“I know,” Stark said. That very subject had been weighing heavily on his mind. A lot of little towns contracted with the county in which they were located or with larger municipalities nearby to provide vital services like police and fire protection. That wasn’t really going to work in the case of Shady Hills. Stark couldn’t imagine George Lozano or Dennis Feasco agreeing to such an arrangement.
“We had a meeting here at our school last night,” Arizola went on. “Almost a thousand people showed up, and they were overwhelmingly in support of approaching you about being included in the boundaries of Shady Hills. What it boils down to, Mr. Stark, is that we’re going to be paying city taxes to somebody in the next few years, no matter what we do. We’d rather it be Shady Hills, where at least you’re trying to do the right thing and stand up to the drug cartels. I tell you, some of the things we see in high school . . . well, it’s frightening, that’s all. I’m convinced that the cartels have agents right here in the school among our students.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Stark said. “But I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Anyway, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I’d like to present my case to the leaders of your community and propose that we join forces.”
“I think you already have,” Stark said with a chuckle. “But if you’d like to do it face-to-face, I’m sure that would be fine. We can meet with you whenever is convenient for you. We’re all retired, after all.”
Arizola suggested that he come speak to the committee that evening. Stark told him that was fine and promised to call him back if anything changed.
The people of Dry Wash wanting to be part of their cause had been a surprise, and this was an even bigger one. But it would instantly increase their credibility, Stark thought. The people who lived in those new housing developments were well-to-do, although they were suffering some like everybody else in the weak economy Washington’s poorly thought out, ham-fisted policies had created. Principal Arizola was right about being able to do more with a larger tax base.
If they weren’t careful, Stark told himself with a smile, Shady Hill might just wind up being a real town.
INTOLERANCE HAS A NEW HOME.
IT’S NOT THE WILD WEST ANYMORE.
NO VIGILANTES.
NO LYNCH MOB JUSTICE.
SHADY HILLS = RACISTS.
“Where did all the idiots come from?” Fred Gomez asked as he and Stark got out of the pickup Stark had bought to replace the one destroyed in the battle. Fred waved a hand at the protestors gathered on the sidewalk across the street.
“Those charter buses would be my guess,” Stark said. He nodded toward two buses parked at the curb not far from the entrance to the county courthouse.
Hallie had parked behind Stark’s pickup. She and her father got out of the car and joined them. Jack and Mindy Kasek were here, too, along with Ben LaPorte from Dry Wash and Principal Carlos Arizola from Gonzalez High School. All of them were going to deliver the signed petitions to County Judge Steven Oliveros. The petitions contained almost three thousand signatures of registered voters who supported the incorporation of the town of Shady Hills.
Some of Chief Feasco’s uniformed officers were standing along the edge of the sidewalk to keep the protest contained. Hallie smiled and said, “I guess we shouldn’t have announced when we were going to be delivering the petitions. We got some unwanted attention.”
“Any publicity is good publicity, right?” Jack Kasek said.
They were getting some publicity, all right. News vans with satellite dishes on their roofs were parked along the street, and several field reporters were standing in the heat, trying to look dignified and handsome as they talked into their microphones. From time to time the cameramen turned to pan across the crowd of protestors, getting plenty of good footage for the evening newscasts.
“I’ve lived around here most of my life,” Alton Duncan said. “I don’t think I recognize any of those people who’re shouting and waving signs around.”
“I’m not surprised,” Stark said. “Somebody brought them in from San Antonio, or more likely Austin or Houston, and is paying them to make a scene. That way when the footage shows up on the news, they can claim that public opinion is against us.”
“That’s just not right,” Fred said.
“That’s the reality of the way things are today, though,” Hallie said. “The left likes to accuse fat-cat billionaires of running the country—and ruining the country—when in reality they have more fat-cat billionaires bankrolling them than our side ever did. And they’re willing to spend whatever it takes until everybody in the country thinks exactly the same way they do.”
“Somebody needs to put a stop to money running everything,” Principal Arizola said.
“Might as well try to stop the earth from turning while you’re at it,” Stark drawled. “Come on. Let’s get these petitions turned in.”
They walked up the steps into the courthouse. Reporters and cameramen charged alongside them. Stark and his companions ignored the shouted questions. At the top of the steps, a couple of deputies halted the media members. Stark and the others went on inside, glad to be out of the commotion.
Judge Oliveros was expecting them. He met them in his outer office and took the stack of petitions that Stark handed him.
“I have to say, I don’t support this effort,” he told them with a stern frown. “But I give you my word I’ll examine these petitions personally, and if the signatures are verifiable and in sufficient quantity, I’ll certify them and set an election date as soon as possible. I’d like to see this matter settled so maybe the county won’t be in such an uproar all the time.”
“We appreciate that, your honor,” Hallie told him.
Oliveros smiled slightly.
“You’ve appeared in my court before, Ms. Duncan. Since these people have such a competent attorney handling things for them, I’m confident these petitions will prove to be in order. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve gone over them.”
