Chasm Page 5

  A trio struck up a rendition of the “Black Velvet Band.” The patrons began to clap and stamp to the beat.

  “Anyway, the last Serb’s a 39-year old loner who’s been fired from two jobs for picking fights with Bosnian co-workers. He’s on probation for carrying around a handgun without a license.”

  Gallatin’s interest was piqued. “He sounds like a good prospect to me. Have you questioned him?”

  “You bet. One problem. He’s got no legs. Apparently, they were blown off by a Bosnian mine. He can’t forgive and he won’t forget. But the guy’s confined to a wheel chair. Strange dude.”

  “No accomplices who might’ve done it for him? Like that Arab who ordered his followers to blow up the Trade Towers in New York? He was just a blind, old fart.”

  “Not likely, Mike. As far as we can tell, this Serb dude’s got no friends at all. What I don’t get is why we let people like that into the country, legs or no legs.”

  “Yeah. Okay, so the occasional bad apple gets in. Can’t avoid it. Anyway, so he’s out of the picture. What about the two Croats?”

  “Now, I’m not saying we’ve got anything hard here, but they definitely fall into the category of scumbags. Two cousins named Branko. Shortened it from Brankovic. Been here nine months. From the minute they arrived, they’ve been trouble. A Croat woman, wife of a green grocer, accused the older one, Milan, of attempted rape three weeks after he arrived here. But the charges didn’t stick. At about the same time, the younger one, Zlatko, punched out a muezzin — a Muslim clergyman — on the sidewalk after Friday services at the mosque. Milan got fired from the Goodyear plant for petty theft. Meanwhile, Zlatko busted up a bar down near the docks. They both got fired from jobs they got in a packing plant after the manager, a Jew, found them trying to recruit members for something called the Cuyahoga Militia. They’re into guns. We found gun catalogs, bullet casings and rifle oil in their apartment.”

  “Where are these guys now?”

  D’Angelo shrugged. “They’re gone. Left their place a pigsty. According to the grateful landlady, they haven’t been at their place since—”

  “The night of the bombing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What else do you have on them?”

  “It’s funny. There’re several things about these clowns that don’t add up.”

  “Like?”

  “Like how come they always seemed to find jobs after getting repeatedly fired. And how come they always seemed to have plenty of cash. And why there are no detailed records on them.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no records’?”

  “We went to your buddies at Catholic World Services. Not only don’t they have anything on the Branko boys, but they’ve never heard of them. And they’re responsible for resettling all the Yugos here.”

  “What about Homeland Security? Have you tried them?”

  D’Angelo threw his hands up. “That’s the most screwed up agency in the government. They couldn’t find a bus ticket in their pocket much less a file on a particular immigrant. I spent three hours at their Immigration and Customs Enforcement district office. I never saw so many semi-literate bozos with their thumbs stuck up their asses. Even the FBI guys give up. They call ICE ‘The Land of the Living Dead.’ And they’re supposed to be working together — for chrissakes.”

  “Hmm. The Cuyahoga Militia, huh?” Gallatin said.

  D’Angelo looked up from his beer. “Yeah. Mike, stay away from them. Leave the militia crazies to the FBI, ATF. They’re nutso.” He turned a forefinger at his temple. “And dangerous.”

  The music turned decidedly political, with the lead singer, a young woman with straight red hair and a sad face, giving a forlorn rendition of Patriot Games. Three deadpan-faced men positioned themselves on the perimeters of the audience, each eyeing the listeners carefully. A fourth looked about furtively, then waded into the crowd with a large Tam O’Shanter which he extended in patrons’ faces as if it were a collection plate at church. “For the lads,” he said quickly. People unhesitatingly tossed in fives, tens, twenties — grocery money, car payment money.

  When he reached Gallatin’s table, the latter shrugged the man off, not setting eyes on him. The man paused and shook the hat. “For the lads, I said,” he repeated insistently.

  Gallatin turned his head slowly toward him, cracked a half-smile and said, “Fuck off.”

  “You’re an Orangeman then,” the collector retorted.

