by Gavin Reese
“GUN! GUN!” Alex drove Dominic’s handcuffs farther up and away from his back, which doubled him over at the waist, while forcibly shoving him left and down onto the LeBaron’s trunk, away from the semiautomatic. Dominic’s chest and face landed on the car and Alex pulled his hands still farther up and pushed his right leg against the back of Dominic’s thighs, effectively pinning him to the trunk.
Melner quickly emerged from the open front passenger door while drawing his holstered Glock, faced the rear of the Neon, and held it at a low-ready position while assessing the area for lethal targets. Lindsay, who saw Dominic’s gun fall to the ground, had already stepped back north as she drew her Glock and placed herself in a position to fire on either Dominic or his passenger, whose face showed fear and surprise as he slowly brought his empty hands straight up above his head and stood still without any direction to do so.
Jones casually glanced up from searching the cell phone, looked over at the passenger, a GPC still clenched between his lips. Smoke rolled out with his command, “Sit the fuck down,” and he took a last, long draw before decisively casting the cigarette aside. Recognizing the severity of the situation, the passenger immediately complied and slowly dropped into a seated position.
“DON’T MOVE, DOMINIC, DON’T MOVE!” Alex yelled to ensure Dominic, as well as any witnesses in the area, heard him. Everyone stayed in place for a moment to assess the threat potential. Jones casually stepped over to the pistol, picked it up, and cleared it while Dominic banged his own head against the LeBaron’s trunk.
“Stupid (bang) stupid (bang) stupid (bang)…” Alex heard him begin to sob, a reaction he’d never unassociated with his suspect. He had only ever seen Dominic display hate, lust, and fear.
“Dominic, that’s enough! Don’t…fucking…move!” Alex was pissed. Another shitbag with a gun, he thought. Alex resumed searching Dominic’s person and clothing, looking for anything hidden even among his pocket lint or the most intimate crevice. No searched prisoner ever retained much modesty, and Alex wanted to ensure Dominic would leave with none today. Alex already knew Dominic grew up Southern Baptist, but the search reconfirmed he was no Gentile.
“Take off your shoes.” Normally a procedure reserved for the secured booking room at the police station, Alex felt like leaving nothing to chance. This asshole wasn’t going into a seat behind me until I’m certain he has nothing left to hide.
“Come on, man, the ground’s hot as fuck, yo.”
Melner, after seeming to have been caught completely by surprise, Alex thought, and apparently pretty pissed about it, had no patience for any further noncompliance. “Hey, FELON, take your fuckin’ shoes off, or we’ll put you on your ass and do it for you. Your choice, fuck-o.” Alex saw he and Lindsay still held their Glocks at a low-ready and awaited Alex to determine no lethal threat remained. Where there’s one weapon, there’s usually two, Alex thought, and Dominic just proved his willingness to hide guns while talking to cops. Dominic glanced between the detectives, and Alex thought he saw a change in demeanor as though he realized the three of them stood poised to face-plant him on the asphalt, or shoot him outright, for his continued bullshit.
Dominic started sliding off his shoes while using his First Amendment rights to attempt to save his dignity and street credit. “Y’all a bunch of muthahfuckin’ bitches. Got pretty brave after the black man got cuffed up, am I right?!”
Melner took real exception to charges of racism, particularly after successfully fighting a baseless federal civil rights suit several years prior. “You really think we’re afraid of you, Shit Bird?” He holstered his Glock, walked up to Dominic, and stopped only after they were standing nose-to-nose. After a few seconds, Dominic tried to lean away from Melner, averted his eyes, and wilted in front of the cops and the still-seated passenger. Melner leaned in closer and spoke just above a whisper. “Tell you what, Showboat, let’s you and me roll out to the desert, I’ll take those cuffs off, and see which one of us comes back. Whaddyasay, Sparky?”
Dominic stood silent, nervously removing his second shoe, and unsuccessfully looking for a rock to crawl under. “Hey, man, y-y-you ain’t gotta be like that. That gun ain’t even mine.” Alex saw him scanning the area as he spoke.
