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SHE COULD feel the escalating stress and outrage in the trapezius knots, neck gristle and rigid joints of her moaning clients, especially once Dirk Hoffman’s story started bouncing around.
He was returning home from the saloon at half past midnight when Agent Rick Talley’s personal radiation detector went off. Nobody disputed that part. Exactly what happened next hinged on who was talking.
Agent Talley wrote it up as a required vehicle stop after Mr. Hoffman’s truck made his PRD flash and beep. The driver appeared to be intoxicated. After he turned verbally abusive, Agent Talley gently subdued Mr. Hoffman in order to properly search him and his vehicle.
The dairyman’s version: He was nearly home when Agent Hothead screeched into a U-turn and hit the lights as if he were Al Capone, then ordered him to step outside and “shut his f*cking mouth.” When Dirk asked what the hell was going on, Agent Hothead ordered him facedown on the street, where he was searched, held at gunpoint and berated in Spanish.
While no nuclear weapon was found on Dirk or in his truck, the incident made it common knowledge that the pricey new toys on the BP’s hips were so sensitive they could detect such drive-by cancer patients as the sixty-nine-year-old Dirk Hoffman, who until then had managed to keep his radiation treatments secret.
This dustup unleashed other tales of harassment. Wildlife biologist Matthew Paust told Sophie he was interrogated for twenty minutes about exactly why he was strolling alone at night along the edge of his property. Alexandra Cole confided at the next bunko party that a new BP ransacked her brother’s Audi after he visited a friend on Peace Drive. East Indians who’d grown raspberries along the U.S. side for decades stopped visiting Abbotsford relatives to avoid the humiliating questions and searches on the drive home.
And complaints about the border cams rose to a boil. They track us whenever we step outside! residents told local councils with no say over the patrol or its cameras. “How would you feel if you had a camera on you twenty-four/seven?” Melanie Mesick demanded. “Who’s to say some perverted imbecile won’t start using them to peer into our bedrooms?”
Still, the security and surveillance continued to escalate as Patera almost doubled patrols yet again to keep his ever-growing force busy. Most vehicles cruising the northern line after dusk were now green-and-whites. Few people took notice of the little flying drone when it first began traversing the 49th like some oversized, high-altitude bird, though they were alarmed to learn that the unmanned military aircraft’s cameras could read a cereal box from fifteen thousand feet.
Patera wanted even more gadgets, urging the Blaine council to seek grants for a radiation alarm system at its busiest four-way intersection. He also insisted that local fire and police should be equipped with PDAs that could tap into FBI databases at the scene of an incident.
Nobody was surprised to hear that Dirk Hoffman had hired a hotshot Seattle attorney to look into suing the goddamn Border Patrol. What everyone was waiting for was his next reader-board salvo: WELCOME TO THE POLICE STATE.