Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(50)

“You don’t hear that every day,” Rae said.

“No, you don’t. The impression I got from the ANM guy is that they hate everybody, and they see themselves as people with nothing to lose. They’re dead-enders. Might as well die now because there’s nothing to live for. Can’t even get laid.”

“What about the other groups?” Bob asked. “Lotsa guns?”

“Some of them could be armed, not all of them. The ANM guy thought Patriotus might be the most likely to set up the 1919 website. They’re anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-whatever you got. They do work the politics, though. They leaflet, they march, they propagandize, they call their congressmen.”

Rae said, “Since we’re mostly worried about shooters, let’s go see this Forlorn group first thing.”

“One thing that bothers me,” Bob said, “is that we’re not really getting at what the 1919 site is set up for. They want somebody else to do the shooting. Even if it turns out Forlorn Hope or one of the others set up the website, that doesn’t get at the potential shooter.”

“That worries me,” Lucas agreed. “If it’s a lone wolf, somebody out there nursing his paranoia, how in the hell do we stop that? We do have some Secret Service coverage—a few people assigned to get the kids to school. They’ve scouted out places where a potential hit might start and are covering them.”

“That’s good,” Rae said.

“Gotta think about all of this,” Bob said. “They’ve taken down the website, right?”

“Yeah, but if you want to read it, I made a copy before it was taken down,” Lucas said.

“Send it to us—maybe we’ll come up with some ideas.”

“I will. And I’ll send you the files on all these groups. Read through them, see if anything strikes you. I’m not seeing much.”



* * *



—

AND THE NEXT MORNING, Rae asked Lucas, over waffles, “Did you actually read the stuff about Forlorn Hope?”

“Yeah, I think so, I sort of skimmed some of it,” Lucas said. “What about it?”

“This Mark Stapler guy, the leader. He lives in the back of a coffeehouse and the front of the place is like a clubhouse for the Forlorn. We might be walking into a whole bunch of assholes who like guns and don’t like us.”

“You want to pussy out?” Bob asked.

Rae gave him the heavy stink-eye: “You know what I think about that word.”

“I was using it in the non-vaginal sense,” Bob said. “A synonym for fraidy-cat.”

“Oh. Okay, then. No, I’m not trying to pussy out, I’m just pointing out that the files say they like guns and there may be a whole bunch of them.”

“Not so likely early in the morning,” Lucas said.

“I looked the place up and it opens up at six a.m.,” Rae said.

“But how likely is it that they have club meetings at six in the morning?” Lucas asked.

“Not likely, but maybe more likely at eleven o’clock, which is about when we’ll get there, at the pace we’re moving.”

“Then drink your coffee and let’s go,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

THE WOKE CAFé WAS IN DOVER, Delaware, a few blocks from the Dover International Speedway, according to a Google map on Lucas’s iPad. Bob said the speedway featured NASCAR races a couple of times a year, but neither Rae nor Lucas knew anything about NASCAR so they didn’t care about that.

The café was two and a half hours from Washington, and they took the Marshals Service Chevy Tahoe, Rae driving fast through traffic, through Annapolis and across the bridge to the Delaware farm country on the other side. Lucas rode shotgun, Bob sprawled in the backseat reading the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, which they’d picked up before leaving the hotel.

“Woke means aware of societal injustice, usually referring to racism, but in this case, maybe sexual discrimination against men who are involuntarily celibate,” Rae said.

Lucas said, “Hum. Might also mean you wake up when you drink their coffee.”

“Could be a pun,” Bob said. “They’re outraged by the unfairness of being incels, and they also wake you up with the coffee.”

“You gotta look at it from their perspective. There is something corrosive in the inability to get laid,” Rae continued.

From the backseat, Bob flapped a newspaper page and said, “Rae, you ever look around on the streets? You ever look at some of the guys who actually have women? Remember Elliott Horton, for Christ’s sakes?”

“Who’s Elliott Horton?” Lucas asked.

“The biggest goddamned loser criminal peckerwood you can possibly imagine, on the run for counterfeiting. When I say counterfeiting, I mean running off twenty-dollar bills on a Xerox color copier and them cutting them apart with scissors,” Bob said. “Anyway, when we caught up with him, he was living in an unpainted concrete box on the banks of the Tombigbee, and his face looked like one of those old pictures of a witch, complete with a wart on his chin, and he had about one tooth, and he had two women. My theory is, show me a guy who doesn’t have a woman, and you’re looking at a guy who’s got some other problem than not having a woman. Probably a large problem. Psychosis—something that actually repels women.”