by John Niven
‘Ah, the 17. We have a special on hollow points right now. Thousand rounds for $199.99 plus tax.’
‘Well, I don’t need that much. What’s the smallest quantity you do?’
‘Box of fifty for $32.95.’
‘That’ll be fine. But you’re sure the …, with the hollow points, that’s, uh, legal, right?’
‘Yes, sir. Since 2022.’
‘Well, OK then,’ Frank said. The kid started doing his thing, rifling through a drawer of ammunition. Something caught Frank’s eye, up on the wall of accessories. ‘Is that … are they silencers?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘They’re legal now?’
‘Since 2022.’
2022. Of course, Beckerman’s bill.
‘Can … can I have one of those too?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
Ah, Frank thought. There were still some limits. Some checks and balances. After all, why would an honest citizen need a silenced weapon?
‘Not for that old gun there,’ the sales clerk went on. ‘You need a threaded barrel. But listen, I can do you a hundred dollars on trade-in for your old 17 against the new Glock 26 which is a far superior weapon and it comes suppressor-ready.’
‘Suppressor?’
‘Silencer. We have a great deal on the ATN 803. Very quiet. You’d definitely want some different ammunition to these standard 9mms if you’re going for maximum stealth.’
‘Stealth?’
‘I’m assuming you want this for hunting purposes? Most of our customers find using suppressors very effective at reducing noise that scares off prey in a hunting situation.’
‘Yeah. Hunting. Sure.’
Frank walked out of SupraMart with a brand-new Glock 26, an ATN silencer and fifty rounds of subsonic hollow points. Just a few years ago it would have taken a professional hit man many days, a lot of black-market contacts and thousands of dollars to put all of this stuff together. It cost Frank fifteen minutes and 620 plus tax. He paid cash.
‘Have a great day, sir,’ the greeter chanted as he left.
‘I will,’ Frank smiled.
* * *
He found the address with no problem at all, the voter roll leading him to a big, ostentatious McMansion on the north-west side of Las Vegas, in an area that looked to be only recently developed. Yeah, the fucker had done pretty well for himself. Pretty well all right. Frank staked it out, sat in the car for the rest of the afternoon, going up and ringing the doorbell, but no one was home. The light faded and, realising how tired he was, he started the car and took a drive down the Strip.
He’d been to Vegas once before, a golfing trip with some buddies back in the early days of his marriage to Cheryl. Frank wasn’t a gambler, so it was all a bit lost on him. One of the boys had blown a ton of money at blackjack and another one spent a small fortune hiring two hookers, one of whom wound up giving him crabs. The dreaded sidewalkers. But Frank had been in the early days of his marriage. He hadn’t got involved. Vegas always reminded him of one of the last times he’d spent with Adam, when he was five, and they’d just got into watching The Simpsons together, sat on the sofa after he got home from school. One night it was the episode where Homer took Flanders to Vegas to try and loosen him up a bit and things went predictably awry. As they got run out of the city a security guard said to them, ‘Las Vegas doesn’t care for out-of-towners.’ Frank had laughed and laughed.
‘Why is that funny?’ Adam had asked.
‘Well,’ Frank had explained, ‘Las Vegas is all about out-of-towners. Pretty much everyone who goes there is an out-of-towner, so the joke is that he’s saying something which is the opposite of the truth.’
‘Like … a lie?’
‘A joke, son.’
‘Oh, I get it!’ Adam said. He really didn’t, but it became a little running gag between the two of them, something to add to ‘DOH!’ and ‘Thank you and come again!’ ‘Las Vegas doesn’t care for out-of-towners,’ they’d say to each other, apropos of nothing, driving Pippa mad. Frank sometimes thought about all the little gags and catchphrases he might have got to have with Adam if he’d lived. But he didn’t. He got shot in the stomach by a madman and bled to death on a classroom floor. And that was that.
