anybody.”
“Here to bust their balls,” Bob said.
Lucas: “Let’s try to keep the conversation away from the condition of their balls. They’re incels, remember?”
* * *
—
LUCAS AND BOB STOOD back and to the sides when Rae pushed the doorbell button on the back door. No reason to think anyone would come out shooting; not that it made any difference, because there was no answer, or any sign of occupancy, even when she leaned on the button.
“Do it the other way, then,” Lucas said, and they trooped around to the front. Inside the café, with Rae leading, they found a dozen people, all male, all white, drinking coffee, spread around five tables and three barstools, with a dozen more tables, all empty, stretching toward the back of the café. A newspaper rack sat to one side, with a few used magazines; three were gun magazines. The patrons all checked out Rae, Bob, and Lucas, and didn’t go back to talking.
A man in a white chef’s apron was standing behind a counter in front of a standard stainless steel coffee bar; a glass case off to one side held pastries, and a stack of Wall Street Journals sat on the counter next to the cash register.
The man behind the counter was short and not so much chubby as out of shape. He had a long sharp nose and expansive, feathery white hair sticking out from under an all-black logo-free trucker’s hat. “Can I help you?”
“We’re with the U.S. Marshals Service,” Rae said. “We’re looking to interview a Mr. Mark Stapler.”
“I’m Mark,” the man said. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties. “What did I do?”
“We don’t think you did anything,” Rae said. “We’re doing research on a whole bunch of organizations in the Washington area, trying to make some important connections. We understand you’re the, uh, president of a group called Forlorn Hope?”
“That’s correct, but we haven’t broken any laws, we haven’t done anything that would interest you guys,” Stapler said.
Another man stood up from one of the tables. As Lucas turned to him, he said, “I’m in Hope, and so is Jason here.” He nodded toward a man still seated, who raised his hand. “What’s going on?”
The man who’d stood up stepped over to the bar. He was wearing a long-sleeved plaid shirt despite the warm day and the shirt was worn loose. When he bumped the back of a barstool, there was a distinct clank. Bob asked, “Sir, are you carrying a concealed weapon?”
The man said, “Yup, and I have a license for it.”
“Please keep your hand away from it,” Bob said.
“What is this?” Stapler demanded.
“We need to talk to you about an ongoing investigation,” Lucas told him. “It would be best if we did it in the back, you know, for privacy reasons.”
Two of the men sitting at a table to one side stood up and one said, “We’re leaving, if that’s okay.”
Rae said, “Sure,” and they left.
“You’re messing up my business,” Stapler said. He was getting red in the face.
“Let’s go talk, no reason there should be a problem,” Rae said.
“Who’s going to watch the counter?”
“You’ve got two guys here from your group, they could keep an eye on it for a few minutes,” Lucas said. “They can call you if somebody comes in.”
Stapler looked at the other two men standing by the bar, and said to the man with the gun, “Ron, could you watch it? We’ll go in the back. I’ll make it quick as I can.”
* * *
—
A LONG NARROW ROOM full of coffee-making supplies, a desk, and file cabinets sat behind the café’s main room; Stapler led them through a second door into his living quarters, a two-room apartment with a couple of decrepit couches and a monster TV in the main room, with an unmade bed visible to the side. The walls held several antique guns, flintlocks and caplocks, mounted on pegs. The mounted head of a deer looked down from over the bathroom door.
Stapler didn’t sit down. He stood, with fists on