by John Niven
@Frank14Brilly: Why do we have more gun deaths than any other developed country?
@AmericanWarLord666: Actually, 2/3rds of those are suicides. Also, while legal gun ownership has risen over the years, the murder rate has declined. Seems like a good trend.
@Frank14Brilly: But, even if that’s true, a third is still a lot. Why only in America?
@AmericanWarLord666: Part of it is probably that we have one of the largest and the most diverse populations in the world. We also have untreated and undiagnosed mental illness in this nation. There’s a lot of factors.
@Frank14Brilly: You just want your guns, don’t you? You don’t care about anything else.
@AmericanWarlord666: We’re just going around in circles. I will never voluntarily give up my right to defend myself, as Americans do 500k – 3 million times a year. And criminals will never follow the law. Again, I’m sorry for your loss, but facts don’t care about your feelings.
This was all happening around the time Frank had lapsed back into drinking, so the discussion went on for over forty-eight hours, until Frank realised his opponent seemed inexhaustible, always able to come up with obscure data to back up his points. Always ready with graphs and memes to disprove what Frank was saying, what he saw on CNN, what he read in the Washington Post, when they still existed. Frank calculated that @AmericanWarLord666 had replied to him personally over three hundred times in the two-day period, as well as replying to the dozens of others who had gradually joined the public conversation. Even Frank, who was retired – who was pretty much lying around the house in his underwear drinking beer and vodka – had to take breaks for food, bathroom and grocery shopping. He mentioned this on a phone call to Olivia one evening.
‘Oh, Dad, you’ve got to stop that.’
‘But I –’
‘Dad – you’re arguing with a bunch of guys in an office block in St Petersburg or someplace. It’s a bot.’
And so he stopped. All of it. Just deleted it all, as the cop was beginning to believe now as he looked at Frank and then went back to the screen, scrolling through the home pages on his phone, finding nothing, no Facebook or Twitter or Instagram icons. Finally, he gave up. ‘Some kinda hermit, huh?’ he said as he started filling out the receipt. ‘I’m not going to write you up tonight.’ Write me up for what? Frank wanted to ask. But he’d become aware that, having killed three people in the last week, it might be prudent for him to limit his interactions with law enforcement as much as possible. The cop handed the receipt over. ‘You’ll get it back in four to six weeks. Have a nice evening.’
He walked off towards the police wagon, whistling, the sound of the Chinese girl crying audible from within the metal walls of the vehicle.
FOURTEEN
‘Manager of the Year.’
Chops drove out of the Holiday Inn parking lot in the mid-size Dodge he’d rented at Trump, the air conditioning cranked against the midday Vegas heat. Having extended his seat fully back, he still found himself with his knees crammed up against the steering wheel. It had been worse on the two-hour economy flight from Oklahoma City. But he was not a rich man and he’d been six-four since he was seventeen years old. You got used to it. Like basketball jokes. During what his phone was telling him was going to be a fifteen-minute drive, he ran through the chain of events.
Marty – shot at close range in his own home with a .22. Most likely a Woodsman.
His Glock 17 stolen.
A photo of a kid – Robbie McIntyre, someone he’d heard Marty mention before – from back in Schilling left out of the album in his closet.
The two queers, killed three days later in Vegas in similar fashion – home invasion, one of them disabled then finished off later – but with a different weapon.
The giant SupraMart lay flat and huge in front of him as he pulled into a parking lot the size of ten football fields.
One of the greeters took a break from saying ‘Welcome to SupraMart!’ and led Chops to the manager’s office.
‘Hi. Detective Birner, Oklahoma City PD. We spoke on the phone?’ Chops was saying as they shook hands across the cherrywood desk.
‘Ben Dahmer. Wow, you must have played some basketball?’
‘Damn right,’ Chops said, playing nice, letting it go.
He handed the guy his Oklahoma PD card. He was a little bit younger than Chops, in his fifties. Bald. His office was small and hot, up in the roof of the building, all those A/C and heating ducts coiling up below it. ‘How can I help you, Detective?’ Dahmer continued, sitting down and assuming a brisk, businesslike air.
