Cold Quarry Read Online Free PDF Page B

at Chester besides Elo getting sick.”
    “Yeah?”
    “He took me to a couple of meetings to see if I could help him sort things out.”
    “Sort what out? What kind of meetings?”
    “Ever hear of a group calling themselves the Stonewall Rangers Brigade?”
    “Sounds like a bad name for a country-and-western band.”
    “Well, this is no musical group. They’re active around this area. I’d guess you’d call them a militia for want of a better term. Named themselves after a unit from the Civil War.”
    “You’re talking about a bunch of fools with rifles.” My masked attacker was beginning to come into clearer focus.
    “Yeah. Except these people aren’t exactly fools—at least some of them aren’t anyway. They’re full of white supremacist crap, and they seem pretty serious about it.”
    “I thought most of their kind went underground after the whole McVeigh execution and all that.”
    “Apparently not—not around here at least.”
    “Okay, but what’s any of this got to do with Carew? You say he took you to a couple of meetings? I find it hard to imagine Chester having anything to do with white supremacists,” I said.
    “Me either, but here’s what happened. A few of them started showing up on his land out there where you were today. Since he was the only one hunting or doing anything on that acreage, they wanted to know if Chester would give them permission to use part of his land for some of their”—he mocked quotation marks with his fingers—”training exercises, as they called them.”
    “So what, Chester let them on his land?”
    “No. At least he said he told them no at first, but they kept after him. Invited him to several of their meetings. He finally asked if I’d go with him to check them out.”
    “Why didn’t he just call the cops?”
    “You know Chester. He said he was going to make up his own mind before calling in the police or anything.”
    “But if he let them use his land and they were ever engaged in anything illegal, he could’ve been drawn into it.”
    “I told him the same thing, but I guess it was more complicated than that.”
    “How come?”
    “He wouldn’t say.”
    “So you went to a couple of meetings with him?”
    “Yeah, some farm over near Hurricane. Seemed like just a bunch of bucktoothed crackers running around wearing camo to me, but then I noticed something. A few of ‘em had better credentials and were deadly serious.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean most of these folks seemed like they barely knew how to hold a rifle, but a couple of the leaders and a small group of others were experienced people.”
    “Ex-military?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What did they talk about?”
    “The head man gets up and gives some lecture about vague threats from all the Jews and enemies foreign and domestic and how we all need to be prepared. Rahrah-rah.”
    I shook my head.
    “I know. Hard to believe anyone would buy into it, but most of these characters just sat there nodding like bobble-heads.”
    “What did you say to Chester?”
    “To tell you the truth, I found the whole idea of these people out there with their little weapons pretty pathetic, especially since we’ve got legitimate military ops and people strung out all over the globe. That’s what I told him.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said I was probably right.”
    “You think one of these militia yahoo types is the shooter who put a bullet in Chester’s back?”
    “Fifty-fifty between them and some drunk hunter. Like I said, most of ‘em didn’t look like they could shoot straight if their lives depended on it.”
    “But you said there were some serious ones too.”
    “Right.”
    “What about the guy that gave me this?” I indicated the contusion at the side of my mouth.
    He winced. “Now that, I’d say for sure, was one of the yahoos.”
    “This sounds like something the FBI would be interested in.”
    “I suppose.”
    “You and Chester consider calling them?”
    “I