Bluetick Revenge Page 25

  It had been a long day, so I asked one of the deputies if I could take a nap in his SUV. I put the back of the passenger seat down as far as it would go and fell asleep.

  By early morning we had more law enforcement and more equipment. Someone’s radio crackled at around six and I heard a male on the other end say, “You’ll have a westbound coal train stopping just east of the tunnel in about thirty minutes. The engineer has been advised to stop before entering the tunnel.”

  “We’ll have to search every car,” Livingston said. “See if he’s hiding on top of one or in between two of the cars.”

  “Could be underneath one of them, too,” a deputy said.

  An FBI agent I did not know offered me coffee and I gladly accepted. We waited.

  I heard the train even before it reached Rollinsville. I looked east every few minutes and eventually the train came into view. Then I heard the squeak of metal on metal as the engineer began braking. It was a long train, maybe a half mile long, and it was powered by four diesel locomotives. The ground vibrated as the train neared us. The engineer brought her to a stop just a hundred yards or so from the east portal, but the diesel engines continued to run and the noise was defening.

  Some of the feds started at the Rollinsville end of the train, at the caboose, and began working their way toward us. Livingston and I and the deputies who had arrived last night started at the first engine and worked our way east toward the caboose. Everyone was armed.

  One of us had to climb up the ladder on each car to look into the top of it. It dawned on me that Bugg could be buried under a mound of coal and we might not see him.

  At some point Prince trotted down a few cars to the east and started barking wildly. Now he was jumping up at one of the railroad cars, howling, and generally going crazy. “I think the dog’s got something,” I said.

  Livingston came up to me and motioned the two deputies to approach the other side of the car.

  I saw the head of one of the deputies as he climbed to the top of the car from the ladder on the other side. “There’s nobody up here,” he said. “Just coal.”

  Prince was still going nuts. Livingston and I exchanged glances. Then he started climbing the ladder on our side until he could see into the car. Holding on to the ladder with one hand, he set his pistol down on the top of the car and picked up his radio. “The dog is alerting on this car,” he said. “We think he might be hiding beneath the coal, but I’m wearing a four-hundred-dollar suit. I’m going to fire some rounds into the car to make sure nobody is hiding. Ignore the gunfire. Repeat, ignore the gunfire.”

  I thought he was bluffing, but he fired three rounds right into the coal. Suddenly a figure covered in black dust appeared from beneath the coal, jumped to the ground, and sprinted toward the trees. “Go get him, Prince,” I said.

  It didn’t take the eighty-five-pound Prince long to catch the 250-pound Bugg. Prince lunged from behind and took a bite out of Bugg’s thigh. Now Bugg was on the ground. Snarling and snapping, Prince was coming at him from all directions. Bugg raised an arm to swat the dog, but Prince sank his teeth into the arm and wouldn’t let go. I trotted over to them, aiming my Glock at Bugg with my right hand, and used my left hand to pull Prince off him. Livingston and the deputies joined us. Livingston cuffed him, then got on the radio and shared the good news.

  50

  ANVIL TURNED OUT TO BE a graduate journalism student who had hoped to make it big with a book about his life and times with the Sons of Satan. His real name was Evan Roberts. He had penetrated the gang with good intentions, but got in too deep. I was still pissed about his role in the snake incident, but I realized he had done what he could to protect Karlynn and me from Bugg. Still, he had committed crimes and would be prosecuted.

  I talked Matt into defending Anvil. We visited him at the jail where he was awaiting trial. He was less scruffy-looking now. In a small room with no windows Matt explained the criminal justice process and conducted his first interview with his new client. We wanted to see how much he knew and how much help he could give the feds in return for a deal.

  Anvil didn’t know anything about Rankin’s death because that had been before he had joined the Sons of Satan. He could testify that Bugg and Mongoose discussed options with regard to Lowell, but he knew nothing about Skull’s involvement. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for us to realize that Anvil knew enough about the gang and its operations to sink Bugg and the Sons of Satan for good. For two years he had been part of Bugg’s inner circle. During those two years he had lived alone in a small cabin near Jamestown, Colorado, and he had kept a daily journal about his life in the gang.

