Dale Brown - Edge of Battle

“No…!”

“You’d better stay!” O’Rourke shouted. “You’ve still got my garage door opener…wait, you’ve got to tell me where to pick up the damned dry cleaning! I just paid for an entire year’s membership for you and your husband at Costco, you ungrateful bitch…! ”

Suddenly he heard a woman shout, “¡Déjela en paz, cagon!” The woman who had gotten out of the Durango hit O’Rourke right in the face with a long, full shot of pepper spray. He went down to his knees, completely blinded and disoriented. The women got into the Durango and sped away.

O’Rourke found himself on his hands and knees on his front lawn trying but failing to blink away the pain and burning. He finally half-crawled, half-stumbled back inside his house, found his way back into his kitchen, and directed cold water from his sink sprayer onto his face for several minutes. It took almost fifteen minutes before he could see again. He almost contaminated himself again trying to take off his jacket, but finally he managed to change clothes. He dialed his office as soon as he was ready to go again. “Fand…”

“Bob! Where are you?”

“Still at home. You wouldn’t believe it—that crazy bitch housekeeper of mine left, and one of her friends shot me with pepper spray! I think it was the Lewis’s housekeeper! I just barely…!”

“Bob, whatever you do, stay home, ” Fand said. “A couple of the cars in the front lot just got spray-painted, and there’s a large group of people on the street. Looks like they’re going to picket the station! There are cops and TV trucks everywhere! It’s not safe.”

He heard her talking, but only the words “TV trucks” got his attention. “Well, what the hell is going on, Fand? You’re a reporter—tell me what’s happening.”

“I think it’s that Veracruz radio message, Bob.” She didn’t mention the bombastic radio show he gave earlier, in effect telling all of America to start hunting down Mexicans. “I think the Mexicans are leaving, and they’re going to stage protests and demonstrations on the way out.”

“What do you mean, ‘leaving’?” But he knew exactly what she meant—had in fact seen it with his own eyes, in front of his own home. “Never mind. I’ll be there right away. Keep me advised if anything else happens.” Fand started to warn him again, but he hung up before she could finish.

O’Rourke was heading out the door, but thinking about Fand’s last warning made him stop, then head upstairs to the safe built into the nightstand next to the massive oak sleigh bed in his bedroom. There was no combination lock to the safe—instead, he pressed a code into a recessed rubberized keypad on top of the safe, and the heavy steel door popped open with ease, revealing several handguns in ready-to-draw position.

One cool thing about living in the great state of Nevada was how easy it was to get a concealed weapon permit: one day in mildly boring classes watching videotapes, listening to lectures, and seeing a few demonstrations; a half-day in an indoor shooting range; an hour or so getting photographed, fingerprinted, and filling out forms for a background check; and then a couple hours actually shopping for a suitable gun, ammunition, and accessories like holsters, cleaning equipment, and car safes. Three months later, he was proudly carrying a pearl-handled .45 caliber Smith & Wesson automatic in a shoulder rig, very aware of the fact that most everyone could see the bulge in his jacket and knew he was packing heat.

He had learned in his semiprivate concealed-carry classes that you couldn’t carry a gun everywhere in Nevada—most casinos didn’t allow it, although he had written permission from most of the casino managers to do so; most government offices like the DMV didn’t allow guns inside, although he avoided all such offices as much as possible; guns within the Las Vegas city limits had to be unloaded (and even he couldn’t get a permit from the chief of police to get around that one); and concealed weapons in Clark County could be loaded but couldn’t have a round in the chamber. But he pretty much ignored those few restrictions. O’Rourke believed in the old saying: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” If he was going to be the target of a kidnapping or robbery, he was going to fight.

Like one of his TV heroes, Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice, O’Rourke preferred a brown leather shoulder holster for his .45, even though he proved over and over in his concealed firearm permit classes that the big .45 was the clunkiest and most unwieldy weapon to carry concealed, and he barely qualified with it on the range because of its heft and recoil force. But the instructor said it had plenty of “stopping power,” unlike the nine-millimeters, the .380, and the .38 calibers. “Stopping power”—O’Rourke liked that notion. The .45 was heavy, hard to hold, hard to take care of, bulky, and dug into his ribs all the time, but it had “stopping power”—and wasn’t that why one carried a piece in the first place?

O’Rourke climbed into his big Ford Excursion SUV and headed to the radio studio, located about thirty minutes away on the other side of Las Vegas in Henderson. He quickly saw more evidence that something big was underway even before he left the carefully manicured lawns of his exclusive gated subdivision west of The Strip in Las Vegas. Garbage cans once full of leaves and grass clippings were strewn around the sidewalks and streets; service trucks were parked haphazardly in front of driveways and in the middle of intersections; and there were security vehicles racing up and down the streets. At the front gate, a long line of Hispanic men and women were filing out on foot, throwing ID cards and keys at the gatehouse. It was a confusing, scary, surrealistic scene: a woman was pleading with a departing Hispanic nanny, while two crying children wailed in the minivan behind her; not far away another man was shouting at a group of Hispanics about something, and the Hispanics shouted epithets in Spanish in return.

The scene was repeated many times as he drove down Route 215 toward where the highway became the southern bypass freeway around the city—long lines of Hispanics walking down both sides of the street, getting longer and longer by the moment, while either law enforcement or cars followed them with either angry, sad, or confused white citizens in them, words being exchanged through rolled-down windows.

His phone rang. “Bob, it’s nuts down here,” Fand warned once more. “Where are you?”

“Almost on the freeway—where else?”

“You see anything happening out there?”

“Lots of Hispanics on the street heading toward the freeway too, but…”

“You may not want to take North Pecos, Bob,” Fand said. “Traffic is really backed up—there are masses of people everywhere pouring onto the streets. Stay on the freeway to Windsong and try Pebble Road.”

He didn’t usually take anyone’s driving advice, but after the traffic on the freeway began getting heavier and heavier as he approached the Green Valley area, he decided to heed her advice. From the freeway he could see his usual exit, North Pecos Road, was backed up for about a half-mile, with police lights and sirens evident, so he was thankful for Fand’s warning. But the east side of the Green Valley hotel and resort area was no better. This was complete insanity: just what were these people trying to accomplish here?

O’Rourke exited on Windsong Road and then, frustrated by the backed-up northbound traffic, exited at the entrance to a private residential golf club. He was instantly recognized by the gate guard, which he fully expected, and asked for directions. The guard was more than overjoyed to get into an electric golf cart and escort him to the western side of the complex to Pebble Road, just a few blocks from his office complex.