“No, shit,” Melner continued, “after we’re done with you today, Dom, I bet I’m retired before you kill your number, even if you suck the warden’s dick to get credit for good behavior. We both know the gun’s hot.” Alex again watched Dominic further deflate, as though he realized the likely truth of Melner’s statement.
With Alex’s excessively thorough search completed, they stuffed Dominic in the back of his Charger for transport to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office 4th Avenue Jail.
“Nice fuck-up, greenhorn, but at least that douche canoe just caught another felony.” Sergeant Jones never missed an opportunity for confrontational humiliation, even if undeserved.
“How do you figure, my fuck-up?” Alex saw no way in which he could have reasonably known Dominic had a handgun clenched between his thighs, and took offense to the accusation. “How was I supposed to see that?”
“You tell me, you were the one standing there interviewing him.” As usual, Jones offered only second hand smoke and nothing constructive.
“Next time, Sarge, I’ll have my drivers start with jumping jacks.” Alex walked back to his Charger before he said anything that really ran afoul of his boss.
His audience lessened by one, Alex heard Jones directing the other detectives left behind with him. “Lindsay, kick the passenger loose if you’re done with him. Melner, finish up the inventory search and let me know if you find anything. Knock out the tow form, and call for a tow truck.” He turned around to yell at Alex’s back. “Landon, get copies of his criminal history and book that asshole.” Alex kept walking to his car, but gave his boss an affirmative “thumbs up.”
Alex escorted Dominic to the Charger and secured him in the front passenger seat for the short ride over to the DCPD station. He turned around to face the scene, and Sergeant Jones, only long enough to enter the Charger’s driver seat. As he rolled the windows up, he saw Jones look around to the other detectives as they continued work on their respective tasks and heard him make one final, general directive as Alex drove the Charger past him.
“If anyone needs me, I’ll be smoking in my truck. In the A-C. So don’t need anything.” Alex looked in the rearview mirror and saw Jones light up another GPC and meander back to his unmarked truck to “supervise.” Alex drove away, happy to be leaving Jones for a bit and booking Dominic in for several new felonies.
Twelve
Cleveland’s property. Tonopah, Arizona.
Billy had excitedly accepted an invitation to join Cleveland, Mikey, and Paul for “afternoon beers” at Cleveland’s home, and had only recently arrived for the occasion. Having never been to the property before today, Billy found it even more impressive than he’d hoped. Located on the north side of Tonopah-Salome highway east of 411th Avenue, the well-concealed driveway lay hidden among a dense line of desert trees and brush, which also concealed the residence and any activity on the property from passersby. After Billy had found the entrance, he started down a narrow, winding path between the trees comprised of soft, fine desert soil that his tires and exhaust soon cast high into the air around his Ford truck, foretelling his approach to anyone watching the long driveway. Only after a hard left turn nearly seventy yards from Tonopah-Salome Highway did Billy ever see the house; a dirt-brown double-wide trailer painted to match its surroundings and largely concealed by more desert brush. This place is fuckin’ perfect.
Billy held Cleveland in high esteem and had sought every chance to gain favor with the founder and self-appointed leader of The Chosen Few. After greetings and small talk, Billy, Cleveland, Mikey, and Paul spread across two dusty, dilapidated couches placed perpendicular to one another in the shade beneath Cleveland’s open-sided carport. Billy beamed as Cleveland asked him to take the pl
ace of honor next to his leader. Having long suspected the other three men used the recurring “afternoon beers” meeting to resolve The Chosen Few’s most important business, Billy hoped to use this opportunity to demonstrate his importance to their beloved organization.
Each of the men wore earth-tone t-shirts and varied patterns of camouflage fatigue pants, which seemed to be the unofficial uniform of The Chosen Few; none of the group had ever told Billy what to wear, but his own natural intrinsic need to conform to the other group members had quickly provided him that information. He wiped his boots on a large piece of aging and faded faux-grass placed in front of both couches to keep dirt out of Cleveland’s double-wide mobile home, but Billy wondered if the dirty, repurposed rug had actually worsened his shoes’ condition.
