True Allegiance

by Ben Shapiro

  That afternoon, Soledad took the supplemental property tax bill, nailed it to a wooden box, aimed her shotgun at it, and blew a hole in it the size of a fist.

  That night, she emptied her last bank account, some $25,000, and signed a check for $5,000. She sent it to Emilio. She’d always wanted to pay for the boy’s college—she’d told Emilio that. Now she paid for his coffin.

  The next morning, she took the other $20,000 and converted it to cash.

  Then she went shopping.

  She had plenty of fertilizer, could obtain Tovex easily, and had her boys order nitromethane, supposedly so that they could race their hot rods around the area.

  Weeks passed. At least a hundred times, she considered backing out, moving on. She knew she was doing something borderline insane—even though she’d taken all the precautions, no precautions could prevent the federal government from bringing all of its resources to bear. And if they were concerned enough about a fish to stifle the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, what would they do if someone destroyed one of their offices?

  She kept coming back to one image: Juan’s coffin. That image would quickly merge with the image of the dead cattle and the dried-up land and the empty house.

  They didn’t understand, she knew. And they’d never understand, unless she made them understand.

  The handoff went down in the middle of a Saturday night in an open field. Nobody noticed it, of course—this was the Central Valley, and nobody cared what went down in the Central Valley.

  She didn’t sleep much. When she finally fell asleep, an empty wine glass dangling from her hand, it was 3:00 a.m.

  She woke up with the television blaring. Pictures of the blown-out side of the Water Resources Control Board offices on I Street in Sacramento led every news network. All of them. Even Soledad was somewhat shocked by the security video—it looked like something out of a Schwarzenegger movie, with cement and steel blasting into the night sky. Plumes of smoke and ash rose from the bombing site. Soledad was grateful that the truck had been completely eviscerated by the explosion, but she knew that federal investigators would check the camera footage—it was only a matter of time before they did proper forensic analysis and traced the truck.

  There were no casualties—Soledad had insisted on a weekend attack to avoid any human toll—but the building itself smoldered, a gaping crater where the front door used to be. The news crawl scrolled: “MASSIVE BOMBING AT FEDERAL BUILDING…TERROR SUSPECTED.”

  The governor pledged to get to the bottom of what he termed a “brutal terror attack.” He called on the federal government for emergency relief—after all, the Environmental Protection Agency shared offices with the Water Resources Control Board. The president pledged to do what he could. He agreed with the California governor, saying, “Such acts have no place in a democratic America.”

  Prescott pledged to enforce federal law, to investigate fully, to prosecute those who would assault the government. Anarchy, he said, could not be allowed to reign.

  Two days later, the SWAT team showed up. They were fully militarized, driving MRAVs. They looked like they’d been redeployed directly from Afghanistan. Which, in fact, some of them had. Virtually every agency of the federal government had been given heavy weaponry—even the environmental agencies. You never knew, the lawmakers said, what kind of weapons American citizens had socked away in their basements.

  When the SWAT team arrived, they set up a perimeter around the ranch. They didn’t approach, presumably fearful of sparking a firefight. Soledad spotted at least two surveillance drones flying above the barren ranch, with its remaining cattle lowing hungrily at the empty creek.

  She turned on the news to see an aerial shot of the ranch—her ranch. The scrolling caption on CNN read: “TERROR SUSPECT RANCHER SURROUNDED.”

  So she called in. After first convincing several producers that she was, in fact, Soledad Ramirez, and had no intention of screaming “bababooey” live on air, they let her through to talk to Wolf Blitzer.

  The scroller on the TV changed to “BREAKING: TERROR SUSPECT CALLS CNN.” They flashed a picture of her, looking surprisingly sinister, and plastered it across the screen. The producers must have pulled it from her Facebook page and then darkened it for effect, she thought.

  “Ms. Ramirez,” Wolf said in his faux shout—it’s like the man never knew how a microphone worked—“do you have any intention of surrendering to the authorities?”

