CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Monday, September 16

I didn’t sleep much last night. Cindy, who’s taking a well-day off from school, stayed up with me until after two. Even after self-medicating with Early Times, I didn’t fall off until sometime after three thirty.

She traced her finger along the various cuts and bruises I got courtesy of the Purifiers and tugged on my misshaped right ear, a souvenir of a bullet last year that made my sorry-ass life pass before my eyes briefly, and noted that perhaps I should consider a safer line of work, like crash-test dummy. She said she thought I had the brains for it.

AND THEN I’m awake at 6:05. I don’t know what roused me, but something made me think about a farm I’ve never visited, up in Hanover County. Call it a hunch. Playing hunches isn’t a very smart way to live your life, but hunches have sometimes led me where reason fears to tread.

Cindy wakes up long enough to ask me where the hell I’m going. I tell her I’ll be back in a while, and not to worry.

“My ass,” she says. “Wherever you’re going, I’m going with you.”

Nothing can stop an Oregon Hill girl when she makes up her mind.

“Should we be armed?” she asks as she follows me out the door, tucking her blouse into her jeans.

I tell her I don’t think so.

“Don’t think so?” she asks, obviously not finding that a satisfactory answer.

I amend my statement and tell her that we’ll be safe, but that I’d be very happy if she’d go back and return her shapely ass to our nice, warm bed.

“I’m tired of worrying about whether I’m going to see you again, or just view you,” she says. “If you gotta go, I’m going with you.”

“What about Butterball? Who’ll feed the cat?”

She advises me that, in the pecking order, I do rank above our fat feline. This is reassuring.

“By the way,” she says, as we’re walking out the Prestwould’s front door and down the steps, “where are we going?”

When I tell her, she has another question:

“Why?”

I tell her I’m not sure, but I’ll know pretty soon whether it’s a wild-goose chase or not.

The sun is just peeking over the buildings downtown when we stumble out to the Honda.

We fight the rush-hour traffic on I-64 West, then exit onto 33 headed out of town, eventually crossing the Chickahominy into Hanover. We pass farms, abandoned stores, and Tea Party billboard screeds. I know the side road where we’re supposed to turn, but not much else. I pull over and make L.D. Jones’s day by calling him at home and interrupting his breakfast to get more specific directions.

If a farmhouse in Hanover County is the last place the Purifiers were seen, I’d like to take a look for myself.

L.D. tells me that the feds went over the farm with the proverbial fine-tooth comb and didn’t find much of anything.

“But if you got nothing better to do, then knock yourself out.”

The chief sounds tired. The fact that he’s willing to let me set foot on anything resembling a crime scene emits more than a whiff of desperation. Today, one way or the other, is likely to be D-Day, and we’re still flying blind.

I find the place, with the aid of the chief’s directions and Cindy’s navigational skills. As I’d been told, there’s a county deputy and one Richmond cop there, keeping watch.

When we pull into the dirt driveway, I see that the city sent none other than my old pal Gillespie.

I honk my horn and make him slosh his coffee. He’s munching on a Honey Bun and bullshitting with the young county cop.

“No donut shops out this way?” I inquire.

He grumbles but defers cursing when he sees that I have a comely female in tow.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” Cindy says, which causes Gillespie to give me the fisheye.

I congratulate him on his astuteness in figuring out the significance of September 16 to Randall Heil. He is taken aback by my rare kindness toward him, once he figures out that I’m not being sarcastic.

“That donut shit is gettin’ old,” he growls when we’re out of Cindy’s earshot. I assure him that I meant no offense. Everybody, after all, loves a Sugar Shack donut. I don’t say that some people just seem to love them more than others.

At any rate, Gillespie, who’s gotten the word from the chief, assures the deputy that it’s OK for me to snoop around the place.

“What the hell,” he says as Cindy and I go inside. “If they haven’t caught ’em yet …”

“Why are we here?” Cindy asks. “They’re long gone from here, right?”

I explain that there might be something here that the feds missed. Something, anything. Time’s almost out. What have we got to lose?

The place is pretty much of a wreck, greatly resembling the joint in Scott’s Addition with its broken beer bottles and assorted trash. It looks like nobody’s lived here for years.

I wander around, into the kitchen and bedrooms and the toilet that was used a time or three despite the fact that it probably was drained years ago.

“Gross,” Cindy observes.

I walk around back, almost falling through the rotting porch. In some places, whole sections of wood have fallen into the dirt below.

I glance down into the dark, and I see something, barely visible.

By kicking a few more boards loose, I make a hole wide enough that I can ease my way through. When Cindy, who’s been walking around the backyard, comes up, the remaining porch floor is at my waist level.

I reach down and am able to grab what I saw—a yellow legal pad that missed the attention of the feds. And now 1 think I know why we’re here.

Bug, the crazy little fucker who pitched my cell phone and “directed” me to the warehouse, was a doodler. I could see him there in the background, behind Randall Heil and his other henchmen, while I wondered if that was the last room I’d ever see. He was drawing on a notepad—a yellow legal pad. For a terrorist, he did seem a little buggy.

We used to have an editor who did that. He said it helped him survive the interminable and meaningless meetings that comprised most of his day.

Bug, it appears, is similarly inclined. Maybe he pitched it when the Purifiers left in a hurry. Maybe he figured slipping it through that hole in the back porch was as good a plan as any. Before my misstep, the hole wasn’t all that big.

I extricate myself back onto the porch with Cindy’s help, then take the legal pad, not much worse for wear since the porch is still covered by what passes for a roof, and walk over to one of the rusted-out lawn chairs.

Flipping through the pad, I find sketches of people and weird-ass diagrams and, of course, the expected Nazi and Confederate symbols. Some of the drawings of women make Cindy go “eww.” We agree that Bug’s future as an artist was limited at best.

There’s nothing on the pad that gives me any clue about what the Purifiers are targeting. Maybe the FBI geniuses, who somehow missed this yesterday, can find meaning here.

But then I flip to the last page on which Bug was practicing his craft.

I look at it. Cindy, who’s standing behind me, leans over my shoulder.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asks.

“If it isn’t, I don’t know what the hell else it could be.”

I walk around the house.

“What you got there?” Gillespie asks, brushing crumbs off his uniform.

I tell him that it appears he is not the only Richmonder who’s in line for a junior detective merit badge.