The F*ck-it List

by John Niven

  Big old wop cock on him too, Chops had delightedly told his own client. The Chink had burst into tears when he saw the photographs. I mean, Chops had thought, what the fuck do you expect? Marrying a young, white, American woman and waving your piggly-wiggly little gook dick at ’em? No wonder they go off and get themselves some real meat.

  Yep, all that stuff was fun enough, but it was nothing compared to the real cop stuff. That time him and Dennis and Marc had staked out that motel for them meth dealers. Three days before they showed up. All Mexican. All tweaked out of their minds on crystal. Dennis took point. Chops was second man through the door. He could still remember the moment when he got one of ’em full in the chest with the pump-action Remington, before Dennis had even shouted ‘Freeze!’ The beaner’s blood hitting the wall behind him just before he did. Happy memories to while away the hours here. Chops checked his watch – nearly 1.30 a.m., the street utterly quiet and deserted. He slipped his gloves on, got out and closed the car door softly. He’d got a chance to look around the back earlier – before the Jew appeared – and had spotted an entry point. Moving quietly around the side of the property, moving with surprising stealth for one of his age and weight, Chops crouched down and started working his penknife into the crack of the low window. It yielded a little bit and he forced the blade up, popping the weak catch. With some effort, sweating and stifling his grunts, Chops pulled himself up and dropped down into the darkness of the house. He was in a laundry room: washer, dryer, a basket with a pile of clean sheets in it. He waited a moment, letting his eyes get accustomed to the level of light, then came out into the kitchen.

  He looked in the fridge. Nothing much except a jar of hot dogs in the door. Chops checked the date. Close enough. He grabbed a couple and chewed thoughtfully as he began his tour, working from the top of the house down.

  In the main bedroom he saw that drawers were out and half emptied. There was no toothbrush or razor in the bathroom. The other bedrooms were full of junk: cardboard boxes and plastic bags of photographs and papers and whatnot. The sad detritus of the sad life of this Frank Brill. Carrying on along the upstairs hallway he saw the ladder to the attic was down …

  He went up it, waiting until he got to the top before turning on his torch. (Neighbours spotting torch beams strafing the walls of empty houses were one of the primary causes of burglaries being reported. Just ask Nixon, Chops thought. Good man. Damn shame. Whole country started going to hell in a handcart the minute they ‘got’ him. Took forty years to get back on track.) He stood at the top of the ladder, just his head and shoulders in the loft, the air up here far colder on his face as he ran the shaft of light around the dusty space, seeing the usual outlines of furniture and boxes, all the crap people took from home to home with them until they died and their kids threw it all out. He was about to go back down when the beam caught something on the floor, quite close to the hatch, something glittering small and gold on the felt floor. Well, not quite gold. Brass. Chops picked it up.

  A .22 round.

  Just like the ones they pulled out of Marty.

  Hello, you sonofabitch you.

  He pocketed it and headed back down.

  In the dining room – computer, armchair, table, golf prints on the wall – Chops found lots of newspaper cuttings, about a school shooting, about the discovery of the body of a twenty-two-year-old girl in a motel in Fort Wayne. He carried it all through to the back of the house, stooping to pick up the mail from the front porch as he went. He sat down at the kitchen table and flipped through the envelopes until he found the one he was looking for – an American Express statement. He tore it open and saw what he was expecting – that it only went up to the end of the previous month, October. Chops thought for a moment. He walked back through to the dining room, staying away from the windows, and sat down at the table. Making sure the blinds were closed, he turned on the old PC. No password, straight onto the desktop. He opened a browser and, sure enough, there it was on the toolbar – ‘American Express’. He clicked on it and the account home page came up, asking him for the password. Chops thought. An older fella like this Brill? Had to be somewhere.