  “Hello, Wolf,” she answered. “No, I don’t have any intention of surrendering to the Environmental Protection Agency over some damn fish. They’ve been starving out me and every other rancher for years. So they can come in and arrest me. They can jail me. I have no interest in spilling blood. But they already have blood on their hands as far as I’m concerned.”

  She told Blitzer about Emilio and Juan, about the dead cattle and the bankruptcy. She told him about the surrounding farms, all dried out, about how the breadbasket of the country had turned into a dust bowl. “You tell the governor and the president,” she concluded, “that I’m happy to surrender and do my jail time if they just keep this water flowing. Because I’m not going to stand for my government—yes, it’s my government, too—violating my God-given rights to water my land. I’ve never taken anything from anybody. And I don’t plan to start now by giving up not just my rights, but the rights of my friends.”

  The media went absolutely berserk. The governor called her a domestic terrorist, put her on par with al-Qaeda. The president vowed to stop violations of law at any cost. “The rule of law,” he intoned, “must not be held ransom by some crazed cattlewoman.” Commentators on cable television speculated that Soledad had stocked up for war, armed herself with bazookas and grenades and every form of weaponry outside of nukes. It would be Waco, they predicted. Waco times two. Times ten. Times one hundred.

  They would have been surprised to learn that aside from the shotgun, Soledad’s weaponry was limited to the cutlery in her pantry, and that her only allies were a pet cat and a mangy dog she’d taken in.

  Soledad expected to be arrested that day. But through the night, nobody approached the house. The drones kept circling. The cameras kept rolling. They shut off her phone lines and her electricity and her water. But they didn’t move toward her house.

  When the sun rose the next morning, she realized why. The members of the SWAT team stood on the ridges overlooking her ranch, their guns trained on her home. But around them, in a wider circle, were dozens of armed men. Over a hundred of them, actually. Militia members. And their guns were trained on the SWAT team.

  That morning, she brought the members of the SWAT team cookies.

  And the standoff began.

  Detroit, Michigan

  Detroit was a shithole. But it was his shithole.

  That’s the way Levon Williams thought of it. He’d grown up in this shithole, right near Eight Mile Road—a long stretch of street separating Detroit from Oakland County. Detroit was 85 percent black, with a median household income of $27,000 per year. Oakland County was 77 percent white, with a median household income of $65,000 per year. End up on the wrong side of the street, you could wind up carjacked, mugged, or beaten and left for dead. The emergency response time measured twenty-five minutes from city hall to downtown Detroit.

  The stores dotting Eight Mile Road itself formed a steady, depressing pattern: liquor store, auto parts store, burned-out hulk, boarded-up shop, hair salon. Repeat ad infinitum. Every once in a while, an auto lot broke up the monotony, or perhaps a music store. But that was about it. What idiot would open up on one of the least-policed streets in America?

  Levon would.

  Some might call it idealism. Others, community loyalty.

  Of course, his shop wasn’t exactly legal.

  Levon ran a local gang. The gangs out here weren’t particularly organized. They were mostly neighborhood stuff, a
few buddies hanging out, running drugs, holding up the local stores. The stores basically took it for granted at this point, shrugged and sighed and let it go. It took twelve minutes for the cops to arrive at an emergency, and eighteen minutes for the ambulances to come. Better to pay up, keep your head down, and not get shot.

  Unless you were Levon.

  Levon’s shop was a barbershop. It didn’t stick out on the road. The clientele was mainly older black men—the younger men didn’t like to hang out there, for fear they’d be sucked into Levon’s orbit. But the older men knew what was happening in the community. More importantly, they knew where the bodies were buried. Often literally.

  The clientele didn’t spend a lot of money. Then again, they didn’t need to. In the back room, behind the swivel chairs, Levon and his crew shuttled crack cocaine. That drug had gone out of style in the mid-1990s thanks to the federal crackdown on crack dealers—black politicians had been the biggest advocates of putting crack dealers on different footing than powder cocaine dealers at the time. Nobody wanted to deal crack anymore. But Levon catered to a select population.

