Chapter LXXXIII

Antoine Pinette was driving along Gretton's main street when a woman in a multi-colored jacket, her head in the clouds, stepped from the sidewalk and almost ended up under Antoine's front wheels. Had he not been abiding by the speed limit, he might well have killed her. He gave her a blast of the horn. She barely reacted, only peering at him with mild curiosity before yielding the road to him.

"These fucking rubes," said his brother Leo, who was in the passenger seat. "I swear, evolution sidestepped this place."

Antoine took in the jaywalker, but her attention was elsewhere. He felt the strangest urge to stop and make sure she was okay. She reminded him of someone: not his mother, because Antoine would have run that bitch over without blinking, but a woman who might, in another life, have been worthy of his care.

"THERE'S NO WAY THATwoman is psychic," said Louis, as we watched Sabine Drew step safely onto the sidewalk. "It's a miracle she's survived as long as she has."

But I was barely listening to him. Instead, I was squinting at the vehicle that had almost run her over.

"You know," I said, "that looks a lot like Antoine Pinette's car."

LEO WAS STILL GRUMBLING. He hated Gretton. Antoine didn't blame him, but this was work. Antoine avoided involving Leo in serious business affairs, but he'd decided to keep Leo close since the incident with the firebomb. The confrontation at the Capital still rankled Leo. Nobody wished to be humiliated in public, but Leo took indignity harder than most because he had so little dignity to spare.

Antoine had made it plain to Bobby Ocean that he didn't like any of his people being manipulated by him, but Leo most of all. He believed the message had gotten through, but couldn't be sure. Bobby hadn't been the same since his son was murdered, and whatever once passed for his impulse control was now seriously impaired. Currently on Bobby's shit list—apart from the usual line-up of negroes, Latinos, Jews, immigrants, feminists, queers, and socialists—was Den Hickman, who had begun to reconsider the wisdom of allowing strangers to situate themselves on his land. A couple of Antoine's associates had inadvertently frightened Hickman's wife by passing too close to the main house and now some aspect of her dementia had caused her to begin fixating on their presence, making life even harder for her husband. Worse, Hickman had become aware that his guests were storing more than the occasional misplaced pistol or semiautomatic in their camp, and had communicated his disapproval to Antoine, Den Hickman not wanting to spend his last days in a federal penitentiary. Also, none of the women were willing to give him pity fucks anymore, which had turned him ornery.

Recently, therefore, Antoine had gone from enjoying a secure operating base in Gretton—with the possibility of something more lasting on the horizon, funded by Bobby Ocean—to trying to keep an old cripple and his crazy wife calm, because the chances of killing the Hickmans and getting away with it in a community as small as Gretton were low, shading to none, even with a half-assed constable counting as the local law. Bobby was more ambivalent, but Antoine wasn't about to put anyone in the ground solely on Bobby's say-so, while the dream of establishing a new Eden in Piscataquis County had always been mostly Bobby's to begin with. For Antoine, it was just more convenient than working out of a lockup or junkyard.

More to the point, the final shipment of guns had arrived the day before, ready for distribution. It was about time to go to ground while exploring new income streams for the future. Antoine had so far eschewed the sale of narcotics, a hangover from the straight edge scene he'd embraced in his youth, but perhaps it was time to yield to pragmatism, since the defense of the white race wasn't going to pay for itself, and it wasn't as though he'd have to hand back all of his Minor Threat and Fugazi LPs. He had solid sources to whom he could turn for meth, even coke. There was a ready market for both, but coke dealing involved meeting a better class of individual, with all their own teeth. Consequently, the market was less volatile.

For now, the priority was to ensure everything went off smoothly with the transfer of the remaining weapons and equipment from the encampment. He and Leo would make one more attempt to convince Den Hickman to see reason before returning to the camp for the night. If they failed, Hickman would be Bobby Ocean's weight to bear. It was Antoine's guess that once Bobby calmed down, he'd see the wisdom in looking elsewhere, or even shelving those settlement plans. The difficulty with establishing a colony based on fear, hate, and anger was obvious: it would attract only frightened, hateful, angry people, all of them armed and with short tempers. Coop them up in some woods in Piscataquis with nothing to occupy them during the winter, and they'd quickly turn on one another. Jesus, already half these people couldn't agree on who they were supposed to hate more, while the other half were too contentious by nature to agree on anything at all. If you left them alone for long enough, they'd start punching themselves.

But Antoine wasn't about to cut himself loose from Bobby, not yet. He and Bobby shared a certain set of beliefs, even if they didn't always agree on methods, and Bobby's pockets remained deep. Only a fool turned his back on a ready source of funds, and Antoine Pinette was nobody's fool.