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.
Levon
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.