  He also ran a protection racket on the side. At six three and two hundred twenty pounds of shredded muscle, Levon cut an imposing figure walking into other stores on the block. They immediately went quiet when he came in. When he told them he’d graduated from the U of M, they got even quieter. This kid was brutal and smart, they knew.

  Today, however, Levon had run into an apparent snag.

  It happened every so often, usually with one of the older folks who didn’t want to pay him. He’d usually head over to their shops and casually inform them that while he appreciated their situation, the last thing they wanted was an unexpected fire striking in the near future. He’d shrug, smile, and turn to leave. More often than not, they’d immediately open the cash register. On rare occasions, when that cash register didn’t open, an unexpected fire would turn the business into a smoking husk by morning.

  This time was different. The old man in question, Timothy Gardner, had seemed like every other holdover from the 1950s. But Gardner was connected, it turned out. He counted among his myriad cousins the Reverend Jim Crawford. Big Jim. Community leader. Talk show host. Friend to the street.

  And now Reverend Jim was standing in Levon’s shop, grinning his million-dollar grin, wearing his thousand-dollar suit, shaking his five hundred-dollar haircut. He sat in one of the swivel chairs. The shop was empty. Levon stood before him, arms crossed, biceps flexed.

  “Mr. Washington,” said the reverend, “I understand that my cousin has been causing you some distress.”

  Levon nodded.

  “Because he is living in your neighborhood?”

  Levon nodded again.

  “Well, what can we do to rectify this situation?” Big Jim’s grin grew.

  Levon pretended to think. He’d known the answer to this question the minute he heard about Gardner’s relationship with Big Jim. Actually, it’s why he had targeted Gardner’s shop.

  Slowly, he approached Big Jim’s chair, saw the fear creep into Big Jim’s eyes, the way it did with everyone when he gave them the dead stare—that blank look he could wash over his pupils to cloud his intent. He put his hands on the back of Big Jim’s chair.

  Suddenly, he reached into the cabinet next to the chair, whipped out a barber shawl, and wrapped it around Big Jim’s neck. Then, like lightning, he reclined Big Jim’s chair. Before the famous rabble-rouser could react, Levon grabbed a can of Barbasol, foamed it in his thick, uncalloused hands, and covered Big Jim’s neck and face.

  Then he took out a razor and a strop. Slowly, he began sharpening it as he looked down at Big Jim.

  “I want in.”

  Big Jim laughed, and Levon found himself admiring the man’s rich baritone. “You’re an uppity one, ain’t you?”

  Levon gave him the blank stare again. Sklop. He sharpened the razor. “I want in,” he repeated.

  Big Jim looked up at him comfortably. “And what if I tell you I don’t have any jobs available for such as you?”

  Levon shrugged. Sklop. “Well, then, your cousin might need a job. Can never tell what’s gonna happen to his shop. And he’s older than I am. And less educated.”

  “What can you do for me? I don’t run rackets on our own people.”

  Levon moved behind Crawford and slowly began shaving him. His stare never stopped. “I have an idea. But you’ll have to trust me.”

  Crawford’s eyes narrowed. “But I don’t trust you now, brother. That’s why I’m here.”

  Levon’s eyes suddenly cleared. He smiled wide. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he said.

  Now Crawford looked confused.

  Levon’s smile never faltered. “It’s Shakespeare,” he said. “It means you’ll learn to trust me.”

  Crawford laughed. Loudly this time. Then he looked at Levon curiously. “Quoting dead honkies,” he twinkled. “You might be useful yet.”

  Two hours to the end of the shift. Ricky O’Sullivan looked down at his watch. Two hours. He hated this beat. The only white boy working the zombieland near the abandoned Packard plant. The plant, which once turned out luxury cars for the upper class, now covered forty acres of dead zone. Now it looked like something out of Mad Max, with shattered windows, rusted beams, and graffitied walls covering block after block. The city had tried to rehabilitate the site dozens of times. They’d failed every time.

