Free The Spy's Little Zonbi by Cole Alpaugh Page B

nodded.
    Over the previous weeks, local chapters of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan had a public relations battle heating up. It began when Klan members broke up their weekly Saturday night meeting in a marshy field near Princess Anne, climbing fully hooded and robed into the backs of Ford F-150 pickup trucks, loaded with six-packs and softball bats.
    Not one of the half dozen pickups made it out of the field without ejecting at least one fat man in a white sheet, but the trucks eventually hit the pavement with bald tires screaming. Information came from press room workers who didn’t mind shooting their mouths off unless it was to a cop or some dipshit reporter. Most didn’t give a darn about the news, didn’t care about the stories folded and wrapped up inside the thick bundles. They only gave a damn that there were bundles to be made and shipped out.
    The Klan group was big on softball bats as weapons because they also fielded a fast pitch team that traveled to tournaments around the Eastern Shore. They were not so cryptically named the White Knights and were tolerated as long as they kept their language in check around the women and children. Their record was just four wins and thirteen losses so far this season, but they expected to pick things up when their clean-up hitter was paroled in early-August.
    The first night Chase showed up decked out in a crisply ironed cotton bed sheet—which Limp had helped sew together—he was welcomed without any questions. His only immediate regret was not reinforcing the hood with some sort of cardboard cone, since it kept leaning way over to one side. The point could easily have put someone’s eye out.
    Chase pulled his Mustang right up to the regular spots they used in a field outside Princess Anne and joined the activities.
    â€œ Take a six-pack,” had been Limp’s advice. “None of those boys ever turned away anybody cartin’ suds. That’s all the greetin’ card y’all be needing.”
    Limp had been right about that.
    Chase was welcomed with pats on the back of his sheet and then mostly ignored by the sixty or so beer-gutted revelers in their own dirty robes. All went about their business of lighting burn-barrels and hoisting a cross made from two by fours cinched with nylon rope. The wood stank of gasoline and was set ablaze after two kegs were tapped and bottle rockets were ceremonially fired up into the mosquito-infested night sky. Short speeches were offered by two officers, but most of what they said was impossible to understand because of their hoods and thick watermen accents.
    Chase discovered that the only things separating a KKK meeting and a night at the local bowling alley were the robes and the ten pins. There was lots of swearing and racist jokes, and plenty of griping about politics and Jew bosses. The night’s activities culminated in some mailbox baseball, where the boys all headed off in different directions to destroy mailboxes owned by black and probably Jewish families. The caravan of old pickups, belching thick exhaust and having to rev engines hard with the heavy payloads weighing them down, streamed out into the steamy hot July air. It was the driver’s job to zero in on mailboxes with the names Lincoln and Sapp, Washington and Blades.
    â€œ We’re huntin’ Katz!” someone shouted and everyone in the pickup laughed.
    They took their chances with Bozmans and Bivens and Perkins, since they could have been white, but decided it didn’t really matter; they were drunk as shit.
    Chase had climbed up into the back of a rusty Dodge Ram with an ominous wide grill and one headlight. Stuffed with some of the fattest Klansmen, it couldn’t go fast enough to flip over—or so he figured—but their tires were spinning as they hit dry pavement, a one-eyed roaring monster careening into the darkness.
    â€œ Cliffy, up on yer left!”
    â€œ I see it!”
    Amos held the