“Yes,” said Maitland, holding his foot off the ground, not knowing what to do with the pain. He was cuffed to the table, so couldn’t squeeze it and hop around.
“Yes I’m right or yes today?”
“Yes to both. He wants to do it today. But I bet you’re wrong about something else.”
“What is that?”
“He’s going to do it with Blanche. That is very special to him, to him and to Chuck. Can you uncuff me? I think you broke my toe.”
“I misstepped, and I’m sorry. You need to tell me more, immediately.”
“This first.”
“How is undoing your hands going to help with your toe?”
“It will allow me to skip the part of my pretrial where I have my lawyer tell the judge that this interview was conducted under duress, and therefore void,” Maitland said, squeezing the pain out of his voice and filling it with professionalism.
Pargiter hesitated, then gave the nod to Bennet, who walked the few steps over to Maitland and keyed his cuffs open. As he was straightening up, Maitland grabbed the front of Bennet’s belt, pulling him over his lap. Emil Chadwick screamed, upending his chair, as Maitland went for Bennet’s gun. Maitland had his left hand on the holster and was thumping Bennet on the back of the head with his right. Maitland knew Bennet’s department-issue holster as well as he knew his own, of course—he released the thumb break and kept moving toward the trigger-guard release. Then he started to slide the gun out, smiling.
Maitland wasn’t going to do it. Pargiter knew it. He knew he wasn’t going to shoot Bennet, or him, or Chadwick. He knew. He just couldn’t risk it.
Pargiter put two bullets into Dan Maitland’s head at close range, and when that was finished, Dan Maitland didn’t have much head left.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
* * *
JAYA CHAUHAN LEFT her mother behind with two police officers in their home when Pargiter called her, telling her to get into her car and drive straight to the Dunkin’ Donuts at Alameda and Elm. He was in the parking lot with coffees when she arrived, and offered her one as she got out of her car. It was black and she usually took milk, but she said nothing and started drinking it.
“The officer I had following you and Blanche Potter is dead. His car’s gone, and he was found behind the bush where he’d last parked it. A block from your house. That’s what we know. Are you all right? I mean, functionally all right?”
“I’m not, but I’d be worse if there weren’t two police officers with my mother right now instead of just one.” Jaya lost her words after this, staring at a Technicolor oil stain in the parking space between her and the detective. Pargiter gave her a couple of seconds before continuing.
“I’m not insulting Clem Broward. He was very good,” Pargiter said. “Any of us can be surprised.”
Jaya stared at him.
“But yes,” he went on. “Surprising two cops isn’t going to go as easily as creeping up on one and shooting him in the back.”
Jaya felt a burning sensation on her chest and looked down, realizing that her coffee cup was tilted toward her body, and that her body was tilting toward the pavement, just as Pargiter slapped the cup out of her hand and set her down to sit on the hood of her car. “Blanche,” Jaya whispered.
“He took her. But I mean took, not killed. She’s not lying where Broward was. This psycho took her somewhere, and I have to believe that it’s where he’s planning to do his shooting.”
“Why? Why do you have to believe that?” Jaya asked.
“Because it gives us a chance, that’s why. A chance to stop this. And I need to believe we have that chance. Jaya, do you have any idea, any at all, where they would be?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
* * *
THE BOY WAS Crissy’s bullshit, as I’m sure you can guess,” said The Boy, as I woke up on a strange, U-dented mattress in a room with the shades drawn. I straightened up then lay down again when the pain in my skull seemed to flower into all of my limbs and torso. My arms were tied behind me, tight, with something that wasn’t rope. Electrical cord, maybe. He’d left my clothes on, but taken the gun. Before I had laid back down, I saw a rifle, burnished and sleek, mounted on a tripod just beside those drawn curtains.
“Maitland gave me the scope back,” The Boy said. “He’d be disappointed I’m not using it. It was just a mock-up, you know. Same model but I built in the scratches from Chuck’s old one out of some photos Crissy had. But I left it up for you by the Denny’s. Little souvenir. I wanted to use this goddamn beast tonight. Full auto.”