He drove slowly along the Strip, bathed in neon, bathed in the money colours – silver and gold – and in red and blue, words reflecting off the windshield telling him FREE BUFFET and FREE BREAKFAST and TABLE SERVICE and GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS, all of America wandering the streets beside him, craning their necks and looking at the sights the electricity had made. Right over there – the Mandalay Bay, where, back in 2017, Paddock had smashed out the window on the thirty-second floor and opened fire on the crowd below, over a thousand rounds, fifty-eight dead, the worst mass shooting in US history until Coolidge, until Coolidge was overtaken in 2021, when sound engineer John Urkel opened up at that music festival in San Diego with a Minigun he’d smuggled inside hidden in a speaker cabinet. He set it up overnight, on the mixing platform facing the main stage, undetected, and opened fire late the following morning as the crowd massed for the first band of the day, killing 139 people in a little over ninety seconds. Some of the victims closest to Urkel’s firing line were simply ‘vaporised’ from the waist up. (Even the NRA’s Beckerman was forced to admit that it was ‘probably’ unnecessary for most Americans to have the right to own a Minigun, a weapon designed for aerial combat and capable of firing 6,000 high-calibre rounds a minute.)
Why hadn’t Frank gone this route? Full crazy. Taking his rage and pain out on an indiscriminate mass of people.
Because Frank had been the editor.
He was going to be precise.
ELEVEN
‘I hope you enjoyed my sofa.’
The next morning, bright and early, just after 7 a.m., Frank was parked back on the street, watching the McMansion again. This time he didn’t have to wait too long. At 7.32 a.m. Target #2 came out of the mock-Spanish double doors dressed in a flamboyant white towelling jogging suit. He was older, in his late fifties now, and much heavier than when Frank last saw him (what – nearly 30 years ago?) but it was definitely him. Frank followed along the street in the car at a discreet distance, pulling over and parking when the white towelling jogging suit turned into a small park. Frank waited. Sure enough, less than fifteen minutes later, the white suit re-emerged, running much slower now, sweat pouring off. Frank let him get a hundred or so yards along the street, back in the direction of the house, before he made a U-turn on the wide boulevard and headed after him, overtaking him and parking across from the house. Lost in his world of panting and sweat as he turned up the garden path the guy didn’t see Frank getting out of the car. Didn’t see him closing the distance across the street, his hand inside his coat. Didn’t see him until he had his keys in the door and the door partially open.
He turned just as Frank was upon him, pulling the new Glock with the heavy suppressor on it out and sticking it in the guy’s damp, towelling belly.
‘Hello, Leslie,’ Frank said.
Leslie Roberts’s mouth went wide but no sound came out of it as Frank pushed him – hard – into the hallway (more a kind of large atrium) and stepped inside, taking the keys out of the lock and closing the door behind him. Roberts went sprawling on the floor – a kind of Mexican tile – and crashed into a small occasional table, sending a vase of flowers smashing down beside him. Frank stood over him and lowered the muzzle, the pistol looking huge and lethal now with the addition of the silencer. Sweating and panting, Roberts said – ‘What do you want?’
‘You don’t remember me?’ Frank asked.
‘Leslie?’ A muffled voice came from somewhere in the house. Roberts’s eyes went towards the sound and he yelled ‘JAMES!’ just as a younger man appeared from a doorway across the atrium. He was in his early thirties, tanned, handsome, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. In his right hand he held a pitcher of orange juice and the words ‘What happened?’ were already dying on his lips. He looked at Frank hold
ing the pistol, and then at Roberts – sprawled on the floor – and then he started screaming.
‘No, please,’ Frank said. ‘Go! Just run!’
‘OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!’
‘Shhhhhhh!’ Frank said. Roberts was trying to get up. Frank pointed the gun at the wall near his head and pulled the trigger: just the clack of the slide and a pfffffft as a huge hole appeared in the dry wall next to Roberts and then the tinkling of the spent cartridge hitting the tiled floor. And now the smoke detector kicked in, triggered by the skeins of cordite drifting up from the muzzle of the Glock. Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.
‘OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!’
‘Shhh!’ Frank said.
‘HELP!’
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.
‘PLEASE – RUN! GET OUT OF HERE, KID!’
‘OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!’
‘POLICE!’
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.
