Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

'Al Pfeiffer. He was a good guy, but nothing says it's time to retire like a firebomb thrown through your front window.'

Jeffrey was sure he'd heard wrong. 'What?'

Nick nodded, pouring cream into the cup until the liquid touched the rim. 'They firebombed his house. Wife and grandkid barely got out. The old man suffered third-degree burns on his face and arms. Lost one of his fingers. Never made a case because nobody would talk: no witnesses, no crime scene evidence, no nothing. Happened in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. Take that as a warning, Chief. These boys don't fuck around. They're making too much money.'

'Skinheads?' Jeffrey asked.

'Guessed it again, Chief.' Nick gave him a careful look. 'Something tells me you've played this game before.'

Jeffrey knew it was his turn to share. I saw this guy outside the Elawah hospital last night – tough-looking con. He had a big red swastika tattooed on his arm.'

'That old thing.' Nick waved his hand like an old lady fielding gossip. 'It's used by the Skin Brothers. Now, there's an interesting bunch of Nazis. Started in the prisons back in the late fifties. Integration on the outside, segregation on the inside. All them white boys running the cell blocks didn't like the black guys coming in and they made it known every way they could.' Nick leaned forward, kept his voice low. 'In the 1950s, you had maybe sixty-five, seventy percent white in all the federal and state prisons, basically in line with the white population on the outside, right?'

'Right.'

'Now, it's upside down. You got maybe a sixty-forty, eighty-twenty mix in some prisons. The whites are the minorities, the blacks and Hispanics are the majority.'

'So, in come the gangs.'

'Crips, Bloods, the Boyz, Tiny Raskals, MS-13, Nazi Low Riders.'

Jeffrey said, 'Which brings us back to meth again.'

'That kind of quick money to be made, there's always gonna be some kind of war going on, some asshole wanting to swing his dick around. Whites on whites, blacks on blacks, all that matters anymore is the green. You got the Aryans telling the Low Riders what to do, the Low Riders telling the Aryans to fuck off, the purists telling them both they're selling out the white race… long story short, whoever's in charge better be looking over his shoulder all the time.'

'Who uses the black swastika?'

'Just about all of 'em but the Skin Brothers.' He anticipated Jeffrey's next question. 'And never the twain shall meet. You put a Skin Brother in with, say, a Low Rider, they see their tats, you might as well put two tomcats in a cardboard box. Only one of 'em's gonna come out alive.'

'You positive about that?'

'Their feud goes so far back nobody even remembers how it got started. Part of the oath they take when they jump in is to kill any motherfucker playing for the other team. Red or black, you get that tattoo, you better be damn sure it's for life. You'll see peace in the Middle East before those two get together.'

Jeffrey breathed a little easier. Whatever was going on in Reece, he could take Ethan Green out of the equation for the moment.

Nick leaned back, cupping his coffee in his hands. 'You hear about that case with the Hells Angels out on the West Coast?'

Jeffrey shook his head.

'Let me tell you, them're some violent motherfuckers. Been inside most of their adult lives, no hope of getting out, they'll cut you just as soon as look at you. The feds are trying to go after them with the RICO statutes, saying they're the same as organized crime. They had to bolt the bastards to the floor during the trial. One of 'em was already in for stabbing his lawyer with an ink pen. These guys got nothing to lose; just biding their time at the old SuperMax, waiting for their number to come up. They know they're never gonna see the light of day without a set of bars casting a shadow through it and they don't care how many bodies they leave in their wake.'

Jeffrey felt his blood turning cold in his veins. 'Let's go back to the Skin Brothers.'

'Technically, it's the Brotherhood of the True White Skin, but that don't flow off the tongue near as well.'

'Tell me more about them.'

'For the last five, maybe ten, years, it's been run by two brothers, Carl and Jerry Fitzpatrick. Carl's in prison and Jerry lives out on a zillion-dollar compound with the rest of the family. Thinks he's some kind of preacher for the Way of Whitey.'

'True believer?'

'Sadistic true believer,' Nick amended. 'You don't cross Jerry. He takes care of the stray lambs himself – tracks them down and shatters their little legs so the rest of the flock knows they better keep on the path. You got grown men, mean-as-fuck skinheads with twenty kills under their belt, who piss their pants at the thought of Jerry coming after them.'

'He's never been caught?'

'Oh, he's been charged plenty, but nothing sticks. Witnesses tend to change their minds when their fingernails are pulled off and their children go missing.'

'Where's the compound?'

'Up in a little town called Keene, New Hampshire.'

'Why is it always a relief when these guys are Yankees?'

Nick pretended surprise, clutching his hand to his chest. 'Racists in the liberal North? How dare you, sir.'

'Shocking,' Jeffrey agreed, wondering not for the first time why the rest of America wanted to believe racism only happened south of the Mason-Dixon. It was as if Watts and Harlem, the cases of Rodney King and Abner Louima, were startling anomalies on their respective coasts.

Nick continued, 'The FBI has the Fitzpatrick brothers on their watch list, but I'm not sure what kind of priority they've been given. All this anti-immigration shit that's been stirring up has been like free PR for the neo-Nazi groups. Suddenly, saying we should close our borders and kick out the people with the funny-sounding names doesn't sound like extremist rhetoric anymore.'

'Good thing we let the Fitzpatricks slip in first,' Jeffrey commented. 'What's the brother in prison for?'

'Shooting two cops.'

' New Hampshire have the death penalty?'

'Just for this very thing,' Nick said. 'Only problem is, they've set their age limit at seventeen. Carl was two weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday when he pulled the trigger. Life in prison without the chance of parole. Smart boy, our Carl. He met the right people on the cell block, made some good contacts, worked his way up in the group, and – as these things happen – beat his boss to death with a dumbbell and took over the organization. Real upwardly mobile guy.'

Jeffrey tried not to think about the two cops that had been shot, how their families, their children, had coped with the loss all these years. 'So, how do the Fitzpatricks pay their bills?'

'They're real heavy into meth. Like, super-heavy, kill-your-mama heavy. The Fitzpatricks control everything going in and out of the Southeast corridor, from Florida on up. Some of those boys are billionaires. Only catch is, they're dead before they reach the age of thirty.'

Jeffrey already knew this. 'And?'

Nick added more sugar to his coffee as he spoke. 'They say they've got skin privilege, that being white means they're better than everybody else, that they should be in control. They view it as a special ordination from God.' The waitress walked by and Nick gave her another wink. He turned back to Jeffrey, asking, 'You like your history, right?'

'Well enough.'

'Then let me tell you this story,' Nick began. 'The Skin Brothers got started by a World War II vet, an Army National Guardsman from out West by the name of Jeremiah Todd. Claimed he was with one of the infantry divisions that helped liberate Dachau.' Nick tried the coffee again, then started back with the cream. Jeffrey suppressed the urge to throw the cup across the room as Nick continued, 'Todd gets back from Germany and starts telling everybody it's all been overblown, that the press is just making a big deal out of nothing. He was there and saw it with his own eyes, and it was just a bunch of Jews stirring up trouble, trying to bring down America.'