by John Niven
There it was – sitting right out in the open on the other side of the bushes Frank had been digging in. A decent lie too. ‘Titleist 4,’ Frank said.
‘Here you go,’ Brock said, masking his disappointment. ‘Shit, son – you’re nearly twenty years younger than me and your eyes are worse than mine!’
‘Sorry, Brock. Thanks.’
Frank knocked it out onto the fairway with a seven-iron. Then he hit a great three-wood just short of the green: one of those pure connections that travelled high and straight, carrying nearly two hundred yards in the air and then rolling out while his opponent whistled in wonder. It was a shot that gave Frank a genuine ache of sadness that – if things went well – this would surely be the second-last round of golf he would play in his life.
Frank knocked it on the green with his pitching wedge and two-putted for bogey six. Brock took two shots to get out of the bunker and then three-putted for a seven. Despite his drive, Frank won the hole to go five up at the turn. ‘Jesus, Brock,’ Brock hissed at himself, smacking his ball off the green towards the cart with his putter after he missed the last three-footer.
Two hours later, over Trump steaks and Trump fries in the Trump clubhouse, Brock handed over the twenty-dollar bill and toasted the victor. ‘Well played, Frank. I nearly fought my way back into it.’
‘You sure did,’ Frank said. ‘Just ran out of road.’
Truthfully Brock had played a little better on the back nine, but it had still been, as Frank’s friend Bill used to say, ‘money for jam’. Frank had deliberately missed a couple of short putts to let the guy stay in the match until the sixteenth hole, worried that if he beat him too badly Brock might not have him back. He had to have him back. In order to make sure of this Frank was going to have to do the very last thing he felt like doing. He was going to have to talk about the fucking cancer.
Brock gave him an opening as he mopped up the last of his au jus with some fries (Frank had managed to eat about half of his, could already feel it sitting like concrete in his guts), when he started talking about a buddy of his who’d just got bad news on some tests. ‘Yeah,’ Brock said, ‘really hit him hard.’
‘Brock?’ Frank said.
And he told him. It didn’t take that long. What was there to say? Brock listened, head inclined, just saying ‘Oh Frank’ and ‘Oh Jeez’ and, twice, ‘As if you haven’t been through enough’.
‘Oh well,’ Frank said at the end. ‘There it is.’
‘Did they say, I mean how …?’
‘Months. Not years.’
‘Oh Jeez.’
‘It’s OK, Brock. Look – thank you for today. It meant a lot. It’s one of the few things that still gives me any pleasure, playing golf.’
‘Any time, Frank. Seriously, any time.’
Frank went in for the kill. ‘How about a couple of weeks from now? Before I go back? Say, the 14th?’
‘The 14th …’ Brock said, reaching for his club diary. ‘Yeah, I’m free.’ A pause. ‘Oh.’
‘What? No good?’ Frank felt his blood, his sick, diseased blood, lurch.
‘No, it’s just …’ Brock lowered his voice. ‘We got the big man here that week. They notify members in advance when he’s going to be here.’ Frank already knew this. ‘On account of the extra security and whatnot. We can still play, just need to leave a little more time for everything, especially for guests.’
‘Right.’
‘Tee times get a little congested too. People know he’s here, they like to tee off in groups behind or just ahead of him. Get a chance to watch him. Press the flesh if they can.’
‘Right.’
‘Nearer the day I’ll try and get an idea from the pro about what time he’s going out and we can either go earlier or later.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Look forward to it, Frank. Gimme a chance to get my money back.’
They clinked glasses and sat in silence for a moment until Brock said, ‘Oh Christ, Frank. I’m so sorry.’
TWENTY-TWO
‘Just doing what any decent citizen should.’