  Matt looked at me and said, “What do you think? You were a federal prosecutor.”

  “They might relocate him if they think he has enough to offer. If not, you can probably still get a pretty good deal. If he has to do time, he can use it to write his book. He might make some money on a book like that.”

  “I’m going to call it A Son of Satan,” he said.

  “I’ve got to ask you one question,” I said. “You didn’t tell Bugg you saw Karlynn with me. At the bar in Longmont you told my partner you hadn’t seen her for months. And you pretended not to recognize me when I saw you at Bugg’s house. Bugg tried to kill me three times. Once up in Idaho, once with the snake, and once by sending his army to my house. How did Bugg know what I had done?”

  “The guys in Idaho saw that you had Colorado plates and a bluetick coonhound, so they thought you might be the guy that took Bugg’s dog. When they described you and your truck to Bugg, he gave them the go-ahead. Then you came back here, gave him the money, and told him that story about Karlynn and his dog. He started having doubts. He thought he had jumped the gun in Idaho. It was hard for him to believe that you were lying, because you had given him so much money. He went back and forth. He did everything he could think of to try to figure out whether you were lying. He even had some guys check to see if there really is a Lewis and Clark Trailer Park in Coeur d’Alene. That’s when he decided you had been suckering him all along. That’s when he told us to put the snake in your house.”

  We said good-bye to Anvil, and as we left the building, Matt said, “I’ve got a better name for his book.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I Was a Thirty-Year-Old Dumbshit.”

  “I’ve got a name for his book, too,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Bluetick Revenge.”

  51

  DURING THE NEXT FEW MONTHS things began to return to normal. I had coffee with Kendra Carlson a few times. I told her Karlynn was safe and perhaps on her way to the life she wanted. I was honest with her about Jayne. I told her about my dream.

  “That’s easy,” she said. “You’re in a china shop. Jayne is in China. She wants to bring something back.”

  “What about the Ford Taurus?”

  “Taurus is the symbol of the bull,” she said.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re the bull.”

  “I’m the bull?”

  “You’re the bull in a china shop. You’re afraid you’ll break something.”

  Though I enjoyed talking with her, we figured out fairly quickly that we were not a good match. Karlynn was right; Kendra was too high-maintenance for me. She wasn’t the kind of woman who was going to allow Buck and Wheat to sleep on her bed.

  I spent more time working out and practicing my karate. It was May and I enjoyed taking the dogs on walks. In my spare time I testified in front of a federal grand jury. I told the truth about almost everything.

  One day, as I was coming out of the federal courthouse, I walked over to Coors Field to meet Scott so we could spend an evening watching the Rockies lose to the Dodgers. When the game was over, we decided to grab a beer and ended up walking right past the spot where Hal had been murdered. I pointed it out to Scott.

  “Do you ever think about Skull?” he asked.

  “Every day.”

  “Me too,�
� he said.

  “Even if we could get to him, what would we do with him? Mongoose and Bugg aren’t talking about Lowell, and neither is anyone else. Anvil knows nothing about Skull. Nobody has enough evidence to prosecute him.”

  Scott didn’t answer me.

  “I don’t think I could kill him,” I said. “Not unless it was in self-defense.”

  We continued walking. Scott remained silent for a while, then said, “How would you feel about kidnapping him and burning every building on that compound to the ground?”

  “I could live with that,” I said.

  We found a sports bar and went inside. We ordered two beers and some nachos. Scott likes sour cream and green chilis, so I asked the waiter to make sure that stuff was on the side.

  Scott said, “Remember when I told your brother we could jump into the compound, and he made some comment about our corpses landing in Iowa?”

  “He has no sense of humor when it comes to skydiving,” I said.