As they left the courthouse, Stark asked quietly, “That’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all there is to it,” Hallie confirmed.
The demonstration was still going on across the street. The sign-waving protesters shouted curses and insults at the people from Shady Hills as they headed back to their vehicles.
“If you asked any of them,” Stark commented, “they’d tell you how much they believe in tolerance and free speech . . . until somebody who disagrees with them wants those same rights.”
“Yeah, then all their high-flown talk goes right out the window,” Fred said.
They had just reached Stark’s pickup but hadn’t gotten in yet when a particularly loud and aggressive shout made them look around.
One of the protesters had gotten past the cops somehow and was charging toward them with a crazed look on his face and his wooden sign lifted over his head and poised to use as a weapon.
Stark had time just to glimpse the words painted on the sign—PEACE AND JUSTICE FOR ALL—before it came slashing down at him and Fred.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Stark shoved Fred to one side and twisted his body the other way. That took Stark out of the way of the sign, which whipped down between him and Fred and smashed into the hood of his pickup with a resounding clang!
The missed blow threw the protester off-balance. Stark thought about decking him, but he knew the news cameras were pointing at him by now and didn’t want to do anything in front of the whole country that would just be twisted to make him look bad. He stepped back as the man swung the sign at him again.
A couple of police officers arrived then and grabbed the protester from behind. Another cop wrestled the sign away from him.
“Let me go!” the man yelled. “We’re here to strike a blow against racism!”
“Racism!” Fred shouted back at him. “You nearly bashed my Mexican brains out, you idiot!”
The cop who had taken the sign away from the prot
ester pointed a finger at Fred and warned, “Watch it with that hate speech, mister.”
“Hate speech!” Fred’s face was flushed with fury. “Can’t you people get it through your heads—”
Stark took hold of his friend’s arm and urged him toward the pickup’s passenger side.
“Come on, Fred. We’ve done what we came here to do. Let’s go home.”
Fred pointed at the protester and said, “I want to press charges against him. What he did was assault with a deadly weapon!”
“We’ll let Hallie handle it. She can talk to the district attorney.”
The cops led the protester away. He was still practically foaming at the mouth with hatred. But it was hatred in the name of tolerance and diversity, Stark thought, so it would be celebrated by certain factions, by people who were blind to the utter illogic of their political positions.
Stark’s other companions had started toward them when the trouble broke out, but they had stopped when the police stepped in. Stark waved at them now to let them know that he and Fred were okay. Everybody got back into their vehicles and headed back toward Shady Hills.
The knowledge that he hadn’t even thrown a punch at that nutty protester gnawed at Stark as he drove. There was a time when he would have put the fella on the ground in the blink of an eye. Maybe he was getting too old for this sort of dustup. Or maybe he had just thought better of it and tempered his reaction.
But Lord help us all, he thought, when John Howard Stark was the voice of reason.
Not surprisingly, the protester who had attacked Stark and Fred wasn’t arrested or charged with anything. The district attorney declined to prosecute, saying that the man, who gave an address in Austin as his place of residence, had acted in the heat of the moment and no one had been hurt. Stark had a pretty good ding in the hood of his truck where the sign had hit it, but he wasn’t going to bother suing the guy in small claims court for the price of getting it fixed. He could tap it out and touch it up himself without much trouble.
Two days later, Hallie showed up at Shady Hills to deliver the good news in person.
“Judge Oliveros has verified the signatures and certified the petitions,” she told Stark, her father, and the Gomezes as they sat in Stark’s living room. “He’s set the election for September seventh.”
“That’s only three weeks away,” Alton said. “Will that give us time to campaign?”
“We don’t need to campaign,” Fred said. “Everybody who signed the petition in the first place will vote for incorporation. It’ll be a landslide.”
Hallie said, “Don’t be so sure. There’ll always be people on the other side, as well as people who don’t want to incorporate because they don’t want to pay city taxes.”
“You can’t blame them for that,” Stark said. “Lord knows, we’re already taxed almost to death in this country. People forget that the ‘tea’ in Tea Party stands for Taxed Enough Already.”
“Let’s not muddy the issue,” Hallie suggested. “We’ll keep it simple, have some signs and flyers printed that make it very clear what the benefits of incorporation are, and hope for a good turnout. The weather should be nice for the election, anyway, and that’ll help get the voters out.”
They began making their plans for the campaign leading up to the election, but Stark’s mind wandered. This wasn’t the sort of thing he was good at. Alton, Fred, and Aurelia seemed to think this was a major hurdle, that once Shady Hills was incorporated things would be better. Stark wasn’t convinced of that. His gut told him there was still plenty of trouble ahead.
For one thing, he wasn’t convinced that the election would go off without a hitch. Shady Hills had become a symbol, a symbol of people standing up for their rights against not only vicious criminals but also against a “do nothing but tax, spend, and regulate” government. Because of that stance, Shady Hills would always have enemies because it threatened the status quo. It threatened the hold on power by an overreaching federal government and the rule by fear of the Mexican drug cartel.
