Rizzo, page 7
Rhino had the kid on the floor before Rizzo even registered he’d
moved, stomping on and breaking his hand with the gun, then grab-
bing his arm and with a sickening snap, breaking the hill rat’s elbow
against his knee. Rizzo thought he had it coming, but wound up
having to rescue the tweaking little shit before Rhino ended his life.
But there was no rescuing the relationship between Rhino and Mo,
his former best friend.
The police would have loved to arrest Rhino and throw his ass in
a chain house—but there were eight witnesses, counting Mama, all
telling the same story about how Rhino’s courage had ended an
armed robbery by another Merit-reared hill rat who felt the flats
were his in which to prey.
It was only after the police left that Rhino started wondering
why his side hurt. It turned out it was because he’d been shot in the
chest. He wound up in the hospital for four days, but he’d stood
there and talked normally to his boys and the pigs for forty-five
minutes before even noticing he’d been hit.
Rhino was an unstoppable force trapped in the body of an
immovable object.
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
This power could not stop tears flowing from Rhino’s eyes as
Rizzo told him about Mountainview. He’d been blown away when he
heard the big baller had been sent up. Rizzo had taken the spot on
the line that Rhino had always assumed would be his.
“What was it like?” Rhino had asked, afraid of what he’d hear it
seemed to Rizzo. “You know. Being part of the gang.”
“Well,” Rizzo had said, considering his words. “It was hell. It was
hell on earth. But...after a while...and this is what scared me the
most...you got so you started thinking those chains were all you had.”
10
WARRIORS OF THE COURT
There goes Swamp Red
Swamp Red, he’s long dead
He’s long dead, long dead
Swamp Red, he had a choice
About how to serve his kin
He could set his birds to soaring
He could show them how to win
Sure winning could mean flying
An end to fear and doubt
But losing could mean dying....
...could mean....
MOTHERFUCK, Rizzo thought. Try as he might he couldn’t remember
what came next. The Tragedy of Swamp Red was his favorite chant.
The one he’d learned earliest and had hit deepest. But he couldn’t
remember how the story ended.
He sat on the porch of the room he was renting, watching the
lights of the crews cars driving away after their final meeting before
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73
go time, staring at the hills with a stogie in his right hand and a glass
of gin in his left. This is what free men do, he thought.
Rizzo winced. Occasionally, like right now, his forearm hurt from
where he’d dug out the house chip. Once he reached the flats, for a
reasonable price he’d found someone willing to stitch him up and
dose him out, but the pain remained despite the meds as a reminder
of the wound’s significance in his journey. The only way to dull the
ache, he concluded, was to guzzle more gin.
Cole Jr. came running back with the ball in his mouth and
dropped it at his feet. Rizzo threw the ball back out into the darkness
and watched his friend sprint after it. The ball had a weight in it that
made it bounce at unpredictable angles, making it a little more chal-
lenging for your play-loving pooch. A month ago he’d been stuffed
inside a cell designed to kill him slowly for a crime no one could
discern nor articulate. Rizzo was thinking of the dog but soon real-
ized he might just as easily have been describing himself.
The flats would protect him, but he knew he couldn’t stay there
much longer. Soon it would be time to mosey on. If the stars aligned,
in a few days he’d be able to bankroll the move easily.
He had asked his friends to join him in his plan to hurt the Merit
Society, and while he knew he could count on them, he hadn’t
expected them all to agree as easily as they had. Something in Rhino
had changed—Rizzo had seen it the second they’d reached out to
embrace. He could see that over time fear had crept into him, the
fear he should have felt all along. But Rhino hadn’t hesitated to
answer the call.
Rizzo needed soldiers. He had ballers. A master thief. A master
of stealth. A stone cold wrecking ball. All of them burning with the
fires of the righteous. Maybe these men represented something
better.
They were starting from scratch: they needed guns, explosives,
ammunition, anything they could lay their hands on designed to
wreak havoc, and they knew exactly the place to look.
74
H O C H E A N D E R S O N
Every big city has a National Guard armory someplace.
In years past, Guard armories were frequent targets for uprisings.
Abolitionist John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid was the seizure of a
Guard armory. Throughout the eighteen hundreds they needed a
good supply of weapons in all local armories for putting down the
occasional slave rebellion, then later to deal with unions and immi-
grants. Today the Guard did most of its fighting in the Middle East,
yet it was prudent to remain prepared should a modern Civil War
break out right here.
Brown had nineteen men behind him and he wound up getting
hanged. Rizzo had three. He’d put bullets in all their heads before he
allowed things to get as far as the noose.
