by A. C. Fuller
Warren pointed at a sleek dark tower in the distance. “Wanna stay there? One of the nicer joints in Vegas.”
“Expensive?”
“Yeah, but I have a discount card. Used to come here a bit when I was in my dark period. Never gambled, but you’d cry if I told you how much I blew on coke there.”
Warren called and got them a room with two queen beds. “They have good restaurants. Quite a few, actually, and I need to eat. Was tempted to pre-order an entire cow, grilled burnt, and have it delivered to my room.”
Cole laughed. “How manly of you.”
“Speaking of ‘manly.’” Warren rolled down the window and pointed at a billboard: Jack’s Shooting Center.
The billboard advertised Vintage Firearms: Machine Guns, Tommy Guns, and Sniper Rifles, All at Affordable Prices.
“Ever shoot?” Warren asked.
She’d asked Matt to take her once, but he’d waved her off, telling her, “I’ve shot enough guns for this lifetime, your lifetime, and ten others.”
“Never,” Cole said.
“Not hunting? Nothing?”
“Never, and nothing.”
Warren tapped on the glass divider, getting the driver’s attention. “Take us to Jack’s Shooting Center, please.”
The driver shook his head in irritation. “We just missed the exit.”
“Can you take the next one?” Cole asked. “We’re tired and hungry, so it’s definitely the right time to play with lethal weapons.”
7
Jack’s Shooting Range was a wide, one-story building a few blocks from The Strip. The decor surprised Cole as she followed Warren through the glass door. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. Firearms lined the walls—everything from long rifles to handguns and, as the billboard promised, vintage weapons she’d only seen in movies. Red and green Christmas lights decorated the walls, along with white stars and snowflake cutouts. Behind the front desk, along with various warning signs and legal notices, hung a large poster of Santa Claus, pointing an AR-15 at a sketchy-looking dude in a ski mask who appeared to be robbing his toy factory.
“Ho ho holster.” The man behind the desk greeted them wearing a Santa hat and a fake white beard. “Holster,” he repeated. “Ho ho holster.”
Cole humored him. “I’ve been good this year and I want a handgun for Christmas.”
After a couple minutes of back and forth, they signed forms and watched a ten-minute instructional video, despite Warren’s assurances that he was more than capable of skipping it. Store policy.
After the video, the clerk handed them heavy-duty earmuffs and goggles. “What are you looking to shoot?”
Cole had been hesitant at first, but her blood warmed at the thought of shooting. “Magnum,” she blurted without thinking.
The clerk looked at Warren, eyebrows raised.
“Don’t look at him,” Cole said. “It’s not up to him.”
“Magnum could break your wrist,” Warren said. “Not a good place to start. I can already see us waiting in urgent care tomorrow morning.”
“You don’t think I can handle it because I’m a woman.”
Warren leaned in, stern but not angry. “Trained my two brothers to shoot last time I visited Oakland. Together they are four hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle. They didn’t start with magnums.”
“Fine,” she sighed, pointing at a 1928 Tommy gun on the wall. Its circular bullet holder reminded her of old mob movies. “How about that thing?”
“How about a nice twenty-two?” Warren said. “Optic sight.”
She nodded. “Fine.”
“For you?” the clerk asked.
“Nothing for me. I’m going to help her get going. I’ve shot enough guns for this life. For ten lives.”
The man took a .22 from behind the counter and led them back to the shooting area. “Standard Ruger,” he said. “Ten rounds in the mag. Those are included. Extra mags are ten bucks each. Pick a target.” He waved at a row of paper targets that lined the wall. Cole picked a zombie target. Warren mounted it and pulled a lever that moved it about twenty feet back in the shooting alley.
“Eye and ear protection first,” he said. “They on tight?”
Cole nodded.
“Like the video said, keep the gun pointed down and away from people. Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Posture. The key is, don’t lean back.” He took her hips and moved them back slightly, then adjusted her back so she had a slight forward lean. “Keep your collar bone in front of your waist. Keep the red dot on the target until well after you pull the trigger. When you pull the trigger, you want a smooth, steady motion. You won’t need to press hard.”
Cole picked up the gun, flicked off the safety, and aimed. A red dot appeared on the chest of the zombie. The optic scope. Was it really that easy? She set the gun down and pulled the cord, making the zombie recede another twenty feet.
Warren put a hand on her shoulder, firm but not pushing. He lifted the earmuff off her left ear. “Just to steady you.” He was letting her know he was there, that he wasn’t afraid, and she shouldn’t be, either. She picked up the gun, aimed, closed her left eye, and fired once. She’d been tensing her shoulders, and the recoil was less than she expected. She fired again, then a third time, and a fourth.
She set down the weapon, took off the earmuffs, and pulled in the target.
“Not bad,” Warren said.
She’d hit the zombie once in the chest, once in the head, and twice in the stomach. “Well, I was aiming for the head all four times, so…”
“Seriously, good job.”
She took off the safety goggles. “You want a turn?”
He shook his head. “While you were shooting, I was thinking. Ana Diaz was involved in drugs—running them and also financing operations for others. Working the legal, respectable side and the overtly criminal side at the same time. Sunny Lee is similar. Finance. Organized crime.”