Roberts, almost on his feet. A big, beefy guy. Frank pointed the Glock at his right thigh and pulled the trigger and now Roberts’s screaming joined that of his buddy, the pitch, deafening, insane. This was a nightmare. There was no way out. He had to …
Frank fired twice – pfffft, clack, tinkle, pfffft, clack, tinkle – the first bullet hitting the pitcher of OJ, blowing it to pieces, shards of glass flying, juice spattering onto the floor. The second bullet went through the kid’s chest, silencing him, knocking him back and off his feet, sending him sprawling to the floor.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.
Frank looked up at the ceiling, saw the white plastic disc, the red flashing light, and fired three times before he hit it, the beeping stopping, everything quieter now, just Roberts’s sobbing and wailing as he rolled on the floor clutching his leg.
Shaking, nausea rising within him, his legs going, Frank walked towards the kid, who had managed to turn onto his stomach and was trying to crawl away. Blood everywhere. Frank flashed on that madman, walking the hallway of the school. ‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said. He fired again at close range, hitting him between the shoulder blades. The guy flattened down on the floor, his arms shooting out to the sides, all movement stopping instantly. ‘Why didn’t you run?’ Frank sobbed. Somewhere behind him he could hear Roberts, throwing up.
After a moment, he joined him.
* * *
He had killed an innocent man. Someone who just happened to be in his way. This hadn’t featured in his planning. In his mind he would find these men who had so wronged him and his family and they would be alone and they would confess what they had done and Frank would kill them and that would be that. Now, in the moment, surrounded by death and blood and sobbing and gun smoke, Frank thought about just calling a halt to all of it. He pressed the muzzle of the silencer to his chin, feeling it burn his skin but numb to the point of not caring as he moved it around, wondering which way to send the bullet. Straight up? Through his bottom jaw, then the tongue, then the top jaw, then up behind his eyes, through the frontal lobes and out through the top of his skull? Or thrust it into his mouth, feeling it burning his tongue, cheeks and the roof of his mouth for a split second before he pulled the trigger and it blasted out through the back of his head? He needed to … he wanted … a drink.
Roberts couldn’t stand up. So Frank dragged him along by the hood of the jogging suit, the fat man sobbing and retching, past the corpse of his friend or lover, through the puddle of sticky orange juice and blood and glass, Roberts getting cut but not seeming to notice. By the time Frank dropped him in the middle of the living room the white towelling jogging suit was covered in blood and he was a hysterical mess. Frank flopped into an armchair, lit a cigarette with shaking hands and looked around for the liquor cabinet. It was a big room, with lots of plants and ferns. Jungly, almost. A wall of glass looked out onto a small, well-kept desert-garden. Frank’s hands were trembling badly as he smoked, taking deep draughts of nicotine as he scanned the room. There were a few bottles lined up on a polished concrete counter that separated the living area from the kitchen. Ignoring Roberts’s wailing and sobbing, Frank walked over and picked up a bottle of Grey Goose. He really thought about it, thought about taking a long pull straight from the bottle and waiting a moment until it washed through him, calming him. That old feeling of anaesthetic pumping through you, replacing your blood. He put it back, feeling the bump of the penguin in his left trouser pocket. In the background Roberts’s wailing had quietened down, just muttered words now as he went into deep shock.
‘Leslie? Leslie?’ Frank said, walking over. ‘Shhhh.’ Frank put a finger to his lips. Roberts fought to get his breathing under control, taking lots of fast, shallow breaths. ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
‘Who … are … you?’ The words getting squeezed out through the pain.
‘You don’t recognise me?’
Roberts shook his head. Frank sighed and looked around the room. His eyes alighted on something. There, over in the corner, forming a kind of sitting area with two armchairs and a coffee table was a cream three-seater sofa.
Frank’s cream three-seater sofa.
The one he’d left behind when he and Grace broke up. Frank pointed over at it with the gun. ‘That’s MY FUCKING SOFA!’
A moment, then Roberts said – ‘Are you … Grace’s ex-husband?’
‘I can’t believe you still have our sofa,’ Frank said. ‘Why? Why did you do it?’
‘What? I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!’
