by John Niven
Frank pressed a pillow to his face, put the gun to it to muffle the shot, and pulled the trigger.
He heard the screams and sobs from the bathroom, but he’d closed his eyes so he didn’t see the shovelful of blood and brains that was blasted up the bedspread and across the cheap wood panelling. He threw the gun in the trash can and walked out the door, taking his gloves off and pulling the beanie down over his forehead, covering as much of his face as he could.
There was no one in the parking lot. Frank crossed the street and made a right down an alleyway. In less than five minutes he was in his car and back on the interstate, heading south, heading back towards the Sunshine State.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Most of the debits are to do with love.’
‘I think it’s terrible. I think it’s a disgrace.’
Frank turned up the volume on the TV.
‘You see now, with the crime. Because we’ve got to get even tougher. And … he was a good man. I put him in there, you know that, right? I made that decision and then he, he made a great, a tremendous decision, a decision for this country that saved, well, who knows how many lives. Think of it – in the last five years, let alone the future. They say there were half a million, maybe more, maybe a lot more, but they say half a million babies were being murdered, in the womb, in this country, because the Democrats – and the Republicans too, you got to say that – they’d allowed it for so long. And I stopped it. And Judge Rockman played a part in that. A big part. So you got to give him credit. So it’s a terrible way for a great life to end, but I think history will remember him as a great, a tremendous conservative and a great thing, really, for this country.’ The wind whipped across the runway, the helicopter powering up in the background, sending the former president’s candyfloss wispy hair swirling around. The moment he stopped talking the reporters started shouting, like they’d been doing for more than a decade now.
‘Mr Trump!’
‘Sir!’
‘Former President Trump!’ one tried, going for respect, hoping to be picked. But Trump pointed at another guy.
‘Sir, what do you say to the allegations that former Justice Rockman was with two prostitutes when he died?’
‘I’m not going to comment on that. No, I’m not going to comment because these are just … sick rumours. Probably started by the left. Who knows, but probably. What I will say is that from what I know of Dennis Rockman – good Christian, good family man – I wouldn’t be surprised if these turn out to be just another sick, fake news attempt to smear a great man’s reputation. Because you saw, you remember, no, excuse me, you saw when we overturned Roe v Wade. They said, “Oooh, you’ll never overturn Roe v Wade. Too tough.” You know what – I got it done. They said, they still say, maybe no one else could have got it done. And the liberals and the Democrats and the fake news, all you guys went crazy. He, Justice Rockman, he got death threats, just the worst kind of things. Things you wouldn’t believe. The hatred. Sick. And so he was brave, a brave man to do it. As I was, by the way. I need to give myself some credit there because you guys never will. And I delivered on what I promised the American people. Unlike all the other presidents – except Ivanka, right? She’s doing great, isn’t she? I know some people say, “Ooh, she’s not as tough as her old man was,” but you know what? Give her a break. She’s learning. She’s learning. And you know what? It’s a steep curve, let me tell you. It’s – the things you’ve got to be on top of as president? No one knows. No one knows how tough it is, But, unlike all the others, I did what I said I was gonna do. More than any administration in history I think. But the point is, these rumours, I’d say to anyone printing them, anyone broadcasting them, be careful. Be very, very careful. Because, as you know, we toughened up the libel laws before I left office. We made it a lot harder for you guys –’ Trump pointed at the assembled press – ‘to just go and say whatever you want. So I think, right now, we focus on catching the killer, bringing him, or her, could be a her, who knows? Because the women, back when we made that decision, the women, some of them went a little crazy, right? So it could be a woman. But I think what’s important is that we focus on catching the killer and not on discussing these sick, fake news rumours. OK? Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. I’m heading down to Mar-a-Lago now, the winter White House we called it when I was president, I guess Ivanka still does. We’re looking forward to a great, a truly great season there. We’re fully booked all winter at Palm Beach, just solid. But if –’ he turned towards the nearest camera – ‘if you want the Trump winter experience, there’s Trump Miami Beach, which I just opened last year and it really is, just a tremendous, tremendous resort. OK. Thanks.’
