I Kill Rich People: New Edition Released 11/27/14

by Mike Bogin

  A canvas wallet fell from his front pocket as Ben rose out the sand trap. His spindly legs did their best to carry him away. One shoe slipped off. Running police were closing the gap. He saw their faces clearly, their determined grimness, their mouths biting air. Ben’s sleeping bag dragged behind him, leaving a three-foot trail across the grass. It gained weight as the dew soaked in, but he would not let it go. The only hiding place he could see was a low-roofed sheet metal tool shed. He made it inside and closed himself into the dark space before the police cars and policemen afoot were upon him. The shed smelled strongly of gasoline cans and grass cuttings. Ben felt his way in the dark around a riding mower in the center of the shed and picked a path past sharpened tools and pesticide canisters. His sock caught on a hedge clipper, tearing into the flesh along the side of his right foot. He had to leave hold of his sleeping bag as it also snagged. People outside were yelling.

  Feeling his way into the back corner of the shed, Ben lowered himself into a narrow gap between the metal wall and plastic fertilizer bags. The shed door opened, flooding light inside the shed. “Close it!” somebody shouted. “Wait for SWAT!” Again, the shed went dark, except that now Ben could see pinholes of light coming through rusted seams where the walls met the roof. The crackled chatter of voices coming over radios, voices out of mouths he could not see using numbers he did not understand. His hands were bleeding, nicked in the darkness all along his palms. He sucked the blood from his right palm and reached down his side. He still had his knife.

  The ground rumbled. He felt the ground shake as a huge machine came in fast and braked outside. Instantly, there were the sounds of metal doors slamming open and of heavy forms thumped onto the grass. Ben grabbed his knife and held it tightly with the blade pointed down from his fist.

  The shed door opened a second time, revealing a wall of black metal shields, each fitted with a narrow Plexiglas window. Black helmets. Black boots with shin guards. M-16s. “Knife!” Every other voice echoed together, “Knife!”

  The black shields parted, the gap filled instantly by a huge form that raised something in front of it. Ben dropped out of the light and balled himself lower behind the stacked fertilizer bags. His knees slid out from under him on the gas-soaked plywood floor as Taser darts slapped against the plastic bags. For a moment, the door closed and the shed went dark again. Ben raised himself so that his elbows rested atop the bags. The door then snapped open and shut just as quickly.

  Ben felt the boom more than he heard it. His eyes roasted from the lightning bolt that felt like it was crashing through his insides. His knife had fallen, but Ben had no cognition of that. His bloody palms reached up involuntarily, pressing against the pounding inside his eardrums. There was a second explosion, this one hot and terrible, instantly searing. Final. The flash grenades had reached fumes coming from gallons of gasoline, pesticides, and paint thinner. Nine Montclair police officers were blown off their feet into the fairway as the flammable liquids exploded into a fireball that obliterated the shed. The debris field reached as far as the seventh green, eighty yards away.

  * * * * *

  Mrs. Khan was incensed that her husband, Dr. Sayed Khan, had refused to close his clinics even for the day. With her cousins and friends seated at her feet urging and cajoling her, she agreed to narrate her “too, too terrible” story of survival that was growing more heroic as versions iterated throughout the day. Of course, she agreed to be interviewed multiple times. “It is simply my duty to get the story right,” she said.

  News footage displayed the burnt remains of a once-green and yellow riding mower; the shed had been blown off its floor and was now a metal heap collapsed on its side seven feet away. Tools and parts of tools lay charred and shattered across a twenty-foot radius. Four of the injured Montclair PD were hospitalized for injuries sustained from the explosion and fire. One officer was burnt over 40 percent of his body. Another faced spinal cord injuries. The footer running headlines across the base of television screens repeated “I Kill Rich People” on a continuous loop as a helicopter cameraman filmed the black plastic body bag containing Ben’s charred corpse being loaded into a morgue ambulance.

