The F*ck-it List

by John Niven

  ‘THREE PROTESTERS KILLED, EIGHTEEN INJURED AT TRUMP RALLY,’ the Washington Post said the next day.

  ‘ANTIFA ATTACKS TRUMP SUPPORTERS!’ said Fox.

  Chops came out of this golden reverie, tuning back into the here and now, into Fox – showing a clip of Beckerman’s legendary speech to the NRA convention in Houston some years ago, when he took over from La Pierre, who had become a bit too warm and fuzzy for everyone’s tastes to tell you the truth. Chops turned the volume up.

  ‘And I tell you,’ Beckerman thundered, ‘if we do not introduce mandatory carry in high schools for all students over the age of sixteen it will be as though we are designating those schools as slaughterhouses. Abattoirs just waiting for the next Adam Lanza, the next whoever, to roll up and start killing. I do not say you are less of an American if you do not carry a gun. I say – YOU ARE NOT AN AMERICAN AT ALL! If you are prepared to walk our streets without the capability to stand up for yourself or your fellow citizens, then what are you? I say – TAKE YOUR LIBERAL, SOCIALIST BULLSHIT AND MOVE TO ENGLAND SO YOU CAN GET KNIFED OR ACID-BATHED BY SOME CRAZY MUSLIM WITHOUT THE MEANS TO DEFEND YOURSELF!’ The Texan arena went berserk. Finally, here was a leader who told the truth, who spoke to the people in their language, as The Donald had done. Hearing Beckerman’s words again made Chops almost tearful with patriotism.

  He stuffed a fistful of fries in his mouth – reflecting briefly that he really had to stop saying ‘yes’ whenever they asked him if he wanted to ‘go large’ at the drive-through, but part of Chops always thinking it was slightly un-American to refuse such bounty – got up and crossed the room to where his gun was hanging in its shoulder holster on the back of a chair. He slipped it out and sat back down on the bed with the short-barrelled .357 Magnum, nickel-plated, rubber grip, his chosen sidearm of many years with the police department. A little bulky, sure, and with a big kick that made it difficult to master, but there was nothing out there with much more stopping power and it would never jam on you. You could, like they say, use it to hammer nails all day long and it would still cut dead centre every single time. Chops pushed the catch forward with his fat thumb and released the barrel, showing him the ends of the six fat slugs. He tipped them out onto the bed and picked up one of the bullets. He kissed it and rolled it around his face, feeling the cool brass on his cheeks and his eyelids. He snapped the chamber shut and pointed the empty gun around the room, training it on the TV (an anchor talking about the other two NRA men killed along with Beckerman), the lamp, the bathroom door. It had been a long time since he’d shot a man. How he missed it. The feeling of pumping a round into something living, of seeing it crumple and twist. That Mexican drug dealer, the astonishment on his face as he absorbed the load of 00 buckshot at close range.

  He hadn’t died right away of course. The boys had secured the room and Chops had come back and stood over the guy as he spluttered, trying to talk, trying to say something. Chops had knelt down close to him, listening while the guy sputtered rusty blood, unable to dredge up any air or words through his shredded lungs, his eyes darting about, haunted, desperate, their light already starting to dim. It was a rare privilege, Chops knew. To get to watch a man’s soul leave his body, even if it was a Mexican’s. Chops had fixed the dealer right in the eye and said, ‘Looks like you’re about to die, beaner.’ The last thing the kid saw – Chops’s leering, gloating face.

  ‘Shit, you’re cold, Chops,’ one of the boys had said.

  Hell, anyone would admit it – killing was a rush. Frank Brill hadn’t killed anyone before Hauser, Chops felt pretty sure of that. But he was off now. Off and running. Getting a taste for it. Or getting used to it at any rate. To go from popping someone with a .22 Woodsman to emptying an AR-15 into three guys? Shit.