When you only had one possible lead you followed it. It really was that simple. So here he was, in the aisles of the supermarket, escaping the heat, soaking up the A/C while he sourced provisions: a tub of M&Ms, a six-pack of beer, a big bag of pork rinds, a jar of hot dogs, cigarettes and gum, all nestling in his little cart. Having taken care of the sustenance of the body he was thinking about how to keep his mind active; Guns & Ammo, the Enquirer, a couple of teeny pop magazines, for the pictures. He was looking at the audiobooks, pondering between the new Grisham and the third volume of Donald Trump Jr’s memoirs, Still Triggering – when he became aware of the conversation, between a mother and daughter just along from him, by the cereals.
‘This one,’ the little girl was saying. She was about five.
‘No no,’ the mother said. She lowered her voice and they had a rapid exchange in Spanish.
Chops slipped the Trump Jr into his cart and shuffled towards them. ‘Hola,’ he said to the mother, smiling.
‘Hi,’ she nodded.
Chops looked down at the little girl, smiling. (The smiling face of Chops, not, he had learned, a sight most people found agreeable.) ‘Want everything their own way at that age, don’t they?’
The woman gave him a weak grin, trying to get on with her shopping, going to move past him with her cart, tugging the little girl’s hand. Chops blocked her path. ‘Papers?’ he said now, his tone still friendly.
‘Excuse me?’ The woman looked at him.
‘You got papers, lady?’
‘What are you talk—’ But she was already flustered.
‘You know exactly what I’m talking about.’ Chops’s tone changing now, getting hard. ‘You a citizen?’
She took him in – a fearsome sight. In Chops’s experience it normally went one of two ways at this point. An actual citizen, even if they were a beaner, would bristle with indignation, tell you to go fuck yourself, maybe even get their phone out and start filming you, figuring they’d get themselves some sympathy from all the libs on social media. A non-citizen would just shut it down, try and walk away. As this woman did now, grabbing her kid’s hand and trying to get round him.
‘Hey, I’m not kidding here,’ Chops said. ‘Are you a citizen?’ The little girl looking scared now, hiding behind the woman’s leg. ‘OK, if you wanna play it that way …’ Chops took his cell phone out. He had the number on speed dial: the national hotline. Put you through to your regional office in seconds. He started dialling.
The woman stepped in closer to him. ‘Please, mister. Please.’ Her eyes were darting, panicked now, all that stony defiance gone in an instant.
‘I knew it,’ Chops said, sighing. The way she’d lowered her voice when she’d slipped into Spanish.
‘You’ve reached the ICE national hotline. To report an illegal immigrant press 1 now …’
‘No! Please, mister!’
Chops pressing 1.
‘Please give your location after the tone …’
‘Uh, I’m at –’
And now the woman made a run for it, grabbing the kid and crashing into a display of cornflakes as she headed for the door. Chops didn’t panic. He took his piece out of the small of his back – the little .38 he always carried – and calmly fired a single shot into the ceiling.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please …’
The woman froze, her hands going up even as she got to her knees to comfort the screaming child. A supermarket employee finally appeared.
‘What the hell?’ the kid began.
Chops held up his badge. ‘Police officer. Get the manager. These here are illegals.’
‘I’m sorry – I didn’t get that. Please give your location after the tone …’
Chops gave the address and then helped the manager lock the woman and the kid in the storeroom while they waited. The wagon was there within fifteen minutes: four ICE agents in full battledress
coming in the store. Perhaps mindful of the small crowd that had gathered now, of the CCTV cameras dotted around the place, they gently and respectfully marched the two illegals to the van. The sergeant in charge turning back to shake Chops’s hand. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.
‘Hell, just doing what any decent citizen should.’
‘Citizen.’ It was a sacred word to him. Being a citizen wasn’t simply a birthright. It had to be earned. And it had to be earned by every generation, wrenched away from those who would try to dilute it, claimed and reclaimed in blood if necessary.