  He went through all the drawers, the bits of paper stacked in the in-trays. Nothing. Chops sat back and stared at the framed photographs on the table – one of Brill on a golf course with some buddies, one of a girl’s high school graduation, one of Brill with a much younger woman, and a little boy, maybe four, obviously the pair that got whacked in the school shooting. He picked up the golf photograph and turned it around. Nothing. Then the next photo. Nothing. Finally, on the family photo, he struck gold – there on the back of the frame, in tiny, neat block capitals …

  Bank – jacksonhigh1966

  Amex – frankgolf2000

  IRS – deathandtaxes1

  Chops tapped frankgolf2000 into the box. One card. Classic green. He scrolled through – last used … United Airlines desk, McCarran Airport five days ago. Eighteen hundred dollars. Chops jotted down the details. He’d need to go through one of the boys back in OKC to get this. No way an airline was giving up a passenger’s travel details to an off-duty, out-of-state cop. He replaced the mail, straightened up everything he’d touched, and was standing in the middle of the dark living room, preparing to leave the house the same way he’d come in, when he saw it, standing on the mantelpiece. An envelope, addressed ‘To whom it may concern’. Chops hesitated for a second, then sat down on the sofa and tore it open, holding his small torch close.

  To anyone left who might care about me, I’m sorry.

  I had my reasons.

  Frank

  He was back at his motel by 2.15 a.m., where he cracked open a pint of vodka and hunkered down with the stolen file, familiarising himself with the sad history of Frank Brill, former editor of the Schilling Gazette and murderer, so far, Chops was convinced, of three.

  A few hours later, muzzy with a hangover, Chops was lying on his rented bed smoking a cigarette when his phone rang. He scribbled stuff down as he listened. ‘Yup, yup, OK,’ he said. ‘Thanks, brother. I owe you one.’

  ‘Chief, I gotta say, we should be sharing this with the Feds.’

  ‘Yeah, we will. Just give me a few more days, kid.’

  ‘You gonna catch this sonofabitch, Chops?’

  ‘Bet your ass.’

  ‘I think you will too.’

  Brill had flown to Dulles. It was about a nine-hour drive from Schilling to Washington. Chops could be there by sunset if he got up now.

  He got up.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘… is believed to still be at large.’

  The restaurant wasn’t so busy when he arrived, just after twelve, getting shown to the table for one he’d reserved online the night before. Frank ordered a shrimp cocktail and then the chicken Parmesan. What the hell, might be his last meal. He couldn’t really eat the rich food of course, just picked at it, sipped his water, his diet soda. There were a couple of kids eating lunch with their parents, over by the window. Frank felt bad about that, wondered briefly if he should abort.

  Then a small commotion was happening over at the door as the maître d’ – who’d greeted Frank neutrally – welcomed the party disembarking from the Hummer very effusively, showing the three of them to their usual table, the corner booth just along from where Frank was picking at his chicken. He felt one of them glance at him as they passed by and he kept his head down over the food. The place was beginning to fill up now, a lively hubbub of chatter, glasses and flatware clinking and scraping. Frank asked for the dessert menu. It was expensive, but that was the least of his worries. He looked across the restaurant and through the window, the bitter wind still whipping by. The Hummer was parked outside and he could just make out the two bodyguards in the front, one reading something on his phone, the other dozing, eyes closed, his seat back a little.

  Frank slipped his earplugs in, pulled his gloves on and put the gym bag over his shoulder.

  He waited until the maître d’ was away fr
om his post, showing a couple to their table, before he went over and, on the pretext of taking one of the place’s business cards from an oversized brandy balloon, locked the front door. No one noticed.

  He walked back towards his table, slipping his hand inside the gym bag. He carried on, past his table, walking right up to the corner booth. As he crossed the last few yards towards it, one of the three men looked his way and Frank knew from the guy’s expression that he knew something was up. The man’s hand went fast inside his jacket, towards his left armpit.

  Not as fast as Frank’s, whose finger, inside the bag, was already on the trigger.

  He squeezed it and the AR-15 exploded, the muzzle flash tearing the canvas bag to smoking pieces, Franks’s upper body shaking like he was gripping a pneumatic drill bullets spraying into the booth as Frank moved the gun a little from left to right, like he’d seen in all the YouTube videos he’d watched last night. The sound of the machine gun was deafening in the crowded room, drowning out the screams that had instantly filled the air, tearing the three men apart, the force of the shells at such close distance blowing big holes in them, slamming them back into the wall of the booth. Frank saw one of their heads just come apart.