  Chops put the revolver down on his thigh and turned back to Frank’s file: newspaper clippings – mostly from what used to be called the fake news back then, before those fuckers all got shut down – about the school shooting in Schilling, Indiana. A bad one, Chops remembered. A bunch of little kids and a couple of teachers had got whacked. (If only they’d listened to Beckerman, who was quoted in one of the papers in Frank’s file, in the New York Times, when he’d said of the Schilling massacre, ‘How many times will the children of America have to lay such a costly sacrifice on the altar of freedom?’ a comment that had sent the libs insane at the time.) Chops saw that Beckerman’s photograph had been circled in blue ink. He looked back at the TV – once again showing the grainy, distant CCTV footage of the man with the gym bag over his shoulder walking into that Italian restaurant in Fairfax.

  Brill killed Marty because Marty had fucked one of his little school buddies.

  Brill killed the old fag in Vegas because of something the fag had done to his ex-wife. Chops figured the second fag was just collateral.

  Brill killed Beckerman because, in his twisted, crazed socialist logic, he thought Beckerman was to blame for all the guns, for some lunatic shooting his wife and kid.

  Personal grudges and political ones. Who would Frank Brill kill next? The answer, he felt, was somewhere in this file. He unwrapped his fourth – and final – quarter-pounder with cheese and read on.

  NINETEEN

  ‘… lemme tell you, they’re gonna get got.’

  Frank wound the car window down, getting a good lungful of the warm Florida air. He’d spent the night at a place called Jimmy’s Cabins (‘waterbeds’, ‘HBO’) and got on the road early, just after 7 a.m. It had been years since he’d been down here.

  They used to spend part of every winter at the condo, before Adam went to school. They’d even talked about moving here at one point, but Frank had felt that the whole thing – Florida, golf, the beach every day – would have been too much like being a proper retiree and he wasn’t quite ready for that at the time. Another apparently tiny decision that had cost him so very dearly. (The Computations: If they’d moved here then Pippa and Adam would never have gone to that school and then …) He watched the familiar territory roll past – the lakes, the reeds, signs warning of gators, all under clear skies and warm sun. He’d rung Brock (‘Mr Schmidt’ Frank had almost called him, old habits dying hard, the man having owned the paper for all that time Frank and his father worked for it) first thing that morning, from the motel – telling him he was down for a few days, would be great to catch up – and had been invited over for dinner that evening.

  Frank took the exit for Lake Tranquil.

  He put the car in the underground lot – an ache in his heart as he remembered that short, blissful time when they’d do this every winter with Adam, the little boy usually asleep in the back when they pulled in here after two days on the road – got his bag and the groceries out the trunk and rode the elevator up to 14.

  He opened the door and was stunned at how the condo had refused to change in the – what? – five years since he’d last been here. They (well, he) paid a caretaking company who came in twice a month, to vacuum and dust and check the place was OK, to turn the heat on sometimes if it got too cold in what passed for winter in Florida. Frank and Pippa had inherited the modest two-bedroom after Pippa’s mom passed and Pippa had spruced it up, repainting the yellow walls a cool, neutral grey, replacing the 1980s peach and mint-green floral sofas in the living room – the room Frank was standing in now, dropping his car keys into the wooden bowl by the door – with a matching pair from Crate & Barrel, navy blue with white piping. She’d found the oak coffee table that sat between the sofas at a swap meet over in Kissimmee one Sunday morning. (Frank remembered the day, sitting feeding two-year-old Adam some ice cream in the shade while Pippa scoured the stalls.) She’d replaced the faded linoleum on the floor of the small galley kitchen – the kitchen Frank was popping his head into now – with sand-coloured stone tiles.

  He opened the fridge: some beers, a bottle of still mineral water. Various condiments. All long out of date. Frank threw it all in the trash and started unloading the groceries he’d bought at the gas station on the 95
. A six-pack of 7-Up, a couple of microwave pasta things, milk, coffee, a half-pound of butter, half a dozen eggs. He knew he had to try and eat something (his belt was ratcheted up to the last hole now and was still hanging loose), so he left a jar of mayo, some American cheese, a pack of ham and a loaf of white bread on the little round dining table. It’d been a bit of a grab bag, grocery-wise. It was difficult to shop for food when you just weren’t hungry and, besides, he wasn’t sure how long he was going to be here. That’d depend on how it went tonight, with Mr Schmidt. Shit, with Brock. He slathered mayo onto bread and stuffed a couple of slices of ham and cheese on there before topping with another slice of bread. He opened one of the 7-Ups and took his lunch back through the living room and out onto the balcony – the apartment’s best feature.

