Lieutenant Brodie knew that it was a futile thing to say, and he was glad in a way that the helicopter was making too much noise for his own officers to have heard him, but he was dreading what was going to happen next. He had a reputation for using the maximum force available to him during civil disturbances, but even the most violent of incidents had never called for anything more deadly than tear gas or beanbags fired from shotguns.
‘Mr Wrack,’ he said, under his breath. ‘God rot you, you zombie.’
Some of the rioters had already seen the ESS men approaching. A few of them started to run away, into the mall’s main entrance or around the side of the Sears building. Most of them stayed where they were, though, dancing and jeering and waving their arms. Several of them picked up broken lumps of curbstone and hurled them toward the advancing security guards, but almost all of their missiles bounced harmlessly across the asphalt, and the security guards kept up their relentless, menacing jog without a single break in their stride.
Even from where he was standing, a hundred yards away, Lieutenant Brodie could see that more of the rioters were beginning to lose their nerve and scatter. Some of the more aggressive were still jumping up and down and howling and giving the security guards the finger, but he suspected that they were so high or so drunk that they had no concept of the danger they were in.
He walked back over to Sergeant Gonzales and said, ‘Come on, Hector. We have to get into this, too.’
‘This is all wrong, sir!’ Sergeant Gonzales protested. His eyes were rolling in panic and frustration. ‘What do they think they’re doing? They can’t just go in like that. There’s too many! Hundreds! This way or that way, whatever happens, somebody has to get killed!’
‘All the more reason we have to get in there. Wrack’s taken the initiative, we have to take it back. We’re the law, not him, no matter what he says.’
Beckoning with both hands like a football coach, he summoned his seven officers in riot gear to gather around him. Most of them looked confused, and kept glancing nervously over at the crowds of rioters, and the security agents who were still running steadily toward them.
‘I’ll make this quick,’ said Lieutenant Brodie. ‘I’ve just been informed by the director of public safety from Empire Security Services that he and his agents have been given the authority to assist us in suppressing this disturbance in any way they see fit. I’m not sure what their tactics are going to be, but I want you men to get in there amongst them and make sure that they don’t use any more force than absolutely necessary. Even rioters have human rights, and impetuous actions today can lead to very expensive lawsuits tomorrow.
‘Got that? I don’t want this to turn into a goddamned bloodbath, now or later. OK – go!’
The seven police officers immediately went jogging off after the security men. Lieutenant Brodie then crossed over to the firefighters who were waiting beside their fire engines, looking impatient. Their crew boss was short and squat with an S-shaped broken nose and a face that was almost as red as his fire engine.
‘So what the fuck’s going on?’ he demanded.
‘You’ll just have to hold your horses for a while longer,’ said Lieutenant Brodie. ‘As soon as we have this riot locked down, we’ll give you the all clear to go in, OK?’
‘Hey – there could be innocent civilians trapped in there,’ the crew boss retorted. ‘In fact it’s highly likely. What are we going to do, stand here and let the whole mall burn right down to the ground, with them in it?’
‘If we have to.’
Lieutenant Brodie looked around. The security agents were now less than a hundred feet away from the rioters, and the rioters were pelting them even more furiously with every brick or piece of concrete they could lay their hands on. Even from here, he could hear the debris thumping and clattering on their riot shields.
‘Hey, lookit,’ said one of the firefighters. ‘What is that guy doing?’
One of the leading rioters was walking calmly toward the security agents, his arms held high. He was making two V-fingered signs of peace. He had shaggy black shoulder-length hair and he was wearing sunglasses and a red bandanna that covered his face, a red T-shirt with FING A printed on it, and very skinny black jeans.
He might have been trying to call a truce, but none of his fellow rioters were taking any notice of him. They continued to shower the security agents with sticks and rocks and traffic cones and even a torn-up STOP sign.
‘Guy must be totally nuts,’ said the fire crew boss. ‘Who does he think he is – Jesus?’