  “I’m a human being.”

  “So are the lads in Belmarsh Jail.”

  “At least they’re alive!” Gallatin erupted. “Unlike the poor, innocent slobs they’ve murdered!”

  The collector dropped the note-filled hat and lunged at Gallatin. He was stopped cold in his tracks with a large fist planted like a brick on the man’s nose. There was a commotion as people diverted their attention from the music and toward Gallatin. A barman the size of a mid-sized refrigerator rushed over clenching a baseball bat in his hand.

  “All right! That’s it. Get outta here. All o’ yuz. Now.” He stood menacingly over an agitated Gallatin, a stunned D’Angelo and a prostrate Noraid fundraiser.

  Restraining his buddy with one arm, D’Angelo held the other up in front of his chest palm outward and said, “Hey, no problem. Really. We’ll go.” They got up. D’Angelo pulled some cash out of his pocket and placed it on the table.

  “One recommendation though,” Gallatin said. “Stick to being a restaurant. There’re too many phonies out there.”

  The barman stood impassively, as stolid as a marble pillar. The other three Noraid men checked their buddy out and glowered at Gallatin as they would a marked man.

  D’Angelo pulled Gallatin toward the door. But Gallatin had locked his sights on the Noraiders. The unspoken message between the men was that this wasn’t the end. They’d finish it later.

  Out in the cold street, D’Angelo put his arms on Gallatin’s shoulder. “Hey! Cool down, goombah. C’mon, I’ll buy you a latte and cannoli up the street.”

  Gallatin rubbed his face with both hands and nodded.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gallatin admired the folk in Ohio’s hinterland. Hard-working, upstanding, fine citizens all. They lived in small towns, as neat and plain as their inhabitants. Dairy farms, hog farms, cash crop farms, small industry. Very nice. Very boring. He rarely ventured south of Cleveland, especially in winter. And little Coshocton, 12,000-strong, normally held as much interest for him as, well, milking cows.

  He pulled off Interstate 77 to Route 36. Soon a sign announced, “Welcome to Coshocton - Home of the Hot Air Balloonfest.” As an investigator, Gallatin valued diners, crossroads of information, as he liked to refer to them. He pulled into the first one he saw, “Stan’s Diner,” on Whitewoman Street.

  Stan’s was a relic from another age. All aluminum and glass, its linoleum-top counter and red plastic-covered booth seats with chrome jukebox selectors evoked the era of Ike, Elvis and the Edsel. Gallatin ordered coffee and rhubarb pie.

  He studied the waitress behind the counter, a forty-something who could easily pass for a fifty-something. Her eyes were sad, reflective of a harsh life of early marriage, several children, grunt work and a life long devoid of dreams.

  “Some weather, huh?” Gallatin murmured as he sipped his coffee.

  “I hate winter,” she said. The woman gazed lingeringly out the window, her eyes focused somewhere beyond the fields of stubbled, brown corn stalks poking through the thin layer of snow which extended to the horizon. Somewhere beyond, somewhere warm, maybe Florida.

  He asked about business. She said it was slow this time of year. Mostly truckers and traveling sales and service people. The busiest time was between the Balloonfest and the Canal Festival, June through August. She tidied the pies under glass on an elevated holder.

  “What do people do for fun here this time of year?” Gallatin asked.

  “Well, not a hell of a—” She perked her ears at the distant gun shots. “Deer huntin’.
Every male with a gun — and they all own guns, mind you — goes out deer huntin’ up till just before Christmas.” She again focused on the distant horizon and said, almost absent-mindedly, “So much killin’.”

  Gallatin tipped his cup for a refill.

  “Where you from, mister?” she asked, as she poured.

  “Cleveland.”

  “What brings you to Coshocton?”

  “Come to hunt. What else?” Gallatin answered nimbly. “I’d like to link up with some guys who know the terrain, though. Any suggestions?”

  The waitress thought a moment. “Well, they just formed something called the Coshocton Hunt Club.” She looked side-to-side, leaned toward Gallatin and whispered, “But rumor has it that they’re into more than huntin’.”

