in their political beliefs—”
That made Calvin laugh, a bark-like sound that she cut off after a single bark: “Politics? I mean, they’re . . . I mean, they don’t even vote, far as I know. Sawyer doesn’t, nor me neither. Voting’s just another fuckin’ scam. Don’t never do no good.”
“But they, the Controlled Burn guys, they don’t like the government, right?” Lucas asked.
“Who does?” Calvin asked. “Nothing to do about it, though. I mean, Dick Willey got busted for fightin’ that judge over in Lynchburg and I guess some things got said at the trial about the government pissing on people like us and Controlled Burn gonna get them, but nobody really thought it amounted to anything. I mean, some people came to Dick’s trial and they made some speeches outside the courthouse, but it all frittered away. Dick’s up to Marion now.”
“You don’t think the members, these people in Controlled Burn—”
“Controlled Burn is a bunch of guys that know each other,” Calvin said. “Half of them couldn’t tell you who the president is. After Dick Willey got busted, you know, there was talk about going up against the government, but it was all a lot of horseshit. Those guys get all shot up holding up a fuckin’ liquor store. How are they gonna overthrow the government? They may be dumb, most of them, but they know that much.”
They talked for a while longer, but Lucas eventually believed her: Controlled Burn was a group of holdup men who knew one another through a variety of different prisons, and whose anti-government stance derived from a single “fight” with a federal judge.
When he was done talking with Calvin, he stepped outside the interview room, thanked Calvin’s attorney and gave her a card, and then went to his iPad and looked up the Dick Willey–judge fight.
Turned out that Willey had been convicted of an assault on a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier, who, Willey said, had been delivering more than mail to Willey’s girlfriend. Out on bail while awaiting sentencing, he had ambushed and nearly beaten to death the federal judge who presided over his trial.
The news stories covering the subsequent trial and conviction, for assaulting the judge, were unclear about how the second trial attracted protests, although it appeared that the judge may have had an undisclosed blood relationship with the letter carrier. The protesters were Willey’s relatives and a few friends.
Nothing there, Lucas thought. A bunch of criminals in a prison-linked gang got their name in the papers for assault on a judge, but it appeared the assault was based on a personal grievance, not on politics.
Lucas had a black eye, cuts on his face and hands, a sprained ankle, a torn Canali sport coat, all bundled up in a waste of time. When he limped into the Watergate lobby a little before seven o’clock, black eye, scratches, sprained ankle, and ripped jacket, he found Deputy Marshals Bob Matees and Rae Givens checking through the front desk, Bob carrying a gear bag, which Lucas knew was full of guns and other pieces of miscellaneous gear that the two marshals had found useful from time to time.
Lucas gave Rae a hug as Bob gawked at him: “What the hell happened to you? You look like you fell out of an ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down.”
“Something like that,” Lucas said. “That’s about what I did. Thanks for caring.”
“And it left him a little cranky,” Rae said to Bob.
Bob was a wide man, but not tall; as a senior at the University of Oklahoma, he’d finished third in the heavyweight class of the NCAA wrestling national championships. He was looking exceptionally well dressed, to Lucas’s eye, possibly because he’d consulted Lucas on the clothing purchases. Lucas reached out and tapped his tie and said, “I’m proud of you.”
Rae was tall, at six feet, a black woman with close-cropped hair, dressed in dark gray slacks and a dark gray long-sleeved blouse, with bits of gold jewelry here and there. Though slender, she had muscles like steel cables and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. Bob said she could reliably bench press over two hundred. She had a fondness for full-auto M4 rifles, although she wasn’t allowed to carry one as often as she wished.
“I am a little cranky,” Lucas admitted. “Right now, all I want to do is get upstairs and stand in a shower for twenty minutes and get some ice on my ankle. I’ve got nothing for