In the Blood by J. A. Kerley

the office had been back in the files, or they would have been shredded by glass and shattered by concussion.
    Nothing was taken for granted any more. There were no windows and the door was metal.
    Near the entrance to the lot I saw a hulking bubba type slouched in a battered pickup with the door open. He had a square face and had gone days without shaving. His plaid shirt had the sleeves cut off, showing hard and tattooed arms. He shot me a look, flicked the cigarette to the pavement. I checked my rear-view and saw him pull a cellphone.
    “You see that guy, Cars? Mean-looking piece of work.”
    “Probably just sitting and eating,” I said. “But around here’s where you should let your natural paranoia shine.”
    “Cuz it ain’t paranoia if they’re really following you, right?”
    “Bingo.”
    I parked at the far end of the building. There was no name on the metal door, just a number. But I knew the name: Southern Legal Defense Program. Though the name suggested a program to help indigent defendants, the SLDP was a monitoring organization that kept close tabs on hate groups. The organization had contacts ranging from law enforcement to prison leadership to informants inside the groups. In a recent case information supplied by the SLDP and a couple of similar watchdog groups helped convict two former Klan members of a series of lynchings that had occurred in the early sixties. The Kluxers were now in their late seventies, and I was delighted they got their earthly retributions in before whatever lays in the distance exacted the Universe’s toll.
    Much harsher, I hoped.
    There had, predictably, been the usual cracker chorus bemoaning the perps’ current ages and calling the investigation a vendetta against a few old men, as though time had washed their crimes away. I recalled video footage of their lawyer, a beady-eyed guy in a loud suit, standing at the courthouse mics after the guilty verdicts, yodeling about injustice to a crowd with few but vocal sympathizers.
    Thus the bomb, one of several revenge schemes aimed at the group in its forty-year existence.
    I’d known the SLDP’s director since my first year on the force, back when I was in uniform. A murder had occurred on my beat, horrific, a fifty-year-old black man beaten to death with ball bats.
    I’d been asking around on the street about the unsolved murder – it couldn’t even have been called a case because I was in uniform – for a couple months when I got a call out of the blue from a guy named Ben Belker. It was curious that he’d heard about my interest, because I was just a beat cop. Belker said I should talk to a guy named Hawley Cage.
    Long story short: Cage turned out to be a member of a group called Aryan America Only. Except he was also an informer for the SLDP. Cage told me of interesting boozy conversations he’d overheard at a meeting. Long story shorter: I vetted the info, passed it to the dicks on the case, and a month later they arrested two psychopathic Klanners who’d killed the old guy after he’d yelled at them to slow down in the street because kids lived in the neighborhood.
    It turned out Ben Belker had worked for the SLDP for years as a field operative and was now its “survey director”, meaning he assimilated and analyzed data on hate groups to make sense of their comings and goings. If anyone was anyone in the various movements, Ben kept tabs on them.
    Ben was at the door as I entered, as skinny as a sapling, brown hair looking like it was combed with a wolverine, big eyes widened by nerdish black-frame glasses. A pen stain soaked the pocket of his work shirt. His shoes were gray Hush Puppies, one untied. He clasped me in a hug as tight as an auto compactor. When we released he slapped the side of my head. Harry seemed content to stand back and watch the drama.
    “Jeez, what was that about?” I asked, rubbing my head.
    “When was the last time you were here?”
    Time has never been exact to me. I tried to recall my