7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7 Read Online Free PDF Page B

all over the country but especially in the extremely red states.”
    “Oh. You do really think…?”
    “There were threats before. It would only take one crazy jingo to carry them out so, yes, I do.”
    “What’s the likelihood, really?”
    “I don’t know, Charlie, but it’s all I have.”
    “Ike, I know this has hit you hard, but take a minute and think it through. How does a group of people primarily composed of little old ladies with blue hair and old guys wearing Uncle Sam hats and sporting beer bellies over white suede belts translate into an attempted homicide?”
    “You are right, it has hit me very hard, but you are wrong in assuming that I am reaching or overreacting. I am not interested in the people the media loves to depict as typical attendees at those State’s Right’s, we’re angry, screw the government rallies. I am concerned with the fringe elements they don’t show or even investigate. I’m thinking of the young men and, I suppose, women, who teeter on the brink of sanity and who listen to the hate mongers and radical broadcasters from the far right and left. Add to that the latest incubator of disaster.”
    “Our what?”
    “Look, we have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for how long?”
    “Since nine-eleven. Too long.”
    “Exactly, and in doing so, and certainly without intending to, we have created a whole generation of professional killers. Young men and women who have had to watch as civilians were gunned down for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have seen their friends and their buddies blown up by suicide bombers or roadside explosive devices, and other IEDs. They have been asked to kick down doors and lob hand grenades into houses without ever knowing if they were filled with terrorists or innocent women and children.”
    “I understand the problems created by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, believe me. The number of suicides, divorces, cases of homelessness associated with it is scary, but what is your point?”
    “My point? Imagine, then, one damaged young man sent home, perhaps multiply concussed, suffering from PTSD and hurting both physically and mentally. Then throw him into this hyperpolarized political system that political talking heads have created in the past several decades and what are the chances?”
    “Okay, I see.”
    “Do you really?” Ike’s eyes flashed. He banged the chair arm. “One side screams death to the imagined threats to our democracy, the other yaps we should quit, withdraw, and apologize. He comes home into this—”
    “Or she.”
    “Or she, especially she. You’re right. We have generations of data on how war affects men, but women in combat is a new phenomenon for us. Are women emotionally different enough that their reaction would also be different, or would they be the same as for men? We don’t know that either.”
    “No telling. I would guess the same and I’m not just being politically correct—certainly similar. Perhaps more…I don’t know…domestic.”
    “I’ll leave it at similar. I don’t understand domestic. Anyway, he returns and feels used, even betrayed. He meets one of those professional purveyors of truth and freedom, buys into his cant, and believes he can help by taking action, by employing the skills with which his country has gifted him. God help us. What is the future going to look like in another ten years?”
    Some adjacent customers seemed alarmed at this last outburst. “Ike, I get it, but surely it’s not simply a matter of PTSD sufferers on the loose.”
    “Of course it isn’t. What I’m saying is that there were too many politically motivated nutcases loose in society already and we are not only not doing enough to reduce their number but, in fact, adding to them.”
    “You think this scenario is possible?”
    “Possible? Charlie, I don’t have a clue what went through Timothy McVeigh’s addled brain when he concluded blowing the front off the