Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (10 page)

“Royal flush!” Rosie said. We looked at each other, and I knew we were both thinking about Royal, our plumber’s-helper client, and how close he was to going down the toilet. Damn. Couldn’t I just be happy about my poker hand?

I got up to refill the chip bowls and replenish drinks. Rosie wanted a Mount Tam, Artie switched to Coke. Dan wanted ice water. Pauline got up to pour herself another glass of merlot and took care of the ale, Coke, and ice water while I poured chips. I was surprised. Maybe she wasn’t so bad, after all. She didn’t pinch me again, either, but she did come a little close in the small kitchen, remarking softly that if we didn’t have a professional relationship she would find me attractive. I wouldn’t call what we had a professional relationship, since she’ll only talk to Rosie, but I didn’t correct her because I didn’t want her thinking I was interested. I definitely was not. I’ve gone swimming with enough sharks. There comes a time in a man’s life when a nice goldfish starts to look pretty good.

She went back to the table and flirted with Dan some more, but she’d already dumped him by the end of the evening.

Next morning, I cooked a breakfast of coffee, eggs, and toast, unrolled the
Chronicle,
and sat down for a slow beginning.

Unfortunately, the news made my heart beat faster than I wanted it to. Below the fold on page one was a story about a rash of vandalism the night before. A black church in Berkeley had been defaced with epithets; a Jewish cemetery in Oakland had been scrawled with swastikas, headstones tipped and broken. A gay bar in San Francisco had taken a brick through the front window and a patron had been slightly injured. In that last case, one of the vandals had been spotted roaring away on a motorcycle, and there seemed to be a pickup truck involved too. But no one had gotten a license number.

Things like this happened from time to time, but not usually so many at once. I thought about Skink and his new motorcycle. The one he was earning. Maybe by vandalizing a cemetery? Spray-painting a church? Putting a brick through a gay-bar window? I found myself hoping the men and boys of the Aryan Command were the ones responsible for all of it. That they had, indeed, committed all these nauseating terrorist acts.

I wanted the warriors who’d been snickering at Thor’s the day before to be the guilty ones because I didn’t want to believe there was more than one bunch of violent, moronic yahoos in the Bay Area.

I couldn’t wait to go to their party that night.

The party was at the house in San Rafael that I’d heard about way back at the beginning of this mess. It was big, but just your basic ranch style, backing up to a wooded hill north of downtown, close enough to 101 to catch a steady freeway hum even now, hours after the northbound rush from San Francisco to Sonoma.

Rosie had offered to cut herself loose for the night and come along as my date, but Royal had made it very clear that this was more than a party, he was bringing me and I couldn’t bring anyone. I wasn’t in yet. I think Rosie was disappointed. She’d been planning to wear some black lace-up boots, a leather miniskirt, a blond wig, and a couple of earrings in each ear. I promised I’d take her to Thor’s the next night.

The owners of the house were a couple I’d seen once before, at Thor’s. Royal introduced us. Their names were Hal and Helen Harte. Hal greeted people at the door. Helen seemed to be in charge of serving chips.

Hal and Helen Harte were beyond mousy.

Helen was around five-seven and so was Hal. Her dishwater hair was teased and combed into a country-music nightmare that made her small, pinched features look even smaller. Or maybe it was a wig and her real hair looked like his— that colorless, thin, brownish stuff that never seems to comb properly, always looks dry and musty, and always seems to allow for an unwanted view of pink scalp.

They both should have shaved their heads, but the look would not have gone with their wardrobes. Their clothes had no holes, no mends, but managed nevertheless to look shabby and cheap— and tacky.

Hal was at least fifteen years older than Helen, around fifty, I guessed. As on that first night at the bar, he was wearing suit pants, a dress shirt with a frayed collar, and a thin tie. She was in a pastel blue skirt and a white blouse with a ruffled front. The kind of outfits that would have been considered appropriate office wear in 1963.

The house was mousy too. Pale pink walls. Sheer white curtains that looked like Helen’s blouse, blue shag carpeting the color of her skirt, a plaid Early American couch, and a glass-topped coffee table.

