by John Niven
A neighbour had called the police after seeing flames coming from the rear of the property. The fire service arrived quickly (it looked like an affluent neighbourhood, hence the newsworthiness) and put the fire out before it did too much damage. In doing so they discovered the bodies of two men – a Leslie Roberts and a James Cuomo. Both victims had been shot.
The report then went into character bios of each victim, strongly suggesting that they lived what Fox viewers might term ‘an alternative lifestyle’. Chops tuned in at this point. On the one hand it looked like the victims were rich, white (well, one looked to be white, the other was some mild kind of beaner) and had been attacked in a safe suburb, which was clearly an outrage. But, on the other hand, the tone of the report implied, these guys were obviously both fags so they probably got what was coming to them. Chops lit a cigarette and turned the sound up. Cuomo was twenty-eight and a bartender at a Vegas club called the Spike. Roberts was fifty-seven, a retired dentist and real estate dealer who was ‘originally from Schilling, Indiana’.
Uh-oh.
Chops picked up the phone and dialled Vegas PD. After some runaround he got put through to a Detective Hartley. They got the formalities out of the way.
‘Detective, I hear one of these fellas that got himself killed was from Schilling, Indiana?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well, and this is probably nothing, but we had a homicide here in Oklahoma a few days back. Victim originally came from Schilling too.’
‘That so?’
‘Yup yup. Could you tell me, was it a .22 used in the shooting?’
‘Nope. 9mm. Glock.’
‘A 17?’
‘Hang on.’ The rustling of papers. ‘A 26 they think.’
‘Damn.’
‘And it looks like the shooter used some kind of suppressor on the weapon. On account of the muzzle stamps.’
‘Muzzle stamps? So those boys got shot close up?’
‘One of ’em did. The older one, Roberts. Shot in the leg and then took three in the torso point-blank.’ (Disable him, then finish him, Chops thought.) ‘The other one, the young fella, got one in the chest from a few yards away, then one in the back up close.’
Chops scribbled it all down. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘What are you boys thinking on all this?’
‘Well, with the silencer, looked like it might be a pro job. But, against all that, whoever did it made a half-assed job of burning the place down. Apparently poured a bottle of Grey Goose over a sofa and threw a match on it.’
‘What in hell’s “Grey Goose”?’
‘Designer vodka.’
‘Dee-signer?’
‘You know, expensive.’
‘How much is that shit?’
‘You got me. I guess like fifty bucks a bottle?’
‘Damn queers got all the money, right?’ Chops said.
‘Excuse me?’
Shit, Chops thought. He’d overstepped the mark. Was a time you could say that stuff to another cop and not even think about it. Nowadays, damn liberals everywhere. ‘Just kidding.’ Chops said. ‘No kids and stuff is all I meant. Thanks for your help, Detective.’
‘Not a problem.’
Chops hung up. He was thinking, it’s odd a couple o’ fellas both from the same small town getting whacked within a few days of each other miles away from home. But – a Glock 26? Not a 17? And the silencer. Why wouldn’t he have used it on the coach if he’d had it?
In the old days it would have been simple to track the recent sale of these items on the Federal database. However, due to a series of very public victories for Beckerman and the NRA in the last decade, it was harder than ever to find out about gun sales. Only basic identification was required for purchase. No wait periods. Very little profiling in most states. Basically, retailers had no obligation to report anything. If you wanted to know the history of a firearm sale you had to ask. And even then they could refuse to tell you. You had to threaten a subpoena. There was only one thing for it. ‘Gonna have to do some good old-fashioned poh-leece work,’ Chops said to himself.
Much later that night, alone in his office, a pot of lukewarm coffee and an empty Doritos bag on his desk, he struck gold when he cold-called the twenty-eighth Nevada gun store on his list.
Looked like he was going to Vegas. As good a place to spend his ‘vacation’ as any.
