Night passage

“Men,” he said, and paused, and cleared his throat. “Men, we have been preparing—I think it is fair to say, that many of us have been preparing all our lives—for the moment that has come.”

He could hear the nervous vibrato in his voice. Was he to fail himself in the moment of crisis? Command, he said to himself. Command.

“You all know Jo Jo. He has his ways, but he has been one of us. Now they have him in jail on a manufactured charge and they will force him to incriminate us. He may resist them, but no one can resist long. They use science to pervert us. Injections, hypnosis, sleep deprivation. It will not be long before Jesse Stone knows our every plan.”

They were listening. His voice was stabilized, though his insides were still turbulent.

“I know that many of us have come to like Jesse Stone, but that is part of his way. He is, at the very bottom line, a stooge for the state police.”

From the inside pocket of his field jacket, he took a Polaroid picture of Cissy and held it up.

“He has even circulated this disgusting piece of trash. I don’t know if any of you have received one; it is an obviously doctored picture purporting to be my wife. A man capable of that kind of deceit is capable of anything.”

Several of the men leaned forward trying to make out the picture. Hasty paused, letting his eyes rove slowly over the room, meeting the look of as many of the men as he could. He let the pause build. After a long moment he put the picture back in his jacket pocket. His insides were settling. He was heartened by his rhetoric. He had felt the satisfaction of revenge as he had held up his wife’s naked picture in front of the men. Bitch. He felt powerful. His voice was strong.

“He has to be stopped,” Hasty said softly.

Hasty paused again, looking slowly around the room. Some of the men were nodding their heads.

“We will implement our plan to take the town hall,” Hasty said. “We will take Jo Jo out of there . . . and we will eliminate Jesse Stone.”

“You mean kill him?” one of the men said from the back.

“In a war of liberation,” Hasty said, “we do what we must. Our forefathers eliminated the British agents of repression at Lexington and Concord. We’ve done this exercise often enough. We know how. Each of you should report to his squad leader now. First squad will disable telephone service from the town hall. Second squad will see to the electricity. Third and fourth squad will deploy to the town hall and establish a perimeter.”

The silence in the room was jagged with excitement. What had been a kind of war game had suddenly become real and the men felt frightened and heroic.

“It is our moment,” Hasty said softly. “Paradise will be ours. Quietly, without fanfare, and without opposition, we can establish a free white Christian community. And bit by bit, community by community, with ever-growing force as our communities proliferate and begin to co

Lying on her stomach behind a folded canvas pool cover in the loft of the carriage house, Michelle Merchant listened intently. Her father and her brother were both Horsemen. She thought that all the rah-rah crap that Mr. Hathaway was spouting was really bogus, but she kind of liked the movement because it was antiestablishment the way she was. And when her father got on her case she could say that she was just rebelling the way he did. Her father didn’t like her knowing anything about the Horsemen, which was why she liked to hide in the loft during meetings and listen in. It gave her ammunition when he would yell at her. Her mother didn’t care. Michelle suspected that her mother liked it when Michelle got her father back, like her mother wanted to, but was too wussy.

Below her the men had broken up into four groups. They checked their watches. Then two of the groups went out first. The other men waited. The tension was so strong that it even reached the loft and filtered through Michelle’s nearly impenetrable scorn. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The men kept checking their watches and after what seemed to Michelle a long time, the last two groups went out and the room was empty.

Michelle could feel her breath coming a little faster. Were they actually going to attack the town hall and kill Jesse? Did they actually believe that crap about starting a free town, whatever that meant? That was total crap. Even if they killed Jesse and got Jo Jo Genest out of jail, pretty soon other cops would know and they’d come and put all the dumb Horsemen in jail. Anybody knew that, for crissake. She smiled for a moment at seeing her father and jerkface brother hauled off to jail. She could go visit them, like in the movies, and talk to them through the bars. Cool. She was dying for a cigarette. The barn was empty. She sat up and lit a cigarette and took in a big lungful of smoke. Her old lady would poop her pants, Michelle thought. She smiled in the dark loft and smoked some more. The only thing that bothered her was Jesse Stone. He was the only adult she’d ever met who hadn’t given her a load of bullshit when he talked to her. She kind of didn’t like him getting killed. She didn’t want to spoil this thing. It was kind of exciting. And she wanted to see what her old lady would do when Dad got arrested. What kind of lecture would they give Michelle then, she wondered. She kind of liked Jesse, though. She finished her cigarette and lit another one. With the tiny red glow of the freshly lit Camel Light bobbing from the corner of her mouth, she slid out the hay loft door and climbed down the back ladder and set off across her backyard.

Chapter 75

“I don’t know exactly what it was Tom Carson did,” Jo Jo said. “Maybe found out about Hasty laundering cash for Gino.”

“You were the go-between?” Jesse said.

“Yeah. I set it up.”

It was late, and Jesse was tired. He and Jo Jo were on their respective sides of the barred door to Jo Jo’s cell. Jesse had a tape recorder. There was a single overhead light in the cell corridor with no shade.

“Hasty’d get a couple percent of what he laundered, and I guess he was using that money to finance the Horsemen.”

“How did he launder it?”

“Just didn’t fill out the cash deposit forms, I guess,” Jo Jo said. “It was his freakin’ bank, you know? Then he’d deduct his two percent, put it in the Horsemen’s account, and wire-transfer the rest to checking accounts in other banks. Now it’s in the banking system nice and legitimate. Gino would write checks on the new accounts. No nasty CTRs pile up on some treasury agent’s desk in Washington.”

“And you think Chief Carson got wind of this?”

“My guess, yeah. And he wouldn’t go with it. Everybody knows it’s drug money. And I heard that Tom said he couldn’t let that slide.”

“And?”

“So they got him to resign, and set him up in a town out in Wyoming. Some Posse group out there fixed it. And after he was out there awhile, they sent Lou out to blow him up. They wanted the local Posse guys to do it, but that didn’t work out.”

“Why didn’t they just kill him right away?”

“We talked about it. Decided it would draw too much attention to kill a police chief. Figured an ex-police chief out in the freakin’ boondocks someplace would go down easier. I think they thought the bomb would pulverize him and they’d never be able to get an I.D.”

“Wyoming cops I.D.’d him,” Jesse said. “How about Tammy?”

“Hasty was tapping her,” Jo Jo said. “She wanted him to leave his wife and marry her. You know Hasty. He thinks he’s a leading freakin’ citizen. Can’t have that. So he told me to dump her.”

“Did he tell you to make it part of the pattern of the painted police car and the dead cat?”