Glenn Beck - The Overton Window

The exit door was almost in reach but Noah stopped short; there was still no sign of Molly. He’d let go of her mother as the two of them had worked their way through the wall-to-wall people, and he’d lost track of her as well.

“There’s no longer any peace to be had!” Bailey shouted from the stage. “Whether you know it or not the war has already begun!”

To describe the next few seconds as a blur would make it seem as if the ensuing events were jumbled together or indistinct, and they were far from that. They passed in something like slow motion, like those graceful shots of a drop of milk splashing into a cereal bowl or a rifle bullet cutting edge-to-edge through a playing card at twenty thousand frames per second. But the trade-off for all that visual clarity was a complete inability to act; Noah could see everything, but do nothing.

A slate-gray pistol appeared in a man’s hand nearby-a man whom Molly had pointed out earlier as a newer member of her organization. The weapon was drawn down and level toward the stage. There was a flash, and the sonic pressure of a firecracker or the popping of a paper bag too near his ear, and then another, over and over as the crowd surged away from the gunman. The rising sounds of panic, a shower of glass and white sparks as a spotlight shattered in its mount above the stage, the back door banging open, the rush of black-suited officers storming in, a sudden stinging odor like a mist of Tabasco and bug spray, a loud commotion at the far end of the room as another squad in riot gear burst in.

Noah was caught up in the blind retreat of those around him, pushed back toward the center of the room. And there was Molly, maybe twenty feet away, held by her hair and crumpling to her knees, her left arm twisted high behind her by a roughneck the size of a linebacker. Noah heard a stifled cry and a repeating electric sound. He turned to see the big man he’d met earlier, Hollis was his name, stricken and helpless in a seizure on the floor, the barbs of a stun gun buzzing in his chest.

From behind his tinted visor a nearby man-in-black raised his riot club, ready to cave in the skull of the helpless man at his feet.

In this strange, slow procession of vivid snapshots, a random thought made its way back to him from earlier in the day. We stay mostly the same and then grow up suddenly, at the turning points. What came next would either go down as one of those dreaded defining moments, or as the final mistake of a bad night that would top any that had ever come before. It didn’t matter which; the die was already cast. Just because he spent his days strip-mining the vast gray zone between right and wrong didn’t mean he couldn’t tell the difference.

Time resumed its proper pace, and he felt his will unfreeze. As the black truncheon swung down Noah reached up and caught the uniformed man by the wrist, stopping him cold with an unexpectedly steely grip toned over years with his personal trainer at the Madison Square Club. It’s true what they say: you just never know when all those pull-ups are going to come in handy.

There was no struggle. The other man locked eyes with him, their faces a hand’s width apart. Perhaps the man was in the midst of a defining moment of his own. At first he looked surprised, and then incredulous, and then-despite the impressive array of armaments swinging from his belt and the three additional troopers already rushing to his rescue-he looked afraid.

A moment is only a moment, and just like that, it’s gone. Noah felt the first savage blow to the back of his head, and maybe another. And then he felt nothing at all.

He opened his eyes, and found her looking down at him.

It was the wide variety of aches and pains that told him for certain she wasn’t a figment of his imagination. His head was resting in her lap, and Molly held him steady as the crowded police van bumped and jostled along the patchy downtown streets.

Police van?

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi.”

The light glaring down was bright blue-white, fluorescent, and harsh. As he turned his head he winced at a sudden stitch in his neck, like a bee sting to the spinal cord. The rear compartment was filled to capacity and beyond, packed with people he vaguely recognized from the bar. Most were sitting up, but some were reclining, as he was, in various states of physical distress.

Noah looked up at her again. “What happened-”

She hushed him with a fingertip to his lips, and he saw that her wrists were bound with nylon ties.

The vehicle lurched and slid to a stop, the double doors in back swung open, and he was pulled away from her and out onto the street. Somehow the news crews had arrived and set up for on-scene reports even before the paddy wagons rolled in. Hot lights flicked on as local and network correspondents began shouting questions and their cameramen pushed in close to capture the scene. Noah’s legs would barely stay under him as he was herded into line along with the others.

Once the reporters were left behind, the remaining perp walk through the police station was a gauntlet of pat-downs, prodding, and barked orders, ending with a final, distinctive clang as the holding-cell door swung closed.

The pen he was locked in was one of several lining the hall; the total census must have been over three hundred. These were all men, of course; the women were taken elsewhere. Most of the guys nearby him seemed to be from the group at the tavern. Some others around the cell, clearly seasoned veterans of the penal system, appeared to have been brought in for day-to-day offenses ranging from vagrancy to prostitution to drunk-and-disorderliness.

The flood of detainees from the bar had filled the place far beyond its capacity. Most of the people seemed stunned into brooding silence but some inmates were belligerent: shouting, picking fights, taunting the guards, or calling out for their lawyers, their mothers, or any other savior within earshot.

Noah had been among the last to enter and he ended up pressed against the bars at the front of the cell. His head was still swimming and he needed to sit, but the cell felt like the 6 train at rush hour: there was barely enough room to turn around.

After a time he saw something that he couldn’t begin to understand; he must have been mistaken. The man from the back of the tavern, the one with the gun, was being escorted from an adjacent cell. He wasn’t in handcuffs or restraints of any kind. He was just walking along with the officers toward the exit.

“Gardner!”

Hearing his name shouted out from somewhere down the hall snapped him back to reality. A police sergeant with a clipboard soon appeared with two other officers behind him.

He reached out through the bars. “That’s me. I’m Noah Gardner.”

The three men gathered around and looked him over, comparing his physical details against whatever description they’d brought with them on the clipboard. It was his gold class ring from Riverdale Country School that seemed to cement the positive ID.

The sergeant double-checked his orders, rattled through his keys until he found the proper match, and unlocked the door. As Noah exited the cell a delirious man behind him made a weak attempt to follow and was firmly encouraged to resume his place among the crowded inmates.

“What’s going on?” Noah asked as they walked him out.

“Your attorney’s on his way,” the sergeant replied, in a tone meant to telegraph a palpable disgust for the entire fickle enterprise of American jurisprudence.

After a short walk through a maze of halls, Noah found himself sitting in a small side office across the desk from a person he presumed to be his arresting officer. The man was in plain clothes, unshaven, and rumpled, as though he was either near the end of a double shift or had been called out of a sound sleep for the beginning of a new one. It wasn’t the officer he’d confronted at the bar; that was a face he would have remembered.