THIRTEEN
‘Love it or leave it …’
‘We will soon be starting our descent into Washington Dulles. Please ensure your seat backs are in the upright positon and your tray tables are safely stowed away …’ Frank looked out of the window at the fields, already some snow in north Virginia. It would soon be December. He’d been on the road for over a week now.
First class was nice. (Then again, at eighteen hundred dollars for a four-hour flight one-way, it needed to be.) Why the hell not? he’d figured. Although, as he’d put his credit card down on the counter at the United desk at Donald J. Trump (formerly McCarran) Airport, he’d known it was a risk. His plan had been to drive all the way, but, emboldened by his early successes and exhausted at the thought of the three-day cross-country drive largely retracing the route he’d already taken, he’d cracked, abandoning his car in long-term parking and splurging on the ticket. Up here, in the nose of the plane, in the huge grey leather throne – picking at his shrimp salad, eating just a sliver of his filet mignon – he’d reviewed his progress and thought about what lay ahead, because, from here on in, as he moved from the personal section of The List on to the political, things were going to become exponentially more difficult. In truth he had no idea how much further he was going to get.
Frank had only flown first class once before, to Mexico on his honeymoon with Cheryl, his second wife. Now, descending from fifty thousand feet, nothing but water and coffee in his veins, eyeing the other passengers feasting on the remains of their wine, their Scotches, their gin and tonics, he remembered that week in Cabo. The pina coladas. The chocolates on their pillows every night. The fresh fruit at breakfast. The sex. The declarations of love. The talk of the family they were going to have. He went straight from that to the image of Cheryl’s eyes, years later, blazing with rage as she flailed at him in the kitchen, telling him ‘Get the fuck out! Out! Out! Out!’ Frank trying to shush her because Olivia was asleep upstairs. And, later that same awful night – nearly twenty years ago now, the night she’d found all the text messages – Frank remembered being in Olivia’s room, his bag over his shoulder and whiskey on his breath while he stroked her hair, very gently so as not to wake her from her six-year-old’s dream (what do they dream of?), and said, ‘Bye-bye, sweetheart,’ his voice thick, his wife’s crying just audible from somewhere downstairs. When had Frank last seen Cheryl? Of course. At Olivia’s funeral. She’d looked right through him, glassy on Valium. Maybe something stronger. He drained his plastic glass of sparkling water and ran through the Computations for what felt like the billionth time in his life: If I hadn’t cheated on Cheryl and we’d stayed together then we wouldn’t have moved and Olivia might not have gone to that other high school and decided to do the courses she did and then might have gone to a different college and she’d never have got pregnant by that guy and then she wouldn’t have … and I wouldn’t have run off with Pippa and then Adam would never have been born and he wouldn’t have …
And, as they always did, the Computations came with the Images: his daughter, on her back with her feet in the stirrups, his son, on that classroom floor, trying to hold his guts in. What was he supposed to do with such thoughts? What was anyone? Frank chewed on a Xanax and went back to his notes.
Target #3 had armed guards at his home, because of the death threats.
Target #3 rarely went anywhere unaccompanied by bodyguards.
Target #3’s office looked to be a stronghold, a kind of a fortress.
Frank couldn’t see any way he could come close to getting in there. But, at the same time, the target had to get in and out of the office, didn’t he? Maybe
an opportunity would present itself. There was also, Frank noticed now, reading through all the stuff he’d printed off the internet, a museum attached to the target’s office. In the same building.
He thought seriously about renting a car at the airport, but he knew that this would involve identification, credit cards, leaving more of a trail, further to the one he’d left at the counter at Trump. It was dusk now and he didn’t have to be in Fairfax, Virginia, until tomorrow lunchtime, when he’d arranged to meet the guy from the internet – freedompatriot1776 – in the parking lot of a Denny’s.
Also, he couldn’t do much of his Fairfax research in the dark. He needed to walk the streets, get the lay of the land. So Frank took a cab from Dulles into Washington, telling the driver to just take him to ‘a Ramada downtown’. Forty minutes and sixty-two dollars later he found himself in front of the familiar red lettering.
