by John Niven
It had given him no pleasure. He’d been reminded of how he’d felt when his pop took him fishing the first time and he’d had to kill a trout. How much it had wriggled and fought for life. How bright its blood was on its gills, on its milky underbelly. The sickening feeling as Dad brought the squat, wooden baton down on its skull. No, it hadn’t been any kind of fun back in that house. He remembered The Sopranos guy – Gandolfini was it? He died. Heart attack, in Europe somewhere – playing a hit man in that film, more than thirty years back now – ‘The first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest. I don’t give a shit if you’re fuckin’ Wyatt Earp or Jack the Ripper. First one is tough, no fuckin’ foolin’. That’s the bitch of the bunch. The second one … the second one ain’t no fuckin’ Mardis Gras either, but it’s better than the first one … it’s more diluted, it’s … it’s better. Then the third one … the third one is easy. It’s no problem. Now … shit … now I do it just to watch their fuckin’ expression change.’ Well, Frank wasn’t ever going to get to there. But he hoped it would get easier. After a couple of hours, coming up on Amarillo, he noticed he was still shaking. It had been so long since he’d felt it that it took him a few seconds to properly place the sensation.
Hunger.
He realised he hadn’t eaten a single thing since his attempted breakfast, more than twenty-four hours ago.
The restaurant was called Rusty’s Steakhouse. A big wood-framed building, plenty of cars out front and rock ’n’ roll music on the in-house sound system as a check-shirted waitress led Frank to a booth and settled him with a menu and ice water. The place was busy. Across from Frank a family of four came in. Mom and Dad had to be weighing in at close to three hundred pounds apiece, their two teenage boys not far behind on the scales. ‘Don’t give us no booth,’ the man was saying to the waitress, ‘we can’t fit in no booth.’ Frank scanned the menu: baby back ribs, fried dill pickles, mountain oysters, onion rings. The insane edifices of the sandwiches – char-broiled chicken, pulled pork, beef, buffalo – and then the steaks: centre cuts, panhandle, Dallas cut, Fort Worth cut, Texan strips, going all the way up to seventy-two ounces, four and a half pounds of meat, which came free if you finished it. Frank ordered the ten-ounce sirloin – about the smallest cut they had – medium rare with fries and grilled mushrooms. All for $17.95. Probably the equivalent of a handful of arugula and a green juice in this joint. ‘Anything to drink there, hon?’ the waitress asked.
‘Just a Diet Coke, thanks.’
‘Coming right up.’
At another table there was a group of four young women, all in their early twenties, all with babies. There were a lot of babies in the restaurant in general, Frank now becoming aware of a certain background level of crying and wailing. It figured – Texas was one of the first states to go for the ban, four or five years back, when it was optional for a short time, before it became law, mandatory everywhere. Frank looked at the babies, wondering what it might have been like to be a grandfather.
Olivia hadn’t told him anything about it, even though she and Frank were back on good terms again, having gradually rebuilt their relationship in the years after she’d rung him, the morning after the madman had killed Frank’s wife and son. They’d not spoken for a couple of years, after her mom, Cheryl, Frank’s second wife, had sat her down and told her the real reason her marriage to Frank had broken down when she was six.
Frank’s daughter had been brought up with the traditional fictions of divorce – we grew apart … Mommy and Daddy loved each other very much, but we couldn’t live together … we’re just very different people … we’ll both always love you … and so on and so forth. Well, just after Olivia turned fourteen, Cheryl took her out to dinner, got the best part of a bottle of Chardonnay inside her, and told Olivia that all that stuff was a bunch of bullshit and the real reason they split up was that she found a load of texts on his phone and figured out that he’d been banging some girl called Pippa, some piece much younger than her. She’d thrown Frank out the house and that was that and she wasn’t a little kid any more and why should she be the one who had to lie to cover for Frank’s adulterous ass when she’d never done anything wrong? Fuck him and, well, you know the truth now.
Frank got the call a couple of nights later.
You bastard, Dad. How could you do that to Mom? All these years telling me this bullshit. I never want to speak to you again. And Frank just saying the only thing he could – I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Over and over again.