“Don’t,” I said, my voice an actual croak, more toad than frog. I thought of those green amphibian bodies on the New Orleans pavement, the rich air and their hot living flesh, so small and crushable.
“I’m Seth,” he said. “Seth Howell, born, but truly Seth Varner. Crissy wanted an official name change, and I had to talk her out of it. Said it’d make me too easy to find, and she knew it was true. Really she couldn’t stand that some other woman, even if it was a dead meth addict—R.I.P., Mom—had given Chuck a child. But I’m Seth Varner, that’s for real. You remember me?”
The face came nearer to me than it had been since the car, and this time, Seth was looking at me full in the eye. He even took off his glasses. Chuck’s narrow nose, for sure. The eyes, a deep green, came from that woman he’d called a dead meth addict, because there was nothing that beautiful in our shared gene pool. But the forehead, the chin, the lips, they were Chuck’s. I was still staring when he kissed me.
I spat back the saliva he’d put into me and Seth wiped his face, backing away. He looked apologetic.
“Sorry,” he said. “Too much information meets too much action. We’re half-siblings, Blanche. Half. The good half. I think that carrying forward that connection to Chuck is as much a duty as this is,” he said, pointing to the rifle. “You know this place? I guess you never saw the inside. Historical for us, and also handy—I got you up the fire escape. Would have been questions if I carried you up through the lobby, asleep as you were.
“Chuck, half the time he left you at the bookstore or whatever, he picked me up from my mom and we came and watched TV here, before he talked to me for hours. Just hours. The shootings, you have to know, they weren’t spontaneous, it wasn’t a that-day decision. He’d told me about them weeks before, told me to be in the Harlow food court at an exact time, and he turned up with you right on the goddamn money. And I got to see everything. Just like you.
“We were his plan, Blanche. You and me together, carriers of Your Life Is Mine. Us and these bullets.”
The Boy, Seth, tossed a handful of bullets into the air and let them clink onto the filthy carpet. He turned off the lights in the room, but I could see him moving, still. The shape of him. Then he drew the curtains open, slowly, showing me what was outside: the boardwalk where Chuck Varner used to walk with me while he trawled for women, one of whom was this creature’s mother. It was a beautiful, busy summer night.
There were a lot of people, but Seth had a lot of bullets in the clips that lay alongside his gun. Enough for all of them.
“Forget my name. I want you and everyone else to call me Chuck. Chuck Varner.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
* * *
JAYA NURSED HER coffee-burnt hand and watched the pavement while Pargiter waited, feeling his desperation.
She thought back over the decade of truths that made up her friendship with Blanche Potter, all the conversations, all the work, all the silence, all the need and give-back and simple fun. And the lie under them all: her dead father, lying in the street like a dog that had been run over, a hole in his mind. And Blanche, lying under that tarp in the back of a truck with a rifle, brainwashed by more abuse and trauma than she could imagine, still unable to kill an innocent person.
“They’re saying the shooter is her half-brother. I know that sounds nuts,” said Detective Pargiter. “That’s what Dan Maitland told us, that this man is Chuck Varner’s son with
another woman.”
Jaya took the only fact she could think of, wondering if it was because it was the most recent, because it was the only chance she could think of with a mind this taxed.
“We drove by a place where Chuck Varner used to take women.”
* * *
It was just after eleven p.m. Jaya’s phone was on Padma’s bedside table, where she’d left it after helping her mother to ease into sleep with a combination of ginger tea and half-truths. Pargiter was driving at a terrible speed, but Jaya could still see people on the sidewalks, in bars, bystanders animated as if for the first time for her as possible victims. There were so many of them, out.
“Getting the last of summer,” Jaya whispered.
“What?” Pargiter said to her. She shook her head. He went back to his conversation.
