CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Tuesday, September 17

By the time they finished the body count, they determined that there were nine Purifiers, including several that weren’t present for my warehouse ordeal.

And, yes, the past tense is appropriate for each and every one of the bastards. They found five bodies in the house. Two died from gunfire or grenades. Three apparently succumbed to smoke inhalation.

Three others met Jesus trying to get to the creek, before the feds bagged Randall Heil himself.

The good news, at the end of the day: two law enforcement agents wounded, but expected to survive, and nine Purifiers gone to their reward.

Chip Grooms, our photographer, wasn’t able to get within a mile of the place, but I did get a few pretty passable shots with my iPhone camera.

“Not bad for an amateur,” Grooms grumped.

I reminded him that they probably were better than the pictures he was taking of his dick while standing behind the police barricade halfway back to Charlottesville.

After I dropped Cindy off at the Prestwould, I reported to the word factory and started spilling my guts for the print edition.

Sally Velez says I might have set the record for most trees killed in one day in pursuit of journalism.

First, I had to tell our breathless readers about how a clue found underneath a porch in Hanover County by an enterprising reporter led to a last-minute reprieve for the Rotunda. I also had a nifty sidebar on the Homeland Security guy who actually defused the bomb. So far, I have not heard anything from our genius publisher about letting Leighton Byrd interview me and write the story herself, seeing as how I’m too close to it.

Most of our audience already knew a lot of the details of the University of Virginia drama, since it made both the local and national news last night. The stuff about my finding the drawing, though, was new to them. It was new to the other news outlets too. I know because the Post, the AP, and the New York Times have already left me messages wanting to interview me about it. I guess, in the aftermath of all the Neo-Nazi unpleasantness in Charlottesville back in 2017, a report of skinheads almost succeeding in blowing up the Rotunda did have some legs to it.

Hell, if I’m not going to let little Leighton interview me for my own rag, I’m sure as hell not going to give my stuff away to other newspapers.

The story I really had by the short hairs, though, was the one on what took place out at the late Whit Charles’s place in Louisa County. Of course, the AP and everybody else had the basics. A couple of TV news crews even got shots from helicopters of the carnage as the house went up in flames and the Purifiers scattered and met their well-deserved fates.

But they weren’t on the ground.

You spend a lifetime in this business hoping to be the one reporter there when national-level news breaks out. And this was it.

“When the smoke cleared and the bodies had all been accounted for,” my story opened, “the charred remnants of a Confederate battle flag drooped from the wall of the burned-out house where nine hate-mongers made their pathetic last stand.”

“Isn’t that editorializing a little bit?” Wheelie asked as he looked over my shoulder.

I gave him, chapter and verse, the reasons why I felt I was well within the boundaries of truth in calling Randall Heil and his minions hate-mongers and calling their self-destructive denouement pathetic.

He said he guessed I was right.

I also did an interview with the chief fed, who went into great detail about how hard the FBI tried to reach a peaceful settlement but, in the end, had no choice. Wink, wink.

And there was a sidebar on the nine dead Purifiers. Leighton did get to write that one, with information she got from the feds. It irks me that we give scum like that a bit of posthumous exposure. Will a nerdy kid who can’t get laid read it and think that these guys are heroes? That’s what we do though.

In the end, it wasn’t a bad day’s work.

Wheelie said he’d see about me getting some overtime.

CINDY’S HEADED back to school today. Young minds are waiting to be stuffed with knowledge.

Since yesterday was supposed to be a “sick” day, I peered up at her from our bed and asked how she was going to explain to her students and coworkers her little sojourn to Charlottesville on a day when she was supposed to be ailing.

“Hell,” she said as she was fishing for her keys, “who’s going to tell them? You?”

I remind her of something. When we were leaving the carnage scene in Louisa County yesterday in the police chief’s car, with me in the front with L.D. and her in the back, an enterprising reporter from one of the Richmond stations managed to flag down the chief and ask him a couple of questions. L.D. didn’t really tell the guy anything, but the cameraman with him did get a good shot of us all, including the lady in the back seat.

“I saw it on the late news last night,” I tell her, “and I’m sure it’ll be on again today. Your hair looked good.”

“Damn,” my beloved said. “Busted.”

THE CAT and I tolerate each other while I ease into my day with some dry cereal and a couple of cups of coffee. Night cops doesn’t start until midafternoon, but there are more stories to write.

On the way out, I run into Clara Westbrook, my favorite octogenarian Prestwouldian, in the lobby.

Clara, bless her heart, still has a print newspaper delivered to her door every morning. She’s pulling her little oxygen buddy behind her, waiting for somebody to drive her somewhere.

“Willie,” she says, “you had quite the day yesterday, it seems.”

I agree that yesterday was one for the books.

“Don’t you think you’re getting a little old for this kind of tomfoolery? I mean, don’t they have some young people at the paper?”

