The F*ck-it List Page 13

  Frank waited for it.

  ‘Look, Frank.’ He lowered his voice and glanced towards the house, conspiratorially, as though he wanted to get this over with, man-to-man. ‘I don’t have to tell you how sorry we were to hear about Olivia. It’s just … crazy. After all that’s happened to you already. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, son.’ That ‘son’. Mr Schmidt, as he was back then, had been in his late thirties when Frank joined the paper as a teenager. Frank nodded along. It was surreal, being with people. Making conversation. He did it so very rarely nowadays. He took a deep draught of the coke. Maybe he should have had a drink. He fished in his pocket for the penguin, but he’d left it in his other pants.

  ‘It’s been tough,’ Frank said. ‘But it’s been three years now. Time helps.’

  ‘Of course.’

  They sipped their drinks.

  ‘And you’re staying at the condo?’ Frank nodded. ‘How long are you here for?’

  ‘A couple of weeks. Getting so cold back home now. You’ll remember that …’

  ‘I sure do.’ Brock shuddered. ‘You should stay longer. You’re retired now. We can play some golf. Been a long time since the two of us had a round.’

  It had come up so quickly. Frank had thought he might have had to work the conversation around to it. Now he might even be able to get out of here early. Fake a headache, or exhaustion from the drive or something. ‘I’d like that,’ Frank said. ‘How’s your game?’

  ‘Hell, I’m struggling off the tee. You wait till you’re my age. Just no power left, Frank. Can’t get through the ball like I used to.’ Brock mimed the rotation. Frank remembered his swing from their time at the country club back home. In his day the old man used to hit a high, powerful draw.

  ‘Oh, I’m the same,’ Frank said. ‘Played with some kids at the club back in the summer,’ he lied. ‘The distance they hit the damn ball. 310. 320.’

  ‘I know, it’s crazy, right?’

  ‘Hitting five-irons over two hundred yards.’

  ‘That was a decent drive back when I started playing!’ Brock said. ‘You know, I was watching this kid on TV recently. He’s got something like 250 to carry, so …’

  Brock talked on as he poured himself more wine and Frank relaxed. They were men now, men on the safe, hallowed ground of sport, where all the talk was of yardages, statistics, form, technique. Where it was all facts. And facts, as @AmericanWarlord666 had delighted in telling Frank, didn’t care about his feelings. Which suited him. Finally, Frank said, ‘So, how about tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow … tomorrow …’ Brock said, thinking. He probably already had plans, but Frank was gambling that a combination of factors – the fact that they hadn’t seen each other in years, that Frank had been through such unimaginable pain – would pull in his favour.

  ‘Is it difficult to get in?’ Frank asked. ‘With all the security, I mean?’

  ‘Nah, it’s fine. They’re not in residence at the moment.’ Frank already knew this, from his research. They were in El Paso, for some wall extension ceremony. ‘It’s a whole other story when they are there though. You get your car searched, your golf bag X-rayed, the whole nine yards. Even the members.’

  ‘Wow.’ Although Frank knew this too, from his research.

  ‘Well, you can’t be too careful these days. Christ, look what happened in Fairfax the other day …’

  ‘Yeah, I saw that …’

  ‘You know what – I can move a couple of things around. Have to be the afternoon though.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ Frank said. ‘My schedule is … light.’

  ‘Right, you’re on. I’ll see if I can get us out around one o’clock, OK? Meet you at the club at twelve and we can have a coffee?’

  ‘Great, thanks, Brock.’

  Cynthia appeared, heavily made up and having changed into a billowing white dress, saying, ‘Let’s eat, boys,’ and they moved over to the table.

  Their maid served the food Cynthia had prepared and Frank let the nice old couple talk at him – of grandchildren and vacations and helping the kids out with mortgage deposits and interest rates and school fees and what Ivanka wore to the opening ceremony for the new stretch of wall and how, yes, Vice President Hannity said some really awful things but his bark was worse than his bite and if they didn’t want to live in cages they shouldn’t try and come into the country illegally and everyone knew but lord Cyn found it hard to watch the footage of those little kids all locked up – while he managed to chew his way through the fat, juicy shrimp and shredded lettuce and then the rare lamb cutlets with lima beans and fondant potatoes, the hosts moving from Sancerre to a Cabernet, and finally to a Sauterne with the Key lime pie (Frank staying with the soda and then coffee, thinking often of his little penguin), and then he was hugging them and saying what a wonderful evening he’d had and that he’d see Brock at the golf course the next day and he’d hopefully see Cynthia real soon and then he was in his car waving as he crunched back out of the gravel drive.

  TWENTY

  ‘Taking dinner home for the family?’

  Chops packing, fast.