I trailed Royal to his first stop, the food. Very cosmopolitan. Good old American potato chips, undoubtedly from Idaho. Pretzels, by way of Germany. And tortilla chips. Maybe they thought Davy Crockett invented those at the Alamo.

Several of the warriors were there, including Royal’s buddy Zack and the two friends he’d been with the day before, Skink and Washburn. A couple of teenage girls too. Unfortunately, one of them was Leslie. She either didn’t notice us come in or was playing it cool.

Pete Ebner was there too, of course, since this was a party for his warriors. He was sitting on a folding chair next to Red. Floyd was deep in conversation with Karl, who was, once again, dressed all in black.

I was trying to get a fix on the size of the whole group. There were the ones I’d met more or less formally— Pete, Red, Floyd, Karl, Hal and Helen, Steve, Zack and his pals Washburn and Skink, Leslie— and a dozen or so I’d seen hanging around. Some of those, including Leslie’s friends, were there at the party. Was that the size of the entire Bay Area Command? A couple dozen? Were there other Bay Area groups, say in San Francisco or down on the Peninsula? Was this two dozen just the tip of the iceberg or the whole shebang? Were they one cell in a national network? International? Royal seemed to think they had big-time bad-ass connections all over the place. Maybe they did, but I wasn’t sure they could get it together to make a long-distance phone call.

I had a sudden image: guys like Steve, half a dozen of them in as many cities, running secret idiot-societies, e-mailing each other at night, and pretending to make plans for world domination they couldn’t possibly carry out with the personnel they attracted. I thought I’d hold onto that image.

Pete Ebner was watching me.

He got up from his folding chair and marched over to where I stood with Royal.

“Royal knows he’s supposed to pick his guests carefully. I hope that’s the case with you?”

I curled my lip, Elvis-style.

“Listen, Royal mentioned there was this party, and you said I could come, so I came. I like you guys’ ideas. I think it’s time we turned things around a little.” Was I protesting too much? Should I keep the political proclamations down?

“Yeah? How far are you willing to go personally to do that?”

“Far as I need to. Time we stopped the bastards before they stop us.” Any old bastards; fill in the blanks. “Support the Command any way I can. Do what’s needed. That’s what I’m willing to do.”

Talk about getting in character.

He quirked a fuzzy blond eyebrow and lifted half his mouth in an unpleasant smile.

“You want to cook us supper?”

Royal laughed. I didn’t. Ebner probably insulted the warriors by calling them “girls.”

“Whatever it takes. But there are things I’m better at.”

“Maybe we’ll talk about that later.”

By this time, the room had filled up. A few more adults, six or seven kids who were either warriors or hangers-on. Did they allow hangers-on? Technically, I thought, I was one.

“You want to sit in, here, that’s okay. As long as you know that everything— everything— we say stays in this room. Royal—” he pointed a finger at the kid’s chest “—Jason messes up, you pay for it.” Ebner turned away.

Tough. Scary. But if he was worried about tales being told, that could mean I’d actually hear something useful during this impressive social event.

Royal got busy with his friends, punching shoulders and looking masculine; Pete had returned to his seat beside Red. Floyd saw me, gave me an index-finger salute, but kept on talking to Karl. Hal and Helen, our hosts, were taking a break from their duties, standing side by side in the doorway of the kitchen. So pale, so colorless, so quiet. Suddenly the lyrics to “St. James Infirmary” started running through my head. I joined them.

“Nice turnout.”

Helen nodded. They both looked at me as if we hadn’t been introduced fifteen minutes before.

“My name’s Jason? Jason Dormeister. Royal’s cousin?”

“Yeah, we know,” Hal said, flickering a quick smile my way.

“You host a lot of these soirees?”

Helen frowned. Maybe she disapproved of the foreign word.

“We all have our ways of contributing. We feel that it’s our duty to entertain the warriors. Show them we care about them.”

“Sure, I can understand that. Do you have other kinds of meetings here too?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know— just besides parties for the warriors.”

“We do whatever we can.”

“I was kind of surprised,” Hal said abruptly, “to see you here tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

He shook his head. “Well, we’re real careful about who gets to come to things. But Pete seems to think you’re okay.”

