“No offense, Ms. Mills,” says Gale. “Your violence-prone videos and online chatter are asinine and inflammatory. Violence-prone people listen to you. You feed the flames. You accelerate them.”
“No, Detective. My followers see my words for what they are: exaggeration and self-promotion.”
“Tell the Proud Boys that.”
“Oh, Jesus. That’s not who I’m talking to.”
“But they’re listening,” says Gale. “Maybe not answering, but listening. You may not be capable of shooting Bennet Tarlow dead, but some of your followers might be.”
Mills takes a sip of beer, gives Gale another prying, dark-eyed look.
“Actually, Lew, I’ve thought about that,” she says. “I vet my audience and my followers by what they post and say. But... there are the silent ones. Out there. You are right.”
“Well, maybe one of them pulled that trigger.”
“You said Vernon Jeffs.”
“He could testify as a silent follower.”
“Which would make me an accessory to murder? An accomplice or even a coconspirator?”
“I’m not sure what a jury would decide.”
“What have you decided?”
“I think you should tone down the violence, Ms. Mills. I don’t want blood on your hands. You have beautiful, innocent hands.”
She gives him a surprised look.
“I meant nothing flirtatious or suggestive by that.”
“Oh, okay.”
With a small smile, she sips bourbon and chases it with the beer.
“I still want you on my podcast,” she says. “But the other reason I wanted to meet you was something Frank’s wife, Cathy, said to me one night over drinks. She said Lew Gale is the gentlest person on earth, and she thought we would like each other. Opposites, you know. She told me to find the Los Angeles Times feature on you. It was a great piece. And your face in the picture broke my heart. An Acjacheme brave. Beautiful and innocent, like how you see my hands.”
One of which she sets on one of Gale’s, pats it twice, and takes it off.
“So, why did you call me today?” she asks.
“I want to talk to King Bear of the Grizzly Braves. He posts calls to violence.”
Geronima gives Gale a long look, some disappointment undisguised within.
“Why bother, if you’ve arrested Jeffs?”
“He claims he was hired.”
“By King Bear?”
“That’s why I need to talk to him.”
Mills studies Gale again, long and cautiously.
“King Bear is Tony Rueda,” she says. “He plays puffed up and violent, but he’s really just a petulant child. A braided pony tail and cool bolo ties, but he’s a pretendian. He has one hundred percent no native blood that he can prove. So far as murder for hire, Tony doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. None of us do. You’re much more afraid of us than we deserve.”
“What does he do when he’s not posting or in class?”
“He works weekends at an indoor shooting range in Oceanside. Iron Sights.”
“Good with a handgun, then,” he says.
“He’s good. I’ve shot with him.”
“Twenty-twos?”
“Yes. He sold me one not long ago. An aluminum twenty-two, semiautomatic. Light as a feather, purse-sized and rose-finished. I wanted it for self-defense. Eight shots. He said it was inaccurate outside of six feet. But a good carry for a chick. Sold me a gun purse made especially for it, too, in matching rose leather with white rose petals embossed. It opens easy, and the gun grip is right there and you can draw it fast. Separate compartment from your lip gloss and credit cards.”
Gale smiles at Geronima Mills’s humor.
“I liked his post a couple of days back,” she says. “On the website killwildcoast.org. The one about Wildcoast being a white fascist utopia and the mountain lion that tore apart Bennet Tarlow getting a golden statue at the mission.”
Gale shrugs. “Okay, King Bear is a poser. But what about the Brunette Bombshell?”
“That’s Tammy Tarango,” says Geronima. “She runs a gator park outside Orlando. Has some Seminole, but she’s far, far away from hiring Vernon Jeffs.”
“Hatchet Man?”
“Bill Custer, doomsday prepper in Missouri.”
“Hmmm.”
Gale sips his bourbon and beer. Feels that little shiver, that hint of luck, of power coming on. Things he’s felt before with bourbon and beer and Marilyn before the war.
“And, to be honest,” says Geronima, “I called you because Frank told me you were a genuine warrior, and that we would like each other.”
Her eyes light a little. “Old-fashioned tribal matchmakers,” says Geronima. “So Frank and Cathy.”
“Mom said that about you, too,” says Gale.
Geronima looks out a window and Gale notes the long evening sunlight waning on her face in profile, the orange rays illuminating one eye, her catlike smile.
A smile that vanishes when she turns to Gale.
“I saw some strange things out at the Wildcoast site two nights ago,” she says. “Big excavators and dozers, heavy-duty augurs, high-power water hose engines like the fire departments have. Nine total monster machines, not counting the generators. Gigantic floodlights beaming down — those white-hot towers of lights they use for freeway work at night.”
“What time?”
“Four in the morning.”
“What were you doing way out there?”
“I go out to the streams and the hills sometimes. For first light. Where the three o’clock ghosts can’t follow. You get those?”
“They’re pretty punctual.”
Gale thinks of the Empire Excavators vehicles, of Kate Hicks, the supervisor who recognized him, the shovel laborer hand-digging a percolation test pit, joking about gold and big valuable crystals.
“Were there company logos on the equipment?”
“Too dark to say. Before dawn they killed the lights. Streamed away in their pickups and vans. Like vampires running for home. The night shift, I assume. Left all the flatbeds and the heavy machinery in place. Lights and all. I hunkered down in a stand of cottonwoods down by the creek. Wrapped in my coat. Dozed off and woke up two hours later to a bright, sunny morning. Looked out at the destruction and all the equipment. All shut down. Resting. No men. Odd.”
Gale checks his watch.
“I need to see it,” he says. “Come with me if you’d like.”
Geronima finishes the bourbon and beer and gets off her stool. “I’ll get the tip.”
Gale lays some bills on the bar top, and they step from the dark bar into the evening.
Gale beholds the broad grassy swale where the alleged percolation test was being conducted.
Approaching in the golden light, he sees big mounds of loose dirt and a wall of unearthed boulders strewn in a wide circle. Looks like some prehistoric ruin, or maybe a fallen temple, he thinks.
Cranes and booms rise against the darkening sky, anchored by their tonnage. Two white pickup trucks, with PacWest Mining emblems: snowcapped mountains and a blue lake. The unlit floodlight towers lean and glimmer dully.
Gales notes that the surrounding earth has been leveled by bulldozers, flayed and flattened by their steel treads.
Climbing and pulling their ways up the pile of rock, Gale and Mills reach the lip of a deep pit. Gale feels that light-headed vertigo as he looks down.
What had been a six-by-four-foot pit dug by one man is now roughly fifty feet in diameter and thirty feet deep. He sees the shine of water down there, just before the last sunlight is snuffed out.
“What do you make of this?” asks Mills.
“Maybe it really is a perc test,” says Gale. “They hit the groundwater. Now the hydrologists have to decide if there’s enough room to drain an entire city or build sewers.”