Jeff Shelby - Wicked Break

“Place is nicer than yours,” Carter observed.

“I don’t have a trust fund.”

“Guy doesn’t live in a shitty complex like this when he’s clearly got the means to move somewhere else unless he’s got a reason.”

“Yep,” I said, thinking the same thing. “Check the bedroom. I’m gonna look at the computer.”

“What am I looking for?” Carter said, walking toward the hall.

“Big black things that shoot bullets. They’re called guns.”

“My specialty.”

I sat down at the chair in front of the hutch, saw the lights on the monitor and CPU that indicated the computer was dormant, and jiggled the mouse.

“Christ,” Carter hollered from the bedroom.

“What?”

“Kid’s got, like, twelve-hundred-count sheets. Softer than a monkey’s ass.”

“Familiar with the texture of a monkey’s ass, are you?”

“No. But these are awesome.”

Carter was easily distracted.

“Keep looking,” I said.

The computer’s main screen came up. I looked through the files on the desktop but didn’t find anything other than what looked like school homework.

I found the directory and checked the Internet history. Nothing out of the ordinary-a few porn addresses, some sports websites, the SDSU address, and a couple of news sites.

Until I got to the last one.

The line read www.whiteisright.com.

The phrase immediately brought goose bumps to the backs of my arms. It was like I was looking right at Mo’s big forehead again.

I found an AOL icon on his desktop and clicked on it. The main menu came up and I logged on as a guest. After entering my password, the computer connected and I typed www.whiteisright.com into the search bar.

“Jackpot,” Carter yelled from the other room.

I watched the screen continue to load. “What’d you get?”

“Come see for yourself.”

“Hang on a sec.”

A very real image of a burning cross flashed onto the screen. The image dissolved into a smiling black man’s face. A gun emerged near the man’s ear and two cartoon bullets moved toward the side of his head. The bullets hit the face and the smile disappeared from the man’s face. The image faded away.

WHITE IS RIGHT!!! flashed on the screen.

My stomach tightened from both the image and my decidedly unpleasant memory of the phrase.

A menu bar loaded on the screen, offering tabs for history, donations, and to find out more.

“Shit, Noah,” Carter yelled again from the bedroom. “You gotta see all this.”

It wouldn’t be hard to remember the address. I closed down the Internet connection, shut off the computer, and walked into the bedroom.

Carter was sitting at the foot of a queen-sized bed in the middle of the room.

He pointed at the oak dresser next to the closet. “Take a look in there.”

The top drawer was pulled halfway out.

It was filled with AK-47s and handguns, probably a dozen total.

“All the drawers, dude,” Carter said. “Same shit.”

I opened the next one down and found sawed-off shotguns. The three remaining drawers were filled with semiautomatics and boxes of ammunition.

“Kid likes his toys,” Carter said.

“Apparently.”

“Guy doesn’t have that much metal unless he’s selling. Or holding.”

I nodded in agreement. This wasn’t somebody taking an interest in guns or owning a few for protection. An arsenal like this could bring in some serious cash.

Carter stood up and walked over to stand next to me at the dresser.

“Look at this shit, Noah,” he said, rummaging through the open drawers, admiring the collection. “Half of these you can’t even get on the street. You’d have to go to Mexico or Central America to get your hands on them.”

“We know the kid’s tied to both a gang and the Nazi boys,” I said. “Gotta be the middleman, right?” I nodded at the dresser. “Why else does a college kid build up an armory in his bedroom?”

“Maybe he’s afraid of something,” Carter said, still perusing the drawers. “Or maybe he’s got something that doesn’t belong to him.”

“Like?”

“Well nothing goes with guns as good as money does.”

“But why?” I said, still not sure. “What the hell was this kid into?”

He shrugged.

“I can tell you,” a voice said from behind us.

Carter and I froze and then turned slowly around.

Dana stood in the doorway, the dreadlocks on her head sticking out in awkward angles, the gun in her hands pointed squarely in our direction.

Dana motioned for both of us to sit on the bed. She wore a tight camouflage tank top and cargo pants cut off at the knees. The small silver rings were still in her eyebrow and lower lip. With the gun, she looked like some sort of Rastafarian commando.

“I thought you were an investigator,” she said, looking at me, her green eyes flashing.

“I am.”

“Investigators don’t break and enter.”

I nodded at Carter. “He did that.”

Carter smiled at her. “I like to show off how strong I am.”

She looked him over the way she had checked me out the first time she met me. She nodded approvingly. “You do have muscles.”

“And in all the right places,” he said, the smile getting bigger.

“That remains to be seen,” she said. She looked at me. “So why are you back?”

“Because I haven’t found Linc.”

“Did you think he was in the dresser?” She focused on my face a little harder. “And who knocked the shit out of you?”

I took a deep breath, tired of the questions about my appearance. “Dana, look. I have no idea what’s going on with Linc. I know he’s not here and your roommate ended up in the hospital. I’m just trying to piece all of this together.”

The corners of her mouth twitched down and she shifted her gaze to Carter, then back to me. “Do you know anything about what happened to Rachel?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t know if it’s all tied together or what. Like I said, I’m just trying to unscramble all of it.”

Her shoulders lost some of their carriage. “I went to see Rachel yesterday. She looks terrible.”

I remembered sitting with Rachel and couldn’t disagree.

Dana’s arms dropped to her sides. She glanced down at the gun in her hand, as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. She tossed it toward me, but Carter reached out and snatched it in midair.

“It’s not loaded,” she said, sinking down to the floor and resting her back against the wall. “I think it goes in the top drawer.”

“You got it from Linc?” I asked.

“Yeah. Gave it to me about a month ago.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and pulled on one of her dreads. “Not sure. He came over and said we might want to keep it. Just in case.”

“In case of what?” Carter asked.

“He said the people he was working with could be a little freaky and if they ever came to bother us, I could flash it at them and scare them away.”

“People he was working with,” I said. “Who exactly were they?”

“Don’t know.” She shook her head. “He constantly had people in here, though.”

“Gangs?”

She nodded. “A lot of those guys. I think it started because one of them used to live here.”

“Deacon Moreno?”

She looked surprised. “Yeah. Linc started hooking up with him and it just grew.”

“What grew?” I asked.

“Whatever he was doing,” she said. “I think he was buying and selling the guns.”

“You know that for sure?”

“I heard bits and pieces,” Dana said. “Pretty sure that’s what was going on.”

“Where was he getting the guns?” Carter asked.