The second he spoke, the rioter pitched backward, as if he had been violently pushed, although there was nobody within six feet of him. Then another rioter fell on to the ground, a fat young black boy in a purple hoodie, rolling over twice before coming to rest next to a low brick wall. Then another, a tall shaven-headed Hispanic who flung his arms up in the air as if he were dancing; and another, and another. Suddenly, the rioters started dropping left and right, like puppets with their strings suddenly cut.
Lieutenant Brodie heard no gunfire, but the ESS helicopter was still droning right overhead, and the rioters were still shouting, and he had seen that the carbines carried by the security agents were all fitted with flash and sound suppressors.
More rioters fell, at least twenty of them within only a few seconds. The rest now realized what was happening, because they were scattering in all directions, and their roaring had now risen to a high, hysterical scream. Some of the security agents had gone down on one knee, to steady their aim; and they were not only picking off the rioters who were facing them, but the rioters who were desperately trying to run away.
Lieutenant Brodie said, ‘Jesus. I don’t believe it.’
He could clearly see what Joseph Wrack was doing – driving the rioters toward the mall’s main entrance, so that they could be corralled and captured. It was exactly the same plan that he had devised. The only difference was that Joseph Wrack had chosen to forgo baton charges and tear-gas and Tasers, and use deadly force as his first line of attack. When any rioter tried to run around the Sears building to the right, or away to the left past Forever 21 and the barricade of squad cars, he was dropped in his tracks.
‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ said Sergeant Gonzalez, crossing himself. ‘This is a massacre.’
Lieutenant Brodie said, ‘Come on, Hector,’ and ran forward to catch up with his own seven men.
‘Cease fire!’ he bellowed at the security agents. ‘Cease fire!’
Even if they heard him, the security agents kept their backs to him and continued shooting. All of the rioters were now scurrying for shelter inside the mall, although three or four of them were running with their heads ducked down toward the squad cars, obviously hoping that the police would give them some protection. The security agents fired burst after burst in their direction, and all of them tumbled to the ground, their arms and legs flailing. Several bullets also hit the fender of one of the squad cars, and punctured its tire.
Breathless with anger, Lieutenant Brodie caught up at last with Joseph Wrack. The ESS director of public safety was standing with his arms folded, still smoking his panatela and watching all of this carnage with no apparent emotion at all.
‘Stop them! Tell them to hold their fire! For Christ’s sake, Wrack, this is wholesale murder!’
Joseph Wrack took the panatela out of his mouth and was about to say something when a bullet cracked between them, so close that Lieutenant Brodie felt the wind of it against his cheek. The riot officers who were crouching behind the squad cars were firing back in their direction, trying to hit the security agents.
Without hesitation, Joseph Wrack tossed aside his panatela and dropped to the ground, spreadeagling himself as flat as he could, one cheek pressed against the asphalt. Lieutenant Brodie remained standing, waving semaphore signals to the police behind the cars and shouting, ‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire! This is Lieutenant Henry Brodie, commander of the Southern Division! I order you to hold y
our fire!’
Guns crackled like fireworks for more than five seconds, sending a blizzard of bullets in both directions. Some of the rioters were hit again and again, and performed a strange kind of drunken moonwalk before falling on top of each other in heaps. Three security agents went down, too, and one of Lieutenant Brodie’s riot officers.
Lieutenant Brodie stood with his arms still raised, looking all around him in horror. There were so many bodies strewn around that it was impossible for him to count them. There were scores of wounded, too, and he could see people with bloodied faces and bloodied clothes painfully trying to extricate themselves from underneath the dead.
The gunfire stopped, but the helicopter was still roaring so loudly that he couldn’t think straight.
Joseph Wrack started to climb to his feet. As soon as he did so, however, another bullet cracked past them, nearly as close as the first. He said, ‘Shit,’ and dropped abruptly back down to the ground.