‘Why did you marry Grace if you were gay? Why did you take all her money? Wreck her life?’
‘I … I’m bisexual. We had a disagreement! We were getting divorced! It happens! We went to court, I won, and –’
‘And how about the one before Grace? Annabel Reed in Minneapolis?’
This shut Roberts up. But he recovered quickly, blinking as he said, ‘Who?’
‘You’re a con man, aren’t you? You married a couple of women, got a lot of money out of them and then hightailed it.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
Fuck it.
He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger three times, moving the gun up from belly to chest as he did so – pfffft, clack, tinkle.
Frank walked across the room and sank down into the sofa he had not sat on for decades. It was funny the way his body remembered the contours of the sofa, its exact, specific feel. He remembered the life he and Grace had when they bought this, from that nice store on Eisenhower, one of the first decent pieces of furniture they’d owned. Living in the little apartment, no kids. In their twenties. Just learning about things like cooking and decorating. Stripping the old paper off the walls and finding that old drywall crumbling beneath it. How the cost of the contractor to fix it meant that they were eating tuna pasta for two weeks. If you’d told Frank back then, when they were in the furniture store signing the papers (they’d been so broke, and Frank had been too proud to ask for help, that they’d bought it on interest-free credit) that before his life was over he’d own three different sofas with three different women, that this would not be the only one he’d eat his meals, read his book, watch TV, fall asleep and make love on, that, indeed, he would, many years later, get cancer and end up sitting on this sofa in Las Vegas with a warm gun in his lap, having just killed the man who’d become his first wife’s second husband but who’d later turned out to be a homosexual long-con man, well. Frank might have asked you what you were smoking. But life was varied. Life was strange, he thought, looking over at Roberts’s body, splayed on its back, a faint gurgling sound as blood continued to pour from its wounds.
Frank had hoped to get some answers. Really get to the bottom of why he’d chosen Grace as his victim. Ask him if he ever thought about the pain he’d caused her, about the fact that he was living here in this palace and Grace died in a one-bedroom apartment, her poor old dad dead too, broke and with a broken heart. Frank had wanted to ask Roberts about all this. But nothing turned out like you wanted it to. ‘Well, asshole, I hope you enjoyed my sofa,’ Frank
said. He stood up and patted the arm, the arm he’d rested his drink on many evenings long ago, in another lifetime. The arm the TV clicker would often fall from, involving much heaving and huffing on your hands and knees because it would always – miraculously – manage to bounce sideways underneath the sofa. The way of inanimate objects. ‘Goodbye, old friend,’ Frank said. He poured the bottle of Grey Goose all over the sofa.
It went up with a gentle whumpff. Frank took The List out of his pocket and picked up a pen from the coffee table.
Leslie Roberts
He walked out of the place, several other smoke alarms beginning to beep crazily behind him, Frank picturing the house soon burning, all Halloween-orange and chimney-red, like the song said. Thinking about this in the car on the way back to the motel, Frank wondered about Mickey’s Big Mouths. Could you even still get them?
TWELVE
‘Uh-oh …’
Every case needed a break. And the Hauser case might well have remained another unsolved, home-invasion murder situation had it not been for a piece of good fortune that came Chops’s way one evening, a couple of days after the death of his friend.
He’d been at home, in his Easy-Boy, eating nachos drenched in melted cheese and reading some Clancy, Fox News on in the background like it always was. Well, he’d been trying to read some Clancy; in truth he’d been thinking about old Hauser. About some of the parties they’d been to. Some of the good times they’d shared. Two men bonded by a shared interest much of society deemed unacceptable. That time, with those two runaway kids they’d met in a roadhouse bar. Sixteen or seventeen they’d been …
He’d been snapped out of his reminiscence by Fox cutting from a report on Vice President Hannity’s recent trip to the safe zone in South Korea (where he’d caused some controversy by suggesting it was only proper that American companies should benefit most from the reconstruction of North Korea, planned to start fifty years from now, when radiation levels had fallen to the acceptable safe limit) to a breaking news item about the discovery of two bodies in a house in Las Vegas.