Matt Hilton - Blood and Ashes

‘He told Birnbaum to give you his best regards… and to cut you some slack.’

‘Nice of him.’

‘He said you’ve proven helpful to the FBI on more than one occasion.’

Could have told him about Tubal Cain, but my involvement there was buried even from the FBI, courtesy of Walter Conrad. I guessed that Vince was referring to Jean-Paul St Pierre, the contract killer who went by the name of a fallen angel. Dantalion had murdered a handful of FBI agents including Kaufman, an SAC from the Miami field office, before I finally stopped him. ‘I’m not a FBI groupie, if that’s what you’re thinking?’

‘So what exactly are you?’

‘I’m just someone who cares. I’m not going to stand around while children are being terrorised.’

‘Donovan Griffiths hired you?’

‘I didn’t come for the money. I just wanted to help. Nobody else seemed to be doing much.’

‘I was on the case.’

‘I couldn’t sit around waiting for the cavalry to come to their rescue, Vince. What do you think I should’ve done?’

‘The FBI doesn’t look favourably on vigilantes.’

‘Vigilantes take the law into their own hands, Vince. Off the record? There aren’t too many laws that govern what I sometimes have to do.’

‘Sounds like you’ve practised that speech, Hunter.’

I grinned. ‘It’s good guy one-o-one.’

Vince regarded me over the top of his coffee, while I stared right back. ‘I suppose you have a point; what I sometimes have to do isn’t FBI procedure either.’

‘The old quid pro quo game, huh?’

‘I guess I owe you an explanation, seeing as I almost strangled you to death.’

I touched my throat. It was still hot from where Vince’s garrotte had sunk into the flesh. ‘Explain away.’

‘Did you ever catch that TV series on the Fox network? Twenty-one Jump Street?’

Couldn’t help but smile at the reference. It was almost as if I’d been expecting it. ‘You know, Vince, from certain angles you remind me a little of Johnny Depp.’

The agent attempted to conceal the smugness, but some of Vince Everett’s swagger returned. ‘So I’ve been told.’

‘Ever seen Edward Scissorhands?’

Vince made a noise in the back of his throat but my smile helped show I was only joking. I had in fact been thinking of another movie Depp featured in where he played a 1950s juvenile delinquent, the one with Ricki Lake and Iggy Pop.

‘If,’ Vince went on, ‘you’re familiar with the concept of Jump Street, you’ll know that it followed a group of undercover cops who infiltrated youth gangs. Well, I’m part of a similar FBI operation. Only we target home-grown militant groups.’

‘So you posed as a racist to get inside Gant’s mob? Odd that neo-Nazis would welcome someone with so much hair.’

‘It was a conscious decision to use the Vince Everett cover. It would have been too difficult carrying off an act that I was a Nazi. Sooner or later, my cover would have been blown. But you know what they say about birds of a feather?’

‘They accepted you through your common hatred of everyone who wasn’t a WASP?’

‘Yeah, but it wasn’t easy. The only way I got in was through Sonya Madden.’

‘The punk rocker girl?’

‘Yeah.’ For a second Vince’s eyes clouded over.

‘You regret that she came to harm. I hope you don’t hold her death against me?’

‘I can’t really do that, Hunter.’ He flicked a glance around, checking for the electronic ears that were more than likely in existence in the command unit. He lowered his voice to a whisper and mimed a nudge of his elbow. ‘Not when I helped her out the window as we crashed. Couldn’t really allow her to harm anyone else, and it was the first opportunity I got.’

Accepting what he said without comment was difficult; the thought of murdering a woman was abhorrent to me… usually. Having the woman’s death on my conscience would have been terrible if she wasn’t trying to kill those under my protection. Instead I said, ‘Vince Everett had to have been a real person. Gant would have checked.’

‘Yeah, Everett was real. He was a young junkie who murdered his grandfather during a bungled robbery. He was also suspected of beating a cop to death with a PR24 baton, not to mention a number of rapes where he first throttled his victims within an inch of their lives with a guitar string. He was as heavy a white supremacist as any in Gant’s outfit. Shame he turned up dead after overdosing: he should have gone to prison for a long time, maybe in a cell alongside some brothers.’

Yes, that would have been justice, rather than the relatively easy way that Everett went. ‘The FBI kept his demise a secret, I’m assuming, and you slipped right into the role.’

‘The name helped. I’ve been called Vince by all my friends since kindergarten, so I was never going to mess up and forget to answer someone calling my name.’

‘There was more to it than that.’

‘Of course there was. I had to get into his mind, become Vince Everett in every way. I had to think like him, act like him, do what he would do. It wasn’t nice being in his head like that, but I had to show those assholes that I was a worthy ally. Plus there was the fact that Everett was just the kind of guy Sonya Madden found irresistible.’ Again the agent’s eyes clouded. ‘Madden by name but mad by nature. It’s a shame she was such a psychopath, ’cause underneath it all she was quite a girl.’

‘Forgetting that she was part of a radical extremist network, as well?’

‘Yeah, there was that.’ Vince straightened his cap, winning a few seconds to compose himself. While he ordered his next words, Fluffy sauntered across the desk beside him. The cat glowered at him like he was something to be utterly and contemptuously destroyed. Vince broke open a carton of cream and offered it to the tom. ‘Peace offering?’

Fluffy sniffed and sashayed, but then settled down to lap the cream from the tub. Its occasional glance my way demanded to know what I was worrying about, now that Vince was his new best friend.

‘Traitor,’ I called the cat. It turned its back on me.

Vince grinned at the cat. ‘He has a lot in common with me, I guess.’

I squinted at him, not quite getting the reference. Vince said, ‘To Gant and Carswell Hicks I’m a traitor to their cause.’

‘Little notice Hicks will take. Last I heard he was dead.’

‘You and millions of others…’

I didn’t like the undertone of Vince’s delivery.

‘What exactly are you saying, Vince?’

‘Carswell Hicks is as alive as you or me. The death story is just that.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Why would I lie to you?’

‘You’re a feebie. You’re undercover. You have your own agenda. Take your pick.’

‘Christ, you’re a cynic, Hunter.’

‘It tends to keep me alive.’

‘And you’re full of pithy sayings.’

‘Good guy one-o-one, I told you.’

Vince sipped coffee. I mirrored him. The cat nudged the empty cream carton along the desk, unaware of or indifferent to the silence between the two men in its presence.

Finally I placed the empty Styrofoam cup down. ‘Carswell Hicks. Where is he?’

‘Sure wish that we knew. As you probably heard, an attempt was made to break Hicks out of prison when he was transferred to a less-secure hospital wing. The hospital’s medi-vac chopper was hijacked but later went down off the coast with no apparent survivors. Hicks’ body was never found, although the general public wasn’t informed of that in case it caused a furore. It was while Obama was running for president, and his supporters wouldn’t take kindly to someone possibly back in the public arena who’d make it his mission to destroy a black presidential candidate. You could say Hicks earned a modicum of protection from the same government he’d tried to disrupt all those years. Go figure, man!’