  The picture shifted to a news anchor. “Just in, we are getting identification information on the dead suspect who was killed during a confrontation with police forces. He is Phillip Benjamin Cooke, 44, an armed forces veteran who had multiple run-ins with law enforcement.” The photo on display showed an unwashed, long-haired, bedraggled man. “Police in Montclair report that Cooke had been caught after what appears to be a failed attempt at a further attack.”

  The anchor raised her eyes to the camera. “I’m sure we’ll all be feeling a level of relief,” she confirmed, putting down the papers in her hand and pressing her lips together to offer a reassuring nod.

  * * * * *

  Emerson Elliot thought it was crap from the first minute. Like anyone goes to Montclair looking for the mega-rich. Elliot called the Montclair PD a “bunch of stupid shitheels” on the air, which Crazy Thumbs quickly purged on tape-delay. How did anyone believe that this poor down-on-his-luck schmuck was Bullets?

  “Do you believe this?” EE demanded. “No fucking way this poor bastard is my Bullets for Billionaires. No way.”

  He watched the news footage again and again, stopping to make snide remarks about the assorted cousins and the intermittent parade of friends and acquaintances that were being filmed coming to visit the dentist’s house, each one making certain to be captured on camera.

  “Did you see the interviews with this Pakistani broad? Fuck me. She’s fucking thrilled, too, like she’s arrived,” he said. Then Elliot put on a mock Pakistani accent: “‘I’m the toast of Rawalpindi. I’m sniper-worthy!’

  “She was loving it. What a farce!” he yelled. “Like she’s ever going to be running with the private jet crowd! Get real, people!” EE both loved and was made half-nuts by the defining American optimism that made people still cling to the last fraying thread of hope that I’ll be rich too, someday.

  “You got fascist billionaires telling the country that Social Security is going bankrupt and nobody calls them on it! At least nobody with any reach. Is it just me and Bill Maher who call these guys out? Medicare, the most effective use of medical spending in the country, using just 2 percent for administration costs, yet we have politicians wanting to move it into the hands of private insurance that burns through 40 percent for administration, denies claims, and cuts benefits. They raise premiums at ten times the rate of current inflation. What, are we going to mint billionaires out of this country’s medical needs?”

  Crazy Thumbs looked on helplessly while Elliot went off again. Telling sponsors to fuck themselves. They were supposed to be doing shtick, but Elliot was tossing out good writing so he could sound like a bad Lenny Bruce imitator.

  Elliot demanded, “Why does Bullets need to be some maniac? Somebody needs to break the conversation wide open! That somebody is ME. You think the Democrats are going to be any answer? These guys can’t tie their shoelaces. What have they accomplished? NOTHING. You can’t get real reform out of Washington! Our greatest presidents would not even be electable today. FDR? No way! Hell, we’ll never see another Abraham Lincoln in this country.”

  No matter how often he banged his head against the wall, even Elliot wanted to believe that things would get better. But the whole system for making things better was hijacked.

  “Did you know that pretty much every Republican in Congress has had a pledge that says they won’t ever vote for tax increases?” he asked his listeners. “So, when you place a vote for Republicans, you’re voting for keeping the rich richer, voting for cutting back social security, voting for laying off the work force, for potholes, rusting bridges, all because not a single Republican can vote for taxing the rich without losing the support of the party. Maybe what’s surprising isn’t that one guy is ruining the rich boy’s fa
t cat parties, but that we aren’t getting out by the millions to take back this country.”

  Crazy Thumbs groaned. The runaway train he was supposedly producing—Emerson Elliot—had swept aside the whole day of scripted programming. He was still ad-libbing on a rant about the dentist’s wife.

  “Four police officers are in the hospital right now. I have to ask myself: For what? Who really cares about these rich buttheads? They steal the country blind, and police officers who can’t even afford to live in Manhattan are supposed to throw down to protect them? I don’t see why they’d even bother. I mean really, who is going to be worse off if there’s ten or twenty or fifty fewer billionaires?”