“So what are you thinking?”
Warren walked a little square, eyebrows twitching pensively. Two young men took shooting positions a few rows down from them and began firing. The shots echoed in the space, but not loudly enough to make Cole put the earmuffs back on.
Warren stopped pacing. “I miss my car.”
“That’s not what I expected. Thought you were about to pull a Gill on me. Bust out a whole elaborate conspiracy theory.”
“That’s just it. Damn well right this is a conspiracy, but I don’t have a theory.” He shook his head and grimaced. “I can’t believe they managed to lose the NVM guys. How is that even possible?”
“How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know. Somehow, all these people are gonna turn out to be connected, and it’s gonna be ugly. Makes me wish I was back in New York. Job or no job, suspended or not, I could be driving Marina to the park in Blue Lightning. I was supposed to see her last week. You know, when we left for D.C., Sarah didn’t even call to ask where I was. When I was drinking, using, I’d miss my days with Marina and, at some point, Sarah stopped following up. Probably thinks I’m back on the sauce. I should be home, taking her to see the tree at Rockefeller Center.” He sighed. “I don’t know.”
Cole put a hand on his arm. “I get it. I do. You’ll be home soon. And if you help me crack this thing, that’s gonna go a long way to getting your life back.”
“Maybe.”
The crack crack crack of an M-16 about ten feet away startled her. It was hard not to view gunfire as a threat. “You know what I’ve been thinking? What if all the targets aren’t connected in any real way, just connected in the warped minds of the killers.”
Warren frowned. “Then we have an even worse chance of figuring it out.”
Cole put the goggles and earmuffs back on and emptied the clip into the zombie target. Six more shots. When she pulled back the target, she’d hit various places, including three in the center of the forehead. She tugged at Warren’s sleeve. “You sure you don’t want to shoot?
Might cheer you up. I’ll buy the bullets.”
Warren turned and walked away. Something about his look told her not to follow. He wouldn’t just leave her there, she told herself. He’d said he didn’t want to shoot, but maybe he’d changed his mind. Then it hit her. He’d said it in almost the same way Matt had. I’ve shot enough guns for this life. For ten lifetimes.
She turned back to the firing range and tried to read the techniques of the other shooters. She doubted she’d ever shoot a gun again, but found it interesting anyway.
Warren returned carrying a rifle. Long and matte black, it had a large scope mounted above the chamber. It looked like the weapon she and Warren had found on the hotel bed in D.C. Wordlessly, he locked in a paper target—a generic-looking man in a ski-mask—and moved it as far back in the shooting alley as it would go, roughly a hundred yards. He loaded the weapon and rested the tripod legs on the counter, then donned his goggles and earmuffs and leaned in.
Cole put on her earmuffs and watched from behind, mesmerized. His shoulders dropped and his whole body went still. He fired a single shot. A crack exploded from the weapon, but she didn’t see the shot.
Warren took off his goggles and earmuffs, then retrieved the target. The shot had left a hole the size of a quarter in the target. Right in the center of the man’s head.
Cole looked at him. “Is that a fifty caliber rifle?”
Warren nodded.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We need dinner. Tomorrow I’ll try to find out what happened to your car.”
8
They checked into the hotel—a modern black tower on the north end of The Strip—and ate a fancy but joyless dinner at a steakhouse off the lobby. Warren had turned cold at the shooting range. The loss of the NVM members had hit him hard. He prided himself on doing the right thing and he defended law enforcement whenever they argued. He’d been in the right place at the right time, had caught The Truffle Pig, then caught his killers. He’d passed them over to the correct law enforcement agencies, and they’d blown it. Cole didn’t know how much of his sourness to attribute to this, and how much to the fact that he missed his daughter, but she didn’t take it personally.
After dinner, they took the elevator to their room and got ready for bed.
Checking her phone one last time while sliding under the covers, she had a notification from the Signal app, a message from her former rival at The New York Times. She’d expected him to do his due diligence, figured it would take a day to get out a story on the photo. But his response took her by surprise.
I was unable to get a second source to confirm the map. No one at the storage facility would talk, and no one in law enforcement would confirm its existence. I trust that you’re not trying to screw me, so I shared it with the FBI. But the Times won’t be running anything.
She read the message twice, then read it aloud to Warren, who sat on the side of the bed, detaching his leg and stowing it under the pillow. “You think he’s part of the coverup?”
“Are you serious?” Cole asked, rolling her eyes.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Cole walked to the window and stared out at the traffic on The Strip, thirty stories below. “You know how the public is so quick to assume evil intentions with police? Same is true of journalists. I don’t agree with his decision, but this is no cover-up. It’s journalistic standards at work. He probably fought like hell with his boss to get them to publish the map. But he’s not gonna tell me that.”
“What are you gonna do?” Warren asked.
Cole paced and clenched her fists, but said nothing.
“Seriously, Cole. You’re worrying me.”
She was sick of dancing around, waiting, wondering. Half a dozen times in her career, she’d been forced to hold or bury a major news story because she didn’t have enough sources, or because her boss told her she didn’t.
