Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [48]
How dare they distort everything that’s happened? she thought. The fact that Corona and Navarre were Mexican didn’t have anything to do with the outrage that filled the town … other than the additional fact that most of the crime within a hundred miles of the border originated in one way or another south of the Rio Grande.
Didn’t facts mean anything anymore?
Then she thought about the way things had played out politically in the United States over the past dozen years and realized that no, they didn’t. Facts didn’t mean a blasted thing anymore if they were inconvenient for the power-mongers on the left. They would just yell their lies even louder, and the media would parrot them.
It reminded her of the big stink over so-called ethnic profiling a number of years earlier, after the terrorist attacks on the U.S. The liberal mind-set that no one should ever, ever be the least bit offended by anything (unless they were white and middle-class, of course) had led to eighty-year-old grandmothers being detained and searched in airports while young Arab men in the country on expired visas swept blithely through security checkpoints.
The threat from the Middle East was still a problem, and one day it would come back to bite the country on the ass, big-time, Alex thought. But for now, the terrorist warlords in their caves had scaled back their activities. They liked the guy in the White House. They didn’t want anything happening on his watch that might damage his administration. That was Alex’s theory, anyway, and she knew a lot of people in law enforcement who shared it.
The bigger threat these days was much closer at hand, as the cartels in Mexico had grown so powerful that they were the de facto government south of the border. The Mexican politicians were just figureheads, mouthpieces for the various cartels, and the army generals took their orders from those same cartels.
Like feudal barons, the drug kingpins made war on each other, and those epic clashes often spilled across the border into the U.S. Alex could see a day coming when there might be an actual war down here, unless the United States was willing to meekly give up Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and a big chunk of California. Of course, if that same spineless bunch was still in power in Washington, that might be exactly what happened.
She forced those bleak thoughts out of her head as she finished her coffee. “Jack, you’d better be awake,” she called down the hall. “I’m leaving, and you’ve got school.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake,” came the sleepy answer. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”
“Straight there, straight home after football practice, remember?” She would ground him until he was thirty if she had to, and he could damned well like it. It was better than being arrested.
“Yeah, I got it.”
Alex rinsed her coffee cup, put it in the drainer, and left the house. Home appeared to be quiet this morning, she saw as she drove through town, and she was grateful for that.
Everybody was probably inside, watching TV as the reporters made them out to be a town full of monsters.
She was wearing a dress again, because she had to go back over to the county seat and be on hand if she was called by the defense to testify. Clayton Cochrum had rested his case. Now it would be up to Joe Gutierrez, Dave Rutherford, and the other defense attorneys. Alex didn’t expect the trial to last much longer. Everything was pretty cut and dried.
Or at least it would have been if not for that backstabbing federal bitch, Rosario Encinal, Alex reminded herself. After what had gone down yesterday, there was no telling what might happen today.
Ed Ruiz was waiting for her when she came into the station. “I need to talk to you about that curfew you declared last night, Alex,” he said, launching right into the business that had brought him here without any small talk, as usual.
“Sure, just a minute,” she said. It was early enough that Eloise was still on duty at the dispatcher