  Gallatin jerked his head back and grimaced. “Like what?”

  “Oh, Jerry Spencer, the Magruder boys, a bunch of others, they’ve been spoutin’ off about the federal government’s no good, out to get us, sellin’ the country out to the Yew-nited Nations. Claptrap such as that.”

  “No kidding,” Gallatin said. “But does Jerry Spencer hunt?”

  “You bet. And shoots. Him and his buddies love nothin’ better than to load up on cases of beer and haul off into the boonies and shoot up a storm. Lord knows what they’ve got. All these big guns everybody’s been buying. My word. My daddy had a shotgun and a twenty-two. That was plenty to get meat on the table for us.”

  “Well, I’ll check with him anyway on hunting prospects. Where can I find him?”

  “At his garage. Right on Route 16.”

  Gallatin thanked the woman, finished his pie and left a fat tip.

  Gallatin was grateful that Jerry Spencer wasn’t out hunting that afternoon. Bent over the engine of an ‘85 Malibu, under a sign, “Jerry’s Auto Repair,” in amateurishly daubed black and white cursive letters, he appeared anything but a crazed, gun-mad, apocalypse-obsessed political maniac.

  “Afternoon,” Gallatin said as he approached the mechanic amid a jumble of auto carcasses and barely resurrected used vehicles for sale crowding the small lot.

  Spencer peered upward. He wore his Penzoil cap backwards. His face was smudged with grease. “Hiya,” he said, his hands continuing their battle against an uncooperative manifold.

  Gallatin tried to engage the man in small talk. About the weather, about business. Just trying to break the ice.

  “What’s your problem?” Spencer asked.

  “Oh, uh, no problem with my car. I’m down from Cleveland. Got some time off. Wanna do some huntin’. Been told you’re about the best when it comes to finding the big bucks in this area.”

  “Big bucks?” Spencer asked skeptically.

  “Oh, I mean deer. Ha, ha.”

  “Yeah. Well. Maybe I do. Trouble is. Man’s gotta work or hunt. Huntin’, it’s fun. But it don’t bring in the bucks, if you know what I mean,” Spencer replied with a snicker.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Play on words,” Gallatin chuckled. He extended his hand. “Mike Gallatin’s my name.”

  Spencer displayed a greasy right hand without holding it out. “Jerry. Jerry Spencer.” He capitulated to the manifold and stood up, crossed his arms and looked at Gallatin expectantly.

  “Whaddya use for big bucks?” Gallatin asked.

  “Well, that depends on what you mean by bucks. If you mean deer, I used a twelve-gauge. If you mean money, well, I’m still workin’ on it.”

  “Well, I could be talking about both.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Firepower. The right amount can get you big bucks — both kinds,” Gallatin said.

  “Yeah?” Spencer was guarded, his eyes revealing nothing.

  Gallatin looked around him. “You know, some people, they like to upgrade to more sophisticated weapons.”

  Spencer remained passive, but receptive.

  “Ever hunt with an AR-15?”

  “Fine weapon.”

  “Well, I’ve gotta bunch for sale, at the right price,” Gallatin said with a low voice.

  “You don’t say? Well. A single bullet from a thirty-odd-six will kill a deer as good as any other,” Spencer replied. He turned around to resume his struggle with the Malibu’s manifold.

  “These are different. They just keep on shooting,” Gallatin said. “Fully au-to-mat-ic,” Gallatin enunciated carefully.

  Spencer rose again from his labor. He squinted. “Maybe I’m interested. Maybe I’m not. My question, mister, is how do I know you ain’t an ATF agent out to entrap me?”

  “I’m not. Just a businessman out to make a buck. That’s all,” Gallatin said.

  Spencer eyed him warily. “A bunch of us…’hunters’…congregate over to the Tuscawaras Inn at around 8:00. You’re welcome to join.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  The jukebox blared Reba McEntire’s latest hit. The draft beer flowed. Men hovered around the two pool tables in the rear. Work caps, jeans and protruding bellies marked this as a blue-collar watering hole. Facial hair and shaggy manes predominated among the younger males.