‘Well, Mr Dahmer, the member of staff I spoke to in your sporting goods department last night – Eric, uh Lowell? – told me that three days ago he sold a customer –’ he checked his notes – ‘a Glock 26, an ATN 803 suppressor and a box of ammunition. Some subsonic hollow points?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’d like to see the credit card receipt and the identification they used. Also any CCTV footage you might have from that day of the entrance to the store and the sporting goods department.’
‘You know you need a warrant for that?’
‘I am aware of that, sir, yes. It’s just –’
‘Well, come back when you have one, Officer.’
And now Chops saw it, on a shelf behind Dahmer, nestling among the ‘Manager of the Year’ plaques and photos of him on hunting trips, the old red cap – MAGA.
Chops figured it was worth the risk. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘Can I speak frankly to you, Ben? I’m investigating a murder back in Oklahoma. Fella who got killed happened to be a friend of mine. He was a good man. A veteran. Fella who killed him tortured him. Shot him all up to hell. Now, if I’m right, well … Oklahoma, Nevada. This is already a multi-state deal. Pretty soon we’re gonna have the goddamn FBI all over this. They’ll be all up in your store, asking for this and that, throwing out subpoenas like candy. And let me tell you something, those FBI boys will be more interested in protecting the rights of that pair of fags who got killed here than they will in finding the son of a bitch who killed my buddy.’ Over a decade of Trumpism and they still hadn’t succeeded in weeding all the Democrats and liberals out of the damn FBI.
Dahmer sighed and shook his head. He looked past Chops to make sure the door was closed. ‘Deep state sons of bitches.’
‘Tried to bring down our president.’
‘Yes they did.’
‘Failed though, didn’t they?’ Chops smiled.
‘They sure did, right?’
‘Amen.’
‘You hang on a minute there, Bob …’ Dahmer pressed his intercom. ‘Mandy? Darling, can you tell Eric from sporting goods to come up here? Thank you.’ He turned back to Chops and smiled. ‘You see the vice president giving them gooks what for yesterday?’
‘Sure did. You don’t fuck with old Hannity.’
After another few minutes of small talk with Dahmer, and then fifteen minutes with young Eric from sporting goods, and then another half-hour in the security booth reviewing CCTV tapes, and Chops was strolling back through the parking lot knowing much more than he had when he pulled up. He got into his car with two certainties, one photograph and one hunch.
Certainty #1: Marty’s killer had come to Vegas and traded Marty’s stolen Glock 17 against a new 26 and a silencer.
Certainty #2: He’d used these to kill the homosexuals.
The photograph: a grainy, distant black-and-white print of a CCTV still showing a man who looked to be in his sixties. Slim. Thinning hair. Wearing a sport coat and jeans.
The hunch: This guy had known Marty Hauser and Leslie Roberts from back in Schilling, Indiana.
Chops got into the Dodge and headed back to the hotel, where his laptop was waiting. Pick up a bucket of chicken on the way.
FIFTEEN
‘You can’t kill a Camry.’
Frank had spent the last couple of days getting to know Fairfax, Virginia, pretty well. He’d seen the sights – the courthouse
, the town hall, and the famous 29 Diner, operating on the same site since 1947. (He’d tried one of their cheeseburgers, but couldn’t get through it.) But most of the time he’d taken his coffee and his notebook and sat on a stone bench on Waples Mill Road, across the street from the huge glass-and-steel building, watching the comings and goings. He’d seen the target coming and going every day.
The bad news: the place was indeed a fortress.
The good news: the target was a man of habit.
Each morning he arrived a little before 9 a.m., in a blacked-out Hummer with two bodyguards. Each lunchtime, around 1 p.m., he left the building with a couple of colleagues, got back into the blacked-out Hummer with the bodyguards, and took a five-minute drive down the street to an Italian place called Beltrami’s, where he and his colleagues ate lunch while the bodyguards waited in the car. They usually spent about an hour in the restaurant. Frank had cased the place thoroughly, eating there twice. The front looked onto a busy shopping thoroughfare. An alleyway out back led to a residential street.
He knew from his research that the target’s home on the outskirts of Washington, about a twenty-five-minute drive from here, was out. It was a gated mansion, guarded 24/7. For the obvious reasons.
