William Diehl - Hooligans

Dunetown was once a quiet friendly little town. Now it had 24-hour porno palaces, neon casinos, a big racetrack and was run by the Cincinnati Triad. Together with the Special Operations Branch of the Dunetown Police Department, Kilmer aims to put them out of business.

HOOLIGANS BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK Copyright 1984 by Hooligans, Inc. All rights reserved under International and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-50862 ISBN Q-345-31201-5 This edition published by arrangement with Villard Books Manufactured in the United States of America First Ballantine Books Edition: May 1985 Map by David Lindroth This book is dedicated to Virginia, who is the love of my life;To Michael Parver, for his support and friendship through the tough times,and for Stick;And to my father, the most gentle and loving man I have ever known, who died before it was completed.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks and gratitude to my family and friends for their constant encouragement and support: to my mother, Temple, Cathy, John and Kate, Bill, Melissa arid David, Stan arid Yvonne, Bobby Byrd, Carole Jackowitz, Marilyn Parver, Michael Rothschild, Billy Wallace, Frank Mazolla, the Harrisons of Lookout Mountain, Mark Vaughn, Barbara Thomas, jack and Jim. To a true and trusting friend, Don Smith, whose wit and wisdom always help. To my good friend, C.H. Buddy Harris, of the Treasury Department, for his selfless assistance and attention to detail, and to his wife, Joan, and daughter, Robin. To Director Charles F. Rinkevich, Deputy Director David McKinley, Kent Williams, Charles E.

Nester, Morris Grodsky, and the other officers of the Treasury Departments Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Brunswick, Ga., for their invaluable technical assistance. To George Gentry and the many other men who served in Vietnam and shared their experiences and feelings with me. To George, Bill, Bear, B.L., Nancy aid Slavko, Sandy, Jim, Frankie and Jingle, Larry, Averett, Ted, Mike, Kurt, Richard, Ruth, Dayton, and all my friends and associates of the late, great Higdons on St. Simons Island, Ga., for sharing their names, friendship, time, and experiences with me. To my editor, Peter Gethers, a man of awesome insights, and to Susan and Audrey, and the rest of his sterling staff. To Marc Jaffe, for his continued faith.

To Irene Webb, my favorite wonder woman. And to a treasured and lasting friend, Owen Laster, at once and always, a gentleman of the realm. SPECIAL OPERATIONS BRANCHThe fish trusts the water, And it is in the water that it is cooked. _HAITIAN PROVERB PREFACE

Dunetown is a city forged by Revolutionaries, hammered and shaped by rascals arid southern rebels, and mannered by genteel ladies. Dunetown is grace and unhurried charm, azalea-lined boulevards and open river promenades, parks and narrow lanes; a city of squares; of ironwork and balustrades, shutters and dormers, porticoes and steeples and dollops of gingerbread icing; of bricks, ballast, and oyster shells underfoot; a waterfront place of massive walls and crude paving, of giant shutters on muscular hinges and winding stairwells and wrought-iron spans; a claustrophobic vista where freighters glide by on the river, a mere reach away, and sea gulls yell at robins. It is a city whose heartbeat changes from block to block as subtly as its architecture; a city of seventeenth-century schoolhouses, churches, and taverns; of ceiling fans and Tiffany windows, twostory atriums, blue barrel dormers, Georgian staircases and Palladian windows and grand, elegant antebellum mansions that hide from view among moss-draped oaks and serpentine vines. Dunetown is a stroll through the eighteenth century, its history limned on cemetery tablets: LOVING WYF OF JEREMY IN THESE PARTS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1744 A FAST TONGUE AND HOT TEMPER DEAD AT 22 YRS.

OF HIS ACE IN A DUEL WITH LT. CHARLES MORAY

These are its ancestors. The survivors become the citys power brokers, the rulers of the kingdom, dictating an archaic social structure that is unchanging, and defined by its metaphor, the Dune Club, restricted to the elite, whose money is oldest, whose roots are deepest, and who, for more than a century, have sequestered it from time. Thus the years have passed Dunetown, leaving behind a treasure: an eighteenth-century serfdom whose history trembles with ghost stories, with wars and brawls and buried loot on shaggy Atlantic beaches; whose people have the heritage and independence of islanders, their bloodlines traced to Irish colliers, Spanish privateers, to Haiti and Jamaica, and Cherokee reservations. Its bays, marshes, and rivers still weave a city composed of islands: Alec, Skidaway, Thunderhead, Buccaneer, Oceanby, Sea Oat, and the wistful, Gatsby-like isle of Sighs, a haunt of the rich, its antique houses serene against the backwaters of the sea, where one might easily envision a solitary and forlorn Jay Gatz, staring across the water at the solemn light on Daisys pier The past is everywhere,If you listen,For that is not the wind you hear,it is the whispering ghost of yesteryear. Reality, to Dunetown, is history to the rest of the world. A Walk Through Dunetown J.

THOMPSON,1972

Sunday: DawnThe small trawler was heading north an hour before dawn on the eighth day out ofCuman, Venezuela, when the captain of the four-man crew first spotted the red trouble light blinkingon the mast of the sailboat. He made it a mile or so away when he saw it the first time. The trawlerwas ten miles at sea and thirty-five miles northeast of Fernandina, Honda, at the time. The captainwatched the light for half an hour as his rusty scow drew closer.In the gray light just before the sun broke, they were close enough to see the sailboat, a rich manstoy, dead in the water. It was a forty-footer, with a man on deck. The man had removed his shirt andwas waving it overhead.The captain, a deeply tanned man in his early forties wearing four days growth of beard, stroked hisjaw with a greasy hand.

Two of the crew members watched the sailboat draw closer with mildinterest. The mate, a black man with a scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, squinted throughthe dim light and then urged the captain to pass up the stricken boat.Fuck em, man. We aint got tune to mess with no honky sailors, he said quietly.But the captain had been a seaman too long to pass up any vessel in distress. Besides, the shirtlessman was obviously rich; a soft, Sunday sailor, becalmed far beyond his limit and probably scared todeath.No guns, the captain said softly in Spanish. rust stand easy and see what they want. If gas is their

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