They were all wearing jeans, including the women, and all had dark hair and eyes. A tall man in a white dress shirt said, “I’m Harry Lopez, I’m the mayor.” He pointed at the two women: “Janice Moreno in the pink blouse, Veronica Ruiz in the white, the bald guy is Doug Hall, the other guy is Antonio Alonso.”
* * *
Moreno had gotten her cell open, and Ruiz stepped out behind her. Ruiz pointed to the beardless guard and said, “This one put his hands on me. Can I kick him in the head?”
The guard said, “Don’t do that . . .”
Kaiser smiled at her and said, “No, that’s not a good idea. You could break a toe, and you’ve got to walk to my car.”
Moreno freed the three men and Kaiser pressed the muzzle of his shotgun into the stomach of the uninjured man and said to a councilman, “Get his pistol.”
When they had both pistols, the councilmen took four .223 magazines and four nine-millimeter magazines from the men’s belt pouches.
Kaiser said, “We need to get their walkie-talkies.”
“Cell phones,” one of the women said.
“Cell phones don’t work anymore. They blew up the cell phone tower.”
Lopez, the mayor, prodded the beardless guard’s leg with his boot and said, “Goddamn it, did you have to go and do that? Took us two years to get that thing built.”
“That’s just the start,” the man said.
Kaiser said to Alonso, a short, stocky guy with a tough face, “I’m gonna point this pistol”—he pulled his carry gun— “at this asshole’s head, and I want you to go through his pockets. We want everything in them, wallet, knife if he has one, hidden gun, check his socks, his ankle . . . If he shows any sign of resistance, shout it out and jump back and I’ll kill him.”
The odor of urine suddenly suffused the jail, and Alonso said, “He peed himself.”
“He has good reason to,” Kaiser said, prodding the beardless man with his boot. “My trigger is delicate as a butterfly wing.”
When both men had been searched—they were both carrying walkie-talkies and knives, but no additional guns—Kaiser kicked the uninjured man and said, “Crawl over to that cell. Go on.”
The man crawled to the cell, and then Kaiser kicked the injured man again and ordered him to crawl to the adjacent cell. He looked around at the council members and asked, “You think they’ve got more keys? Like, you know, hidden somewhere on them?”
One of the men said, “I don’t believe so. Somebody might have keys, but I don’t think these guys do.”
Kaiser told Moreno to lock the cells and to test them to make sure they were locked. When they were, he went to the door. He could see three women walking down the hill on the main street, one block over, apparently on the way to the noon meeting.
“I will tell you everything I know in a minute,” Kaiser told the council people. “Right now, I want you to walk uphill, one at a time, to the first street. There’s a Ford Explorer parked there, the doors are unlocked. We’re gonna have to get six people in it, but that’s the only transportation we got . . . You women are going to have to sit on somebody’s lap . . .”
“Where are we going?”
“Tell you when we’re on the way,” Kaiser said. He tipped his head toward the cells. “I don’t want these guys to know.”
The bearded man said, “You guys are dead.”
* * *
The five council members walked out, one at a time, the men picking up the AR-15s as they went. Up the hill, they piled into the Explorer. Kaiser went last, carrying the two pistols taken from the guards. He climbed into the Explorer and put it in gear.