So here he sat, in a Denny’s off the freeway a little way out of town, reading the local paper, the local paper around these parts being the Washington Post. ‘NEW DIPLOMATIC TRIUMPH FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP!’ the headline screamed, above a story about Ivanka’s recent trip to Russia, where she’d been photographed fishing and hunting with the 74-year-old Putin, now in his fifth term in office. It was safe to say that it wasn’t the same Washington Post Frank had grown up with. The original paper had closed down in 2021, after they had printed a completely false story they’d been fed about Jared and Ivanka’s ongoing divorce. Kushner was in jail by then anyway but the Trumps – gearing up for Ivanka’s 2024 run – had thrown all their might and resources into suing the paper. They won the case and the paper was forced to close. The following year it was brought out of administration by Rupert Murdoch, making one of his last major investments before his death. Frank finished the Ivanka puff piece and skimmed the rest of the paper, a hodge-podge of human-interest stories, celebrity gossip and relentlessly pro-government political pieces. There was one (small) negative story about an outgoing cabinet member, a practice that allowed the Post to brand itself as ‘fair and balanced’.
Frank recognised freedompatriot1776 the moment he came through the door, because he was carrying, as he said he would be, a red umbrella. Frank waved to the guy and he came over and sat down in the booth.
‘Just call me Bill,’ the guy said, extending his hand, ‘and I’ll call you Ted.’
Frank nodded. ‘Bill’ wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He was about Frank’s age and conservatively dressed, preppy even, in a sweater, chinos and wool overcoat. Grey hair, tanned, healthy-looking. Black horn-rimmed spectacles. What had Frank been expecting? A grizzled vet. A biker. Someone with facial hair and tattoos in a combat jacket, someone not unlike the guy who’d butted that Asian girl in DC a few days ago. ‘Just coffee,’ this ‘Bill’ said to the waitress who’d appeared. She trotted off.
‘I have what you requested, Ted.’
Frank began reaching into his coat for the envelope.
‘Not here,’ Bill said softly. ‘In the lot.’
Frank nodded. Silence. To fill it, Frank said, ‘So, is this where you do a lot of business, Bill?’
The guy looked at him properly for the first time. ‘Are we making small talk here, Ted?’
‘I guess so …’
Bill sighed as the waitress came back with the coffee. He took one sip. ‘Meet me in the parking lot by the green Toyota Camry in five minutes.’
Frank watched him go and finished his coffee. Oh well, it wasn’t like he was looking to make new friends here.
Bill was standing by the car in the far corner of the empty lot smoking a cigarette as Frank walked up. ‘OK,’ Bill said, walking around to the trunk. He popped it. The only thing in there was a blue canvas sports bag. Bill unzipped it and Frank looked inside.
‘OK?’
‘Well, I’m going to have to trust you,’ Frank said. ‘I don’t really know much about this stuff.’
Bill closed the trunk. ‘It’s the M&P version. With the hundred-round drum.’ Frank just looked at him. Bill sighed again. ‘Pearls before swine. Listen, she’s clean. Real simple to use too. I found you a manual online and printed it off. It’s in the bag.’
Frank handed over the envelope. Eight thousand dollars in cash. ‘How much do these normally go for?’ Frank asked.
‘About a thousand,’ Bill said.
‘Seems like I’m paying an awful lot of money for the car then.’ Frank looked at the licence plate. 2012. ‘Seven grand for a fourteen-year-old Camry?’
‘One – neither the piece nor the car can be traced to you. Two – this is a Camry, you understand? I’m guessing you want reliable? You can’t kill a Camry, my friend. This thing’s got 150,000 miles on the clock and it’ll go round again. It’ll survive the fucking holocaust.’
‘OK.’
‘Besides, that’s not what you’re paying for, is it? You’re paying for me to have never seen you in my life after you do whatever crazy fucking shit it is you’re planning to do with the contents of the trunk.’
‘What do you think I’m planning to do?’ Frank asked.
‘Ted, I do not know and I do not care. But, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say someone fucked your wife. Something like that?’
‘Something like that,’ Frank said.
‘You have a good day now.’ He handed Frank the car keys and walked off, out of the lot and down the street. Frank called after him. ‘Hey! Hey! Can I give you a ride somewhere?’ But the guy couldn’t hear him over the wind.
