Right To Die - Jeremiah Healy (24 page)

"What do you know about the threats?"

"Only what he told me."

"Which was'?"

"Just that Maisy had received them. For God's
sake, man, the positions and people she associates herself with, I'm
not surprised."

I got all the way up this time. "All right,
Strock. Let's leave things at that for now. But keep it zipped,
okay."

"You have no right — "

"I meant your mouth."
 

=20=

I HADN'T MUCH ENJOYED THE SESSION WITH WALTER STROCK.
I figured to enjoy the next one even less.

Most of Dorchester has never been upscale. The
streets have terrific names; just the A's include Armandine,
Aspinwall, and Athewold. The structures, however, reflect the culture
a little more exactly. Peeling three-deckers with decayed porches,
burned-out storefronts boarded over with warping plywood, vacant lots
full of rubble but free of hope. Working class launching welfare
class, generations of experience greasing the skids.

The clubhouse for the American Trust was just off
Gallivan Boulevard. From the outside it looked like it might once
have been a laundry. Now there were reinforced metal shutters instead
of plate glass and professional signs. The two hand-lettered messages
on the shutters read: ATTACK DOGS ON PREMMISES and DONT FUCK WITH US.

I got out of the Prelude and locked it. Approaching
the door, I could hear the rumble of a loud stereo. I knocked
politely twice. Then I banged on the door until I heard the music
stop.

A "Joe-sent-me" slot opened on the other
side of the door and one of the kids from the library looked out.
"Yeah?"

His eyes were bleary from being high, and he didn't
place me.

"I'd like to talk to Gunther Yary."

"Ain't here." The slot closed with
authority.

I started banging again. The music came back on. I
kept hammering away until it stopped.

The slot reopened. The same kid said, "Get the
fuck out of my face, awright?"

"I want to talk with somebody about Yary."

"I said he ain't here. You deaf or what?"

"You can let me in, or I can camp out here and
talk to the first one of you leaves or comes. Your choice."

"Aw, fuck. Just a second."

The slot closed again. I waited. The music didn't
come back on. Then the sounds of bolts and maybe a crossbar from the
other side of the door before it swung open. A bit too inviting to be
credible. The kid I'd been talking with was smiling. "Come on
in, man."

I took a step with my right foot, then drove off it
to the left, barging my left shoulder as hard as I could into the
door. The metal hit something that gave, then crunched a little as
the door wouldn't go any farther.

I jumped to the right as my greeter came at me. I
grabbed him by the left arm and spun him around and over my
outstretched left leg.

Something sagged behind the door. Something else
heavy and metallic clattered to the floor as the door itself swung
back. I drew the Chief's Special from the holster over my right hip.

Rick, the guy who'd been feeding Yary set-up lines at
the library, slumped forward, scrabbling for the Colt .45 Automatic
that was between his legs. Blood was flowing pretty freely from his
nose and maybe a lip too. There was enough blood that it was tough to
tell.

"Don't," I said.

Rick didn't look up at me. He moved his hand toward
where he thought the gun would be.

I cocked mine. At the sound, the guy stopped,
weighing things. He wasn't deciding for peace yet.

I said, "This thing makes only one more noise."

Convinced, Rick sat back.

I moved toward him and edged the automatic away. My
greeter was just about to his elbows on the floor. I slid the Colt
into the pocket of my raincoat. Then I went back to the door,
slamming it shut, but using only one dead bolt to secure it.

Rick was gingerly touching his nose and cringing. My
greeter was up to his knees, but wobbly.

I took in the room. Hung ceiling with some panels
missing, the rest stained. Posters on the walls of scabrous guys with
long hair or no hair, done up in leather and gripping heavy-metal
guitars like tommy guns. Two flags, a small Confederate war banner,
and an even smaller Nazi swastika. The stereo system on sturdy
plastic milk crates, incongruously scrubbed-looking in red, white,
and blue. A blue crate held stacks of audiocassette tapes. The ones
with printed labels were mostly Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and
Aerosmith. The knockoffs were Skrewdriver, No Remorse, and Immoral
Discipline. The floor, once nicely carpeted, was now burned and torn,
smelling like stale beer. There were enough cans of Coors around the
base of the walls to build an Airstream trailer. Two sets of bunk
beds met head to toe at one corner, a cluttered desk to one side. I
said, "The photo team from Better Homes and Gardens been here
yet?"

"Fuck you," said Rick, burbling a little
through the blood.

I moved to the desk and started rooting around.

"Hey," said my greeter, "you can't do
that."

"Constitution's suspended for a while, boys."

Most of the paperwork was in the form of leaflets,
newsletters, and requests for contributions. White Aryan Resistance
and some kind of affiliated group called the Aryan Youth Movement,
both from Southern California; The American Front from Northern
California; White Heritage from the Midwest. Some newspaper and
magazine clippings, but of whole articles. About white supremacy
groups like the Klan, the Order, and the Posse Comitatus. One long
story from the Boston Globe on skinheads in New England. A poor Xerox
copy of a report from the Antidefamation League of the B'nai B'rith,
defaced with predictable remarks. Even an ad from a British magazine
for steel-toed Dr Martens workboots, which seemed to match what the
skinheads were wearing.

No mutilated headlines, though.

I walked over to my greeter. "Let me explain the
drill."

He looked at me sideways, the way you might watch a
kid who steals ice cream from your cafeteria tray.

I patted the pocket with the automatic. "I'm
betting this isn't registered, at least not to you clowns. I'm also
betting I can get one of you a year the hard way for having it. Who
wants to cover my bet?"