No, things were not going to go smoothly, Stark thought, no matter what his friends might hope.
It was just a matter of trying to figure out where and how hell was going to break loose next.
For several weeks now, Nacho Montez had been smarting from the defeat at Shady Hills. He had known that those old gringos would be armed and ready for trouble, but he had expected the feint at the front gate to fool them, and he had been convinced any resistance would collapse quickly once he and his men were inside the retirement park.
Who could have guessed that the residents would fight back so fiercely and so effectively?
It was all Stark’s fault, Nacho had thought more than once as a bitter, sour taste filled his mouth. Stark was their leader, the one from whom those old people drew their inspiration. Who knew he would fight like such a devil?
Kill Stark, and it would be like cutting the head off a snake. The problem was, killing Stark would not be easy. Nacho had people watching him, and Stark was always armed when he went anywhere. Not only that, but he usually had several well-armed companions with him. Nacho didn’t want to take a chance on failing again. He was already worried that Señor Espantoso might be losing confidence in him.
The señor had summoned Nacho and Jalisco to the ranch today. Chuckie was at one of the cartel’s safe houses on the other side of the border, recuperating from wounds he’d received during the fighting at Shady Hills. For a while there, Nacho had been very worried that his brother was going to die.
If that had happened, it would have been just one more score to settle with that gringo bastard John Howard Stark.
Now it looked like Chuckie was going to recover. He had the best medical care available, of course. The cartel could afford it. Not that they had to pay, because everyone was so frightened that they were eager to help in any way they could.
The Arab was still here, Nacho saw with distaste as he and Jalisco were shown into the sumptuous living room by Señor Espantoso’s bodyguards. Nacho didn’t like the man and didn’t see why the cartel was so eager to do business with strangers from the Middle East. Although born and raised on the Texas side of the border, Nacho considered himself a Mexican. He could tolerate the presence of Colombians in the cartel—they provided most of the product, after all, and at least they were Latino—but getting involved with the Islamic terrorist groups seemed like a mistake to him. The cartel could get along just fine without their help.
No one asked his opinion about such things, though, so he simply ignored the Arab and said to Espantoso, “You honor us with your invitation, señor.”
“Never mind that,” the señor snapped. “The people at Shady Hills are going to get their election. It was just on the news.”
Nacho felt a surge of anger. This whole business of the retirement park trying to become a town was just another slap in the face of the cartel. Nacho knew that, and his wounded pride wanted to strike back at them.
He forced himself to remain calm, though, as he said, “It means nothing, señor.”
“It means they will be able to hire their own police force. I want that land, Montez, and yet they continue throwing up obstacles to obtaining it.”
“Even if Shady Hills becomes a town, it will be tiny and poor. What sort of police force can they afford?”
“They defeated you and your men without a police force,” Señor Espantoso pointed out ominously.
Again Nacho struggled to control his anger.
“Only because they took us by surprise,” he said. “I promise you, we will never underestimate them again. When we strike at them the next time—”
“And when will that be?” the señor cut in.
Nacho thought fast. He said, “They have to hold an election to become a town, no? That would be a good day to teach them a lesson they will never forget.”
Espantoso frowned, and Nacho knew that the señor was considering the idea. But after a moment Espantoso shook his head.
“There is more to what we do than just simple killing,” he said. “We are not like bandido warlords who just crush anyone who defies us.”
And that was sort of a shame, Nacho thought. The legends of those simpler times held a great appeal to him. He had often thought that he would have liked to ride with Villa.
“We proceed tactically,” Espantoso said in an annoying lecturing tone. “And one such tactic is to let our enemies do our work for us.”
Nacho had to shake his head.
“I don’t understand, señor.”
“We are not the only ones opposed to the idea of Shady Hills becoming a town,” Espantoso said with a wolfish smile. “Perhaps we should just sit back and let their other enemies do our work for us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The president, his chief of staff, and the attorney general sat in the Oval Office, and the latter two men looked distinctly uncomfortable as their boss slapped a folded newspaper down on the big desk.
“This has gone on long enough,” the president said. The headline on the paper read: ELECTION APPROVED FOR TEXAS TERROR TOWN. “What sort of judge would approve an election to create a haven for gun-toting, Bible-thumping, racist vigilantes? Who appointed him, anyway? It couldn’t have been one of us.”
“He, uh, wasn’t appointed by anyone, sir,” the chief of staff said. “He isn’t a federal judge. He’s a local county judge. He was elected.”
The president rolled his eyes.
“And that’s why we don’t trust the voters in this country. They make mistakes like that all the time!”
“What do you want me to do, Mr. President?” the attorney general asked.
“I know you both said we ought to stay out of this as much as possible.” The president’s finger stabbed down at the newspaper. “But this can’t be allowed to stand! I want a federal injunction against this election, ASAP.”
“I’m not sure about jurisdiction—” the AG began.
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