Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (i can read books TXT) 📕

notes in there too and things Wally Ray liked to talk about. That jump drive has recordings of the Krieger podcasts.”

“The what?”

“Morgan Krieger, the guy who does the renegade internet podcast about white purity and the race problem in America.” He pauses as if waiting for you to acknowledge you’ve heard of Krieger. You’ve seen the name in Grant’s notes but you keep that to yourself, so Cropper continues: “Nobody knows his real identity but he’s real popular.”

Nodding, you tap the CD. “What’s on this?”

“The Squirrels,” he says, sliding out of the booth and standing. “Rock band popular with the movement. The Free Range Vampire Squirrels. Their lyrics say it all. I hope this helps the police find which of Wally Ray’s people did all this to you.” He looks about one last time and reaches out to shake your hand.

You offer it hesitantly, trying not to cringe. “Thank you.”

“Thanks for the lunch, ma’am. Good luck.”

Then he is gone.

That night an hour of internet searches surprises you about the extent of bigoted music—several annual festivals, video clips of various bands, girl groups, even a rap-style rivalry between neo-Nazi rockers the Snake Eagles and the Free Range Vampire Squirrels. Then you listen to the Squirrels. Though their song “Watermelon Slurp,” about French-kissing a black girl, got them removed from YouTube for violations of terms of service, you sit through the whole CD. You take notes, replay lyrics, stop now and then to take a breath and remind yourself why you are subjecting yourself to this. With songs like “Buchenwald Boogie” promoting dancing through death camps and “Bullets and Babies” detailing what’s necessary for white survival, the CD is full of stereotypes, racial epithets, and invective that crosses the line into mental illness. With lyrics like “Boy, this is my place/ you need to learn yours,” the song “No Dogs, No Niggers, No Jews” calls for founding a nation called AWE, for All White Ethnostate. “Hot Flash” says, “Not enough to leave his black ass swinging in a tree/ you got to burn the rancid meat to get back to pur-i-ty.” “Bloodfucker” depicts a man dismembering his daughter for dating across racial lines. “Enemy of the People,” a diatribe about traitors in the media, almost makes you throw up. Other titles include “Still Gator Bait to Me,” “Squinty Squirmy Chink Chat,” “Lock and Load to Secure Your Abode,” and “Burn the Burka with the Bitch Still Inside.” By the time you finish you want to toss the CD into the fireplace, but you know you must keep it, for the sake of the book.

Plugging in the flash drive Cropper gave you, you begin to listen to the podcasts. With a voice altered by technology that makes it sound robotic but with discernible inflections—a kind of Stephen Hawking lite—the podcaster may be male or female, young or old. But you think Morgan Krieger is a man because of his anger, as older and uneducated because of his speech patterns and word choice. The podcasts range from twenty to forty minutes. What you hear horrifies you even more than the noise of the Squirrels and the Snake Eagles, who, given time, will destroy each other before they destroy America.

Krieger is different. Calm despite his anger. Engaging. Persuasive. Even intellectual. Bible verses justifying slavery, genocide, and the separation of races fall from his lips with the practiced ease of a preacher in a megachurch. He rattles off facts, figures, and historical anecdotes with a confidence that discourages fact-checking. His ethnic impressions in an electronic voice reverberate with stereotypical speech patterns and pronunciations designed to get laughs. He heaps vitriol upon public figures rooted in liberal politics or the entertainment industry. He quotes from books you’ve heard of but never read: The Clansman, which was filmed as Birth of a Nation in 1915, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, The Camp of the Saints, The South Was Right.

“Slavery,” he declares in one podcast, “was benign. Sure, there were cruel masters who forgot their Christianity and caused pain. But they were the exception, not the rule. If the masters were so bad, why would a hundred thousand Negro soldiers fight for the Confederacy? Most of those old-looking photographs of slaves with whip scars ‘cross their backs were staged, beginning in the 1940s.”

“I been asked,” he says in another installment, “why Germany’s got no monuments to Hitler and Goering and other leaders of the Reich while America has to fight to keep its southern heritage intact. The answer is simple, my friends. Germany is ashamed of its history. We’re damned proud of ours.”

The episode that forces you to stop listening makes your blood run cold: “Shooting up a synagogue full of old Jews or a church full of old Negroes is a waste of ammunition. They’re past their childbearing years, past being a threat. Killing them only lines the pockets of undertakers, Jew and Negro alike. You don’t wipe out rats by shooting them when they’re fat and old and out scavenging for food. You wipe them out by cornering them in their nests and killing them when they’re young, before they breed.”

The next morning you read that Joseph D. Cropper was stabbed to death outside a Richmond hospital and an off-duty police officer on his way to visit his dying mother wounded and arrested Carl Lee Stoneman—possibly Stony in the pages from Cropper.

You decide it’s time you got your gun back from Dr. Clay.

24

At six-fifteen, Zulema opened the door for our group of ten and locked it behind us. She introduced us all to the cook, bartender, and two servers who would be working tonight and to Will Johannes, who’d come alone and already had copies of In the Mouth of the Wolf on display. While Ramos began to set up the security station by the door, complete with NO WEAPONS signs, Drea and Will discussed coordinating the signing after the reading. Before he joined Ramos, Betty Park gave Pete a