Unlike its traditional part-time status, the local Guard was made
up of a normal combat infantry unit with an engineer company for
support. The armory used to be right downtown until the building, a
century-old relic that cost a fortune in HVAC and needed hundreds
of thousands in repairs, was gutted and turned into a new hotel
owned by the Martins, complete with historic façade. The replace-
ment armory was built out in the suburbs with little fanfare.
Dennis drove and the crew rode in the back of their new step
van. Stealing it was child’s play for Dennis. Similarly, getting into the
armory and disabling its alarm was also of little challenge. Dennis
said, “I wouldn’t use that system to protect a liquor store, much less
enough hooch to invade France.”
Rizzo and Cole Jr. trotted down aisles crammed with armaments
like they were Sunday shopping at Target-for-rebels.
“You had to bring your mutt?” Dennis asked. He had never been
comfortable around dogs.
“He’s my good luck charm, aren’tcha, boy?” Rizzo said.
They were surrounded by rifles, machine guns, high capacity
sawed off shotguns, pistols, hand grenades, anti-tank rockets,
ground-to-air rockets, parachutes, tear gas, gas masks, high resis-
tance bullet proof vests, leg armor, pelvis armor, arm armor, polycar-
Rizzo
75
bonate chest armor, helmets with reinforced face shields, sound
cannons, ear protectors, tasers, compound bows, arrows in quivers,
ammunition of every description, and enough plastic explosive and
blasting caps to destroy Hoover and his dam.
They were boys at their first Christmas whose parents were as
rich as the United States government. Days ago they had drawn up a
plan on what they would retrieve from the armory. The sheer scale
of the available options forced a hasty reconfiguring. They had to
decide what they would take, and how much, and they had to do it
quickly.
“Gentlemen, start your engines,” Rizzo said, and no one laughed.
They had already decided on Cincinnati as their target. The city
enjoyed a special place in the hearts of some Americans. It was the
center of the Copperhead movement, the Northern support for
slavery and opposition to the Civil War. It was a major hub for the
KKK in the twenties when it made its move to become a mainstream
political party. It was the center point for the German American
Bund, the American Nazi movement. Something in the water made
Cincinnati a nexus of fascist extremism.
Now it was the Midwestern headquarters for the Dagger Cross
Society. Tomorrow it would be the transfer site of a massive amount
of cash.
The Merit and Dagger contained a certain contingent with a
high level of paranoia about the government, even this government,
finding anything out about their lives in general and their finances
in particular. They were distrustful of banks, credit unions, credit
cards, cloud finance—anything that left a trail. Rizzo was certain he
didn’t want to know what they were hiding.
Once a year the Dagger Cross Society had its big fundraiser to
stockpile the money needed to run the Merit Party and buy the
influence they needed to continue their domination of the country.
Their members and acolytes always responded generously, with the
figures they publicized reaching mind-boggling eleven figure totals.
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
Most of that money came in conventional form, through checks,
credit cards, bank transfers.
But a small percentage arrived in all-American greenbacks.
Twenties, fifties, hundreds, all sent through the US Mail to a post
office box in Cincinnati.
Even a small percentage of an eleven figure number is a lot of
money. The Dagger Cross kept the three to four hundred million in
cash in a large vault under heavy guard in their Midwestern head-
quarters throughout the campaign. Even as a child Rizzo had
enjoyed staring at the pictures of the piles of currency in the papers
and on the news every year during the funding drive.
Rizzo just assumed the society kept a large pile of that money to
bribe politicians and judges, buy drugs and escorts, or cover up
more severe crimes in their day-to-day business. Whatever its uses,
in the end most of it was transferred to the Federal Reserve Bank in
Cleveland by means of a large armored truck, escorted by MRAPs
cruising immediately ahead and behind it. They were accompanied
by a helicopter gunship, fully armed. A lot of publicity about how
heavily armed and armored the vehicles were arrived dutifully in the
media each year, designed to discourage any attempts, any fleeting
thoughts of robbery.
Here’s what Rizzo knew: no matter how heavily armored you
were, running in a highway caravan was a distinct disadvantage. An
opponent knew exactly where you were, and you were very concen-
trated in the three vehicles. And although the caravan route was a
deep secret, there were, one, a limited number of routes whose
bridges and road beds could handle that kind of weight, and two,
always a number of people who knew what the route was.
Something else Rizzo knew: the Dagger Cross had no idea they
were coming.
Rizzo remembered his gin, took a gulp to make up for the time
he’d been lost in his own thoughts. My god, he thought, if they could
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77
have seen the shape their lives were going to assume back when the
four of them played ball on the neighborhood courts....
