The Spy's Little Zonbi (9 page)

The first night Chase showed up decked out in a crisply ironed cotton bed sheet—which Limp had helped sew together—he was welcomed without any questions. His only immediate regret was not reinforcing the hood with some sort of cardboard cone, since it kept leaning way over to one side. The point could easily have put someone's eye out.

Chase pulled his Mustang right up to the regular spots they used in a field outside Princess Anne and joined the activities.

“
Take a six-pack,” had been Limp's advice. “None of those boys ever turned away anybody cartin' suds. That's all the greetin' card y'all be needing.”

Limp had been right about that.

Chase was welcomed with pats on the back of his sheet and then mostly ignored by the sixty or so beer-gutted revelers in their own dirty robes. All went about their business of lighting burn-barrels and hoisting a cross made from two by fours cinched with nylon rope. The wood stank of gasoline and was set ablaze after two kegs were tapped and bottle rockets were ceremonially fired up into the mosquito-infested night sky. Short speeches were offered by two officers, but most of what they said was impossible to understand because of their hoods and thick watermen accents.

Chase discovered that the only things separating a KKK meeting and a night at the local bowling alley were the robes and the ten pins. There was lots of swearing and racist jokes, and plenty of griping about politics and Jew bosses. The night's activities culminated in some mailbox baseball, where the boys all headed off in different directions to destroy mailboxes owned by black and probably Jewish families. The caravan of old pickups, belching thick exhaust and having to rev engines hard with the heavy payloads weighing them down, streamed out into the steamy hot July air. It was the driver's job to zero in on mailboxes with the names Lincoln and Sapp, Washington and Blades.

“
We're huntin' Katz!” someone shouted and everyone in the pickup laughed.

They took their chances with Bozmans and Bivens and Perkins, since they could have been white, but decided it didn't really matter; they were drunk as shit.

Chase had climbed up into the back of a rusty Dodge Ram with an ominous wide grill and one headlight. Stuffed with some of the fattest Klansmen, it couldn't go fast enough to flip over—or so he figured—but their tires were spinning as they hit dry pavement, a one-eyed roaring monster careening into the darkness.

“
Cliffy, up on yer left!”

“
I see it!”

Amos held the Louisville Slugger in his left hand while using his right to battle wind that was trying to rip his hood off. A lefty hitter, Amos wasn't getting as much action as righty Tiny Simms. Chase sat with his back to the cab, thumping up and down on his rear, trying to hang on in a churning ocean of half crushed beer cans.

“
Cliffy, heads up on the right!” shrieked the four-hundred pound Tiny Simms, who'd already lost his hood a dozen mailboxes back. Simms, a right-handed hitter who was three-for-three tonight and hitting a respectable .400 in the league games the
Times
sometimes covered, took a few practice cuts, then got ready for the next mailbox coming at him at fifty miles per hour. With a slight uppercut, Simms sent the green metal box soaring into the front yard of a double-wide.

“
Home run!”

“
C'mon, Cliffy, you shit!” Amos complained from the opposite side of the truck bed, as they barreled on, coughing smoke and shedding empty beer cans. “It's my turn to hit!”

The party went on like that until the gas tank got down toward empty and nobody had the guts to work the pump in a Klan sheet. They headed back to the field in Princess Anne and everyone drove off with the look of impending hangovers.

Late the next morning, the phone in Chase's apartment rang with a tip about an arrest. Jimmy Ray Jones had been hauled in after being overheard bragging to one of the girls behind the Salisbury Dunkin Donuts counter. Chase was allowed to sit in on the interrogation as Jones confessed to the mailbox bashings, as well as a few other crimes they'd committed. Jimmy Ray had been driving one of the other trucks that had been responsible for five smashed car windows and a dumpster fire behind the elementary school. The group obviously had no respect for the rules of mailbox baseball.

When both the
Times
and the
Delaware
State
News
up in Dover ran front page photos of the mailbox and property destruction, a Delaware neo-Nazi chapter didn't take it too well. In fact, it turned out they were jealous of all the Klan's attention, according to one of the
Times
delivery drivers who had friends in both groups. These little crime sprees were good for attracting new members, and new members meant more guys pitching in for beer, Leon Tooman had told Chase in exchange for a pack of smokes.

The Nazi chapter called their organization the White Armed Warriors for America, or WAWA for short, not to be confused with the convenience store.

The WAWAs decided to make their statement on a grander, more historic scale, Tooman warned Chase. It wasn't a new plan, by any means, since retired exterminator Elkins “Pinkie” Gunder had been just bugging the heck out of his Nazi buddies to use some of his hoarded poisons for years.

“
Now they've had a kick in the pants,” Tooman whispered through a puff of menthol smoke, “and they got a boy with some bad know-how.”

Among piles of unlabeled, noxious chemicals, the Nazis stored pounds of Gunder's thallium in Maxwell House coffee cans in their meeting hall basement. Chase had researched thallium in microfilm files at the city library, discovering it had once been used as a rat and ant poison but was eventually banned because of high toxicity and human cancer risk. One of the earlier uses of thallium was as a hair remover, according to a ten-year-old
Baltimore
Sun
story. It said the CIA had come up with a plot to have it applied to Fidel Castro's shoes while they were being polished. The plan wasn't to assassinate him, an informant had told the
Sun
reporter, but to emasculate him by making him as beardless and bald as a baby.

The plan hatched by the Nazis, according to Tooman, was to assassinate a poultry house full of chickens owned by old Abraham Greenberg, a local Jew who had fired more than one of the WAWAs over the years for not showing up for work. Those who did show up were stinking drunk from the night before.