It would take the death of her stepmom and half-brother for her to speak to her father again. And, once they had, Frank responded like a man. Which is to say he took her out to dinner and got very drunk and broke down crying and asked for her forgiveness. Which the sixteen-year-old Olivia, once again his only child, gave him.
In the years that followed they’d grown close once again. She went off to college in Indianapolis and Frank would drive up sometimes and take her out to eat. Slip her a little extra money. He thought of the last time he saw her, just before Christmas, three years ago. They’d gone to an Italian restaurant she liked, near the college. Living on her own for the first time, Olivia said, had made her grow up a lot. She realised how difficult life was. How many choices you had to make. Frank had looked at his daughter – twenty-two years old now, in her senior year, sat across from him, drinking legally and everything, and she still looked like the little girl who’d sit in his lap at the dinner table and he’d sneak her a weak spritzer, just a splash of white wine topped up with soda water, and hope she wouldn’t have problems with drinking as she got older, like he did, and, oh God, the pain he’d caused her in her young life but maybe it would all still be all right.
It wasn’t.
They’d had to piece it all together after she died, from her friends, her room-mate, the police. They never found out who the guy was. It hadn’t been anyone she’d been seeing seriously. Her friends knew that. It had been a party, a one-night thing. Then she’d found out she was pregnant. Indiana had always been tough. Way back in 2016, Pence, governor at the time, had signed a bill trying to prohibit women from getting an abortion due to diagnosis of disability. The bill also proposed that the identities of abortion providers be made public, that funerals be held for fetal remains and that women undergo an ultrasound at least eighteen hours prior to undergoing the procedure. (Of course, this was all long before whatever happened with Pence in that DC hotel suite. No one would ever really know for sure. Pence resigned and denied everything, but rumours abounded on the left and right: he was set up by the Clintons, he was set up by Trump to make way for Ivanka, he was slathered in amyl nitrate and sucking off a black kid. Nothing happened. Everything happened. As ever, in all the churn, no one ever knew what really went on. ‘Mike Pence had very little to do with my policies or my election!’ Trump had tweeted at the time.) Anyway, in 2017, after Pence had gone to the White House, the new governor, Holcomb, had signed a law that required abortion providers to report detailed patient information to the state. His supporters said the law would ensure safe abortions, but, in reality, it helped stigmatise the procedure. The ACLU fought the case and lost. Anti-abortion groups celebrated. ‘A BIG weekend for LIFE in Indiana!’ All that stuff. But this was nothing, just a prelude to the big one.
Overturning Roe v Wade.
It had been the biggest triumph of Trump’s second term, when the Republicans had really been feeling their oats, after the early rushes of success in Iran and North Korea. They finally got their shot at truly changing the Supreme Court in 2021, the year Ginsburg and Breyer both died.
It had been Trump’s final pick, his fourth Supreme Court appointee, who’d made it happen, who’d really pushed it through.
Justice Dennis Rockman.
Rockman – the staunch family man, father of eight and fiery pro-life advocate from the great state of Texas – had been nearly eighty at the time of his appointment, and according to rumour, pretty much senile, but the Republicans had pushed his appointm
ent through regardless. He was on the Supreme Court for just eight months before retiring due to ill health and moving back to Texas to tend to his hobbies – horse breeding and the Church. It had been the shortest SC appointment in history, but it was long enough for him to provide the decisive vote.
Anyway, like Roe v Wade itself, this was all history.
The upshot was that, two years later, when Olivia found herself pregnant, she’d wound up in the spare bedroom of a former midwife in Fort Wayne. The needle meant to puncture the sac holding what would have been Frank’s only grandchild had also gone undetected through the wall of her lower intestine. Olivia had been told by the midwife (one Annie Baxter, who was still in prison, which is where Olivia would have been, too, had she lived) not to attempt the two-hour drive home to Indianapolis after the operation. She’d got an Uber back to her motel (the police had pieced all this together in the investigation) where she’d taken the strong painkillers she’d been given to help with the post-op cramping.
They worked all too well.
Olivia Brill, aged twenty-two, beloved daughter of Frank and Cheryl, bled to death in her sleep in a rented room off the interstate, due to complications arising from an improperly performed abortion.