Cole Jr. came running back with the ball in his mouth. He
sneezed as he dropped the ball on the ground, walked onto the
porch and laid down at Rizzo’s feet. Rizzo stroked the tired animal
from head to toe. He winced as his hand rediscovered the scars the
boots had left him with in his hind quarters. The dog didn’t seem to
mind. Rizzo believed if Cole Jr. could have purred he would have.
“You know, little buddy, I’ve been thinking,” Rizzo said. “This
thing we’re doing tomorrow is dangerous. And if I’m being honest
with you, there’s a good chance we might not come back from it. I
don’t know how I feel about dropping you in the middle of all that.
God knows you’ve already been through enough. I was thinking,
Bella from the coffee shop...she really likes you. And I know you like
her. Maybe you should just go stay with her where you’ll be safe
instead of running around with me. What do you think?”
Cole Jr. rolled his head back and stared at Rizzo. Then he put his
head back down on the floor and immediately started snoring.
11
OPERATION PAYBACK
RIZZO UNCAPPED a thermos filled to the halfway mark with espresso
and took a solid hit. Dennis sat at the metal fold-out table with him
stripping and cleaning his rifle, a Famas F1 he’d taken a shine to
back at the armory. Rhino wrestled on the floor with Cole Jr.
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79
Everyone who ever met the dog fell in love with him, that is except
for every single boot back at Mountainview.
They paid first and last on a small cinderblock warehouse in
Columbus under the name D. O. Shaquile, and set up a temporary
HQ. Dennis moved some of the items he’d liberated over the years
into the front in case they needed to prove they really were
importers/exporters of rare fine woodworks and objets d'art. Draw a
line on a map from Cincinnati to Cleveland and you would see that
line pass very close to Columbus. The men had a reasonable idea
that the caravan would have to pass someplace close to or through
the state capital.
Without warning Mo appeared in the office where Rizzo and
Dennis were sitting, wet from the rain and obviously pleased with
himself. “What’s the word?” Rizzo said.
Mo had it. The convoy’s exact route. He was the kind of guy who
knew the people who knew the people who would know that. Rizzo
had chosen early in their friendship never to ask too many ques-
tions. Mo took a red marker and drew the route from memory on the
map. They were bobbing and weaving on and off Interstate 71, some-
times using the highway, sometimes smaller roads that ran parallel.
Mo and Rhino kept their distance from each other. Rizzo had
seen Rhino gather the courage to approach his former partner a
couple of times only to have Mo walk away, unwilling or unable to
forgive. Certainly unable to forget. But he always remained in the
room which felt like something rather than nothing. They gathered
round the map, Rhino on one end and Mo on the other. Rizzo
studied the lines and colors. He took a yellow marker and circled a
spot. “Here,” he said.
'Here' was a stretch of two-lane road in a shallow valley. The loca-
tion allowed the posse a set-up with clear firing lines on the convoy
from above.
They waited, sheltered in a small copse of trees, and dressed in
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
maximum body armor. Rizzo had even managed to find a small
Kevlar vest that fit Cole Jr. perfectly.
Before every battle, Rizzo got cold feet. Wondering if this would
be his time and how he would face the moment when it happened.
Dreading that feeling of relief he got every time one of his squad
members got hit instead of him. Thinking about who he might have
to kill and whether or not they deserved it. The men and women
guarding the caravan were just working stiffs like him, right? It was a
job. They had families, they had the air tax. Were they all that
different from Rizzo when he was in the army?
Fuck that, he thought. You bet your ass they were different. There
might be a handful of them incapable of deeper thinking who
figured they were just doing a job, maybe. But the Dagger and Merit
security forces were working to preserve and protect a power struc-
ture that had sent Rizzo and thousands like him on the run, robbed
him of his basketball career, sent his mother into hiding, tried to
make him a puppet and when that failed turned him into a slave—
Rizzo had finally learned to say the word out loud. He was only one
man. There were millions out there whose bodies were being
abused, whose lives were being destroyed by a handful of people
who weaponized cruelty in the name of growing ever richer, ever
more powerful, power beyond need or reason, power only for the
sake of itself. This was the order the caravan guards had chosen of
their own free will to preserve.
Rizzo was not specifically out to kill them. He was out to slice the
tender underbelly of the Dagger and Merit where it would hurt and
bleed but not kill. If in the process the paladins of the great castle
faced slaughter that was in God’s hands, not Rizzo’s.
Cole Jr. tensed just as Rizzo heard the chopper. So many times,
