America Rising (3 page)

“I’ve also already reached out to your representatives in Washington to help us flesh out these regulations—to write the fine print, so to speak. As you know, that’s where the power to shape legislation actually lies. I realize this may cause some hardship for you, Mr. Bernabe, but with all due respect, I’m not sure you know how much anger and frustration is out there on Main Street. If we don’t throw the people a bone, they may just tear the flesh off of ours.”

Frank Bernabe scowled. “And if you throw them a bone, next thing you know they’ll want another. And another after that.” His eyes bored into Kip Richardson’s. “It’s your job to
manage
their expectations, Kip. Not just to go soft in the head whenever a few people start screaming. If we have to throw them a bone—and at present I’m not at all convinced that we do—then the bone will be thrown in our way in our own time. Is that understood?”

“I do understand, Mr. Bernabe. But I’m telling you, that time is now. Something is going on out there. Something has changed. People have reached their breaking point. They—”

“Don’t talk to me about breaking points,” Frank Bernabe snapped. “I didn’t send you to Washington and put you on the committee to work against my interests.”

Kip Richardson shuddered. He’d heard that tone only once before. It was molten honey poured over an icepick—warm and smooth and poised to gouge out your jugular in a heartbeat. Frank Bernabe gauged his visitor’s reaction and smiled to himself.

Actually, he had no objection to the Senate’s approving this transparently phony bit of “financial reform.” Despite what he’d just said to Kip Richardson, he had already decided that now was indeed the time to throw the peasants a few crumbs, so long as they didn’t grow fat or come to expect them. But he was annoyed that Richardson hadn’t been honest with him, and he wanted to stiffen the man’s spine in case any of his fellow employees down there in Washington decided to propose legislation with real teeth.

He let his smile show and said, “But all that’s water under the bridge, Kip. I can live with S.4220. Just next time do a better job of keeping me informed.” He pressed a button on the underside of his desk and the Asian woman appeared at the door. “Ms. Lee will see you out.”

Kip Richardson’s nerves held until the silent driver backed the Town Car out of its parking space. Then he opened the door and threw up on the pavement.

* * *

The letter Julie Teichner had been dreading arrived on a cold, dark November afternoon. She’d sat at her kitchen table and stared blankly at the single page, feeling as if someone had hollowed out her insides. It was a legal-looking document, full of whereases and therefores, but the only words she saw—the only words that mattered—were “strict foreclosure of said mortgage.”

Her weathered two-and-two bungalow in Coston, Ohio, a town of about 12,000 some sixty miles southwest of Akron, was worth just half of the $105,000 she and her late husband had paid for it five years ago, two months before John died and six months before she gave birth to Megan. A year later Julie was laid off from her secretary’s job, the bills piled up and the house was worth even less.

She tried to work things out with the bank but there was always some sort of problem, some sort of delay. They’d lost her application to modify her mortgage. Twice. There were endless requests for more documentation, which never seemed to be complete enough or get to the right people. When the case finally wound up in court, the bank couldn’t produce the note on her house. Then it produced a note with her name on it for a different house. Then it produced a note so obviously back-dated the bank’s attorney smirked when he submitted it. None of that mattered. The court ruled for the bank anyway.

All the while Julie’s neighbors did what they could, making the home repairs she couldn’t manage, bringing over home-cooked meals at the end of the month when her unemployment check always seemed to run out, even loaning her money to get her fifteen-year-old Honda fixed. It was a close-knit community; people there looked out for each other, even if their own situation was equally desperate. Julie stopped making her mortgage payments, socked away what money she could and tried to prepare for the day the sheriff would show up and tell her she had to leave.

That day had finally come.

It was November again, five o’clock in the morning on another cold, dark day. Temperature was in the mid-twenties; an unusual early season storm carried snow flurries on biting winds. Julie was at her living room window, watching the street through a crack in the curtains; a friend in the Coston police department had warned her today would be the day. She bit her lip as a patrol car eased down her street and parked in front of the house. Thank God she’d sent Megan to stay with her parents for a couple of days. She couldn’t bear the thought of her daughter seeing this.