From his position on the couch, Billy looked to his right and saw the carport affixed to Cleveland’s dirt-brown mobile home with only a few large, mismatched wood screws, and the trailer itself rested uneasily on numerous, assorted cinder blocks, landscaping bricks, and jack stands. Billy felt safer outside in the near-hundred-degree spring heat than inside the air conditioned trailer. If it’s this hot in March, I just might haffta go inta that death trap come August, he thought, when it might be more reasonable to risk death for the air conditioning.
As dedicated members of The Chosen Few, Cleveland led the other three men to ritualistically reaffirm their sworn goal to “save America for white families by any means necessary,” and followed Cleveland’s lead to recite a call-and-response oath proclaiming their devotion to reshaping the United States of America in accordance with their white supremacist philosophy. The four men opened cans of cold macro-brewed beer, toasted their organization, and allowed the swill to combat the rising heat. Despite the beer’s refreshing initial temperature, Billy knew the cans would soon succumb to the afternoon heat and therefore drank his with the appropriate gusto.
“We need to get some books on bombs,” Cleveland announced to those around him, wasting no time in getting down to business, “or at least help from some fella who knows more ‘n us. The biggest thing we’re missin’ right now is some explosives, some real equalizers for when the fuckin’ feds come chargin’ through the gates. They can protect themselves from our rifles and bullets, they can buy armored trucks, but they don’t got much they can bring to a bomb fight.”
“So, what-er you sayin’?” Mikey spoke up between gulps. “We need to set up, like, booby traps? How’s that gonna work to make sure we don’t blow our own selves up?”
“Yeah, booby traps, kinda, I think they call ‘em ‘claymores,’ what I’m thinking of. The ones the Army uses that’s motion activated, so we can be sure we don’t blow ourselves up.” Cleveland spoke while wiping quickly accumulated dust from the top of his beer can.
“Won’t the kai-oats set ‘em off, just runnin’ by chasin’ jack-rabbits ‘n shit?” Billy seized the first opportunity to contribute to the discussion, hoping to offer useful insight. “We can’t have gawd-damned bombs goin’ off every time some critter comes onta the property.”
“Yeah, that’s true enough,” Cleveland conceded, “so, we need somethin’ like a claymore, but what’s more controllable. More predictable.”
“Billy, whaddyathink, your brother gonna go along with somethin’ that could help us out?” Paul spoke up for the first time, and calmly leaned back into the couch.
Billy chuckled. “That principled, starch-shirt sonuvuhbitch, not a chance in hell,” he offered, knowing Jonathan would not do anything to help him or his friends.
Mikey laughed at the insult. “Sonuvuhbitch? He’s your brother.”
“Maybe, I’ve never been too convinced uh that. He may be desperate for work, and momma says he and his wife’s broke, but he’d never help us if he knew what we’s up to.”
“Think we can convince him to help us, maybe if he thought we’s up to something else?” Cleveland asked his question without taking his eyes from the beer can nestled between both hands and his lap.
“Something else like what? Gotta be a good gawddamned reason we need bombs out here.” Surprised by the question, Billy imagined no way to manipulate Jonathan into unknowingly helping them.
“What about kai-oats, blaming it on them?” Paul offered as he worked through his own thought. “Maybe we need sum-thin that makes a tiny boom to keep ‘em scared off, away from our chicken coops? Then we can use whatever he gives us to make something with a bigger boom, to keep a different kinda predator away.”
Puzzled, Billy looked around what he could see of the property. “What chicken coops?”
“The ones we ain’t got yet!” Cleveland’s joke about their malicious intent ignited laughter among all of them. “If you think your brother’ll bite on somethin’ like that, we’ll have coops and yard birds here by sundown!”
“If Billy’s kin won’t come through for us, think we can come up with some of the old standards, like Anarchist Cookbook, er The Kitchen Terrorist?” Billy could see that Paul shared his belief about Jonathan’s helpfulness.
“Yeah, as a last resort, maybe,” Cleveland offered, “but I don’t like the idea of getting ourselves blowed up trying to follow those bullshit stick-figure drawings. I’m thinking about finding a real guide book, maybe something the military uses. They gotta give their bomb squads some kinda study book.”
