Edge of Battle

The officer took a deep, exasperated breath and affixed the nationally syndicated radio host with a dead stare, quickly thinking about his options. Finally he looked over the Excursion’s large hood and said to the officer on the other side, “Paul, get the crowd back and let Mr. O’Rourke’s vehicle pass. Then form up and let’s get him inside the building.” The other officer hesitated for a moment, silently asking if that was a good idea, and then faced the crowd head-on, arms outstretched, trying to cut the line of demonstrators in half and move his half off to the side of the driveway. A couple more officers were called in to help. The crowd kept on shouting, but they seemed satisfied to be led back by the police.

It didn’t take long for the media to notice what was happening, and soon they were surrounded by reporters and cameramen. “Bob! Mr. O’Rourke!” one well-known female correspondent for a cable TV news channel shouted. He didn’t look in her direction until she called him “Mr. O’Rourke.” “What are you going to do?”

O’Rourke rolled the window of his big SUV down, revved the engine, then put it into gear. “I’m going to work, that’s what I’m doing.”

“Will the police do anything to help you?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” he replied, loud enough for Wilcox and the other officers to hear him. “It’s totally up to them. They can protect me, or they can stand by and watch a law-abiding citizen of the United States be assaulted and threatened with bodily harm right in front of them.”

“Do you feel any sense of responsibility for this demonstration outside your studios today?”

“Responsibility? I have nothing to do with any of this!” he shouted from inside his car. “If you don’t want to blame the actual people who are out here disrupting free movement in this place of business, blame that Comandante Veracruz character for inciting the crowd like this! He’s the one who should be thrown in jail for organizing this! I’m not going to be inconvenienced because some gangster from a corrupt third- world banana republic wants his name on the news!”

“Do you think it’s wise to drive in there like that, Mr. O’Rourke? Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

“I trust the Henderson Police Department to maintain order,” O’Rourke said. “If they can’t do it, the mayor needs to call in the Highway Patrol or even the National Guard to help restore order.”

The police found it relatively easy to move the crowd aside, probably because the protesters quickly noticed that they would have O’Rourke’s vehicle surrounded once it got inside the private parking lot. O’Rourke’s car was hit repeatedly by rocks, bottles, empty cans, and picket signs. He laid on the horn several times to try to move the protesters away. He had to rev the engine several times and creep forward slowly to avoid running anyone over, but soon he was in his parking spot, surrounded by two police officers.

O’Rourke got out of his car and stood on the steel running board of his Excursion, making sure he would stay above the cameramen so he wouldn’t look any shorter on TV, and he surveyed the crowd as calmly as he could. The TV reporters were being jostled a bit, sandwiched in between the crowds behind them and the police in front. Many in the crowd wanted to get on TV just as badly as Bob O’Rourke, while others wanted to get within spitting or yelling range of the famous radio personality. So far the protesters were obeying police instructions and staying behind the invisible line projecting from their outstretched arms. A stray banana peel sailed past O’Rourke’s head —he tried to pretend it didn’t bother him.

“Mr. O’Rourke,” one of the female reporters asked, thrusting her microphone up toward him, “are you determined to go to your studio and do your morning broadcast as usual, despite this demonstration?”

“This is not a ‘demonstration’—this is a near-riot, bordering on complete anarchy!” O’Rourke shouted. “But I am not going to be scared away by a bunch of rabble-rousers! I’ve got a job to do.”

“Don’t you think you should talk to the organizers of this rally?”

“You call this a ‘rally’? I wouldn’t dignify this insane act of criminal trespass, assault, hate crime, intimidation, and conspiracy as a ‘rally.’ And I do my talking on the air, for the rest of the free world to hear—and that’s what I intend to do right now. If you want to hear what I think of these hatemongers, listen to my show, The Bottom Line, on your local radio, satellite radio, or on the Internet. Excuse me, but I have work to do.”

