Shadows Reel (Joe Pickett #22)(69)

He thought for a second about putting the box under his arm and exiting the store without paying. Better that than agreeing to be robbed by this man.

“Twenty dollars or put it back,” the man said. “Then get out, antifa.”

Randy tried to stare down the clerk, but he couldn’t see his eyes well enough through the thick plastic. What he could see was that the little man seemed very agitated.

He considered his options. If he left the plastic bags, he’d be forced to stand in the street and get soaked. If he walked out with them, the store owner might either pull a gun and shoot him in the back or call the police. If the Asian store owner called the cops, he’d be easy to find since he’d be standing at the mouth of the alley a block away.

Or he could pay the ransom.

Randy slid a twenty through the slot and exclaimed loudly that it was fucking highway robbery.

Before he pushed open the door, Randy paused and looked over his shoulder at the man. He was still there, wavering behind the uneven plastic like an apparition.

“You’ll get yours, you fucking . . . capitalist.”

He whispered the last word. He hoped the owner heard it and it stung.

“Get out and don’t come back. Store for neighborhood, not you.”

As Randy stood on the street punching a head hole and armholes through the plastic garbage bag before pulling it on, he looked back at the bodega and thought, Yours will be the first place we burn down, old man.



* * *



—

Still steaming from the encounter at the bodega, Randy returned to his position as sentinel and realized right away he’d missed nothing on the street. Hard rain came down in sheets and angry black water shot down the gutters into storm drains. There were no protesters out, nor cops. The only vehicles he saw were delivery vans sluicing through the running water.

Across the street was a small urban park. There were benches and some kind of sculpture and several small dome tents lit from the inside. Probably homeless, he thought. Aside from the tents, there were no live human beings milling around there. Wasn’t this the square designated as the staging area for the street action?

Had Axel got the date or time wrong? Or the location? That didn’t seem like Axel.

Randy drew out the radio and keyed it near his mouth.

“There’s nothing going on out here,” he said. Then: “Over.”

“Stay in position,” Axel responded.

Randy sighed and rolled his eyes. Rainwater pattered incessantly on his makeshift plastic raincoat.



* * *



—

After ten more minutes of nothing to report, Randy wiped his wet face clean with the cuff of his shirt and retreated back down Gum Wall alley. He wanted to get under the overhang and out of the rain. What could it hurt? He could still see most of the street.

The pounding of the rain hushed when he reentered the covered alley. He kept to the shadowed side of the right wall so that if Axel looked in his direction, he wouldn’t see his outline from the streetlights on the square. Randy didn’t want to invite Axel’s wrath.

The mouth of the alley provided an odd kind of acoustic anomaly. Even though Randy couldn’t see Axel and the Blade deep in the shadows near the cache, he could hear them very clearly.

Axel was holding court. And it sounded to Randy like Axel was talking about antifa.

“They really don’t have any realistic goals,” Axel said. “It’s all bullshit from trust-fund militants with daddy issues. They say they want to abolish the police. They say they want no government and no capitalism and they want to return the country to indigenous tribes. But they all have the newest iPhone. It’s all just fucking insane.”

The Blade laughed. He said, “But, man, they love you.”

“Yeah, they do. That’s how smart they are.”

Randy felt a chill run through him. He felt as if someone had punched him in the chest.

Axel said, “Remember those child soldiers in Myanmar? How fucking incompetent and fucked up they were? Well, compared to the antifa guys I’ve met, those boys were highly trained warriors.

“There really aren’t that many of them altogether,” Axel continued. “It’s a media myth. There are maybe just a couple hundred in the whole country at most. Most of them are concentrated in Portland. The reason people think antifa is a big deal is because they keep recirculating. They get arrested but not prosecuted, and they’re back on the street in hours. It’s a shell game.

“And they’re only good for one thing,” Axel said. “They’ll help us destabilize the status quo, even though they don’t know it. Them and the hard-core BLM guys. They’re a means to an end, as far as I’m concerned. Both groups are easy to manipulate if you press the right buttons. With BLM, of course, you need cops to confront them and injure or kill one on video. With antifa, you just turn them loose and don’t arrest them or prosecute them for anything. It emboldens them if they don’t get any pushback.”

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” the Blade said.

“Yeah. We can’t go at the leaders in D.C. directly for what they did to us. It’s impractical and they’re all hiding behind walls and fences. But we can light the cities on fire and expose them as weak and spineless. The media will be on our side. They always are.”