  Crazy Thumbs watched as EE worked himself into a fervor that would have suited an itinerant preacher. For the first time, it occurred to Thumbs that Emerson might get himself killed.

  “Guns, gays, and abortion,” Elliot shouted. “That’s how they keep everybody divided. You got to have your guns to shoot the gays and protect unwanted babies! Who can name a single Democrat who wants to take away the guns? Nobody can, but half the working people still pull the trigger to elect politicians who cut wages, cut benefits, and export jobs because rich assholes employ smart people to make any change seem terrifying. Isn’t that terrorism?”

  Did that dentist’s wife really think his Bullets would target her, was she that dumb? She barely scratched the top one percent, and pretty much anybody with the money to go to Disneyland and pay the bills every month was part of the top one percent nowadays.

  Crazy Thumbs waived Elliot’s interview guest into the studio in hopes that Elliot would move in another direction. Elliot waved to the young man and pointed for him to take a seat. Thumbs adjusted the guest’s headphones and mike.

  “Joe van Gaard is here with me in the studio,” Elliot began. “In case you didn’t see the papers, Joe is the soldier whose photograph made the front pages today after he was tased and pepper-gassed because he chained himself to a bench in front of the U.S. Army Recruitment Office on Avenue of the Americas. Scary stuff, Joe. You look good, considering.”

  “I’ve been through worse.”

  “The photos were déjà vu all over again, circa 1969. Why did you do it?”

  “Because I’m pissed off. Three and a half years ago I signed up at that office. I could have gone to college, but I put that off and went to Iraq instead so I could get my degree later with the money they promised I’d get. Now, instead of the $30,000 they promised, they’re telling me I can have $15,000 now or I can wait two years more to get the whole amount. You tell me—how can I get an engineering degree with $15,000? They were supposed to be forgiving student loans and now that evaporated, too!”

  “Maybe it’s a glitch,” Elliot suggested.

  “That’s what I thought. But lots of vets are facing the same BS. We did our part, why don’t they do theirs? Our government doesn’t break contracts with corporations, right? So why do they get to break contracts with American soldiers?”

  Elliot nodded. “Joe, this isn’t our government. It doesn’t matter what party has the upper hand, we just can’t get meaningful changes from the inside anymore. It’s of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich and it’s ruining this country. The insiders won’t change things when they make the laws! Not when they get multi-million dollar advances on books that never sell. They get the cushy stock deals. They leave office and become big-money lobbyists.”

  “Emerson, you know how much money just one of those rich people that got shot made last year?” Van Gaard asked. “Three billion dollars. He makes three billion while I’m out there dreaming of finding something that pays fifteen dollars an hour. Not just me. There’s hundreds of thousands of us vets hoping to land $30K jobs. That one person made 100,000 times the money that I’m hoping I can make. At fifteen bucks an hour, he’d be working two hundred million hours a year to get three billion dollars.”

  Emerson recognized great radio. He let Van Gaard do his own thing.

  “It’s not like people are bending over backwards to hire a sapper. You got some landmines to clear, I’m your guy,” Joe shouted into the microphone. “Man, we come home to no jobs, bad jobs, or screw jobs, like what I got.”

  Van Gaard knew that he wasn’t alone. “Soldiers are patriots. We’re not red states guys and blue states guys. We’re just Americans, OK. But every single American soldier on this planet, here or wherever we’re deployed, we all ought to call in sick for a day and send a message to the politicians. We’re giving more than anybody and we’re getting screwed.”

  Elliot’s voice became shrill. “Wow. Sounds like you want to unionize.”

  “I don’t care about that. I’m saying you can’t screw us and get away with it! There’s hundreds of thousands of us and we can screw right back!”

  “Whoa. That’s sounding like you’re talking revolution, Joe,” EE said. “Where are you going with this?”

  “I want my country back!”