  Gallatin felt almost at home. A pinball repairman, bartender and construction worker in his younger days, and son of a railroad man, proletarian playgrounds such as the Tuscawaras were as familiar to him as pie and coffee, a boiler-maker after work and swapping dirty jokes on the job.

  Spencer was sitting on a bar stool hunched over a bottle of Bud. Shed of his overalls and grease, the president of the Coshocton Hunt Club, was a hulking, fit ex-Marine in his mid-30s. He sported a pair of reflective sunglasses popular with the State

  Trooper set. He smiled as Gallatin approached and promptly made introductions.

  “This here’s Hank, that’s Jeffrey, Al, Dave and Whore.” The men ranged from mid-20s to late-50s. They shook Gallatin’s hand in turn.

  “Whore?” Gallatin felt compelled to ask.

  “Oh yeah. Whore’ll work for anybody doin’ anything. You name it. Real name’s Clarence.”

  The other men gaffawed. Whore was not amused.

  “Sort’ve a Boy Named Sue syndrome,” Spencer said good humoredly. He raised his bottle to Whore, the youngest, and Gallatin surmised the dumbest, of the lot.

  “I take it then that this is the famous Coshocton Hunt Club?” Gallatin asked.

  “Give or take,” Spencer replied.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ll be here presently,” Jeffrey, a jolly, red-cheeked, young farmer, said.

  Jose Cuervo, you are a friend of mine…the female crooner sang from the juke box.

  “I love this song,” Hank, a barrel-bellied, middle-aged man with an Abe Lincoln beard, said, shaking his head.

  Spencer gestured for the group to retreat to a secluded booth in the rear.

  “So, Mr. Gallatin, why don’t we just get right down to business,” Spencer said as he cast a challenging gaze at the newcomer.

  Gallatin nodded. “Well, like I said. I’m an independent salesman and I offer special products. AR-15 being one of them.”

  “What’s the big deal about them?” Dave, a surly construction worker in his early 30s, demanded. “Get ‘em anywhere. Probably can get ‘em at Wal Mart by now. Big fuckin’ deal.”

  Spencer signaled Dave to put a lid on it.

  “Fully automatic,” Gallatin added. “I’m selling them off paper. No records.”

  “What makes you think a hunt club would have any interest in automatic weapons?” Spencer said, plumbing Gallatin for suspicious signs.

  “What’s a hunt club doing mouthing off about the evil U.S. government, the United Nations conspiring to take over the country—”

  “I get your point, Mr. Gallatin. Hard times are comin’. Citizens got to be on the ball. Just like during the Revolution.”

  “No Waco woulda occurred back then. Not with the likes o’ Paul Revere an’ Patrick Henry!” Dave blurted.

  “I said, shut the fuck up!” Spencer ordered. “Who’s commander of this militia anyway?”

  Dave fell silent and angrily swig
ged his bottle of Pabst Lite.

  Spencer switched from hot to cool. “Mr. Gallatin, we’ve got problems with the Brady Bill. We’ve got problems with the way Big Government is trampling on the Constitution. And, yes, we’ve got problems with the United Nations. Honest citizens’ve got to defend themselves for the day when they declare war on the American people. So, you have any samples?”

  “In the car.”

  The heads of the Coshocton Hunt Club’s members turned collectively in the direction of two men who had just walked through the door.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Jeffrey announced.

  They were in their late twenties, disheveled, and they swaggered in their matching, studded, black leather jackets. The taller one wrapped an arm around an unsuspecting young waitress. She threw his arm off and marched off in a huff. He made a shrill whistle after the girl and pumped his hand up and down in a lewd gesture.

  As the two men approached the hunt club’s table, the thing about them that struck Gallatin the most was their smugness, accentuated by malicious sneers on their unshaven faces.

  Spencer made introductions. “Zollie, Mee-lan, this here’s Mr. Gallatin. Come to help equip the hunt club,” he said.

  None of the introductees offered a hand; as if by instinct, they distrusted each other. Gallatin glared.