  He sipped his soda and looked out over the lake, hearing the buzz of jet skis, seeing families and couples strolling on the boardwalk across the road. It was strange. In his memory he’d done exactly this often, stood out on the balcony having a soda (well, a beer in the early days) and a smoke as soon as they’d got here, although back then there would have been the noise of a toddler running around, a wife in the kitchen, unpacking groceries, the TV already on, showing cartoons. In reality it had only maybe been half a dozen times in the five years of Adam’s life. Their time together had really been so very short.

  After he’d finished his drink and managed to take a few bites of the sandwich, Frank got up, went back inside, and turned on Fox.

  After an item about the wall (construction problems being overcome heroically) and one on the economy (things were going great, apparently there was no need to worry about the deficit now being seven trillion dollars) there was an update on the Fairfax shooting. There were interviews with NRA members (‘whoever did this, lemme tell you, they’re gonna get got’) and a screenshot of a tweet from Ivanka: ‘Bob Beckerman was a great American who fought tirelessly for the Second Amendment. We will find his killer!’ Then the anchor was saying ‘Police have released images of …’ and a CCTV photo of Frank came up. It was blurred, taken at some distance – clearly from a camera on the street outside the restaurant – and showed Frank arriving, with the canvas gym bag over his shoulder. He had sunglasses on and you couldn’t really tell if it was him or not. ‘He is described as being in his sixties, slim, with dark hair. He is considered to be armed and dangerous …’ Frank turned the volume down. Of course he’d been listening to updates in the car on the way down here. Had read all of that morning’s papers over breakfast. It seemed like this was all they had – just a bad photograph. No lead on his name, or the car or anything like that. ‘And the National Rifle Association,’ the Fox anchor was saying now, ‘has just announced that it is posting a reward of half a million dollars for information leading to the arrest of the killer of Bob Beckerman and his associates. We go live now to NRA spokesperson …’ So it was official – Frank was a wanted man. There was a price on his head.

  He laughed.

  The only thing in the living room that was authentically Frank was the old brown leather Barcalounger by the glass doors onto the balcony. It had belonged to Pippa’s father and Frank had insisted it stayed, over her protests. Now this is comfy, he thought as he lowered himself into it and flipped the lever extending the footrest.

  ‘You look like such an old man in that damn chair,’ she’d say.

  ‘I am an old man,’ he’d say.

  He checked his watch – a little after two. Plenty of time for a nap before the ninety-minute drive down to West Palm Beach. Frank Brill dropped off quickly, exhausted from the drive, enjoying the lake breeze wafting in the open balcony doors, falling swiftly into a dream where he was eating a hot dog over on the beach across the street, feeding pieces of it to his dead son, his dead wife somewhere close by, somewhere on the edge of the picture.

  * * *

  He woke up with a start, a little over an hour later, and took a shower. This wound up taking longer than expected because, when he’d pulled the shower curtain back to turn it on, he saw something he’d completely forgotten would still be there – a mesh net bag filled with Adam’s little plastic bath toys, stuck to the tiled wall with suction cups. His little boats, ducks and the small penguin Frank used to make ‘walk the plank’ along the edge of the bath before dropping it with a scream into the water. (‘Again! Again, Daddy!’) Well, after taking that in he’d spent a while sobbing on the bathroom floor. It took half a Xanax to pull himself together again, with the result that it was nearly five when he got on the road south, so it was almost six thirty, getting dark, when Frank pulled into the Schmidts’ street in Prospect Park.

  Safe to say the area was somewhat more high-end than Frank’s Florida home: big mansions, mostly built in the 1920s, separated by palm trees and tall hedges, with ‘armed response’ signs on the front lawns. This was West Palm Beach, not quite as chic and affluent as its eastern neighbour right on the Atlantic, but getting there these days, especially during the last decade or so as the First Family had made the area their official home from October through to April.