My take on this was that Pete did not at all think I was okay, but had decided to try me out, or Steve and Red had decided that after our chat at Thor’s. This could be some kind of test, or maybe they just needed new members badly enough to take a chance. Once again, I went with the possibility I liked the best. They needed members. Desperately.

“So does Floyd. Think you’re okay. And Leslie likes you too.” This contribution came from Helen, with a half-smile on her thin lips.

I smiled back. “Well, I think Floyd’s a great guy. Pete, too, of course. I think—” I gazed fondly out at the assembled crowd “—they’re all great guys. I can’t believe my good luck at finding you people— that my own cousin would know you. I got to say, it’s a thrill.”

A bit of color rose to Helen’s cheeks.

“Yes, it is exciting, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So you’re members then? Of the Aryan Command?” I put as much reverence as I could into the name.

“Oh, yes.”

“Wow. Listen, I really want to get into the group, but how do you join?”

Helen opened her mouth to answer, but Hal broke in. “When people get to know you, they invite you.”

“I see. Well, I hope that happens to me soon. I really want to do my part. Do you have to be invited by a member of the Inner Circle?”

“No, but they have to approve the invitation. We have to know you feel the way we do about things.”

“Well, how exactly do you feel about things? I mean…”

Hal held out his hand and began ticking off points on his fingers. “We are white people. We are proud of being white people, the creators of all decent civilizations, all noble causes.” I thought the Egyptians and the Chinese would get a laugh out of that. “We feel that white people have a right to be proud and to maintain themselves separately from nonwhites like Jews and Mexicans and Africans. We feel that our U.S. government has been taken over by the forces of the nonwhites, by the evil ZOG, and that the government is attempting to dilute our noble European blood and destroy the country we love. Which would, of course, destroy the world. It is our duty to prevent that from happening. To do anything we must to protect and defend our white honor.” He was on his second set of fingers by this time, but I was still back at “the evil ZOG.” What in the name of God was
ZOG?
“We have a sacred duty to fight the forces of darkness and raise the banner of white people to sovereignty.”

He stopped and dropped his hands to his sides.

“Wow,” I said, before I remembered I’d already used that one. Should have gone for “zowie.” “Did you memorize that? That’s really amazing. I can’t tell you how excited I get just hearing that, you know, hearing the things I been thinking all these years set out so clear and true.” This was too easy. Maybe my future was in the theater.

Hal seemed exhausted by his recitation. He nodded vaguely, mumbled something about chips, and wandered away.

Helen watched him go, then turned back to me. “Yes, well, you know you can’t say those things everywhere. The world has been made unsafe for white people. And we’re going to take back the world.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, we are.” I smiled at her. “With women like you.” Helen smiled and blushed. “Very exciting. Very.” Yeah. The group was as exciting as a grenade and she was as exciting as heartburn. “How many members do we have now, anyway? Here in the Bay Area? And wherever?”

She smiled. “That’s a secret.” I should have guessed.

“Have you been in the Command long?”

Helen nodded, her eyes moving slowly over the crowd in her living room. “A few years. Not from the very beginning, but soon after. Right after I saw the black helicopter.” There it was again. I’d heard Leslie refer to black helicopters.

“I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know about those helicopters, Helen.”

“Don’t be ashamed. They’re part of a government conspiracy. They belong to the UN.” A slightly confused look crossed her pinched face. “Or to a secret faction of our own federal tyranny. There are secret underground hangars all over Napa County. They’ve been seen in other places too.”

Conspiracy. Always possible, I guess. But I tend to think the kinds of control freaks who’d be into world domination couldn’t manage to share a house, let alone a plan. They’d be killing each other off after about a week.

I wanted to ask her which of the members had actually been in at the very beginning, but thought that might be pushing it. Maybe the information would just slip out if we kept on talking.

“I was wondering, I never heard of this
zog
thing Hal mentioned. The evil
zog?
What is that?”

“The Zionist Occupational Government. The secret Jew government that is ruling our country.”

Uh-huh. Just my luck. My own relatives were ruling the country and no one was letting me in on it. I looked thoughtful. “Yeah. You know, that makes a lot of sense. More and more of them…” I nodded, scowling.