  Now it was a known drug hangout. There had been a dozen killings in the nearby area recently, and the new mayor insisted that police presence in the area increase. That, at least, was the right idea—or would have been, if it weren’t for the department’s use-of-force policies, which made it nearly impossible to do proper police work. Morale in the department had never been lower, and for good reason. After the latest consent decree with President Prescott’s Department of Justice, every cop on the force walked gingerly.

  O’Sullivan rubbed his hands together in the car for warmth. He was low on gas and didn’t want to leave the engine running—his shift was almost over, given that it was nearly midnight. He couldn’t wait to get home, back to his apartment, far away from the cold and the dark.

  He’d joined the force just a year before. He wasn’t a Detroit native, but he’d seen the recruitment ads. High pay, chances for advancement. On the force, he was a newbie. But in Detroit, that was as good as being a veteran, given the turnover.

  The radio clogged with static.

  “10-31, handle the 459 in progress, Iowa and Van Dyke.”

  O’Sullivan sighed. Nobody responded.

  “10-31, handle the 459 in progress, Iowa and Van Dyke,” the dispatcher repeated.

  “10-4,” O’Sullivan said into his radio. He turned the engine over, flipped on the lights. The siren sounded. He still got a thrill in his legs every time it did. Burglary in progress at the gas station. That sounded about right. He hit the gas, shot forward on East Grand. From the radio, he figured there should be a couple other cops on the way soon, but he’d be there first.

  First. Response time in this city was awful.

  He breathed heavily out of his mouth. “Calm down, boy,” he said to himself. “Keep cool.”

  Still, he could feel the sweat popping on his brow. This wasn’t his first robbery, but it was his first solo response. No senior partner to help out this time. Short-staffing and budget cuts.

  The gas station looked empty when he pulled up. Grass had pushed its way through the cement of the lot. Graffiti marked the station—illiterate bubble letters; O’Sullivan had given up on trying to decode that shit long ago—and the lights on the street flickered eerily. Rows of broken-down townhouses marked the surrounding side streets. Across the Earle Memorial Highway, there was an abandoned church, covered in graffiti, a couple boarded-up brick buildings. An open field bordered the gas station to the e
ast.

  He didn’t see anybody on the street as he pulled up next to the quick mart. A couple of those windows were boarded up, too. He peeked through the window—nobody was behind the counter. The place looked closed. But he couldn’t be sure from the car.

  The car door creaked as he pushed it open with his foot. O’Sullivan reached out for the secure feeling of the gun on his hip—it was warm to the touch, comforting. He took his hand off the butt of the pistol and pulled his flashlight from his belt, turned it on.

  Nothing. Just dark and quiet.

  He looked through the glass door, saw the racks of Funyuns and Doritos. The cashier’s counter lay behind a thick pane of double-plexiglass. Nobody sat behind it.

  Then he heard the voice.

  “Hey, pig,” it said. The voice wasn’t deep. It was the voice of a child. And the kid stood outside the door of the quick mart, legs spread, arms hanging down by his sides. A cute black kid, wearing a Simpsons T-shirt and somebody’s old Converse sneakers and baggy jeans.

  On his hip, stuck in those baggy jeans, was a pistol.

  It looked like a pistol, anyway. But O’Sullivan couldn’t see clearly. The light wasn’t right. He could see the bulge, but not the object.

  O’Sullivan put his flashlight back in his belt and put his hand back on his pistol, the greasy handle still warm to the touch.

  “Stop right there, pig,” the kid said. His hand began to creep down toward his waistband.

  O’Sullivan pulled the gun out of its holster, leveling it at the kid. “Put your hands above your head. Do it now!”

  “Fuck you, honky,” the kid shot back. “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood.” Then he laughed, a cute kid’s laugh. O’Sullivan looked for sympathy behind those eyes, found none.

  Oh, shit, O’Sullivan thought. Then he said, “Hands up. Right now.”