The black-and-white’s doors swung open and two cops clambered out. Julie recognized the bulky one. Sgt. Dan Majerle. Mid-fifties, divorced, passed over for a promotion he knew now he was never going to get. An angry and bitter man, a real hard-ass. Even his fellow cops thought so. Majerle and his partner stepped up to the curb and started for the house.

Then it happened.

Julie could only watch in fear, in pride, her pulse pounding, as the two cops stopped, frozen, their eyes bulging in surprise, then disbelief. They exchanged glances, refocused again. Sgt. Majerle’s hand eased towards the Glock strapped to his waist.

Like ghosts materialized out of the blowing snow stood Julie Teichner’s neighbors. In ones and twos, they came from her block and the block down the street and the block around the corner. Standing silently, with unflinching purpose and immense dignity, they formed a line in front of her home. Every one was armed, some with hunting rifles, others with pistols, others with weapons brought back from Iraq and Vietnam. Tom Tanner, Julie’s next-door neighbor, blocked the pathway to her front door, cradling an old Remington 700 in hands rough and calloused from two decades in construction. Out of work for more than a year, his own home was being foreclosed on too.

His voice wasn’t loud but it rang like a clarion.

“Sorry, Dan. We can’t let you do this.”

The big cop’s hand closed around the butt of the Glock. He jerked the weapon from its holster, assumed the two-handed firing stance and shouted, “Put down your weapons! I am ordering you. Put down your weapons and disperse!”

The men and women in front of Julie Teichner’s house remained silent, expressionless. Unmoved. Majerle’s partner radioed in the situation, leaned into the sergeant and said, “Let’s lighten up a little here, Dan. Backup’s up its way.”

“No!” Majerle’s face was red, his breathing heavy. He trained his pistol on Tom Tanner. “For the last time, put down your weapons and disperse! I
will
fire on you!”

The air was thick and salted with electricity, the snow eddying on winds that suddenly seemed to blow in slow motion. Men swallowed and tasted their own mortality. Tom Tanner stared into the Glock’s barrel. At the window, Julie Teichner held her breath, too scared to look, too proud to look away. The slightest false movement, panicked reaction, and the snowy ground of this quiet neighborhood would ooze red.

Three more patrol cars arrived and a half-dozen blue uniforms jumped out, eyeing the armed citizens and their angry, huffing sergeant with equal unease. They weren’t prepared for this, an armed confrontation a millisecond away from a massacre. It was the stuff of New York or Chicago or L.A., not a small town in the Midwest where people still waved hello to their neighbors and spoke to strangers without fear.

“Unholster your weapons and place these people under arrest!” Majerle shouted at the deputies. “I am in command here! I AM IN COMMAND!”

“Put it down, Sergeant,” a calm voice said.

Dan Majerle shook his head as if to banish the unthinkable and felt the cold, smooth barrel of a Glock like his own at the base of his skull.

“Put it down, Dan,” the calm voice repeated. “No one’s getting hurt here, no one’s getting arrested.” The voice belonged to Majerle’s partner, a two-year patrolman named Rafael Ortega, a veteran of three tours in Iraq whose quiet, steady demeanor had impressed even officers many years his senior. “I’ve seen all the killing I ever want to see. There won’t be any here today.”

The sergeant’s face blazed red. His gaze flicked to the assembled uniforms. They stared back impassively, hands at their sides. Their eyes held only pity. Majerle’s shoulders slumped. He let out a long, slow, defeated breath and dropped his pistol back into its holster. Rafael Ortega holstered his own pistol, then faced the line of defenders and raised his voice.

“You can go home now,” he said. “This is over. I didn’t become a cop to throw my friends and neighbors out into the street. If the bank wants to take this woman’s house, let them come here and do it themselves.”

