Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (6 page)

Floyd was silent, so I was too. I yawned. He burped.

The guy with the double-lightning tattoo waddled toward us. His belly hung over his fatigues. His brown T-shirt was stained with grease spots. The top of his bald head was freckled. Possibly he was unaware of Pete’s age limit for skinheads. This one was no kid.

He spoke to Floyd while he looked expressionlessly at me. “Goin’ okay, Floyd?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Hey, Red, this is—”

“I know. Jase. Royal’s cousin. Pleased to meet you, Jase.” He lifted his upper lip in what was probably a smile and I could see he was missing a couple of incisors. He sat down. Now three of us were silent. Floyd broke first.

“So. Jase. Tell us about yourself.”

Floyd had pulled his chair closer. He clutched his beer glass and tried the suspicious look again, but I was suddenly aware he’d had too much beer. Those narrowed eyes were also a bit glazed.

Which made it as good a time as any to unroll the cover spiel I’d worked on that afternoon. I’d put a lot of thought into it, because it needed to make sense and it had to include some stuff I thought would help me keep unwanted visitors from my actual home.

“Where should I start?”

“At the beginning.” Red grinned. Like a wolf.

“Okay. I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota.” Close enough. Chicago. “My parents were working people. She was of Scandinavian descent. He was German.” Close enough. Russian Jews. “I was an only child.”

“Threw away the mold, huh?” Red snorted.

Hot enough for you?

I grinned like I appreciated his joke. “Guess so. Anyway, we lived in a working-class neighborhood until it started to go bad.”

Floyd nodded wisely, clucking his tongue. He knew what kind of “bad” I was talking about.

“Sonsabitches,” he said.

“Yeah. Anyway, after Mom died, my dad, he moved out here to be near some family. My dad, he’s not doing so great, kind of needs me to help him out.” I looked very sad. Dad was on his last legs. Not at all up to visitors. “So I decided to come on out here and take care of him. I like it here just fine. Great weather. Some—” I emphasized the
some
“—great people.”

Red sneered. “We got our share of problems. Point is, we don’t have to take it laying down.” His hand went to the knife sheath hanging from his belt.

“I agree.” I slapped the table. “Royal’s just a kid, but I know what he means when he says we gotta take this country back.”

“Damn right we do.”

Floyd’s eyes were closed. Looked like the conversation was now two-way, me and Red.

“I’ve been thinking, maybe I should join this club of Royal’s— are you in it?” I made it sound like his being in it would just about clinch my decision.

Red bared his sharp-looking teeth at me again. “Yeah. I’m in it, all right. Big time.”

“Yeah? You run the organization?”

He shook his head and laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”

I was trying to talk to Red and keep my eye on the action too. Pete came back to the bar, without Zack. He said a few words to my “cousin,” and marched him back to that mysterious place where he’d taken his friend.

I stood up. “I gotta pee.”

This time I went past the men’s, past the women’s, and saw the door to what had to be the Back Room, between the women’s room and the rear exit. It was paneled like the wall and damned near invisible, except that it had an
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign on it. I could just hear mumbling voices inside. No point in taking a chance on someone catching me eavesdropping— I’d ask Royal what this was all about. Quickly, I slid back down the hall and into the toilet, stuck around for a minute, flushed, and headed back toward Floyd and Red. On my way to the table I passed the young buzz-cut female, who was saying something earnest about a black helicopter— a black helicopter?— to another young woman. I was trying to catch the other kid’s answer when the bristle-head noticed me.

“Hey!” she said.

I turned all the way back toward her. There was that long, sullen look again, this one ending in a smile. Maybe it takes two nights to earn the friendlier version. Then she spun all the way around on her bar stool until she faced me again, very coy. She was all of eighteen, tops, small and stocky, kind of like a tree stump, with short legs squeezed into a pair of black tights. Boots just like Floyd’s, except they were red-brown. Her hair was about a quarter-inch long all over her head, and bleached white. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt and a red T-shirt that said SIEG HEIL.

Very seductive. I smiled noncommittally and walked on.