  “May is the ideal time for skydiving in northern Idaho,” he said. “Statistically, Idaho has less wind in May than in any other month.”

  “I think a small plane flying a few thousand feet over the compound on a sunny day would be pretty obvious,” I said. “They’d shoot us before we landed.”

  “I ain’t talking about a small plane,” Scott said. “I ain’t talking about daytime or a few thousand feet.”

  52

  I HAD BROKEN MY SHARE of rules. But usually they had been silly or unimportant rules. Staying in the girls’ dorm after midnight, bringing prescription drugs over the border from Canada, things like that. Now we were considering conspiracy, kidnapping, and arson.

  I had been taught that the end never justifies the means, but when I analyzed that statement, I began to question it. Wouldn’t you have to weigh the two and decide each case on its own merits? In some cases might the end justify the means? It came down to a choice between an absolute morality, in which certain acts were just wrong, and a utilitarian morality that required weighing competing interests. True, society would deteriorate quickly if we could commit crimes without fear of legal consequences, but were there cases in which it was desirable to teach someone a lesson and destroy his base of operations? If so, who gets to decide?

  These were the thoughts going through my mind as we sat in Scott’s “war room,” finalizing our plan. There were five of us: Scott, Matt, Troy, me, and Troy’s friend Jeff Smart. Jeffis a pilot. He owns an air charter service called Smart Charter, though we sometimes call it Get Smart. This was our third and final meeting.

  “Now, the trick to making this work,” Scott said in conclusion, “is total surprise. We have to get in, do our work, and get out without getting caught.

  “Does anyone have any questions or concerns?” Scott asked. No response.

  “Does anybody have any second thoughts?” I asked. “If any of us falter, we all go down. So if you’re having second thoughts, now is the time to say so. Once Scott and I exit the aircraft, there’s no turning back.” Again, no response.

  “All right,” Scott said, “see you in Idaho.”

  53

  I HAD BEEN SKYDIVING BEFORE, a few times in the Marines and a few times just for fun, but all my jumps had been low-altitude static-line jumps, the kind where the parachute opens as soon as you exit from the aircraft. I had never experienced free fall.

  Now I was in Jeff’s luxury business jet ten thousand feet above Idaho. It was dark, as it usually is at three a.m. Jeff was flying the aircraft. Matt was there to help us with our gear and to close the door once we were out of the aircraft. It might look funny if Jeff landed with the door wide open.

  Scott and I were going to do a tandem dive because he felt that if we jumped separately we might land too far apart on the ground and screw up the whole plan. My aura must have been the color of Grey Poupon.

  We had done our homework. We had hiked four miles to the compound over pretty rough terrain to get an idea of the layout of the buildings, the number of people around, and so forth. We had found a rock formation overlooking the compound about a half mile from it. Using one of Scott’s telescopes, we had observed the compound and its inhabitants for a solid day, then hiked back out during the evening.

  Now I stood near the door of the jet. I looked at Scott and in that moment, more than any other, I saw the difference between us. I was going to jump in spite of my fear; Scott was smiling.

  I saw a flashing beam of light below, signaling the aircraft. Troy had purchased one of those two-million-candlepower lights that you can plug into your car’s cigarette lighter. Then Jeff’s cell phone rang. “Here we go,” Jeff said.

  “Not yet,” Scott said.

  “We’re going to miss—”

  I never got to finish my sentence. We were falling through the night at 120 miles per hour. I can’t describe the sheer terror of it. My body tensed and I was not allowing myself to breathe. At times I lost track of my brother’s signal and the lights of Coeur d’Alene. I had no idea how high we were, how close we were to the ground. We could have been ten feet from it and I wouldn’t have known.

  Then I heard a snap, felt a tug, and we were floating toward Earth. “Okay,” Scott said, “here we go.”

  I saw the small lake that we had seen on the map. Then I saw the buildings. Most of the lights were out.

  “Ten seconds,” Scott said. “Remember how to land.”

