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 Pan—American 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 Department‟s 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 Higdon‟s 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 BRANCH

The 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 city‟s 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 Daisy‟s 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: Dawn
The small trawler was heading north an hour before dawn on the eighth day out of

Cumaná, Venezuela, when the captain of the four-man crew first spotted the red trouble light blinking

on the mast of the sailboat. He made it a mile or so away when he saw it the first time. The trawler

was ten
miles
at sea and thirty-five miles northeast of Fernandina, Honda, at the time. The captain

watched 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 man‟s

toy, dead in the water. It was a forty-footer, with a man on deck. The man had removed his shirt and

was waving it overhead.

The captain, a deeply tanned man in his early forties wearing four days‟ growth of beard, stroked his

jaw with a greasy hand. Two of the crew members watched the sailboat draw closer with mild

interest. The mate, a black man with a scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, squinted through

the dim light and then urged the captain to pass up the stricken boat.

“Fuck „em, man. We ain‟t 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 shirtless

man was obviously rich; a soft, Sunday
sailor,
becalmed far beyond his limit and probably scared to

death.

“No guns,” the captain said softly in Spanish. “rust stand easy and see what they want. If gas is their

problem, we can help the gringos out.”

He turned on a powerful light and swept its beam along the sailboat from bow to stem. He steered the

trawler close beside the sailboat and tossed the man a line.

“Habla espanol?”
the captain asked.

“No,”
the sailor answered.

“What
ees your problem?” the captain asked in broken English.

“Not enough wind.” The sailor, who was wearing white jeans and designer sneakers, pointed at the

limp sail. “And no gas. Can you sell me some gas?”

“I geev you enough gas to make Saint Simons Island,” the captain said, pointing toward the horizon.

“Fifteen,
maybe twenty miles northwest.”

“Thank
you,
thank you very much.
Muchas gracias, señor.”
The man bowed and waved a thank-you.

The captain ordered one of his men to take a gas can aboard the sailboat. The man went below and

emerged a few minutes later with a ten-gallon can in hand. He and one of the other crewmen

scrambled aboard the sailboat.

The captain and the mate watched from aboard the trawler.

“Messin‟ with trouble,” the black mate mumbled.