The Voting Machine

The Watch List

Under the streets of Las Vegas, I plodded forward, my hands groping blindly through webs and debris. It was somewhere on my way down the manhole that I lost the Glock. I tripped in a shadow and heard it clatter down a vent by the base of the drain. The weapon that killed Chang and Weisbein was gone. They'd have to dig up the whole city to find it down here.

The tunnels were riddled with hidden dangers. I could fall into an open pit or step on an infected needle. I could be bitten by a black widow spider. I was OK with that. I made my peace with these risks and decided it was a good day to die. Everything I'd clung to, my hope that my wife would take me back, my dreams of watching my daughter grow up, that was all ripped away like flesh from the bone. It had taken me my whole life to get this far, to accept the fact that it could all end any second.

"You afraid to die, Temo?" my friend Flytrap once asked me when we kids, right before he did his initiation. We were sitting on a hill in the old neighborhood in Highland Park, gazing up at a house on earthquake stilts.

"Of course," I said. "I am not a gangster. I am just a regular guy."

Flytrap had just gotten his first gun, a .38 special. He stuck the barrel of the gun in his mouth. He clenched it hard in his teeth.

"Even a regular guy can't be afraid to die, Temo. Even a regular guy got to put it all on the line like a warrior. Maybe not everyday. Someday."

After trudging through the tunnel for one hour, I raised the grate and climbed out the drain hole at the strip mall on Flaming and Durango. A thin, young woman in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt carried a hose to the sidewalk in front of the Dollar Delight and washed away pools of piss and malt liquor. Dark, intelligent eyes peered out from the black scarf that covered her head under the hood. Fatima was minding the store herself now that her father Abdul was taken into custody.

Two red-faced men in ragged clothes approached her, screaming and waving their arms. They must've been ones who drank the malt liquor and relieved themselves at her doorstep overnight. Fatima nothing but lifted one hand from the hose to warn them with a flat, cut-off signal. The men both frowned and scuttled away. The sign still read "Closed" when I followed her into the store and locked the door behind me.

"Fatima," I whispered.

She placed a finger to her lips and walked behind the counter to flip a switch.

"Now we can talk," she said, glancing at the security camera. "Those drunks didn't see you did they?"

"I waited until they crossed the street."

"They know they better behave. Or else they'll never be able to buy liquor in this city again."

She peeked through the glass at the front of the store.

"You can't stay here long. They're coming after you. Just like my father. I heard it on the news. They said you killed those FBI agents."

She showed me the screen of her cell phone. I skimmed the news story:

LOCALS WANTED IN HOMEGROWN TERROR PLOT:

TEMO MCCARTHY

ABDUL SHAHABI

BRENDA SAVAGE

PAMELA DUST

TERESA SWAN

AWARD FOR ANY INFORMATION LEADING TO CAPTURE

ALL SUSPECTS ON THE WATCH LIST.  ARMED AND HIGHLY DANGEROUS

"They say my father is on the loose? So thatmeans they say he escaped from custody? That's a lie," she shouted. "The FBI has lied to us many times. They said they wouldn't spy on our mosque and then they did. They said they wouldn't audit the Dollar Delight finances and then they did"

"Did you talk to him after they took him in yesterday?" 

"Not a word."

"Why would they bring him in with no warrant and then make a lie that he'd escaped?"

"They have a vendetta. He gave a lot of money to legal defense funds and charities. He took the FBI to court and they had to pay a settlement to the mosque."

"So this was payback?"

"It has to be."

"That doesn't really make sense though. I met the head of the FBI office yesterday. I don't think he'd have your father arrested to settle a score. Plus why would they lie about him escaping from custody? That makes them look terrible."

"I don't know, Temo. What do you think?"

"Maybe it was someone pretending to be the FBI. Brenda told me a story about her time in Iraq. There was a group pretending to be the army. They were able to manipulate things."

"I don't understand how that relates to my father."

"Think of all the names on the watch list.  Me, Brenda, Abdul and the others. There has to a thread connecting us together. Your father told you about his past, didn't he?"

"He was a scholar, he studied literature. Then when he moved to Las Vegas, he started Dollar Delight to make money."

"No I mean before that. Back when he was a student in Egypt. He was pushing for free elections. They threw him in prison. He showed me the scars"

"That was a long time ago. What are you getting at?" she said. "My father is a good man."

"Yeah, I am a good man too. And they're coming after me just like they did for him. That's why we need to know what happened. You said your father lots of money right? Charities. Legal defense funds. Who did he give the money too?"

"He had a contact in Orange County. A man named Jamaal."

"Did he send the money through check or wire transfer?"

"No, of course not. He used the hawala. It's more secure"

"Do you think you could contact Jamal? I have questions I need to ask. It might help us find out what happened to your father."

"I can try," she said. "If you think it will help. This secret group you're talking about, does it have a name?"

Just then we heard a knock on the front door.

"FBI. Open up."