Dr. Rebecca Nesbitt, FBI specialist in religious terrorism, was silent. “He’s not wrong,” she said at last. “And it scares the hell out of me.”
Epilogue
Friday, July 11, 2014, Seattle, Washington
It had been awhile since Mac had checked his Facebook account. Weeks. He probably should be better about it, but he didn’t like social media in spite of all of the obvious research potential it had for a journalist. But it was late at night, really late, even the evening reporters were gone. He was in the newsroom waiting for Angie to finish some photo editing. They were going to the Bohemian when she was done — if she managed to get done before the bar closed, Mac thought. From the muttered curses he heard coming from the photo department office, the editing wasn’t going well.
And there it was in his feed. Naomi Fairchild wishes to announce the engagement of her daughter Kate Fairchild to Anthony Washington. Washington was an assistant professor in mathematics at Seattle Pacific University. The wedding was set for Dec. 23, 2014, at the Christian Life Church where both were members.
He looked at the announcement for a while. There were a lot of comments wishing the couple well. Lots of those stupid little blue thumbs and red hearts.
He didn’t hear Angie come out of her office until she leaned against his shoulder to see what he was staring at. She read it. “Well that didn’t take long,” she observed.
Mac didn’t respond. He didn’t really know what he felt.
Angie tugged on his arm. “Come on, Marine,” she said. “We’ve got a table calling our name if we get there in the next 20 minutes. Of course, if we don’t get there? My apartment has a table too.”
“And roommates,” he said. “Your apartment has roommates.”
“And your house has an aunt,” she responded. “So?”
“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go. And you don’t know how good it feels to be able to say fuck again.”
Angie laughed. Shit, he loved her laugh.
Mac smiled down at Angie as he followed her out the back door. “Even better is fucking again,” he said. “Roommates, aunts and all.”
He might need to do something about that, he thought. Time for a place of his own?
He couldn’t help but look back one last time at the computer announcing the end of a dream. Fuck it, he thought. His reality was just fine. Better than a dream world where he couldn’t be himself.
Still. Well, just fuck.
He turned out the newsroom lights and lengthened his stride to catch up with the woman who liked him as he was. And after that weekend in the mountains? There should be no doubt in her mind exactly what kind of person he was. And she liked him anyway. Maybe even because he was the person he was.
Which was good. Because he liked her too.
A lot.
Postscript
Hi, I'm the author of this book, and I hope you liked it. As a former journalist, I wanted a reporter protagonist who could solve problems. Mac came into being, based on my reporting experiences as well as others, coupled with the military experiences of a former student turned journalist. This is the third book in the series. You can find the first two, Trust No One and In God’s Name at your usual e-publishing site.
In 2016, I, like a lot of people, was stunned by Donald Trump taking the presidency. The fact he was opposed by most American voters was no comfort. Some 63 million voters had voted for him. In spite of his incompetency, in spite of his racism and misogyny. Or maybe because of it. They were sending a clear message, I thought bitterly: any white man, no matter how incompetent and mediocre, was preferable to a Black man or to a woman.
I’d worked in diversity activism for a long time. I’d been a reporter in some pretty racist parts of the country. And I would have guessed that 15-25 percent of the country were like that. Many of them were people I grew up with. My liberal friends thought I was exaggerating the threat.
Turned out, it’s closer to 35 percent of Americans who feel like that. (Feel free to argue with me. I can be found on Twitter at @ljbreedlove, and I’m happy to discuss politics there!)
You know who weren’t surprised? Black people. Native Americans. Latinos. LGBTQ people. Immigrants. They knew. They all knew. Americans are like that.
Hell, even Lyndon B. Johnson knew: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." (1960)
And so, I set out to find out what did we know back in say, 2014? Could we have seen this coming?
I checked in with some scholars who study the rise of white supremacy, militia’s and anti-government rhetoric. I asked, could we have known in 2014?
Their answer? We did know in 2014. We’ve known since 2008. The FBI knew. Homeland Security knew. Nobody wanted to listen to the experts. No one wanted to listen to people of color, to all the people marginalized because they weren’t straight, white Christian men and the women they’re married to.
I finished the first draft of this not long after armed white supremacists took a Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol because they thought Trump wanted them to overthrow Congress to “Stop the Steal.”
You may read this book as an answer for my own lack of realization of how large the problem is, or you may choose to see it as another Mac Davis thriller and read it for that. I hope you liked it either way.
If you did like the book, please write a review at your favorite e-book retailer. Or put in a good word for the book on your Facebook page
