True Allegiance

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, Michigan

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.

He also ran a protection racket on the side. At six three and two hundred twenty pounds of shredded muscle, Levon cut an imposing figure walking into other stores on the block. They immediately went quiet when he came in. When he told them he’d graduated from the U of M, they got even quieter. This kid was brutal and smart, they knew.

Today, however, Levon had run into an apparent snag.

It happened every so often, usually with one of the older folks who didn’t want to pay him. He’d usually head over to their shops and casually inform them that while he appreciated their situation, the last thing they wanted was an unexpected fire striking in the near future. He’d shrug, smile, and turn to leave. More often than not, they’d immediately open the cash register. On rare occasions, when that cash register didn’t open, an unexpected fire would turn the business into a smoking husk by morning.

This time was different. The old man in question, Timothy Gardner, had seemed like every other holdover from the 1950s. But Gardner was connected, it turned out. He counted among his myriad cousins the Reverend Jim Crawford. Big Jim. Community leader. Talk show host. Friend to the street.