Exhausted from his efforts, Chops added an ice-cream sandwich to his shopping. He went out and sat on a bench across from the supermarket, overlooking the lake, listening to the jet skis buzzing and watching the heat haze rippling and feeling pretty good as he ate his ice cream and looked around at all the good citizens going about their business. Two fewer grasping mouths, two more snouts removed from the trough of America, Chops thought. He opened the bag of pork rinds.
TWENTY-THREE
‘Sometimes in losing a battle, you find a way to win the war.’
Three days later the early afternoon found Frank driving west across Texas, along the 10, the coast road, the Gulf of Mexico shining flat and grey on his left, the Bob Dylan song much on his mind after he’d spent the previous night in a motel outside Mobile, having driven nine hours straight up from Florida. ‘Oh, Mama …’
The last three days had not been pleasant. Perhaps it had been the rich meals he’d done his best to eat – the lamb at the Schmidts’ place, that steak in the clubhouse – or perhaps it was a delayed reaction to all that he’d been through in the previous week or so, what with killing six people now (officially making him a serial killer, he’d realised with grim satisfaction), or maybe it was just the progress of the disease. Or a combination of all these things. Whatever the reason, straight after he got back to the condo from the golf game, he’d pretty much spent forty-eight hours in bed, weak as a kitten, only managing to eat a little soup and drink some weak tea. He’d had to punch another hole in his belt. There was one upside to this time: in three days of watching TV he remained unconnected to the killings.
Up ahead, on his right, outside of Corpus Christi, glinting under the Texan sun, he saw it, the first one he’d seen in real life, not just on TV. He pulled over onto the verge and got out the car to look at it, maybe half a mile away, down a long drive. Like many of the others it was a former branch of SupraMart, just off the interstate. The exterior of the huge metal shell was still painted the same drab brown as a regular SupraMart, but there the similarities ended. This one had no signs for special offers in the windows. Had, in fact, no windows at all, all of them having been blacked out. Chain-link fencing topped with razor wire surrounded the place, studded with signs warning ‘GOVERNMENT PROPERTY’ and ‘NO TRESPASSING’ and ‘ARMED RESPONSE’. In the distance he could see guards patrolling with dogs. The original building had been much extended and modified, with the former parking lot now mostly converted into overspill accommodation – hastily built wooden huts arranged in rows, a guard tower with machine guns and klieg lights at every corner. What was it they called them now? That was it – FRCs: Family Resettlement Centers.
They’d first sprung up back in 2018, during the first term, when they’d started arresting anyone trying to come in illegally. It had meant separating kids from their parents, and the media and the Democrats had gone bananas. Trump had almost abandoned it as a vote loser, especially among women, but he’d held the line – relentlessly insisting it that it was Obama who had started it all, who had built these terrible cages, and that he was just following the law. After his stunning re-election in 2020 FRCs were one of the first things they poured money into. New and improved. They no longer separated families of course, well, they did, but it had been refined. The new Homeland Security Secretary, Stephen Miller, had successfully argued that – given the scale they would now be doing this on, and the increasing amount of time people were being held for as the deportations backlog grew – it would be self-defeating to allow the sexes to mix in the new facilities: human nature being what it was they would soon be breeding more immigrants than they were sending back. And of course those new children wouldn’t even technically be immigrants as they would have been born here, creating further legal nightmares. So, families were sent to the same camps, but the women and children under fourteen were housed in one block and all the men were housed in another. After they turned fourteen, the boys joined their fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins in the men’s block while the girls remained with the women.
And what a scale they were doing this on now.
After the trade tariffs had begun to really bite, poverty – and its associates: drugs and violence – in South America had gone through the roof. The number of people trying to cross the border illegally had tripled. So now you had FRCs all along the southern border. Over a hundred of them had sprung up in the last few years, stretching from Brownsville in the east all the way to San Diego in the west, the average centre housing two thousand detainees, but the big supercentres, like the one Frank was looking at now, holding perhaps ten to fifteen thousand. (And what a boon it had been to SupraMart, whose ailing retail empire was on its knees after decades of Amazon. Huge government contracts were awarded. Dozens of supermarkets that had been teetering on the brink of collapse were repurposed for detainment.)