  Frank pulled up to the wrought-iron gate and leaned out of the car to press the buzzer on the little metal box set on a pole. ‘Can I help you?’ the voice said.

  ‘Hi. Frank Brill. I’m here to see –’

  ‘Of course, Mr Brill. One moment …’

  A click and a buzz and the heavy gate was swinging open in front of him. Frank drove onto the gravel and parked in front. He took a couple of deep breaths. In the main he managed to avoid anyone from his old life (well, his life would be a better way of putting it) because their sympathy was the hardest thing of all to bear. But it had to be done. It was necessary for the final act, if he ever got that far. Brock was already on the doorstep by the time Frank got out of the car. ‘Frank!’ he said, coming towards him, beaming. ‘What a pleasant surprise!’ They shook hands.

  ‘Hi, Brock,’ Frank said, taking in his former boss for the first time since the twin funeral for his wife and son. Schmidt had to be nearly eighty now, but he looked to be in better shape than Frank, with a nice, even, year-round tan, perfect white teeth, still trim in his chinos and polo shirt. ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘Oh hell, I’m getting older and dumber by the day, Frank. But how are you?’ Frank smiled weakly and shrugged, as if to say ‘somehow I’m still here’. Brock just nodded and gripped Frank’s shoulder tightly. A nice gesture, Frank thought. It said, ‘We know what you’ve been through and you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’ He knew they’d have heard about Olivia from back home. They might well have sent a card, but Frank didn’t remember much from that time. He’d already decided he wouldn’t be telling them about the cancer. Really, what was the point? ‘Well, come in, come in,’ Brock was saying. ‘Cyn’s in the kitchen. She’s dying to see you again …’

  Frank had only been in this house once before, on a visit with Pippa and Adam, but he remembered its scents immediately: lots of wood – the mahogany panelling, the polished floors – mixing with sweet potpourri, fresh-cut flowers from the garden, Brock’s cologne, citrus trees and, somewhere off in the distance, cooking. The scents of rich, retired America.

  As they walked through the big, airy lounge, Cynthia Brock came through the door at the far end to greet them. ‘Frank!’ she trilled. ‘How lovely to see you again!’ She was smiling, but the eyes were crinkled with sorrow. Combined with the slight head tilt as she reached him, it was the female version of that shoulder grip Brock had just given him, a look that said, ‘We know what you’ve been through, you poor man.’ Cynthia embraced him, the smell of perfume and the onions she’d been chopping adding to the olfactory symphony.

  ‘Hello, Cynthia,’ Frank said. ‘Something smells good.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just some lamb. I’m nearly done in there. Brock, I thought we’d eat outside. Do you want to take Frank out for a drink? I’ll let you boys catch up for a bit then I’ll join you.’

  ‘Do you need any help
in the kitchen?’ Frank asked.

  ‘You see,’ Cynthia said, looking at her husband. ‘Manners. I don’t think I’ve heard that sentence once from you in forty years, Brock Schmidt.’

  ‘Don’t be holding out for it any time soon. Come on through, Frank …’

  He followed his host out onto the back patio, a terrace overlooking the lush garden and small pool (Frank remembering Adam splashing in it), the pool lit from beneath, the water shimmering mint green in the gathering dusk, lamps glowing throughout the shrubbery, candles already flickering on the wooden table set for three.

  ‘What’s your poison, Frank?’ Brock asked, walking towards the full wet bar beside the pool.

  ‘Just a Coke,’ Frank said.

  ‘Off the sauce, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that. Nah, just a long drive back. Not as sharp as I used to be!’

  ‘I hear that …’ Brock was letting it go. Some people you hadn’t seen in a while, you told them you didn’t drink any more, it was like you’d told them they couldn’t drink any more. Or at least told them they shouldn’t. That they were fucking losers if they did. Brock took a Coke and a bottle of white wine from a small, glass-fronted fridge and poured them both a drink. They settled on two armchairs. ‘Cheers,’ Brock said.