He hated jumping off the tall running board, but there was no way else to get inside. Fortunately few in the crowd around them were taller than he was, and the protesters created such confusion that he hoped no one would notice how short he really was. Wilcox and two other motorcycle patrol officers began clearing a path for him toward the office building, using nothing but their gloved hands to carefully but firmly push the crowd back as he approached the short set of stairs leading up to the semicircular drive and main entranceway. O’Rourke could see several workers at the entrance and waved to them. Just fifty feet more, he thought, and I’ll be free and clear…

But as he reached the drive, the crowd suddenly seemed to surge forward. Both police officers on either side of O’Rourke were squeezed against him, and he pushed them away toward the crowd. The push seemed to anger many of the protesters, who pushed back even harder. A can bounced off one officer’s helmet; a raw egg hit O’Rourke on the shoulder. Forty feet more…

The crowd started to chant, “RA-CIST! RA-CIST! RACIST!” Before long, the chanting turned to shouting, and then to screaming, and soon the words had changed to “?CA-GU-E-TAS! ?CA-GU-E-TAS!” which O’Rourke knew meant one of two things in Spanish—“little child” or “coward.”

“Hey, why don’t you just keep on walking home to Mexico or wherever you came from!” O’Rourke shouted in return. “We don’t want you! We don’t need you! Come back like real people and not burglars!”

More eggs and vegetables were thrown at him. “Mr. O’Rourke,” Wilcox shouted behind him as he led the way toward the studios, “I’m ordering you right now to shut up. You want to address the crowd—do it on your radio show. Now is not the time!” O’Rourke swallowed nervously and fell quiet. Thirty feet…

Suddenly from his left, a large brown malt liquor bottle flew over the crowd, hitting another Henderson police officer squarely on his left temple at full force, and he went down. The protesters surged forward once more, now close enough to grasp O’Rourke’s jacket, pull off his cowboy hat, and spin him around. Now O’Rourke couldn’t see which way to go. Several sets of hands were grabbing him, threatening to rip his jacket right off his back, threatening to…

The gun! He had almost forgotten about the pistol in his shoulder holster! Even now he felt little dark fingers reaching for his weapon. If he let anyone grab that gun, there would be a bloodbath —he, then the cops, would certainly be the first ones to die…

He didn’t actually remember doing so, but before he knew it, the big .45 was in his hand. He raised it up over his head and pulled the trigger, startled that it seemed to require hardly any effort at all to do so—and equally surprised that the second, third, and fourth pulls required even less. The crowd jerked down and away as if pulled by innumerable invisible ropes from behind. Women and men alike screamed hysterically. Most of the crowd turned and bolted away, trampling those too slow to get out of the way.

Except for two persons lying on the driveway, the path suddenly seemed to open up in front of him as if two giant hands had parted the crowd, and O’Rourke ran for his office building. Witnesses standing on the steps and in the lobby ran for cover when they saw O’Rourke with the smoking gun still in his fist heading for them. He ran inside the front doors, his thin chest heaving. “My…God, they…they tried to kill me!” he panted. He couldn’t control his breathing, and he leaned forward, hands on his knees, trying to catch his…

“Police! Freeze! Drop the gun, now!” he heard. He didn’t think they were talking to him, but someone else behind him in the crowd with a gun, so he stayed bent over until he was finally able to…

Wilcox and another Henderson Police Department officer tackled O’Rourke from behind, running at full force. O’Rourke’s face was mashed into the tile floor, his arms pinned painfully behind his back, and the gun wrenched out of his right hand by breaking his index finger.

“This is Mike One-Seven, inside the Green Valley Business Plaza, shots fired, one suspect in custody—it’s fucking Bob O’Rourke,” Wilcox said into his shoulder-mounted radio microphone after he and the other officer wrestled the gun out of O’Rourke’s hand, twisted his arms behind him, and handcuffed his wrists together. “I’m declaring a code ten-ninety-nine at this location, approximately two hundred individuals. I want them cleared out now before someone else decides to bring a gun out here. Over.”