Free Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation by A.W. Hill Page B

Raszer said.
         “Right.
Up above the Burro Canyon Shooting Park, on the east fork, not far from the
state corrections fire camp. It was an abandoned heap from the ’60s, wedged up
in a gulley. How it got up there, I couldn’t tell you. But Johnny took it over
and set himself up like some mystic commando. Stenciled a big peacock on the
side of it.”
         “A
peacock?” Raszer asked.
         “Right.
He had guns, he had pills, he had a pirate radio transmitter and a rebuilt
generator to power his music, and after a while, he had girls. The boys from
town, the slackers and gamers, some from other families the JWs had—what do
they call it?— shunned , they loved
Johnny. Made him a hero. They’d truck up there Saturday afternoon, do some
shooting at the range, and then play that hardcore techno shit all night, till
it shook the canyons. Drove the Forest Service and the other trailer folks loco . They finally confiscated his
generator. I guess that’s when the kids started looking for other places to
dance, if you can call it dancing.”
         Aquino
did a wild-eyed impression of a raver’s pogo, as good as a man of thirty-two
could muster while seated, wearing a shirt and tie, and with pictures of his
young children on the wall. Raszer sensed that the detective, though square,
was probably not a bad dancer himself, given the right music.
         “Why
didn’t they move him off the land?” Raszer asked. “I don’t get it—firearms,
drugs, a state prison facility nearby . . . ”
         “Well,
unfortunately,” Aquino replied, “we didn’t know the whole story until after the
fact. Johnny and his friends fell through a crack. That’s federal land up
there, but it might as well be no-man’s-land. Technically, the Forest Service
could have instituted procedures, but it all happened pretty fast, and—believe
it or not—Johnny had the folks up there both spooked and sweet-talked. He was
smooth. And he had all the weapons cached. He learned that in Babylon. He
learned that from the enemy.”
         “You say
he was a good talker, and you called him a ‘mystic commando.’ What was his rap?
What brought the boys up there, aside from pills and girls?”
         “Well,
again, we got most of this from Emmett. That’s Emmett Parrish. He’s the boy who
got cold feet that night.”
         “Right,”
said Raszer, glancing down at the names Sam Brown had given him. “The witness.
He was one of Johnny’s regulars, too?”
         “Yeah.
According to Emmett, Johnny was into anarchy. He called his little club WARM,
for World Anarchist Reform Movement. Had that painted on the trailer, too. He
claimed he had ‘brothers’ in the Middle East and other places. Might’ve been
bullshit . . . he didn’t know which end he was coming from, and he didn’t care.
He had stuff up there about Aryan Nations, the Red Brigades, Hezbollah, and the
Freemasons, for chrissakes. All he knew was that everything was wrong, and that
all laws were made to enslave. When you added Henry Lee’s magical shit in with
it, it was quite a mix.”
         Switches
began to click in Raszer’s mind. The first tiles in the mosaic fell into place.
“Tell me about Henry. What kind of magic was he into? Silas Endicott called it
Satanism. Was it?”
         “Not
exactly, although what do I know? That’s your business, right?”
         Raszer
cocked his head and waited for the other shoe to drop.
         “You’re
the guy who worked that militia cult up in Shasta, right?” Aquino said.
         “How did
you know that?” Raszer asked. “I was undercover, I didn’t appear in court, and
I wasn’t in the papers—not that time.”
         “Cops
have their own Internet,” Aquino said, grinning. He picked up the telephone and
shook the cord, making it dance. “It’s called la vina .”
         “Okay,”
said Raszer, holding up his palms in surrender. “Fair enough. But for the
moment,