  Then we were on the ground. No broken bones, all our equipment intact. We shed the parachute and harnesses, then put our face masks on. “Put that shit over there,” Scott said as he pointed to some trees. “We want to take it with us when we leave.” I picked up the chute and harnesses and carried them over to the spot Scott had indicated, then came back to him.

  There were a number of structures. One was the main residence, a gigantic structure made of logs and stone. It looked like a resort lodge. There were two smaller bunkhouses. There was a pavilion, which I assume was used for church services and hate rallies. There was a barn used for storage of equipment, and another for horses.

  “I’ll do the bunkhouses,” he said. “You do the main house, the pavilion, and the barn.”

  “Not the horse barn,” I said.

  “No, the other one, the one with the equipment. Keep a low profile. If one of us doesn’t find Skull in the chaos, we’ll meet back over by those trees. Don’t set fire to all sides of the building; just douse one side. We want anyone who is in these buildings to get out safely.”

  I walked briskly to the main house. I had three one-quart plastic bottles filled with gasoline. I doused one side of the structure with gasoline, then lit it. I ran to the barn and repeated the act, then did the same at the pavilion. I saw the sides of bunkhouses in flame. I heard Scott’s firecrackers go off, so I lit mine and hid against the back side of the pavilion. It was chaos, flames and noise everywhere.

  People started coming out of the house and the bunkhouses. It looked as though five came out of the house, three out of one bunkhouse, and two out of the other. A total of ten, all men. And the two German shepherds.

  Skull was one of the three who emerged from the first bunkhouse. He was wearing the jean jacket with all the Aryan Resistance garbage on it. His buddies seemed confused, but he appeared alert. He made the mistake of straying from his pals and began to walk behind the bunkhouse. I knew that’s where Scott was, so I slipped over to our agreed-upon departure point near the trees. The buildings were really burning now.

  Skull’s mouth was a bloody mess, and I could only guess how Scott had hit him. Scott was carrying something in one arm that was about the size and shape of a large briefcase. “Let’s go, motherfucker,” Scott said. He kicked Skull in the tailbone and we headed into the forest. When we were a few hundred yards in, we tied his hands behind his back with plastic ties and gagged him by-shoving a sock in his mouth and wrapping duct tape around his head.

  “What’s that?” I asked Scott as I pointed to the metal object he had taken fro
m the compound.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said.

  We had to hike downhill about four miles to make it to the road and Uncle Ray’s camper. Ray knew nothing about our operation, but I had asked him to let me swap my truck for his camper for a week. Troy was driving the camper.

  When we were within sight of the road, I didn’t see the camper. I dialed Troy on my cell phone, and when he answered I said, “Flash your headlights for one second so we can see where you are. And don’t forget to put your mask on.”

  He did, and that was all we needed. We walked a few hundred yards west, made sure there were no other vehicles approaching, and shoved Skull into the back of the camper. We bound his legs together with duct tape, and blindfolded him.

  Skull was lying on a bed in the camper. Despite having his limbs tied together, he struggled violently at times. At other times he tried to be verbally abusive, though all we could hear was muffled noise because of the gag.

  We decided to stay put for a few hours. Driving a camper at four in the morning might have attracted undue attention. We would wait until sunrise to head out.

  Troy started the camper a little before six and headed into town to buy some coffee at a convenience store. Then we headed south, where we planned to catch the interstate and head down through Idaho, across Utah and Wyoming, and down into Colorado.

  What to do with Skull was the subject of some debate. The consensus was, we had every right to kill him, but nobody was eager to do the deed. I knew I couldn’t, and I suspected that even Scott was unwilling to go that far. The plan had been to beat the crap out of him, but he looked so helpless now, I was even questioning that. That idea had appealed to me in the abstract, but now that the opportunity had presented itself, I realized that it was more enjoyable to imagine hurting him than it would be to actually do it. It wouldn’t bring my cousin back. It wouldn’t bring Steve Lowell back.