The Vanished Man

troubled and said, “We’re supposed to sit tight here for a bit. Weir’s escaped.”
    “No! Is Grady safe?”
    “I don’t know. I assume he’s got guards looking out for him.”
    The prisoner sighed in disgust. “You know who’s going to come off the heavy? Me, that’s who. I’ve had it. I’m just sick and tired of this crap. I’m going to find out where Weir is and what he’s up to.”
    “You? How?”
    “I’ll have everybody I can muster up in CantonFalls track down Jeddy Barnes. Maybe they can convince him to let us know where Weir is and what he’s doing.”
    “Hold on, Andrew,” Roth said uneasily. “Nothing illegal up there.”
    “No. I’ll make sure of that.”
    “I’m sure Grady’ll appreciate it.”
    “Between you and me, Joe, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Grady. This’s for me. Giving ’em Weir and Jeddy’s head on a platter—I do that and maybe at last everybody’ll believe I’m on the up-and-up. Now let’s make some phone calls and get to the bottom of this mess.”

Chapter Thirty-eight
    Hobbs Wentworth didn’t get away from Canton Falls very often.
    Dressed like a janitor, wheeling a cart containing push brooms, mops and his “fishing gear” (that is, his Colt AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle), Hobbs Wentworth realized that life in the big city had changed quite a bit in the past twenty years, the last time he’d been here.
    And he noted that everything he’d heard about the slow cancer eating away the white race was true.
    Lord above our green pastures, look at this: there were more Japanese people or Chinese or something—who could tell?—than in Tokyo. And Hispanics everywhere in this part of New York City, like mosquitoes. And ragheads too, who he didn’t see why they weren’t simply rounded up and shot because of the Trade Towers. A woman in one of those Moslem outfits, all covered up, was crossing the street. He had a fast urge to kill her because she might know somebody who knew somebody who’d attacked his country.
    And Indians and Pakistanis too, who should be sent back home because he couldn’t understand what the fuck they were saying, not to mention they weren’t Christians.
    Hobbs was furious at what the government had done, opening up the borders and letting these animals inside, to gobble up the country and force decent people into little islands of safety—places like Canton Falls—which were getting smaller and smaller every day.
    But God had winked at sharp-operator Hobbs Wentworth and given him the blessed role of freedom fighter. Because Jeddy Barnes and his friends knew that Hobbs had one other talent aside from teaching Bible stories to children. He killed people. And he did it very, very well. Sometimes his fishing gear was a Ka-Bar knife, sometimes a garrote, sometimes the sweet Colt, sometimes the compound bow. His dozen or so missions over the past few years had gone perfectly. A spic in Massachusetts, a leftist politician in Albany, a nigger in Burlington, a baby-killing doc in Pennsylvania.
    And now he was going to add a prosecutor to his list.
    He pushed the cart through the nearly empty underground parking garage off Centre Street and paused at one of the doors, waiting. Looking apathetic about starting his night shift as a janitor. After a few minutes the door opened and he nodded pleasantly at the woman stepping out of the downstairs lobby, a middle-aged woman with a briefcase, wearing jeans and a white blouse. She smiled but pulled the door shut firmly behind her and said, sorry, she couldn’t let him inside, he understood, with security being what it was.
    He said, sure, he understood. And smiled back.
    A minute later he dumped her twitching body into the cart and pulled her ID card lanyard over her head. He slid it through the electronic reader and the door clicked open.
    He now took the elevator to the third floor, rolling the cart in front of him, the woman’s body obscured by wads of garbage bags. Hobbs found the office that Mr. Weir had decided would be the best one to use. It offered a good view of the street and, since it belonged to the Department of Highway Statistics, wasn’t likely to have any emergencies that would require employees to be here on Sunday evening. The door was locked but the big man simply kicked his way inside (Mr. Weir had said there wasn’t time to teach him how to pick locks).
    Inside, Hobbs took his gun from the cart, mounted the ’scope and sighted on the street below. A perfect