Rick said, "Don't say nothing, Tone."

"Tone? Tony, right?"

Greeter who might be Tony didn't say anything.

I said, "Tony, let me spell it out for you, no
big words. You guys were stupid, going hand to hand with the cops
back at the library."

Tony looked me in the eye now, memory dawning.

"But the piece, the piece is beyond stupid. The
piece is getting to play drop the soap in a communal shower. Am I
getting through to you?"

Tony was definitely sensing the drift of the
conversation. "I wasn't anywheres near the gun."

"You fucking shithead."

I ignored Rick and said, "Where's Gunther Yary?"

Tony worked his mouth.

I said, "Twelve months is fifty-two weeks, three
hundred sixty-five — "

Tony said, "He's out on the bridge."

"You yellow fucking — "

"What bridge'?"

"The Granite Ave bridge. The judge, the judge
gave him public service."

"You're a fuckhead, Tone."

I pointed to Rick. "The guy with the broken nose
thinks you're a yellow fuckhead, Tony. The guy who's supposed to be
standing next to you, standing up for you. Think about that."

I left the place. In the
car I unloaded the automatic. Two blocks later I dumped the gun down
one storm drain and the bullets down another.

* * *

There were four men working on the surface of the
bridge, a couple of orange barrels and a bunch of orange traffic
cones keeping the passing cars at least three inches away from arms,
hips, and legs. I walked up to the closest man, the only guy who
didn't have a tarbrush in his hands.

He was wearing an orange safety vest with yellow X's
front and back. Below the vest, patched corduroy pants and sneakers.
Above the vest, a green, battered hardhat. He held a filterless
cigarette between a thumb and forefinger, the thumb missing its nail.

I said, "John Cuddy. I'd like to talk with one
of your men there."

"What's it about?"

"Case I'm working on." I showed him my ID.

"Lemme guess. The Nazi."

"Gifted, isn't he."

"Sonofabitch. Fucking judge don't got the balls
to put a guy away so close to Christmas, that I can understand. But
putting him on my gang, for chrissakes, don't they even think about
that? Judge's got a criminal, what does he do, he sends him out to do
my job.

How do you figure that makes me feel?"

"Yary been any trouble?"

"Nothing but. Guy opened his mouth about the
Jews and the look, I'm not carrying the torch for anybody, get me?
But I had to send this guy, Roosevelt Barnes, off with another crew.
My best worker, and I had to send him off. You know why?"

"Yary?"

"Called Rosey a nigger. To his face. I mean,
forget Rosey's about three hundred pounds, you don't say that to a
black guy, not anymore. Took two a us to hold Rosey back. I'm not
about to let a good guy like Rosey, got seventeen fucking years in,
get bounced for dropping a piece a Nazi shit off a bridge abutment
just because some fucking judge's got his head up his ass. So I send
Rosey off for a few days while I get squat outta the Nazi. Go
figure."

"I can't. Mind if I talk to him?"

He lowered his voice. "You gonna rough him up
any?"

"Not planning to."

He shook his head, disappointed. "Hey. Yary.
Yary."

One of the orange vests looked over at us as the
other two stopped with their brushes.

My friend motioned him over with two jerks of his
cupped hand. To me, he said, "Stay here and talk to him. I wanna
spend some time with my guys."

"Right. Thanks."

Yary drew even with the foreman about forty feet from
me and tried to ask him a question. The foreman just stayed in stride
and walked on by.

Yary continued to me, the hardhat jiggling askew on
the shaved head. He slowed before stopping about five feet away and
reflexively touched a hand to his ear. "I don't have to talk to
you."

"Monday night you sounded like all you wanted to
do is talk."

"I would have. Till you and the nigger cops and
kike money-changers — "

"Tell you what, Yary. You stop the slurs, and I
won't fracture your skull. What do you say?"

He kept his distance. "Go ahead."

"What brought you to the library?"

"A bus. It was real big, see? With seats and
windows and everything. "

I shook my head and sighed. "The foreman said
he'd look the other way if I needed to get rough with you."

"You can't do that. You'd lose your license or
whatever."

I sidled a little closer to Yary. He thought about
backing off before deciding he couldn't and keep face.

"Just had a talk with a couple of the boys at
the clubhouse."

Yary didn't reply.

"You know, Gun. Rick and Tone? They said to give
you their best."

"How do you . . ." Yary squinted, then
jammed his hands in his pockets, suddenly looking very young.

"They told me where you were, Gun. After a
while."

"Look, I don't want no trouble from you."

"Little late for that."

"You don't understand. None of you understand
us, the Trust, the Movement. We're just trying to get back what's
ours, that's all. What the race mixers . . . what the government's
let the others take away. One thing I learned from that, from Martin
Luther King and Jesse Jackson and their kind. You can win in this
country if you just keep talking, just keep in people's faces so they
can't believe that you're still around, bothering them, making them
face what the truth is. About how everything's been taken away from
people who earned it by people who didn't. Once I chased this big
nig--once I purified the crew here, one of them started listening to
me.
Hearing what I was saying."

"Why did you go to the debate?"

"To get some publicity, man. Free publicity. But
even the TV and radio don't care about Andrus and her 'friends.'
They're shoveling all this shit about the right to die. That's not
the point, don't you see it? It ain't the right to die we got to
worry about. It's the right to live, to take back what's ours from
them that took it from us."

"You don't see Andrus and her crowd as a threat,
then."

"Threat? Threat, shit no. Those assholes are
just a distraction, get it? They're just being used to get attention
for issues that don't mean shit so the real issues, the raping of our
people by the others, don't get settled."