A key piece of evidence wasn’t out there. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was running with the story. Every cable news show was wall-to-wall with “experts” offering all sorts of wild speculation. On Twitter, everyone had an equal shot at shaping the narrative. An amateur journalist with three followers had a voice just like Cole, who had half a million. A lunatic’s opinion—if retweeted enough—had as much weight as the President’s. The world had gone crazy, as far as she was concerned, but Matt had always told her to see the world as it was, not as she wished it to be.
She stopped pacing and smiled. “You don’t want any piece of what I’m about to do. But check the Internet in ten minutes and you’ll know.”
“Where on the Internet?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She walked to the door. “It’ll be absolutely everywhere.”
Cole took the elevator to the business center on the second floor and logged onto a computer. Next, she created a new email address through Gmail and created a new Twitter account using the new email address. Kids and criminals called fake accounts “Burners,” and used them for all sorts of reasons. Celebrities used them to try to shape their public narratives or respond to journalists anonymously. Kids used them to track girlfriends and boyfriends without being seen as stalkers. She was going to use her burner account to leak the most important photograph in the world.
She hadn’t been on Twitter in twenty-four hours, and the first thing she saw surprised her, though it shouldn’t have. The assassinations were trending under two different hashtags. The first was general news and opinion and used the name the media was running with: #9Murders. They’d taken the promise of the manifesto and turned it into a branded crime. Just as the killers wanted, she imagined.
The next hashtag—#9MurdersTheories—contained theory after theory related to the killings. The story was the biggest in years, and everyone had an opinion.
A buzzing sound came from the corner, startling her. She whirled in her chair. Just the cooler of a drink machine in the corner switching on. She took a few deep breaths. Relaxing into the chair, she locked onto the screen like it was a subject she was trying to read. She was going to do this. The photo was a burden she had to release.
For the next hour, she followed every journalist she could think of, then every news organization, then every celebrity. By the time she was finished, she’d followed over a thousand accounts. Only three had followed her back. But Twitter’s algorithms were designed to show the tweets of new accounts to people who might be interested. And the hashtags alone would get her tweet a lot of visibility.
She considered adding a profile picture to her account, but decided against it. As much as she loathed Twitter, there was something cool about designing a viral tweet from an account with a generic avatar.
After a few moments of consideration, she composed her tweet:
@Ambani_Meyers_Diaz_Truther: The attached image is real. It was taken in the storage unit of Michael Wragg one week ago. The NYPD and FBI have this photo. They’ve chosen not to release it. #9Murders #9MurdersTheories #9Murders9Cities #9Murders9CitiesTheories
She hoped her two additional hashtags would create new worldwide trends. She emailed the photo from her phone to her new email address, then attached it to the Tweet. Finally, she made sure that location detection was turned off so no one would be able to see where the tweet had originated.
She looked nervously around the business center, then closed her eyes and pressed “Send.”
Needing something to distract herself, she turned to another task—her promise to Warren. It took her half an hour to find every tow company and impound lot in Arlington, Virginia, where she and Warren had left his beloved Blue Lightning. All were closed, but she’d make calls the next day. She printed the list of names and numbers, then checked back on her photo.
It already had 13,000 views, plus a few dozen retweets and a handful of replies. She checked the retweets, most of which were from accounts with few followers. But the most recent retweet was from Danny Chubb, a former child actor who now hosted a conservative politics podcast.
His retweet came
with a comment.
@Danny_Chubb_TruthEagle: Haven’t confirmed this yet, but it would be just like the liberal NYPD and FBI to cover this up.
From there, his conservative and liberal followers began arguing in the replies. And then the retweets blew up. A few real journalists sent it out, then actors and even some athletes. Within an hour, the photo itself had begun trending under its own hashtag: #9Murders9CitiesPhoto.
No one knew for sure if it was real, but everyone was talking about it. Cable news would pick it up soon—they’d have to—and the FBI and the NYPD would be forced to make statements. There was no telling what would happen then, but she’d done all she could.
9
Sunday
Warren woke early, attached his leg, and took a few quiet steps around the hotel room. He’d fallen asleep while Cole was at the business center. He remembered her promise that he’d see what she’d done if he checked the Internet, but he couldn’t stand the thought of going online.
His mood had lifted overnight. He was still furious at the FBI for losing the NVM members, but instead of stewing, he’d made other plans.
He slid into his jeans and black button-down, put on his leather jacket, and slipped out of the room without waking Cole. Something had bothered him since soon after The Truffle Pig was shot. It made sense that whoever had hired The Truffle Pig to kill Alvin Meyers and Ana Diaz would want him dead. If he was caught, he could bring down the whole operation. But what didn’t make sense was why the New Vegas Mafia would have anything to do with it in the first place. He was no expert in their beliefs or tactics, but the massive, ideological battle promised by the manifesto didn’t connect with the NVM business plan. NVM was about one thing: money. So why would they take part in an elaborate international plan to kill political and business leaders? It was possible they’d been hired by whoever was ultimately behind the plot. Possible they’d hired The Truffle Pig, then taken him out, for a fee. A sort of middleman for world terror. But then why would Sunny Lee herself—the head of NVM—be the next target?