He took a room for one night, paying cash plus a fifty-dollar per-day minimum deposit for incidentals, and headed out to see his nation’s capital.
There were lingering signs of the huge Veterans Day parade he’d watched on the TV at home: bunting hanging from trees, bleachers set out here and there along the route. A huge billboard, Ivanka with Donald behind her, both looking proudly towards the horizon. The slogan – KEEPING AMERICA GREAT, AGAIN. Frank took his time, his overcoat and scarf wrapped around him as he walked in the cold night air, heading west all along Constitution Avenue, the museums and the Smithsonian brightly lit on his left. He idled in front of a department store – the TVs all tuned to Fox, a story about the great gains being made in Iran, the main text saying ‘TROOPS HOME FOR CHRISTMAS?’. In much smaller letters, running across the bottom of the screen, ‘Eight dead in Seattle school shooting’, the size of the type almost like Fox was apologising to its viewers for troubling them with such a tiny shooting. Terrible to say, but these words actually cheered Frank. Made him feel better about this leg of the trip. He’d come to terms with the fact that he might fail in Virginia. Or that he might die here. And now the image on Fox was changing again, as the anchor introduced the nightly segment by the Donald J. Trump dancers (and why weren’t they the Ivanka Trump Dancers now?) and the quartet of blonde cheerleaders – in tube tops, Stars and Stripes hot pants and KAGA hats – started belting out one of their numbers. Frank could not hear the music but Fox kindly put a rolling banner up along the bottom of the screen so that he, and the viewers at home, could learn and sing along …
Don’t wanna hear from no liberals, uh-uh
Don’t care about their pain,
We just love America,
That’s why we ride the Trump Train …
On the ‘uh-uh’ line one of the girls smiled into the camera as she wagged her finger. Frank pictured it, all across America, the screens glowing in the spacious living rooms of Florida mansions, in track housing in the Deep South, in snow-caked apartment blocks in Anchorage, and even in the Rust Belt of Chicago, the people moving their shoulders to the clunky hip-hop beat and singing along. Old folk singing softly as they ate tray dinners and clipped coupons. Little kids, copying the rudimentary dance moves in front of the TV, clapped and cheered on by adoring parents.
He made a right turn, north on 15th Street, the little map he’d taken from the lobby of the hotel held out in front of him like a real tourist, and he could see it up ahead, lit by klieg lights in dazzling white blocks. He walked on and got as close to the White House as he could, which wasn’t that close any more. The safety measures. The clamping down on protesters.
Frank heard some chanting up in the distance and headed towards it.
There were only half a dozen of them (gatherings of ten or more without prior written authorisation had been made illegal by the Extreme Patriot Act), two girls and four boys, probably students Frank figured from their dress. They were chanting ‘No more war!’ over and over and waving their placards that said ‘TROOPS OUT’ and ‘FREE IRAN!’. Their cries echoed off into the cold night, dying somewhere in the air long before they could possibly reach the White House. (Which, this being a Saturday night in winter, obviously contained not a single Trump, the whole family, as was traditional now, having decamped to Mar-a-Lago for the winter, right after the Veterans Day parade.) Two cops watched the protesters from about twenty yards away, chewing gum, looking bored, their hands resting on their nightsticks, their pistols.
A man came striding past Frank, almost pushing him out of the way. He was young, not much older than the protesters themselves, and wore a filthy combat jacket and a growth of beard. ‘HEY! HEY!’ the guy yelled, charging right up to them. ‘LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, YOU FUCKEN ASSHOLES!’
‘Ooh, that’s original!’ one of the girls cooed.
‘Why don’t you suck this, bitch?’ the guy said, grabbing his dick.
‘Can I volunteer?’ one of the guys said.
‘Fucken faggot.’ The guy spat.
‘Guilty!’ the guy said prissily as his friends laughed, taunting the man further.
Now Combat Jacket zeroed in on the one Asian member of the group, the other girl who hadn’t said anything. ‘Why don’t you go back to your own fucken country, bitch?’ Frank glanced over at the cops. They were just watching. Didn’t seem alarmed.