“Yes, Cabana Hotel,” Pargiter said into his cell phone. “It matches up. Tons of teenagers out there drinking above and below the boardwalk, along with couples ending dates, panhandlers. It’s a goddamn ideal vantage point. You use no radios on this, got it? Shooter could be listening. I need bodies out there, everyone we have, the ones who have a full understanding of the risk they’re facing out on the boardwalk in plain clothes with badges, quietly getting it clear. Post up uniforms out of scope-sight of the hotel, seal off anyone else from getting on the boardwalk. We want it clear. Phones only, keep it quiet, and I want eight cops who can shut their mouths and walk softly to meet me a block from that hotel.”
Pargiter waited for the amount of yeses he needed, and was gratified not to hear many questions back. Just one, exactly.
“Yes. He has a live hostage. Reason to hope she’s alive.” Pargiter hung up and remembered Jaya was beside him. “Sorry.”
“No. I mean, that’s just it. We have reason to hope.”
Pargiter nodded. Blanche was only alive, if she was alive, because of how crazy this kid was. But she was only in there with him because of how crazy he was, too. There was a joke in there somewhere, and if he had time, he would figure it out.
The lights of the boardwalk came into sight, and soon, so did the people on it. Pargiter drove faster.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
* * *
SHE DID TELL me about you, you know,” I said to Seth’s back. He was at the rifle, swiveling it back and forth as he looked through the scope, and he didn’t answer me when he spoke again—he took a photo out the window with his cell phone, and brought it over to my bedside.
I looked and saw, just in that frame, a middle-aged Asian couple holding hands. Two teenagers in the universal huddle that means a joint is being sparked. A younger boy, maybe twelve, too young to be out, holding a skateboard and drinking from an enormous fountain pop cup. He had a Jurassic Park T-shirt on. Seth would aim right at the center of it, if Crissy had passed on Chuck’s sniping advice. Use logos as a target if the faces start to distract you.
“Crowd’s thinning out,” said Seth. “Usually stays busy even later than this, but I guess the temperature’s dropping a little. Might only get twenty, twenty-five bodies down. You impressed with how quick I had things going once you got back to town, Blanche? It was part impatience, part planning.” He laughed, looking at me like a boy expecting praise, but not needing it. He was proud enough of himself without it.
“Crissy told me about you. I didn’t know exactly that she was talking about you, but she dropped enough hints that I figured it out. Just didn’t want to believe you existed,” I said. I was sweating against the cord around my hands, but the knots were tight and didn’t slip.
Seth looked at me, and I could see him smiling. With the light coming in from the lampposts along the boardwalk, there was an orange haze in the room so we could see each other. I was straightened up against the headboard behind me. Seth came over and sat at the foot of the bed.
“Bullshit, Blanche, but I’ll hear you out.”
“She said Chuck probably had bastards around and she was fine with it. That she had me and that was what was important. That’s why she put so much into training me up—it’s the only reason that makes sense, right? She knew about you, but she knew you didn’t have it. That you were second-rate. Or else why, why in fuck would Chuck and Crissy let a girl in on his plan? And train her to lead?”
“Bullshit. Bullshit once again. But clever.” It wasn’t quite light enough in the room for me to see if there was any doubt crowding around those green eyes, but he did turn his face away.
“Chuck never taught women. He always went for men. Boys. Always. Crissy, too. They were stuck with me because you couldn’t cut it. They knew you were a loser. No matter what she told you, Crissy knew it, and she did her best to fill you with the confidence in yourself that she didn’t have in you.”
I slouched, moving lower down the headboard so it would stop vibrating with my back. I was shaking.
Seth was quiet.
“There’s even proof, Seth. You fell for it. The getting-me-back here, the we-have-to-do-this-shooting-together. Don’t you understand? Crissy engineered all of this. Even knowing that you’d jump the gun and kill her. She knew that was the only thing that could get me back here, that could get me to take this operation out of your childish, useless hands. You weakling. You pussy.”
Seth spat on me, the hot liquid landing in my eye, before he started to yell.