Frank’s steak arrived and, along with it, a tin bucket of fries and a bushel of mushrooms, sizzling on a cast-iron platter. He raised an eyebrow at the enormity. The waitress smiled and said, ‘We serve our sides family-style.’
EIGHT
‘He sure pissed somebody off.’
Detective Bob ‘Chops’ Birner whistled through his teeth as he ducked under the yellow tape one of the deputies was holding up for him. He was already out of breath. When the call came in and he heard the address, he’d made a point of getting here fast. There was blood on the front porch, where it had seeped under the door, and there, through the front door that opened straight into the living room, was the body. Old Hauser was a mess – his face pocked with a lot of little holes, propped up against one wall, the floor around him covered in sticky, dried blood. ‘Gonna want these, sir,’ the sergeant – Walter something, good guy, Chops had dealt with him before – was saying, holding out the little blue plastic bootees you strapped over your regular shoes. Chops bent over to slip them on – his arthritic knee giving him a current of pain, his huge gut tugging him earthwards, the very act of bending over costing him a fair bit of breath, causing his heart to flex in his chest a couple more times – and moved carefully into the house, a house he knew well, stepping around the puddle of blood. The forensics boys were busy bagging up tiny brass cartridges.
‘.22s?’ Chops asked.
‘Yep,’ one of the guys replied.
‘Think it’s a pro job?’ one of the younger deputies asked, his reasoning probably being that he knew from movies and TV that professional hit men often used .22 pistols up close, because of their accuracy, relative quiet and so forth. But ‘no’, Chops thought, looking at the body. Looking at the number of entry wounds. Hit men don’t get that angry.
Chops looked around the room, at the football trophies, in cases, on tabletops, on window ledges. He’d been in here, what? Four nights back? Him and Martin. Having some drinks, some fun. Looking at some stuff online. Not much sign of a struggle. Nothing smashed or broken. Shot him a few times in the legs. Torture situation? Or to neutralise him? Yeah, Hauser was old, but he was big. Got Chops thinking – maybe the killer was old too. Or weak. Or both. There was a wastepaper basket nearby. He peeked inside. Guy threw up. Most definitely not a pro. One of the forensics people – actually a woman, that blonde girl, the one he’d heard mouthing off about how great Obama had been at one of the Christmas parties – saw Bob looking in the bin. ‘We’ll be sending it off for analysis,’ she said.
Chops sat his 230 pounds down heavily in an armchair, making a sound of pained pleasure, the way most overweight 63-year-olds sat down, and closed his eyes for a moment, saying a silent goodbye to his old friend. His closest friend. So few shared their special interests. He opened them again to see the sergeant standing over him. ‘OK. So how’d we get here?’ he asked the guy.
‘Paperboy saw the blood on the front porch, from under the door. Looked in the window and saw the body,’ Walter said. ‘Went to the house next door, called us at –’ he checked his notes – ‘8.48.’
‘I’ll need to talk to him. We interviewing the neighbours?’
‘As we speak.’
‘And who is the guy?’ Chops asked. Him and Hauser had enjoyed what might best be described as a ‘clandestine’ friendship. It was probably best to keep it that way.
‘Martin Hauser,’ Walter went on. ‘Retired. Lived alone. Used to coach high school football. Originally from here. Moved back around fifteen years ago. He’d been living in Indiana. Seems there was some … trouble back there.’
‘How do we know all this?’
Walter handed Chops his phone, the screen showing Google searches for the name ‘Martin Hauser, coach’. Chops pretend-scanned a few articles. Whistled as though scandalised. ‘Yep,’ Walter said. ‘Goddamned pederast …’
‘There’s a laptop in here …’ one of the other officers said. They stepped through into the kitchen.
Bright and clean, orderly. The laptop sat on a table in the breakfast nook. ‘Have it bagged up and sent over to homicide,’ Chops said. ‘We’ll have someone get into it. If the guy’s an honest-to-God paedophile, who knows what’s gonna be on there.’
Well, Chops knew. He had no anxieties there. He wasn’t in any of Hauser’s photographs. He wasn’t fucking stupid.
