You are trespassing. I am asking you to leave my driveway. He looked over his shoulder at the other three sentinel men. They climbed off the cart and started walking up the driveway. They had drawn their batons.
The leader took one step closer to me. Mr. Talmage, you are under HOA arrest. Sir, there is no such thing as HOA arrest. He swung the baton. I had been a federal agent for 28 years.
I had been trained for this exact moment by instructors at Quantico, by hand-to-hand combat trainers at the Tampa field office, and by a Marine Corps drill sergeant my father had insisted I spend a summer with when I was 16. I knew in the half second between the swing and the impact that I had two choices. I could deflect, draw my own weapon, and end the encounter with the lead Sentinel guard, wounded or dead in my driveway. I could also take the hit and trigger the federal response. I had promised Camille I would take the hit.
I took the hit. The baton came down on the back of my left shoulder. I went to one knee in the St. Augustine grass. The pain was the kind I had felt twice in my career when I had taken a punch from a heavyweight suspect.
It was hard but survivable. My left arm went briefly numb. The other three guards came up the driveway fast. One of them produced a taser. He fired it from about 8 ft.
The probes hit me square in the chest. The current was set high. I went all the way down on my back in my own grass. Inside the house, May was not there. May was in Bradenton.
Estelle was in the kitchen. Estelle reached up to the spice rack behind the rosemary jar. Estelle flipped the switch. In the panel van at 672 to Bayou Drive, four red lights came up, green on a console. In the Mercedes Sprinter at the back of the community, eight tactical agents put down their water bottles and reached for their vests.
In the FBI Tampa field office tactical operations center, a quiet woman named Special Agent Petra Linquist hit a single button on her dashboard and routed every camera, every microphone, and every coordination radio to the Department of Justice's secure server in Washington, DC. The clock started 92 seconds. The Sentinel leader stepped over me in my own front yard in front of 12 cameras with the taser still crackling on the grass beside my shoulder. He bent down to put fake handcuffs on my wrists. He did not get them on.
The first bureau sedan came around the corner at 91 seconds. Special agent Drusen Crane was in the lead. He stepped out of the driver's side of an unmarked dark blue Ford Explorer with his sidearm at low ready, his badge out and his FBI windbreaker open at the chest. Behind him, three tactical agents in full plain clothes and body armor configuration moved up my driveway in a clean three-point formation that I had personally watched Drusen rehears on the Quantico track in 2014. FBI, hands up, hands up.