I sat back down with Floyd and Red and scanned the bar with what I hoped was a satisfied “home at last” expression. Pete and the two boys reappeared. The boys went back to the bar, and Pete walked out. Royal grabbed for his beer stein, knocked it over, spilling on himself, jumped up, yelled, “Shit!” and stomped toward the john. He looked rattled, big-time— more than spilled beer seemed to account for. In the hall entry, he nearly collided with Karl, who was just coming through in the other direction.

Floyd’s eyes were open again, but he was practically snoring. Red sat drinking his beer, looking around, occasionally scratching some part of his anatomy. Royal reappeared and stood leaning against a wall, staring into space.

I looked at my watch.

“Hey, this has been great, but I got to get home. I like to listen to Preston Switcher— you know him?” I studied their faces for reaction. Floyd’s was blank, Red’s was sly.

“Yeah,” Red said. “He’s one of the truth-tellers.”

Whatever that meant. I nodded enthusiastically and stood to leave.

“See y’around, Jase.” Oh, good. Red liked me.

Royal looked up when I approached.

“Walk me to my car, Royal.” He nodded and followed me out the door.

I was going to wait until we were well down the street before I said anything, but Royal spoke first.

“Listen, I got the money. Your pay. I just didn’t want to carry it around tonight.”

“Carry it around? It’s in cash?”

“Well, yeah.”

I figured I’d get it when I got it. “Tell me about the bartender. Steve. Is he in the Command?”

“I never see him at a meeting or anything. Kind of seems like he just likes having us— them— come around. He owns the place. Makes them welcome, you know. But everyone does what he says. Everyone.”

“I’m not surprised.” Steve had a certain… presence. “And Red?”

“Yeah. Red. He really is Inner Circle.”

“What’s the tattoo mean? Seems I’ve heard of it…”

“Aryan Brotherhood. Some skins wear it too.”

“And Karl? Tell me about him.”

“Smart. Real smart. He fixes computers!” This seemed to amaze Royal. “Talks a lot about brainy things. Kinda sickly. Almost Inner Circle.”

“Zack? Is he in the group?”

“Yeah. Me and him are warriors.”

“And what does that mean?”

“We do the work. I got to tell you—”

“Just a second. What about Pete Ebner? The guy who was so busy with you and Zack?” If they did the work, what did he do?

“Pete. Yeah. He’s real dangerous, I do know that. He’s killed a bunch of guys.”

Killed. A bunch of guys.

“You actually know that, or is it just his rep?”

“Well, I didn’t, like, see him do it, you know.”

I let that go. “Is he Inner Circle?”

“Oh, yeah. And he commands the warriors.” Aha. Some kind of sergeant. That explained the attitude.

“Sit in my car for a minute and tell me what was going on in that back room with Pete tonight. What was he talking to you about?” I unlocked the doors and shooed him inside.

He shook his head. “Well, that’s just it, you know. I got to go talk to Zack. Pete gave him some orders, and how it works, Zack’s supposed to pass them on down to me. All Pete said to me was, ‘You ready to be a real warrior?’ I had to say yeah without knowing what he meant. I had to, like, make the commitment.” That must have been when the kid had come back into the bar and spilled his beer. He shook his head again. “Shit. Anyway, something’s going down.”

I was hoping that wasn’t the case. The cops thought the Command was big on talk and small on action, and after meeting this bunch of morons and freaks I wouldn’t put it past them to play loyalty games, putting these kids through weird initiations that had nothing to do with anyone or anything else. I saw a documentary once on how this one tribe somewhere pierced a guy’s belly muscles and hung him by a strip of rawhide. Courage-testing.

Royal was holding the door handle, waiting for me to say he could get out of the car. I wasn’t ready to lose him yet. I needed to get a fix on all this crap about Pete telling Zack and Zack telling Royal.

“So there’s the Inner Circle, and there are warriors. What are some of the other levels? The hierarchy?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Tell me about the levels of power.”

“Oh. Okay.” He stuck a finger in his ear and probed. A hair-twister, I thought, when he had hair. When he didn’t, an ear-poker. “The Inner Circle, they’re the ones who, like, connect with other countries, other cities, like that. Then there’s the lieutenants.”

Lord. “What’s a lieutenant?”

“A manager, like. Pete’s one. Warriors get our orders from them.”

“And warriors do the dirty work?”

“Well, we’re the tough ones, you know, the strong ones. The runners, the fighters. If we do our jobs we get to be lieutenants sooner or later.”

