mitigation, road improvement standards—his memory included a Christmas without lights on the city tree because energy costs soared while police wages were cut ten percent after a decade of no increases. A basket of food and a frozen turkey were left on his doorstep. He’d been so humiliated, but so thankful. He knew it’d been Carliss who’d delivered the charity. With his military pension, he was one of the few citizens who had any disposable income. It was Carliss who paid to keep on the floodlights on the three flags that flew above ‘Ol Lee.
“Let me buy the city some time, Solcross. Marshall said he’s got a line on a pregnant couple. He’s explained to them how desperately we need them. They’ve agreed to visit. The three of them could take Robin and the kids’ place. It’s the only way I can make up for Meritsville not meeting the census requirement. Please, Chief. Please.”
“D.C. will only send another agent . . .” It was grief doing the begging. He knew desperation when he heard it.
“But it’ll take months before the EPA finishes its investigation and assigns somebody else. I don’t care what happens to me. What good am I to myself without my wife and grandkids?”
It was another question that had no answer. Just like the question of why God let a drunk driver smash into Robin Carliss’ mini-van. For some men, however, men like Carliss, the only thing that fights grief is fighting something else. “Whatever you want us to do, we’ll do it,” he’d said.
Waiting in the basement of Cana Baptist Church was a cache of 1945 Soviet-made fully automatic PPSH-41s with fifty-round drums, and Carliss’ Mosin M-91-30 with scope—the same sniper rifle that decimated the Nazi officer ranks at Stalingrad. When Sherman entered City Hall to confiscate the yearly birth and death records, Solcross would give the order: everyone off the streets, and all schools on lock down. If no one saw anything, no one could say anything. Carliss would station himself in Meritsville’s pride, the Civil War Monument across from City Hall—a twenty-four foot high by twenty feet long, granite based cube with four enlisted Rebels facing the four points of the compass, and in the middle, above them, General Robert E. Lee astride his white horse. Engraved on the base were the names of a hundred husbands, brothers, and fathers who left town and never returned.
And, as far the EPA would know, Agent Norris Sherman never made it to Meritsville. He’d never return to D.C. either. Carliss was a dead shot.