  In a slow-mo out-of-body moment he could see himself, Frank Brill, sixty-year-old retiree, standing there, teeth gritted, arms shaking from the force of the weapon, blasting away at three men he’d never met before in his life. Bullets tearing into plaster and flesh and into the leather booth, hot, spent cartridges tinkling onto the tiled floor all around him. It felt like it went on forever. In reality it took just six seconds to empty the hundred-round magazine.

  Frank walked back through the room, the air thick with gun smoke. Everyone was on the floor, screaming and crying. A waiter threw himself down as Frank approached, shouting ‘Please! No!’ Out of the corner of his eye, Frank could see the bodyguards running across the busy road, dodging traffic, guns already drawn. He dropped the spent, smoking machine gun and turned right, jogging down the hallway towards the restrooms, hitting the exit door hard, running now, sprinting down the alleyway and onto the street. Somewhere behind him he could hear the bodyguards hammering on the locked front door and then glass splintering as they started kicking it in. Frank made a left and slowed his pace to a brisk walk, his lungs aching. There was no one around. After a hundred yards or so he came to the intersection with the main road and turned right. There it was, parked on a meter, the green Camry. Frank got in and started her up. Just as he pulled away he heard them, faint in the distance, the crazed, excited whoop and gulp of sirens.

  Forcing himself to drive slowly, he focused on his heart banging and clattering in his chest, the weightless feeling in his limbs and the nausea rising in his throat. Those poor kids, eating their lunch. Never to be the same again. They – fuck! Red light! Frank jabbed the brakes, stopping at the last moment, the tyres giving a little squeak, the car a little jolt, the motorist in the lane beside him briefly glancing his way. Calm calm calm. He wound the window down and inhaled cool, fresh air through his nostrils, fighting that nausea. Easy, Frank, easy. Suddenly the blast of a horn right behind him. Jesus! No, the lights had changed, that was all. Frank slipped her into gear and pulled away. Shaking and sweating even with the window down and freezing air pouring in, he found the freeway entrance and slipped into the traffic, just another American fish joining the great stream, the blur of vehicles headed north and south, radiator grilles and tail lights running against each other.

  He took the 95 south, not stopping for over five hours, until exhaustion forced him to pull into a gas station off the freeway, somewhere outside a town called Florence. He filled her up and went on in, grabbing some coffee. There it was as he stood in line, blaring from Fox on the TV set above the counter, the newsreader (young, female, heavily made up, low-cut dress) announcing: ‘And it has been officially confirmed that one of the three men killed in the restaurant shooting in Fairfax, Virginia, this afternoon was National Rifle Association president, Robert Beckerman. The police are hunting for the killer who fled the scene and is believed to still be at large.’ Frank looked around at his fellow travellers in the line, a trucker staring at the TV. A mom juggling her infant and her tabloid. A couple of college kids glued to their phones. No one looked his way.

  He reached into his inside pocket, took it out and did his thing.

  Beckerman

  Three down, two to go.

  ‘At large.’ Frank smiled. It was a cliché he’d encountered many times in a career in journalism. Now it was him. He, Frank Brill, was at large. He walked outside and smelled the night air, yawning. Already a little warmer down here in South Carolina. He was tired. He’d find a motel for the night. Continue in the morning. Frank sipped his coffee and walked back to the car.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Shit, you’re cold, Chops.’

  Chops heard the news on the radio when he was switching channels, around dusk as he was approaching Washington city limits. A madman had killed Bob Beckerman and two of his colleagues in a restaurant near the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, just a short drive outside Washington. Obviously you couldn’t get near Fairfax now – police, the media, every damn hotel booked up instantly. So he’d found a motel off the interstate, lugged the stuff he’d taken from Brill’s home into his room and got to work.