The inmates were there for anything from a couple of months to a few years, depending on the complexity of their case and the efficiency of the legal representation they could afford. It was tough to get official figures but it seemed likely that in 2026 at any given time the US was holding around half a million detainees. Inevitably, whole ancillary industries had sprung up around the camps: legal and medical, transportation to and from them, catering contracts, clothing, construction. And then the black markets that cluster anywhere large groups of people are held en masse: prostitution, gangs, drugs and child abuse. You could read articles online (about the only place left where you could find critical accounts of government policy) that detailed the abuses at some of the centres: the governor who was running an on-site brothel, open to locals. The children and babies who simply went missing, sold off to childless couples, or into slavery, or worse. The padded invoices paid to the private contractors who ran the places, often charging close to a thousand dollars a day to house a single inmate, a figure that suggested a five-star hotel, high-thread-count sheets and filet mignon. In reality: a bit of cement floor, foil blankets and bowls of rice. The billions (‘billions and billions of dollars’, Frank could still hear Trump saying in his head) that were getting siphoned off throughout the system, the kickbacks upon kickbacks. Of course, this stuff was all under the counter. Openly, above the counter, a large part of the cost of the centres was offset by the inmates own labours. They were made to work for their bed and board, sewing mailbags and so forth. Doing highway maintenance, cleaning and construction work. In his last months in office Trump had been trying to broker an ambitious synergistic deal whereby future Amazon warehouses would be sited next to the camps, with underground tunnels delivering the free labour straight from the prison to the shop floor: increasing profits for shareholders, slashing prices for consumers, everyone winning. There was even talk of a ‘Work to Remain’ programme, whereby, after so many years of free labour in the camps, you would have amassed enough credits to be considered for US citizenship. But the deal failed to get concluded before the end of Trump’s second term and it had not yet been revived by Ivanka, who, it was said, worried about the optics of profiting from slave labour more than her father had. Frank remembered a recent press trip she’d done, to a facility like one of these. It had obviously had a lot of money pumped into it for her visit and she was variously photographed walking along between neat rows of perfectly made-up bunk beds, beaming with delight at clean, toy-stocked kiddies’ play areas, and, in the shot that made most of the front pages, grinning in an apron as she
served soup to a smiling throng of children, all of them looking delighted to be meeting the president. It had looked a far cry from what Frank was looking at now. He could see people moving around in the distance, in a yard off to one side of the main building, a dusty square enclosed with razor wire, clearly some kind of exercise yard, containing hunched brown figures, shambling around in a circle.
On impulse he levelled his new iPhone at the huge, jerry-built monstrosity and snapped a photograph. He couldn’t read the ironwork sign over the entrance at this distance, but he knew what it said from newspaper articles: ‘Sometimes in losing a battle, you find a way to win the war’ – a Trump quote. As he slipped his phone back in his pocket his reverie was broken by the sudden yelp of a siren right behind him. He turned around to see a police cruiser pulling up behind his car and two Texas Highway Patrol men getting out.
They strolled towards Frank, their polished brown boots kicking up clouds of dust. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ the first trooper said, a small guy with a dark moustache, maybe in his early thirties. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’
‘I was just … I hadn’t seen one of these before. I’m on vacation.’
‘You know taking photographs of government installations is against the law?’ The other trooper stood behind the guy, staring at Frank. He was much bigger, over six foot, with a blond buzz cut. Both of them were expressionless behind mirrored Aviators.
‘No. I didn’t know that. How … how was I supposed to?’ Frank gestured around at the empty landscape.
‘There’s signs up ahead. At the entrance.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that.’
‘Licence and identification,’ the little moustache said.
‘But why?’
‘Excuse me?’ Moustache said. Frank saw his name badge now – Daniels.
‘Why do you –’