***

Chase parked his car near Greenberg's irrigation pond and killed the engine, eyes adjusting to the light from a three-quarter moon. Twenty minutes later an old Ford pickup rolled past the farm with its headlights off. Chase watched three WAWA boys dressed in blackface paint jog across a bean field toward the sleeping chicken houses. The one taking up the rear had a Styrofoam cooler Tooman had said was filled with a mix of soy chicken feed and thallium shavings.

Chase slid out, clicked the door shut, and made his way to one end of the building the trio was trying to enter. The heavy ammonia smell seeped through the vents and made his eyes burn.

“
Man alive, this shit does stink,” he heard one of the WAWAs say over the hum of the circulations fans, as they found the door latch and stepped into the coop. “I never knew anything could smell so fuggin' bad.”

“
Will you shut the hell up!” another nearly shouted, and there was a murmur from stirring chickens. Chase saw the three silhouettes take careful strides through the mass of chickens toward the center feeding trays.

“
Smells like somebody poured ammonia on dog turds.”

“
Breath in an out yer mouth, dumbass.”

“
Feels like it's burning the nose off my face.” Chase could see the lead man hike his shirt out of his pants to use as a filter mask as they squished across the thick layer of chicken shit.

The man with the cooler dumped some of the lethal contents into the steel tray and they slowly retreated as birds began to feed. One house done, they slipped back out and proceeded to poison the other three coops in an easy and terrible crime.

With every fiber of his being, Chase wanted to yell out from the moment he saw the first poison being poured, but there was more to this assignment than covering a story. His job was to take control of an event, to work under the cover of a journalist while producing results as a spy.

Their mission accomplished, three black-clad figures ran from the last chicken house toward their truck, one tripping over a garden rake and falling headfirst.

Reaching into his pocket, Chase pulled out a thick black marker and looked for a flat surface to write.

***

The slaughter of thirty-seven thousand chickens made newspaper headlines and was the lead story on both local TV news stations. You didn't mess with chickens on Delmarva.

But it wasn't the poultry industry that had Chase feeling as though he no longer possessed a soul when he returned to the scene of the crime later that morning on a spot news assignment. He spent two miserable hours wandering among lifeless white lumps, shooting a few frames of old Abraham Greenberg comforting his wife. He was careful with his exposure inside the chicken house, where hours earlier he'd used a thick marker to rob credit from the WAWAs. He'd drawn three large Ks over the door frame and matching crosses on each side.

According to Tooman, the Klan was nervous about accepting responsibility for the massacre even though it had been Jew chickens.

“
They were talking about wanting to turn in who done it,” Tooman told Chase on the loading dock after his rounds later in the week. “None of the boys are ready fess up and for good reason. Ain't nobody supposed to be killin' chickens. Kill somebody's momma and a family wants revenge. Kill chickens and the whole Eastern Shore grabs the hangin' rope.”

Chase was called into Mack's glass-walled office and sat next to a man who introduced himself as an FBI agent.

“
Seems we have a hornets' nest stirred up.” The agent, in a gray suit with tan work boots, had tracked little rectangles of chicken shit into the small office. Chase could smell it.

“
We know the poison belonged to a group of boys up in Delaware,” said the agent. “But somebody used a Klan autograph on the job and stole their credit.”

The look Chase gave Mack was as innocent as possible. Then he glanced down at the place on his right hand, where he'd had to scrub a spot of indelible ink with the rough soap they used in the press room.

“
Those boys get to drinking and some dangerous ideas get thrown around,” the agent said.

“
Like poisoning a chicken farm,” said Mack.

“
That's right,” said the agent. “And we're thinking that everyone in the media should take a little more care to double-check their locks at night and keep an eye on their pets.”

***

During the second week of August, just as the temperature and humidity started evening out in the low nineties on the Eastern Shore, WAWA Captain Early Wayne nervously dropped coins into a gas station payphone and began to dial.

“
City desk.” The voice on the other end was tired, disinterested.

Wayne reached into left front pocket for the handful of marbles he'd stolen from his little boy's collection. He shoved them into his mouth and worked them into his cheeks.

“
We have Shockley,” Wayne said into the phone. From the video store he'd rented and watched all four movies that involved kidnapping. “You have twenty-four hours to come up with fifty thousand dollars in small, unmarked bills.”

“
What?”

“
Or Shockley dies!”

“
Buddy,” said the older male voice on the other end. “Spit out the marbles and try again. I can't understand a word you're sayin'.”

Wayne nearly dropped the receiver. His heart thundered in his chest and his hands shook as he scanned the parking lot for cop cars. Was he being watched? How did the guy know he just jammed his mouth with a handful of marbles? Kidnapping, extortion, and they surely knew all about the animal porn. He'd never see his family again. But no SWAT team came swooping in with weapons pointed. Not a single blue light turned circles in the parking lot of the Exxon station that was about to close for the night. It began to dawn on Wayne that he probably just sounded like he had marbles in his mouth. His heart slowed as he dropped his chin and let the little glass orbs spill out, bouncing off his work boots. He cleared his throat.

“
We want fifty grand or Shockley dies,” Wayne told the man.

“
Fifty grand, huh?”

Emboldened, Wayne strayed from his notes for added effect. “Or this time tomorrow he'll be swimmin' with the fishes.”

There was a pause and Wayne was sure he could hear the man lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag. That was a good sign. He had him shaken. Wayne patted his pockets for his own pack.

“
Look, buddy, I don't know what bar you're callin' from, but Shockley's right here. Hold on.”

It wasn't possible. He'd left Shockley hogtied back in the basement of the WAWA meeting hall not fifteen minutes ago.

There was a click on the other end of the phone. “Limp here,” said the voice. “I work for chocolate, so you better be sweet.”