Lieutenant Brodie turned his head to see if he could tell where the bullet had come from. If it had been fired by a police officer, then by God he was going to have his badge. He saw a puff of smoke drifting away from one of the squad cars, and he thought he could make out an officer in mirror sunglasses kneeling behind it with a carbine still pointing in his direction.
He had just started to walk toward him when another bullet hit him in the left eye, blowing off the back of his head and drenching Sergeant Gonzalez in his blood and brains.
THREE
‘Look at this, will you – Baking With Julia!’ Bryan protested. ‘You wouldn’t believe there’s any kind of a crisis going on at all!’
He had switched on the TV and changed to the local public service channel, but so far there had been no updates on the drought, or the water supply, or the riots. All that was showing was Julia Child ‘in my own kitchen’, baking madeleines.
‘There’s no question at all that the powers that be are deliberately keeping us in the dark,’ said John Wilson, who lived on West Mirada Avenue, opposite the elementary school. ‘To my mind, that means only one thing – the situation is a heck of a lot worse than they’ve been telling us.’
‘Well, I’ve tried calling City Hall more times than I can tell you,’ put in Dick Bortolotti, who lived five doors away on West 25th. ‘Either they simply don’t want to answer, or there’s nobody there, or the whole darned place has been burned to the ground.’
‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ said Myron Platt, the association’s treasurer. ‘Did you see all that smoke, first thing this morning? Looks like the Inland Center could be burning, too.’
‘And yet there’s not a single word about it on the news. Not one. It’s crazy.’
Fourteen of the fifteen committee members of the Muscupiabe Neighborhood Association had gathered in Bryan’s living room to discuss what they could do about the sudden cutting off of their water supply. The fifteenth member, Tama Takamura, was away visiting her parents in Kyoto.
‘I’ve tried to get in touch with every city and county service that I can think of,’ said Bryan. ‘I’ve tried calling California Water and Power. I’ve tried calling Cal/EPA. Nobody’s picking up. Nobody.’
‘So what the hell are we going to do?’ asked Corben Myers, his deputy chairman. ‘What if you’re right, and they never turn the water back on? I have two young grandchildren. How are they going to survive?’
‘If they’d only give us some information,’ said Luis. ‘How can they expect us to cope without water if they won’t tell us what’s going on?’
As if on cue, Baking With Julia was suddenly interrupted by a card which read DROUGHT EMERGENCY: A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. Bryan switched on the sound in time to hear: ‘—about the water crisis from Governor Halford Smiley.’
There was a moment’s blackout and then Governor Smiley appeared, sitting alone at the end of a long mahogany table. He was dressed more soberly than usual, in a white short-sleeved shirt and a plain green necktie.
‘Good afternoon, citizens of San Bernardino. I’m talking to you live from your own fair city which I am visiting in the hope of bringing you reassurance about the water crisis that we’re faced with. You already know that we have been obliged to rotate the supply of water from one neighborhood to another, so that our limited resources can be shared out as fairly as possible.
‘You won’t have failed to notice that a small but selfish minority have reacted to this rationing in a way that I can only describe as extremely negative. They have inflicted willful damage on your city center, setting fires and looting business premises and tying up the emergency services which are already stretched to the limit by the shortage of water.
‘I want you to stay as calm as you can. I want you to have courage, and I want you to show that deep sense of civic responsibility on which you the citizens of San Bernardino have always prided yourselves. We are doing everything within our power to share out water equally, but I won’t try to conceal from you the fact that this is a very grave emergency, and that all of us will have to suffer.
‘In the interests of public safety, though, I must add this. We cannot and will not tolerate any citizens behaving in a threatening or violent manner, or causing wanton damage to public or private property. Some of you may feel that you have a legitimate grievance, and that you have a right to demonstrate, but you will be dealt with by the police and the security services to the utmost extent of the law. For that reason there will be a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the city center and every neighborhood in which the water supply has been temporarily withdrawn. That curfew will apply from tonight onward, until further notice. Anybody found out on the street in those localities after dark will be considered to have unlawful intent, and will be dealt with accordingly.’