  “Joe, have you seen the YouTube video that came out yesterday? You’re a regular kind of guy. I’m curious what you think of New York flying a delegation to Beijing to apologize for three Chinese getting killed. What do you think of New York’s Deputy Mayor asking in Chinese for their understanding and bowing, not just a nod, either, but right down from the waist and staying down?”

  “I didn’t see it,” Van Gaard responded. “No surprise. Chinese have the money, so politicians bow.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Owen and Tremaine drove directly to The Bunker. More than a hundred detectives in total were gathered there for the first time since the July 4th attack. Bringing the full force under one roof brought the collective noise and energy that made the room feel renewed and exciting, like a celebration. The esprit de corps was electric. New support staff, too. Even the rooms looked refreshed.

  While the Intel Division assembled, a slideshow looped on the big screen. Victim lists with photos. Aerial maps of Sands Point, Sag Harbor, Central Park West, Barrow and Taylor in the Upper East Side.

  “Cell phones on silent,” Dansk ordered. “We will be moving fast, gentlemen, women. Get those cobwebs gone right now. Nineteen days ago we were hit with the first of four terrorist events. As of today, and until further notice, this case is our singular priority. We find this shooter and we take him down.”

  Owen and Tremaine exchanged glances. So did partners throughout The Bunker. Intel Division’s tempo conveyed that they were flush again, fully-funded and ready to roll.

  “Until we have reason to believe otherwise, we are looking for a single shooter. We have a coward who hides himself and shoots unarmed civilians for reasons unknown. No explanation, no motive, no ransom demands of any kind. All that we do know is that this individual is terrorizing New York.”

  “What about I Kill Rich People?” Tremaine asked himself. Wasn’t that a reason?

  The next slides behind Dansk displayed images of the types of rifles the shooter had employed. “He has used multiple weapons,” Dansk continued, “which means that he has access to some weapons stash. He has practiced with each of these weapons; he uses all with proficiency. We know him to be six-feet to six-feet-two-inches tall, weight one-hundred-eighty to two-hundred-ten pounds, white or light-skinned, wearing size thirteen Nike cross-training footwear.”

  A mid-fifties, full-bird colonel, taut physique and sharp features, appeared on the screen. The colonel ran Harmony Church, where the Army molded the finest snipers on the planet. Owen was unaware that the FBI’s Major Gonzalez had taught under this colonel at the same U.S. Army Sniper School. Harmony Church was Gonzalez’s last post before he was offered the Bureau position and took his retirement from the army. Somebody had pulled serious strings to bring this colonel forward to brief them.

  The Harmony Church colonel did not introduce himself. In clipped language, he moved the focus straight to the shooter.
Distance, accuracy to target, firing speed was all documented from shootings on CP West. “This is a singular individual with superior intelligence, fitness levels in the top 0.1 percentile, finely-tuned vision, hearing, and motor skills. Skills in stealth, ingress and egress, a sharp mathematical mind able to adjust for significant angularity on descending shots executed upon a target series in darkness.”

  The colonel’s analysis continued by echoing the same clear admiration Major Gonzalez had revealed. “Six out of six shots at 250 yards, each in the kill zone, in 14 seconds. The shooter collected his casings, broke down his weapon, with scope, and made it across that rooftop without breaking stride. You don’t do that at speed unless you have done it before. There is only one way to get experience of that. The training weaponry employed in sniper school consists of six categories from small arms to fifty calibers, with primary field emphasis upon effective use of the M24 SWS, which also has a bolt action. Not just anyone can fire six rounds from a bolt-action weapon while maintaining constant visual contact with variable targets. To do that without ending up with your entire eye socket black and blue, a shooter needs to compensate for 3/8 inch relief from the scope. He does. In any other capacity within the ranks, the soldier executes mission plans developed by others. Good soldiers learn to adjust to the dictates of multi-variable scenarios. But only snipers run their own show. Once the sniper has been given an objective, the sniper is front and center from plan to execution. This shooter is schooled.”