Full Measure: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

must follow suit. So, we call on the city leaders of Fallbrook to recognize November twenty-second of this year to be ‘Self-Protection Day,’ during which Fallbrook’s good and law-abiding citizens over the age of twenty-one can legally carry, in public and on their persons, and loaded if they desire, the weapons of self-defense upon which this country was founded and built.”
    “Complete with thirty-shot magazines?” asked Anders.
    “Let’s work out the specifics later.”
    “Did you choose the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination on purpose?”
    “Of course I did.”
    One of the city councilwomen moved to table the proposal for further study and it was seconded by the councilman sitting beside her. The council swiftly voted.
    “Tabled it is, Mr. Magnus,” said Mayor Anders.
    “You’re just hiding your head in the sand.”
    “We appreciate your input. Welcome back to Fallbrook and behave yourself.”
    Anders whacked her gavel on the desktop and Norris heard the sharp ring of it over the jeers. Magnus remained at the podium and turned toward the audience, and Patrick had his first good look at the man in more than a decade. He was handsome in a cunning way, his hair brown and full, his eyebrows disingenuously arched, eyes wide in feigned innocence. There was a trace of a smile on his lips. “You dumbass liberals with your cheap Third World labor don’t know one thing about this country. Time to take it back, boys and girls.”
    Some people sitting with Magnus stood and clapped and hooted. Patrick saw a young pierced and tattooed skinhead couple. There was an older biker in chains and leathers with an obscure patch on the back of his vest. There were two fresh-faced man-boys wearing white shirts and black ties and they looked to Patrick like Mormons, though this was doubtful. The man-boys couldn’t be much more than teenagers. The big biker fell in behind Magnus as he left the podium and strode down the center aisle toward the exits. Magnus looked at Patrick on the way and Patrick caught the gleam in his clear blue eyes—mischief or menace, hard to tell, he thought. “Welcome home, Patrick,” Magnus said to him. “Thank you and well done.”
    “Go to hell,” said Patrick.
    When Magnus had passed by, Patrick saw Iris Cash looking at him from across the chambers. He waved at her awkwardly, as if trying to conceal his action from the hundreds present, many of whom were looking back in his direction at Magnus. After thirteen months of living in close quarters with men, it felt strange to Patrick to intend anything as private. Iris smiled. He smiled too and felt fortunate that he had carried her with him into the war and back, and that she apparently bore him no grudge for not calling. He had cast her as a weightless ideal rather than a flesh-and-blood human being, far easier to transport and protect, and he knew this was a selfish convenience even as he had done it. Now seeing her again she was exactly as he had pictured her: very real and beautiful.
    *   *   *
    Mayor Anders called the last old business on the calendar. A woman in the audience set up an easel on the dais, and set a foam-backed photograph on it. Even from far back Patrick saw that the image was a boy’s smiling face, probably an enlargement of a school picture.
    “That boy was killed on Mission Boulevard two weeks ago,” said Lew Boardman. “Ten years old. It was late and dark and the car that hit him didn’t stop. A late-model white four-door is all the witness could say. It was weaving. The car threw him up and the windshield caught him again and he flew twenty feet. And the car kept on going.”
    A city safety engineer presented a PowerPoint proposal to construct two lighted crosswalks. On a city map he ran the pointer along Fallbrook’s two busiest streets and stated that some stretches of them were hundreds of yards from the nearest traffic lights. He said that without stops or crosswalks, Fallbrook’s