He paused, staring at the camera with what he clearly imagined to be a serious, concerned expression, but he appeared to have forgotten what he was supposed to say next. Eventually he glanced to his left and said, ‘What?’ and then ‘Oh. Remember,’ he said, ‘we are all in this crisis together. You have my heartfelt good wishes, and my promise to be here for you through all of the difficult days and weeks that lie ahead of us. Let us be of good cheer, my friends, and pray to the Lord for rain.’
Julia Child reappeared, rolling out balls of dough.
The committee members stood looking at each other in disbelief.
‘A curfew?’ said Bryan. ‘A dusk-to-dawn curfew? They might just as well lock us all up in the slammer! Maybe some people downtown have been rioting, but we haven’t, and we don’t intend to, either. I thought you were innocent until you were proven guilty.’
‘Did you see where he was speaking from?’ asked Myron. ‘That was the conference room at Verdemont Country Club. No, I’m absolutely sure. That’s where my company holds their annual stockholders’ meetings.’
‘So what are we waiting for?’ said Corben.
‘What do you mean, what are we waiting for?’ Luis asked him.
‘I mean, Bryan believes that our association members have a right to know what’s going on and we have a mandate to go to the authorities and demand they give us some answers. Our water’s been cut off, for God’s sake, and our water is our lifeblood! We need to know how long it’s going to be cut off for, and whether they’re going to be cutting us off on a regular basis. So – since we can’t contact the authorities on the phone, let Mohammed go to the mountain.’
‘What the hell does Mohammed have to do with it?’
‘I mean let’s all go to the Verdemont Country Club and beard Governor Smiley in his den.’
Bryan felt suddenly inspired, almost brave. This was what the neighborhood association was all about: action. ‘Great idea, Corben,’ he said. ‘Let’s darn well do it.’
He went through to the kitchen where Marjorie was sitting at the table watching their portable television. She was wearing pink latex gloves and polishing their silver cutlery. ‘We’re going over to the Verdemont Country Club,’ he told her. ‘Governor Smiley’s
there, and I’m going to ask him a few pertinent questions about our water supply.’
‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘Do you really think you ought to?’
‘Of course. Why not? I’m the elected representative of the residents of Muscupiabe. I have a duty to ask him questions, and he has a duty to give me some answers.’
‘Well, I think you’d be wiser not to go. He didn’t sound very amenable to me.’
‘Oh, come on. You heard him say that we’re all in this together.’
‘Politicians always tell you that. They never mean it. Let me tell you, Bry, I was listening very carefully to what he was saying and that man is not in the mood for being challenged.’
‘I don’t care what kind of a mood he’s in. It’s his job to be challenged, and I’m going to challenge him.’
Marjorie looked up at him over her the rim of her spectacles. ‘Bry,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘No … nothing,’ she replied, and went back to cleaning the fish knives.
They arrived outside Verdemont Country Club in a convoy of five vehicles. The parking lot was almost empty except for three black Escalades and two Crown Victorias with ESS logos on their doors. The sky was hazy with heat, but cloudless.
Bryan climbed stiffly down from his Range Rover and looked around. Verdemont Country Club was an imposing Colonial-style building with a white-pillared portico, like a house from a Southern plantation. It was set in front of a green, gently rolling eighteen-hole golf course, with the mountains behind it. To the south, almost invisible through the heat, was the San Bernardino valley. Bryan could see palls of dark brown smoke still hanging over the city center, but he could hear no sirens and he could neither hear nor see any helicopters. Apart from the incessant chirruping of cicadas, the afternoon was almost completely silent. No airplanes in the sky, no noise of traffic on the freeways, not even the whinnying of golf carts.
He and his fellow committee members walked across the parking lot to the portico. The air was so hot that Bryan felt as if it were scorching his nostrils as he breathed it in.
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