A phalanx (another word never used anywhere but in the written context, the editor would have reflected) of Secret Service agents engulfed the hulking black shape and started leading him towards the helicopter. The CNN anchor’s face filled the screen. ‘And that was former President Trump, at Andrews Air Force Base earlier this morning, commenting on the news from Texas of the murder of former Supreme Court Justice Dennis Rockman. And the current president had this to say …’ Frank turned the sound down as it cut to Ivanka talking in the Rose Garden. He’d seen the clip already this morning.
He yawned and stretched out on the huge bed in the New Orleans Four Seasons. Maybe it was the aftertaste of Rockman, that terrible squalid motel, whatever the reason, last night, having driven ten hours south and east, Frank couldn’t face the usual set of cinder-block rooms off the highway, with the drained pool and the broken waterbeds and the locked phones in the rooms. He’d wanted to spend just one night in a nice hotel. So he’d taken the exit for New Orleans and checked in here, paying over seven hundred dollars for a deluxe room.
He sipped his coffee and looked out the window at the city, starting to come to life many floors below him, and thought about the last few weeks. Oklahoma, Vegas, Washington, Florida, Texas, now New Orleans … thousands of miles. He’d seen so much of the country and – so far – had gotten away with seven homicides in four states. Had he expected it to be more difficult? He’d been pretty sure he could get away with Hauser and Roberts, but the others …
Then again, there were some factors helping him.
There had been a record-breaking 29,456 firearm-related homicides in the USA in 2025, including forty-two mass shootings. Against this backdrop Frank’s little old seven-killings-in-four-different-states looked like what it was – a few random acts of completely normal, garden-variety violence. Also helping him, he reflected, sprawling there in the enormous bed high above the Big Easy, was the fact that law enforcement had been gutted on both local and national levels over the course of the last ten years. The FBI was a shell of its former self, half its field agents gone. The only law enforcement agency who had seen an upside to a decade of Trumpism was, of course, ICE, whose budgets had soared.
Meanwhile, in all the major conurbations, crime was up and police departments were struggling, stretched taut as razor wire. Interestingly, the public perception was still that the Republicans were the party of law and order and that, given the chance again after ten years in the wilderness, the Democrats would usher in an apocalypse, a carnival of crime. Why did people think this? Well, because, and despite all statistics to the contrary, the administration just kept saying it. Frank looked at the newspapers spread out on the bed – the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Orleans Sentinel – and counted seven different stories where leading members of the cabinet (Miller, Conway, Hannity and Gorka) trumpeted, without correction, misleading claims about crime statistics and Democrat policies. The few crime stories that were reported all focused on crimes by illegal immigrants. (Since the Freedom of the Press Act 2022, the act Trump had been referring to on the TV a moment ago, all of these papers were just state mouthpieces.) In a way, if you were white and American, the new climate was almost an open licence to commit crime.
But couldn’t people just look out their windows and see the truth? Not really. The o
nes who had benefited in recent years, the ones who had seen their tax bills halved, lived in gated communities, in private estates with private security forces they paid for themselves. Most of the bottom half of the population – the ones who lived with all the shootings and the rapes and the muggings and the burglary and the arson – genuinely believed that the government was trying to help them and would be able to do so just as soon as they got rid of all the law-breaking immigrants. Thinking about this, feeling that twitch and burrow in his lower bowels (that second cup of coffee definitely a bad idea) as whatever was killing him worked its way up there, Frank reflected again on how he was glad his time was almost up, that he wouldn’t be around to see where things went from here.
He looked back at the TV screen, where they had returned to Andrews, the helicopter, powering up, preparing to take off. Along the bottom of the screen, on the rolling news ticker, Frank saw the words ‘NRA INCREASES REWARD FOR BECKERMAN KILLER TO ONE MILLION DOLLARS’. He felt a strange rush of pride as he looked back at the helicopter containing the former president, taking off now, spiralling up into the cold Virginian air, where it hovered for a moment before its black nose dipped, like a beast scenting something, and it headed due south, seeking the sun, the warmth of Florida.