“You fucking dumb cunt,” he said, his voice pushing through the walls around us and behind me. Immediately there was pounding at the door, loud. Seth leaned right into my face, shoving my father’s nose right into mine, and I turned my head and opened my mouth. I could see the corner of his eye, the surprise in it, a glimmering second where he thought I was seducing him in some aggressive way that was foreign to him.
I bit into his cheek, gathering as much of it as I could get into my mouth, pushing my teeth together and through his flesh as Seth screamed. When I pulled my head back and spat out his skin and blood, I could see his teeth through the hole I’d made. He grabbed my throat with both hands and started to squeeze so hard that I was sure his fingers were going to go right through me.
The door burst open and people came through. Men and women in black. In vests. In armor, with guns. Seth jumped up, turned, and every gun in front of me illuminated, making me deaf for the second before I closed my eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
* * *
Excerpt from Last Victims Redux: Chuck Varner’s America by Emil Chadwick. RedPillMega Press, 2019.
AFTERWORD
I never appreciated what my mother did for me until I saw what she did for Chuck Varner’s family. She’s gone now—by which I mean, she doesn’t ever want to speak to me again, and I doubt she will suddenly start reading me now. Jill Gudgeon never watched, heard, or read anything I made. She was afraid she was too much of a critic to read me without it changing her opinion of me, “perhaps permanently,” she said. “I love you, and I usually respect you. Do you know how rare that is, Emil? Do you know how precious?”
The first time we met, Blanche Varner told me that my mother got her right in her book, Last Victims. That made me so mad I could barely think, but Blanche wasn’t perceptive enough to see that. She didn’t inherit Chuck Varner’s ability to read people, or she would have known that I was about to flip the table, to tell her how it really was. That her child’s memory of her father, of herself, couldn’t help but be massively flawed, victim to the same ugly brainwashing that every child undergoes from his or her mother.
Increasingly, that’s how I see child-rearing in this country. A process of brainwashing, an erosion of all that is purely moral, innately known, and remarkable in children. In boys. Women like Jill Gudgeon and Crissy Varner are flatteners of the messages that we are born with and the great teachings that are revealed by the prophets, holy and otherwise, that we’re lucky enough to come into contact with.
These parents, and yes, most of them are mothers, are giftwrappers, presenting the promise of acceptance and approval in exchange for the erosion of
everything that’s remarkable in the self. That’s what my mother gave to me. And it’s what she gave Chuck Varner’s daughter, as well. Blanche Potter, as she proved in erasing her last name, touting the truth of my mother’s version of her past, and her complete repudiation of the good parts of Chuck Varner’s message, the core truths that violence has unfortunately obscured.
I haven’t abandoned the truth that I came to understand in Stilford. I really, truly believe in Your Life Is Mine. In the fifth rule of Chuck Varner’s code: There is no justice or peace in civilization. Only in chaos. Some of the other rules, particularly number three (Obedience = Faith) require careful unpacking, and may come to reflect the opposite of what they seem to at first. But what philosophical text doesn’t transform in front of your eyes when truly awakened minds unlock it for you?
Blanche Potter—I call her by her chosen name because she just doesn’t deserve the Varner, not because I’m a slave to her wishes—also called me “misogynistic.” Such an easy word that is, for these people, a skeleton key that locks every conversation shut. It’s just more evidence of how little she understood anything her father said to her, despite having the privilege of direct education from the man himself. I don’t hate women any more than I hate everyone. I don’t hate everyone more than I hate her in particular. You in particular. The idea of focusing hatred is as foolish as the idea of focusing love. Focused love turns into the kind of poison that Jill Gudgeon fed me. Focused hate becomes a distraction that prevents us from getting in tune with the total chaos of a free universe, the greatest gift we’ve ever been given.
Chuck Varner gave me that gift, and I hope that after reading this, I’ve given it to you, as well. You have to remember that the bullets are a distraction, yes, but they’re also a pathway into the only future that the ignorant and asleep deserve, and a welcome escape from an ungrateful world for men like Chuck Varner and Seth Howell.
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