‘Fuck you – you racist piece of shit,’ one of the boys said, their sense of humour starting to fade. Now Frank slipped his phone out and started filming.
‘Fuck me? Fuck you and fuck your gook bitch, you fucken faggot. Here – gimme that fucken thing.’ The guy made a grab for the Asian girl’s sign. He got hold of it and they started tussling. ‘Hey. HEY!’ one of the other kids yelled.
Using the spar of wood on the sign, the combat jacket guy pulled the girl in towards him and headbutted her right in the face. The other kids screamed and jumped in.
And now the cops finally ambled over, taking their nightsticks out. Out of the them spoke into his radio out of the corner of his mouth, Frank hearing the word ‘backup’ as he stepped away, still filming. The cops started swinging their clubs, crunching them into the protesters, boys and girls alike, clubbing two of them to the ground as, with a screech of tyres, a police van pulled up and four more officers piled out of it, their own batons drawn. It only took them a couple of minutes to cuff all six of the protesters and lead them crying and bleeding towards the van. Frank, shaking, dry-mouthed, panned around to film the combat jacket guy, who was already staggering off into the distance, unharmed, un-arrested, chanting ‘USA! USA!’
‘Sir? Sir?’ Frank turned. A cop, one of the original two, was standing there. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take that phone.’ He was already holding out an evidence bag.
‘What?’ Frank said.
‘Clause 14, subsection 11b of the Extreme Patriot Act of 2022: “It is illegal to interfere with government officials performing their duties in any way, including unauthorized filming or sound recording.”’
‘I, but …’
‘Hey, you wanna join your little buddies in the wagon?’
Frank handed over his phone and the cop started tapping at the screen. ‘I’m going to need the passwords to your social media accounts,’ he said.
‘I, what? Why?’
The cop sighed. ‘Clause 18, subsection 2, “Officers shall have the right to request access to social media accounts of persons suspected of being members of Antifa or other known terror organizations.”’
‘What? You can’t do that.’
‘You wanna spend the night in jail? Talk it over with a lawyer?’
‘I don’t have any social media accounts.’
This was true. He’d had social media accounts once upon a time. He’d deleted them all shortly after Adam and Pippa were killed. The abuse and the death threats from gun nuts just became too much to bear. But perhaps even worse than the death threats were the attempts by some of these guys to engage in so-called ‘reasoned debate’. These endless, circular discussions – packed with firearms minutiae and stats from obscure websites …
; @Frank14Brilly: You don’t care that my wife and son were murdered?
@AmericaWarLord666: It is tragic, and I feel for your suffering, and I hope they catch the monster involved in this atrocious act.
@Frank14Brilly: OK. I’ll keep my arguments for common sense gun control to myself.
@AmericaWarLord666: That’s the problem, though. What more laws would have stopped this psycho from avoiding security, bringing a weapon into a gun-free zone and committing murder? All of those things are against the law, which criminals ignore.
@Frank14Brilly: You’ve convinced me. I’m glad the man who killed my family had an AK-47.
@AmericaWarLord666: Again, what law would have stopped this?
@Frank14Brilly: Not being able to buy an AK-47?
@AmericanWarLord666: We’re still avoiding the argument that the man did everything illegal possible. Why are we blaming the tool, and not the monster? They don’t have guns in the UK, so they kill with knives and acid attacks. More people are killed with fists and feet than rifles. Evil will do evil.
@Frank14Brilly: You might want to double-check British knife and acid death stats against our gun death stats. Again, why did he have an AK-47?
@AmericanWarLord666: It wasn’t an AK by the way, it was a WASR-10. A semi-auto rifle that looks like an AK, but doesn’t perform like one. Also made in Romania, not Russia. Not an AK.
@Frank14Brilly: What does that even mean? Is it better that my wife and son were killed by one of those?
@AmericanWarLord666: Again, I am sorry for your loss. But facts matter. The AK is banned in your state.