“Are there levels of soldier? Privates, corporals, sergeants?”

“Zack’s a corporal. I’m a private. That’s why he’s going to give me the orders.”

“Do they all hang out there every night?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Sometimes there are meetings.”

“Where are those?”

“Sometimes in the back room. Sometimes at a house over in San Rafael.”

“When’s the next meeting?”

“I can find out, but they won’t let you come. They don’t always let the warriors come. Listen, I better get back, okay?”

“Call me when you find out what it is you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Yeah. Shit.” He got out and closed my car door too hard.

Rosie hadn’t forgotten that I’d planned to visit Thor’s again. “Hi, Jake— call and let me know how the Nazis were tonight. Tomorrow’s soon enough if you get home really late.” Very casual. Probably dying to know about my latest adventures in Fascistland. “I’ll be looking at that house in the morning with your new realtor. I have to say she seems unusually interested in whether or not I’m your girlfriend. I got the feeling she thinks you’re pretty cute.”

Hmm. Well, why not? There are those who think I could pass for a Baldwin brother. Just my luck, though, she’ll think Rosie’s the cute one.

Twelve-fifteen. I’d let Rosie sleep. But since I’d told my new pals I was going to listen to Switcher, I thought maybe I’d better listen to him. I’d caught the show a couple of times by accident, so I remembered it was on this time of night. I turned on my bedside radio and started getting undressed. He was somewhere in the middle of his oration.

“The trouble with so-called employment rights laws, my friends, is not so much that they give the jobs to incompetents and homosexuals and take women away from their primary function as homemakers and caregivers and mothers…” I grinned, thinking of Rosie “…but that they discourage the competent among us. Destroy the will to succeed, to innovate. They tear at the fabric of our great land. And that’s precisely what they are meant to do. Yes!”

I let him babble on while I brushed my teeth, which was taking longer than usual. I’d brought home a bad taste in my mouth. I’d been involved with murderers before, with crazies and killers who should not have been born. But never a whole group of lowlifes.

And certainly, never with anyone who scraped me raw this way, exposing childhood memories of bullies who threw punches and slurs. Kike. Sheeny. Memories of adults I’d met who’d survived the Holocaust, survived the camps. Tattooed family members, friends, who had spent their childhoods starving behind barbed wire.

Tattoos, for Christ’s sake.

The phone rang. I rinsed my mouth and went to pick it up, catching another bit of Switcher on the way.

“…you don’t see our competition in the world market sacrificing their economies on the pagan altar of phony fairness. Oh, no…”

“Hello?”

“Jake? Are you there?”

“Yes, Royal, I’m here.” If he got any more ridiculous I might find myself liking him.

“You’re not gonna believe this. I got my first assignment as a warrior.” He sounded sick, his voice weak and strangled. Were they going to hang him from a strip of rawhide after all?

“And?”

“And me and Zack, we’re supposed to kill Preston Switcher.”

Okay. No rawhide. He had to slay a dragon. And the target was saying in the background: “We have been duped by those who want to see us fail. My friends, the thieves of the left want nothing so much as the complete destruction of capitalism. Remember that the next time you hear some women’s libber raving about equal pay— for what, inferior work? Destroyed homes? Criminal children? A ruined economy? A great white empire crumbled into ruins? My friends…”

Your friends, you lying, opportunistic asshole, want to kill you. And I guess I’m going to have to try to stop them.

“You still there, Jake?”

“Go to the police, Royal. Now.” I already knew what his answer would be.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? I don’t care how you feel about cops— we’re talking about murder here. Just do it.”

What was that snuffling sound? Oh, God. He was crying.

“I can’t. I got good reasons. And besides, if I go to the cops, they’ll kill me. The Command will find out and they’ll kill me.”

I tried not to sound exasperated. “Why do you think so?”

“Because there are Command guys in the police departments.”

“No. I don’t believe that.” Didn’t I?

“It’s true. Pete Ebner says so, and he would know.”

Oh, right. Like Ebner had nothing to gain by warning these punks that the police would turn them in to the Command. But it occurred to me that I had no way of knowing it wasn’t so, and if Pete Ebner wasn’t lying… My head was spinning with possibilities.