  He’d now reached some conclusions, stretched out on his bed in the early hours, working on his fifth beer and his third cheeseburger, glued to Fox on the TV, who were doing a kind of a retrospective on the great work of Beckerman. Normally of course the shooting of just three people – one under the threshold required to even qualify as a mass murder – wouldn’t have attracted anything like this kind of attention. Why, just the other day there had been fourteen killed in Oregon (retired bank clerk whose wife had left him) and that didn’t get anything like the kind of coverage the Fairfax shooting was getting. Then again, the Oregon incident didn’t involve the head of the NRA.

  A great man, Chops thought, taking a sorrowful pull on his beer. A great patriot. No one had fought more tirelessly for the Second Amendment. No one except the president. Not the current president, the one who had married the fucken Jew and who Chops suspected was secretly a bleeding heart liberal. No, when Chops said ‘the president’ there was only one man he was thinking of. His president. Her father. The greatest leader the nation had ever known. Would ever know.

  He thought back to the Oklahoma City rally on the 2020 campaign, him and Hauser, one of the best times they ever had.

  It had been a warm night, late summer. They’d taken Chops’s pickup truck and got there early, hanging out in the arena parking lot, drinking beer, joining in the chants and the singing with the other supporters, all of them pretty drunk as it got near to show time. Things had been running pretty hot that whole election, the libs and the Dems and the fake news working overtime, trying to take down the president. The Russia crap. Then all the impeachment crap. There were protesters at all the rallies. Fucking Antifa, in their black shit, with their masks and their banners and their signs. Fat dykes and queers and all sorts. Obviously there hadn’t been too many of ’em in Oklahoma – this was Trump country, he’d go on to win 75 per cent of the vote there that November – but there’d been enough, a few hundred or so, being held back by dozens of Chops’s buddies from the Oklahoma City Police.

  Inside the arena it was … magical. Hannity had been the opening act, doing his thing, winding the crowd up, getting ’em to fever pitch just as the great man appeared. Chops and Hauser had been right down the front by this point. When he came out … bathed in silver light, his great, black shadow standing out against it, his golden hair shimmering … it was like standing before your God.

  And the speech that night, the blood and fire of it as he railed against the liberals, the scum, the animals, who were trying to defeat him, trying to cheat them, the people – Chops, Hauser, all decent Americans – of their rightful leader. He had warned them of the hell-path America would take
if he lost the election, the dark age of socialism that would dawn, the food queues they would have to stand in, the weapons that would be taken away from them, the medicines they would have to pay for, for the bums, the vagrants, the immigrants. Chops had looked around him at the snarling, angry faces of the righteous – screaming ‘LOCK HER UP’ and ‘FINISH THE WALL’ and ‘SEND THEM BACK’ and ‘USA! USA!’ and ‘EIGHT MORE YEARS!’ – and grinned, basking in the hate, feeling the warmth of the rage, knowing that this was where he belonged, that all of America’s history had been leading to this moment. They’d come barrelling out of the arena – 12,000 strong, inspired, incendiary – to see that black knot of protesters still there, still chanting.

  The thin line of cops had parted for them without hesitation and carnage had broken out in the parking lot. Hauser had been old even then, six years back, but he’d been game. Chops had slipped his blackjack out and swung into the melee, taking down a kid in a ‘Black Lives Matter’ T-shirt from behind, and Hauser went right in there, booting the boy in the face as tear gas exploded all around them and shots started ringing out and firebombs traced through the sky. Chops remembered a few beautiful images, he deliberately committed to memory: a Negro’s face, contorted in agony as he was tasered. A young girl, a ring of blood around her mouth, teeth missing, cowering as the nightstick came down on her once again. A teenage boy clutching a ‘LOVE TRUMPS HATE’ sign as he wept. The place looked like a fucking war zone and, for a moment, it felt like they could do anything. Just keep going, rampaging out of the parking lot, across the city, across the country, just scourging and pummelling, destroying all opposition as they went, carrying on all the way to California, sweeping every last Democrat, socialist and liberal into the sparkling Pacific, cleansing America for once and for all. He and Marty had stood there, eyes streaming in the acrid breeze, arms around each other, chanting ‘USAUSAUSA’ in victory as all around them the last dregs of the protesters were beaten, were hit over the head with wooden spars, with baseball bats and iron bars. It had felt like they were ruling the whole country.