Frank checked out, and, in humbler fashion, did exactly the same thing.
The last leg of the journey, the drive from New Orleans back to Florida, the last long drive he would ever undertake, should have taken nine or ten hours but wound up taking fifteen. There were ICE roadblocks all along the coastal highway, where they were stopping traffic, checking documents, doing all the usual things. Since the US/Mexico land border had become a far harder crossing proposition, many refugees tried coming across the Gulf. They made the trip from the beaches of north-eastern Mexico, striking out in tiny boats, canoes, inflatables even, many dying, the lucky ones landing on the Texan coastline. At one of the roadblocks, just west of Pensacola, Frank saw a dark-skinned man arguing with the officers as they went to lead his friend away from his wife and children. One of the officers shoved the guy back towards his car. The guy shoved the officer back. Down he went in a flurry of billy clubs as four agents descended on him. Many people in the long line of cars got out to watch, some shouting ‘STOP! and ‘LEAVE HIM ALONE!’, others, many more, shouting ‘KICK HIS ASS!’ and, inevitably, ‘USA! USA!’ It only took a few seconds until the guy stopped moving, stopped twitching, and was carried – unconscious? dead? – to the wagon. Kids dangled their arms out of the windows of cars, filming the whole thing on their phones, their expressions dispassionate, uninterested. (And how, Frank wondered, will their kids feel about all this, twenty years, thirty years from now?) Already two officers were going down the traffic line confiscating phones, reciting the Extreme Patriot Act, words Frank was so familiar with now. They wouldn’t get all the phones of course and footage of the attack would show up in the usual places, to support the usual agendas. On CNN as an unprovoked attack on an innocent man, an indictment of the now nearly unlimited powers of ICE. On Fox as brave soldiers defending our freedom, responding to provocation by an illegal immigrant, most likely a member of the dreaded MS-13. On left-leaning websites as proof of a police state. On right-wing ones as proof of state vigilance. The left would believe what they were going to believe and the right would believe what they were going to believe and the people in the middle, the people caught in the churn, would throw their hands up and say – ‘How can you know anything any more?’
Frank Brill used to edit a newspaper.
He was glad he would soon be dead.
TWENTY-SIX
‘It’s gonna sting some …’
It was just after five o’clock the following morning – still pitch-dark – when Frank walked into the condo, exhausted, shaky and drained. Having eaten nothing on the last ten-hour stretch of the drive, he was clutching a paper McDonald’s bag containing two sausage-egg McMuffins and four hash browns, the only food he’d been able to get in town at this hour. He dropped his car keys in the fruit bowl by the door and reached for the lamp on the table next to it. Just as he reached the switch he smelled something, something fetid and ripe, booze and nicotine, as though someone had been having a party. He turned the lamp on.
‘Good morning,’ a voice said.
Frank screamed.
The man was sitting in the lounger by the window. He was big, really fat, and he was pointing a gun straight at Frank, a big, nickel-plated revolver of some kind. ‘Just sit down over there on the sofa, nice and easy,’ Chops said. ‘Keep holding on to that bag. Hands where I can see ’em.’
The room had been … destroyed.
All across the floor, on every available surface, there were fast-food cartons, bags of potato chips, beer cans, soft-drink cans, overflowing ashtrays.
Frank almost collapsed onto the sofa, his legs giving out from under him with shock.
‘I have money. In the safe,’ he croaked.
Chops looked at him, cocking his head a little to the left. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ he said. ‘I been here over a week. Ain’t really had time to prioritise the housekeeping, Frank.’
Frank waited.
‘I don’t want your money, Frank Brill,’ Chops went on. ‘Well, I’m going to get some money, but not yours.’
‘What … what …’
‘You killed my buddy, back in Oklahoma City. Coach Hauser. I been on your ass for weeks. Don’t you fucking lie to me now, or I swear to God –’
‘Yes,’ Frank said. ‘I killed him.’