Yeah, I concede, they do. And as soon as the suits decide that I’m past due date and start sending Leighton Byrd and her peers out to cover the good stuff, my days in the newsroom are numbered. Youth works cheap.

“Yes,” Clara says, “I guess you’re right. I’ve been our church historian for thirty-eight years, and sometimes it just seems too much to keep up with. But if I let them know that, they won’t think I’m young anymore.”

We laugh, and it occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve done that lately.

WHEN I get to the newsroom, ten-ish, we’re already in “what have you done for me lately?” mode.

There is need for an all-encompassing thumb-sucker. There are so many loose ends to tie up.

I call Marcus Green to find out what’s happening with Jerome Sheets, now that he’s not headed for life or worse as a murderer.

Marcus tells me that the kid is actually out on bail.

“His momma came up with the money somehow,” he says. Marcus and I both are pretty sure that young Jerome owes his at least temporary freedom to the largesse of Big Boy Sunday.

“Did Big Boy pay you too?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” Marcus says. “He paid me very well. And he’ll pay me even better if I can get the boy off with probation.”

I wish him luck. Maybe a few days in the city jail will be enough to convince Big Boy’s charge and likely offspring to be, if not more law-abiding, at least more careful. If he’s going to hang out with Big Boy Sunday, careful is about the best we can hope for.

I get Jerome’s mom’s number, but neither she nor her son have anything printable to say for public consumption.

I also give a call to George “Snake” Davis, Stick’s brother. I haven’t talked with him since the memorial service. 1 thought he might have a few words about how this has all played out.

“So he got his ass killed because he was messing around with a bunch of damn Nazis?”

I explain that they were neo-Nazis.

“What’s the damn difference?” Snake asks.

“Not much,” I concede, except that the latter don’t at present have the right to fulfill their fantasies.

I go on to stress that I don’t really believe that Stick bought into all that crap, and that he seems to have been trying to help bring them to justice.

“Well, damn,” his brother says, “he ought to have just left that to the cops.”

He gives me a passable and maybe even sincere quote about missing Stick. But he has one more question before I hang up:

“Is there any reward?”

“Reward?”

“You know. Like would Stick have been in line for some kind of reward of some kind, for helping to stop those assholes?”

I see where this is going.

I tell Snake that I don’t think there is a reward, and 1 don’t think rewards get passed along to the next of kin, but that I’ll let him know if I find out anything.

“Well, shit,” Snake says as I hang up.

Terri McAllister actually calls me.

“That was some story,” she says. “Who knew ol’ Stick had such a backstory? I wish he’d have told me what he was up to. Of course, if he had, they might have come after me. Sometimes silence is golden, you know?”

She confesses to “kind of missing” Stick. After she hangs up, it occurs to me that it’s possible that the late Whit Charles gave more of a damn about Randolph Giles “Stick” Davis than either his only living kin or his last girlfriend.

Considering that Stick stole a considerable amount of money from Charles, that says something, although I’m damned if I know what.

I also got a tip from the feds, although I’ve got to put this one in my back pocket until everybody’s hash is settled. In the weeds back of Whit Charles’s house, along the path Randall Heil took en route to his reward, they found an iPad, apparently belonging to Heil. Miraculously the iPad had not been sufficiently damaged to keep the FBI guys from gleaning a few names off it.

The way I understand it, there will be quite a few arrests on charges related to attempted terrorism and various other things, over several states. Yesterday’s shootout apparently did not completely rid us of Purifiers. I’m sure the impending busts won’t either, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Keeping a lid on these assholes is like mowing the grass. You get everything looking nice and pretty, and before you know it, the weeds are popping up again.

Sarah stops by. She congratulates me for still being alive. I congratulate her for getting away with shooting a man and not getting charged with anything.

“Wheelie wants me to write something about it, a first-person account of being stalked. But I don’t know, I haven’t written anything for a while except goddamn memos and budgets.”

I suggest that she could let Leighton interview her.

She snorts and says that will happen right after pigs grow wings.

THERE IS something else I want to write in addition to the big-picture piece.

It might take more than a day to do this one.

Stick Davis did not earn a lot of laurels in his foreshortened existence. He was careless, selfish, larcenous, and somewhat short of Einstein, brain-wise.

But what if he was trying to do one good deed in his sorry-ass life? What if he really was planning to pull the plug on the Purifiers after shaking them down and then making a bundle telling the whole story in his memoirs?

I point out to Wheelie and Sarah that without Stick, things could have gone very, very bad. He infiltrated Purity, got his hands on that video, and left enough hints for me to find the damn thing.

“Well,” Wheelie says, “if he had that DVD, why didn’t he just take it to the cops?”

Because he thought he was a player, I explain. He thought he could con everybody and still wind up saving the day.