He paused and let the electricity in the air subside, then he took Dan Majerle by the elbow and led him back the patrol car. Tom Tanner and the guardians watched the cars disappear in puffs of exhaust and clouds of swirling snow. They watched a minute more, then, as silently as they had assembled, they were gone.

I
t was time to go to work on Armando Gutierrez.

I did a Google search on the name, starting broad and gradually narrowing it down, just to see what would turn up. There wasn’t much, but what there was confirmed the outlines of what Chloe Enders’ contacts in SFPD had told her. There was a news story about an arrest for waving a gun at a fellow motorist in a road rage incident, about a fight in a South Beach bar, another arrest for beating up a man at a political rally in central Florida.

A criminal history check in the Miami-Dade court database revealed more of the same—a domestic abuse “stay away” injunction, an arrest for burglarizing a downtown law office, an assault trial that ended in dismissal when the alleged victim refused to testify. It was a curious and disturbing picture—a half-dozen violence-related arrests and charges filed only once. Armando Gutierrez had some kind of juice.

A little more digging and the picture grew more disturbing still.

Using Chloe’s information, I did a LexisNexis search next. Armando Gutierrez’s thuggery wasn’t just local. There were arrests in Denver, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and other cities—assault, assault and battery, criminal threats, brandishing a firearm. More searching produced another set of results—news stories suggesting a campaign of threats, vandalism, confrontations, beatings aimed at individuals and groups deemed “not American” enough to suit an amorphous collection of self-proclaimed patriots. All occurred during election years. All without charges being filed. I cross-referenced the dates of those stories with the dates of Gutierrez’s arrests. They matched.

Gotcha, you piece of shit.

I wanted more. Chloe had scanned and emailed me her files; I paged through them and found Armando Gutierrez’s mug shot. He was a nasty-looking sort—big round head, meaty face, short goatee, lightning bolt tattoo racing up a thick neck. I paged through some more and printed out his inventory sheet. When booked into SF County jail he’d been carrying $7,000 in cash and credit cards in several different names. Other personal property included a smartphone, two diamond earrings, a half-dozen gold chains and a Rolex President that retailed for more than twenty thousand dollars. There was other good stuff too, like a home address that more searching revealed as a waterfront condo at the tip of South Beach, a building where even in Florida’s depressed real estate market, individual units went from eight hundred thousand to eighteen million dollars.

That was all I could find out on my own. Anything else, I’d have to go to Mongoose.

I had no idea who Mongoose was, where he lived, how he supported himself, his real name. All I knew was that he was one of a tribe of cyber-anarchists who lived on the margins in Northern California, squatting in abandoned buildings in San Francisco one month, pitching tents in the wilds of Humboldt County another. The only constants in their lives were an Internet connection, prodigious computer skills, and complete disdain for virtually every aspect of American society.

I first met Mongoose covering a story on San Francisco’s young urban squatters, and immediately thereafter was scorched by his on-line flamings. But we’d established a fragile bond over our mutual love of great jazz on vinyl, and during my war against insurance companies he’d fire off an occasional approving text message. When I needed access to internal company emails to provide the smoking gun that would give her case credibility to the mainstream media, I thought of Mongoose, offering him the chance to fuck over a rapacious American corporation and a rare European recording of Thelonious Monk from my collection. The next day a thick folder containing every document relating to Carolyn’s case was dropped at my front door, and Mongoose and I had established a tentative but oddly compelling relationship.

My clumsy thumbs typed out a message on my smartphone: “Need ur help. Call.” An hour later the phone rang.

“Henson.”

“Speak.”

Mongoose was never much for social niceties.

“I need a full jacket on Armando Gutierrez. G-U-T-I-E-R-R-E-Z. Cuban. DOB 11-30-77. 100 South Palm Drive, Miami Beach. He’s got a cell; I don’t have the number. That’s it.”