‘Good. We’re establishing trust here, Frank.’ Chops sat forward, still not taking the gun off Frank. He had a few beers lined up in front of him on the coffee table and he popped one open, slurped. ‘And you killed them two faggots? Over in Vegas?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then Beckerman and those two fellas outside of DC?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was a bold one, Frank. And I’m guessing that this very morning –’ he pointed at the TV with the snub barrel of the gun – ‘you just came back from Texas having killed poor old Justice Rockman.’
Frank didn’t say anything.
‘See, the first couple, Oklahoma and Vegas, I figured them out myself. Good old-fashioned police work. On Beckerman, I had some help …’ Chops held up one of Frank’s files, the heavy manila folder. ‘These old files gonna go a long way to helping me prove who you are. And, I gotta say, Frank,’ Chops laughed, ‘number 5 on this list? You got some brass fucking balls, my friend. Hell, I was almost thinking about letting you go just to see how the fuck you was gonna pull that one off.’
‘You’re a policeman?’
‘At first I just wanted to catch the motherfucker who killed my friend. But then, well, you got interesting. Like a million dollars kind of interesting. I was just going to kill you when I found you, get you to confess and then shoot you in the head. But seeing as they’re going to fry you anyway, I figured – why not take you in? Then I get paid and I can come watch you wriggle in the ’lectric chair.’ Chops smiled. A terrible sight.
So this was how it ended, Frank thought. In the old days, the days of due process, he could probably have counted on dying in prison, the cancer doing its work long before he got to trial. Nowadays? With the Accelerated Justice Program? Oh well, he wouldn’t be facing the electric chair. Frank knew that. He tensed his legs. Any moment now he was going to lunge. Just attack this guy and – bingo – Death by Cop.
‘Now, Frank, don’t do anything stupid like trying to come at me and make me kill you.’ It was like the man was reading his mind. ‘I’ll just pop a couple in your legs and then you’ll be in agony for a while and then have to be on death row in a wheelchair.’ Frank eased back into the sofa. ‘There’s one thing.’ Chops reached into his pocket and took out a small, black plastic device. ‘I got to know, what’s the link with Roberts in Vegas, Frank? I’m guessing it had to do with your ex-wife? Marty, I get. He was fucking some young buddy of yours back in the day,
right?’
‘He raped my friend when he was just a kid.’
‘Hell.’ Chops waved his gun airily. ‘You got all worked up to kill a good man over that? Like we say back in Oklahoma, Frank – ‘old enough to pull ’em up, old enough to pull ’em down.’
He laughed at Frank’s set jaw, at his anger.
‘He killed himself,’ Frank said.
‘Yeah, like twenty years later?’ Chops said. ‘Lotta shit coulda happened since then. River of cum coulda gone up that boy since then.’
Frank clenched his fists.
‘Easy there, tiger,’ Chops said. ‘Don’t do nothing stupid. See, with the NRA guys and Rockman, and the big enchilada on your list here –’ he tapped the folder – ‘I’d have said you were some crazy libtard. Some left-winger looking to make a statement. But how do them faggots fit into that? Liberals ain’t going round killing no homos.’
‘Roberts ruined my ex-wi—’ Frank began.
‘Hold on there. I’m gonna need to record your confession here,’ Chops said, turning on the Dictaphone he’d brought out. ‘Might need it to back up this folder. Let’s hear the whole thing, start to finish.’
‘Can I have a glass of water please?’ Frank asked.
‘Nope, I ain’t getting up. But here …’ Chops tossed a beer onto the sofa next to Frank.
‘I can’t drink this.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I’m an alcoholic. I can’t drink beer.’
Chops gave a throaty chuckle, shaking his head. ‘Hell, son, you just get that beer down you. I wouldn’t be worrying too much about that “I’m an alcoholic” bullshit now. You’re gonna be dead soon enough.’ Frank sighed and set the beer down on the floor. ‘Besides,’ Chops went on, ‘there’s too much of this –’ he assumed a whiny liberal voice – ‘“I’m an alcoholic, I don’t eat meat.” We’re fucken Americans. We drink beer and eat cheeseburgers and if you don’t like it get the fuck out.’
