ahead of the law.

I GET in touch with Sarah at home. I congratulate her on her marksmanship.

“Well,” she says, “I wasn’t really trying to kill him, just maybe fuck him up a little.”

Mission accomplished, I reply.

She says that she and Jack were planning to go out this afternoon to the animal shelter, to look for a replacement for Grover.

“Do you think they’ll charge me with anything?”

I tell her that Sally doesn’t think so. Neither do I. The tire iron Luther Gates was wielding probably entitled her to a few gratuitous shots with that Glock 43. Here in the Old Dominion, we’re pretty sanguine about letting you shoot people who are trying to kidnap or kill you.

“You know,” she says, “the only bad thing about this is that now I’m probably going to be the poster girl for the NRA. You know, ‘It takes a good woman with a gun …’ Hell, I’ve already gotten an e-mail from some gun-nut group.”

I tell her that it could be an opportunity.

“You can point out that there’s a not-so-fine line between carrying a gun for self-protection and trying to stop lunatics from buying rocket launchers.”

“But then I won’t be able to pick up big bucks shilling for the NRA,” she says.

“Virtue has its price.”

We tell each other that we’re very glad that we are both still among the breathing. We tell each other to be careful. We both know how likely that is to happen.

When I check out after eleven P.M., we’re still pretty sure something bad’s going to happen tomorrow. Somewhere.