Frank went back to the Comfort Inn and spent a little while in his room practising, taking the safety off, getting a sense of the weight of it, feeling a little bit silly doing all this Travis Bickle stuff, but there it was. He was practising swinging it up and out of the gym bag when suddenly he felt faint. Weak. He sat down on the bed and looked at his hands, shaking.
He breathed long and slow, trying to calm down. There had been blood this morning, in the toilet. Dark blood. Black. Arterial. Not good. Eating him away.
He drank a glass of water from the tap, took two of the pills and lay down for a little while. How long did he have?
Usually everyone asks the same question.
Long enough, he hoped. But no sense delaying.
Tomorrow.
SIXTEEN
‘frankgolf2000’
‘Uh, can I help you?’ Mrs Rosen leaned over the garden fence, smiling at the tall, heavy man in the fleece-lined denim jacket and heavy boots.
‘Hi there,’ Chops said, coming down off the porch towards her. ‘I was just looking for Frank.’
‘Oh, he’s not home.’
‘Damn. You got any idea when he might be back? I’m Dan. An old buddy of his.’ He took off his glove and extended a hand across the fence.
‘Rachel,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘Rosen.’ Fucken oven-dodger, Chops thought automatically. ‘Not for a while I don’t think. He said he was heading south for a while. He’s got a condo in Florida, you see …’
Chops had been working fast.
His internet research had told him that the late Leslie Roberts had been married twice before, one of the marriages being to Grace Deefenbach, who had formerly been Mrs Grace Brill, of Schilling, Indiana. Her first husband, Frank Brill, it turned out, had been editor of the local paper and a reporter before that, so it hadn’t been difficult to find an image of him online.
Chops then came across the fact that he’d gone to Jackson High, the same school the kid Robbie in Coach Hauser’s photograph had gone to. The same school Hauser had taught at. That he’d had his … ‘troubles’ at.
The CCTV still he’d got in Vegas was too blurred to make
a positive ID, but the two men did not look dissimilar. Chops flew from Vegas to Indianapolis last night and had been at Robbie McIntyre’s mother’s house first thing this morning.
He’d told the elderly, befuddled Mrs McIntyre (eighty-four) that he was a private investigator looking into the disappearance of one of Robbie’s old school friends. Grateful for the company, the old woman had invited him in and, after a third cup of coffee, she’d led him to a closet where she still kept all of Robbie’s things. In among the old vinyl albums, posters, schoolbooks and magazines, Chops found what he was after – Robbie’s 1984 Jackson High yearbook. Sure enough, there on the inside cover, where everyone had signed it, was all the confirmation Chops needed.
‘To my best bud Robbie. Frank B.’
‘Damn, Chops, you’re just too good,’ he said to himself.
A quick look through the voter roll at the town hall had turned up the address that had brought Chops to this porch, conversing with the Jew. ‘Oh. Not to worry,’ Chops said to her. ‘I just happened to be in town. Thought I’d surprise him.’
‘Well, the condo was his wife’s, I think. You know …’ She inclined her head sadly.
‘To tell you the truth, Rachel, we haven’t seen each other in a long time. Nearly twenty years …’
‘Oh goodness. Then you don’t know?’
‘Know what?’
Mrs Rosen told him about the incredible tragedies of Frank Brill’s life: the school shooting; his daughter’s strange, unexplained death a few years ago. (She didn’t go into the abortion rumours.)
Chops thanked her and left.
Ten hours later, at one o’clock in the morning, he was back, sitting in his car, on the darkened street across and along from Frank’s house. Chops stuffed fistful after fistful of M&Ms into his mouth as his mind drifted back to the many stakeouts he’d performed, both as a cop and doing the work he took on off-the-books as a private investigator. The PI stuff was, on the whole, less high-octane, although it was agreeably more salacious. He remembered the infidelity case he’d worked for that rich old Chink some years back. He’d been married to some young white piece. Goddamn race-defiling bitch that she was. Chops had spent a week on her tail before he caught her on camera in the house of an Italian-looking fella. Got some good shots too – couple of the wife sucking the boy off, her on her knees on the bedroom carpet. Telephoto lens from some bushes in the garden.