“If you’re good with it, Cleveland, let’s maybe put the word out among the congregation to ask if they know anyone with the skills or resources to be useful to us,” Mikey offered. Billy recognized that the quietest among them had waited to speak until he had something useful to offer the group. “I think we wait to hit up Billy’s brother until our other options are exhausted.”
Thirteen
McDougal residence. Dry Creek, Arizona.
Jonathan sat on the worn, medium brown, faux-suede cushion and stared blankly at the television from the right side of their living room couch. From his position adjacent to a wood-and-glass end table, he enjoyed both the background distraction of a local news broadcast and a solid place to stage his whiskey glass when it wasn’t cooling the fingers of his right hand and numbing his harshening reality.
Glancing down at the glass-topped table as he lightly set his whiskey glass upon it, Jonathan’s focus moved farther right, back to the open, folded letter laying a few inches away. After having read it three times to ensure he had done so accurately, he now had SecureCorp’s termination letter nearly memorized: “Despite our firm belief that our employees acted justly and lawfully upon being attacked in the Jameela market, SecureCorp’s leadership must prepare for the impending battles in international civil and criminal courts, as well as the inherent media space. As such, we unfortunately no longer have a position available to you and no timeframe within which we anticipate to again hire or fill employment vacancies. We wish you and your family luck with your job search and deeply regret the circumstances that put this into motion for all of us effected.” Jonathan heard scuttlebutt from a few contractor friends still in Baghdad that confirmed national new stories that local police investigating the SecureCorp shooting had turned up no weapons among the dead or injured, but had unsurprisingly identified an overwhelming number of local witnesses who proclaimed the shooting as unprovoked. The trigger pullers do the right thing, but the surviving bad guys hide the evidence before local cops arrive, he thought. Terrorists and their families get paid to lie, the attorneys on both sides get richer, a company gets bankrupted, and a pile of good men get unemployed. Maybe I should go to law school, those assholes still win even if they lose.
Jonathan felt everything beginning to fall down around him. Unemployed in a still-broken economy with insufficient jobs or opportunity, he felt no certain, immediate hope for a brighter tomorrow. Colleen and Michael are the only things the civilian world has to offer me, he thought, and I’m supposed to take care of them. I wonder how proud her dad must be of his son-in-law now. All that leadership and combat experience isn’t as ma
rketable as the recruiter made it sound in ‘01. I should’ve gone to Ranger School or Special Forces so I could at least have a shot at a private training job. Regular Army does the bulk of the heavy lifting in combat and gets almost none of the recognition in the civilian training market.
The newscast momentarily grabbed Jonathan’s attention as the aging male anchor and an overly manicured reporter discussed recent evidence that as many as 15-to-20% of Arizonans remained unemployed, underemployed, or working reduced hours.
“…and that’s part of the problem, David, at least according to the sources cited in this study. Anecdotally, the report found that many employers still shuffle through hundreds of applications for even the most menial jobs. It appears our state population continues to grow as folks flee the bankrupt California economy and the high tax rates there, but come to Arizona to find the job market here only slightly better than that in their home state.”
“Harvey, is there any discussion in this report of what effect immigration issues are having on the local jobs market throughout the state?”
“That’s a great point, David, and the report offers very little insight into that aspect of our local economy. It does, however, stress the difficulty in accurately assessing how underground employees and cash-only positions are affected. It’s hard to get real numbers, David, when researchers are relying on participants admitting to criminal activity, even if they can do so anonymously.”
“It seems to me, Harvey, after hearing your report, that there’s a growing segment of Arizonans, and, for that matter, Americans in general, who are significantly overqualified for open employment positions and, therefore, immediately overlooked for every job for which they applied.”
“Yes, David, that’s a problem, even in normally high-turnover jobs. One employer we talked to off-camera, he anecdotally stated he’s more willing to hire a long-term, mediocre teen-aged employee who’s gonna give burgers away to their friends, than to hire a mature employee who might only be there six months. He said that his soft costs associated with training and hiring are significantly greater than the hard costs of a few burgers and fries.”