‘Detective?’ The voice came from down the hallway. Chops and Walter walked on down and turned right into a bedroom, Chops doing a good job of pretending he didn’t know where he was going. ‘In here, sir,’ one of the deputies was saying, one of the new guys, Tom or Ted?
They stepped into a kind of dressing room off the main bedroom. A big tallboy with a couple of drawers open. ‘We just checked online,’ the officer was saying. ‘Seems Hauser had a permit for a Glock 17. But …’ He held up an empty holster. ‘Can’t find the gun anywhere on the premises.’
‘Gotta assume the perp took it,’ Walter said.
‘Yep,’ Chops said. ‘Get the gun’s serial number from the paperwork and put it out there.’
Chops moved over to the dresser. There was a photo album open on top of it. On top of the album a single photograph had been taken out: a boy, around sixteen or seventeen, in high school football uniform, and, next to him, with his arm around him, the former Coach Hauser, grinning, forty years younger.
‘Walt, you got gloves on?’ Chops said. ‘Here, turn this over for me …’ Walt flipped the photo – on the back the handwritten inscription, ‘Robbie M, Sept 1982’.
‘I guess this is back in Indiana?’ Chops said.
‘Jackson High.’ Walter nodded. ‘Place he coached. Think his past caught up with him, Chops?’
‘He sure pissed somebody off. I’ll get on to the school. See if we can track down this Robbie M at least. Probably worth going through more of these photos too …’
Chops moved over to the window and looked out at the street. Suburban. Quiet, although a crowd was now gathered behind the tape stretching around the property, kids and stay-at-home moms, drawn by the cruisers and the flashing lights. Like most older policeman in major American cities, over the last thirty or so years he’d seen the murder rate tick gradually upwards and the areas where the crimes took place move out of their traditional strongholds – in Oklahoma City’s case North Highland, the South Park estates, Woodward Avenue – and into other corners of the city. Was a time you might have been able to do something about this shit, back when you could still do some actual policing, really use your nightstick and your gun-butt and your fists to explain some things to the niggers and the wops and the beaners. Chops remembered his first partner, back in the late 1970s, old Sarge Furlong, big old Irish boy, catching that black kid shoplifting. Just broke two of the fingers on the kid’s r
ight hand. Swear to God. Like he was snapping off chicken wings. Sent him on his way. Never saw that kid shoplifting on their beat again. But that was long past. Democrats and liberals everywhere, even all through Oklahoma PD. It had looked for a time like the old ways might have been making a comeback, with the big man in the Oval Office, but now? With his daughter. Hell, she was a half-liberal herself, wasn’t she? Couldn’t trust her. Always pissing on about women’s rights and shit. Bitch married a Jew as well, the first husband, the one they pinned all that shit on. Now that had been funny. Christ-killing son-of-a-bitch was in Rikers right now working on a ten stretch.
Still, Chops thought, snapping back into the moment, into the house, this wasn’t the usual part of town for a homicide. And he had a strong feeling that the killer wasn’t from around here. That photograph. ‘Sir?’ someone was saying. Chops turned. The deputy was on his knees on the floor by the bed, where he’d hauled out a big suitcase and opened it. It was brimming with magazines. Chops sighed and shook his head.
‘Yeah,’ Walter said. ‘Fuck this guy.’
Chops was feeling a couple of distinct emotions. There was anger, certainly. The urge towards avenging his old friend. There was also, and this was probably winning out right now, fear. The fear that whoever had killed Hauser had done so because of Hauser’s … interests. Interests that overlapped with Chops’s own. And that scene back in the living room, all those bullet holes. Had whoever killed Hauser found anything out from him in his final moments? Anything that might lead him to Chops? He was so close to retiring. Full pension. The magnitude of the scandal. He made the decision there and then.
He had a lot of vacation time accrued …
NINE
‘The love you take.’
Phoenix was experiencing a November heatwave – 25 degrees this morning. Somewhere around 5 p.m. the sun would drop and the mercury would rapidly follow it, tumbling down to around 10 or 12 degrees seemingly in a few minutes. But, during the daytime, it was hot. He’d sprung for a slightly nicer motel this time, the Tropicana, with cable, A/C and a pool you could actually swim in.