  Two days in Fairfax, Virginia, had got him nowhere. His out-of-state credentials cut no ice up here. The local cops were reluctant to share anything, even in the way of gossip. He’d hung around, talking to some of the NRA supporters, kindred spirits. There were hundreds of them, mounting a vigil outside the headquarters, just along the road from the restaurant where it happened. The restaurant itself was still a major crime scene, but Chops had been able to walk around the nearby streets and get a feel for how Brill had done it. He’d locked the front door, gone out the back way. The back door of the restaurant opened onto an alleyway that gave out onto a residential street. It was a dead end to the right, opened onto a main road to the left. He’d have left his car there. Down the alleyway, boom, in and off in two minutes. No CCTV cameras on that part of the main road either. Just that one grainy, distant shot of Brill entering the place. Chops hit the pavement, talking to store owners, householders and what have you. He hit the local landmarks, like the 49 Diner (where he’d tried one of their famous cheeseburgers. It was for shit. Somehow too … organic, too natural-tasting for Chops’s palate, accustomed as it was to the Colonel, Ronald and the Burger King), but … nothing. Local cops had already been around of course. No one saw anything. Knew anything.

  For an amateur this guy came and went like a fucking ghost.

  The file was a bust too – no leads on where he might be headed next. Chops had only one card to play but it seemed like such a long shot it wasn’t even worth bothering with.

  On his second night, last night, Chops had been about ready to throw the towel in. This was deep, multi-state shit now. All that mattered was getting the guy. Fuck it – he was going to go to the FBI and tell them everything he knew, starting with Hauser and then the fags in Vegas, how Chops had put them together.

  When it came to Beckerman, well, he was going to have to bullshit there. He could just about play the ‘rogue cop following a hunch’ card up to and including his visit to the Vegas SupraMart, but, after that … breaking and entering a private citizen’s home? Logging into their credit card account? Stealing their papers? Yeah, that wouldn’t fly. He’d call Donnie Chong in the morning, the Chink he knew over at FBI field office in Oklahoma City.

  And that had been Chops’s plan last night, as he sat in front of the TV in his motel room, working his way through a ten-piece bucket, four fries, beans, gravy and a quart of Coke. (‘Taking dinner home for the family?’ the coloured girl working the drive-through had asked him, cheerfully. ‘Nope. Just me,’ Chops had said with pride, thinking ‘mind your fucking business, bitch’.)

  It had been his plan right up until he turned up the volume on the TV as the anchor on Fox had said – ‘And the National Rifle Association 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 …’


  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Looks like you pushed it a little …’

  Frank was at the golf club at the appointed hour the next day, pulling up the long driveway a little after noon. He let out a whistle as it all spooled out in front of him.

  Trump International, West Palm Beach.

  His name was down on the visitors list and the security guard waved him on into the parking lot where Brock was already waiting for him. Before he was even out of the car two valets descended on him – one taking his golf bag towards the cart, the other handing him a ticket and parking the car itself, looking at Frank’s Camry as though it was a skateboard or a kid’s tricycle, here among the Lexuses, the Range Rovers and the Benzes. ‘Afternoon, Frank!’ Brock said.

  ‘Boy, they take care of you here, don’t they?’

  ‘Sure do,’ Brock said, putting a tanned arm around him, leading him towards the clubhouse, lowering his voice as he went on, ‘Mind you, with these membership fees, right?’

  Frank whistled. ‘Far cry from old Schilling Country Club …’

  ‘It sure is, son. Nicer weather in November too, huh? Now come on, we got half an hour or so, we’ll grab some coffee, I’ll show you the locker room …’

  By the time they were in the cart – the cart itself a kind of mini-limo, with GPS, tinted windshield and an icebox packed with frosty sodas and beers – Frank was stupefied with opulence. Everything, from the thickness of the hand towels (rolled, not folded) to the glassware and flatware, from the carpeting to the complimentary markers, tees and balls you were given, screamed here is money. Frank watched as Brock said hello to fellow members, introduced him to some of them, these retired bankers, doctors, dentists and construction magnates, all seeing out their days under the Florida sun, all of them paying the $150,000 joining fee, then another forty-odd thousand a year in dues, all so they could relish the fading of their lives in this glorious place, this fortress of furious solvency, at what they surely saw as the most glorious time in American history – all of them now paying something like 15 per cent in taxes.

  ‘Take it away,’ Brock said, gesturing to the first tee – a long par four, with a creek winding all the way along the right-hand side, thick trees and rough in there too. Frank stepped up, lined up the shot and took a few preparatory waggles, before, to no one’s surprise more than his own, he striped it 260 yards straight down the middle. ‘Hey!’ Brock said. ‘Easy there, son! You know, maybe you should be giving me a few shots here …’

  They rode through the greenery in the cart. Brock lit up a Cohiba and talked about the club. About how the second tee box was built over the nuclear fallout shelter the original owners had built during the Korean War. About the new tee box they’d put in at 14, adding thirty yards to the hole. About his buddy Van Peters, whose eight-iron at the par three fourteenth had been so close to a hole in one the other week, it had just lipped out. And about the former president. His last visit. His next visit, a couple of weeks from now. About how he could still shoot his age at eighty. (Although questions remained about his sporting conduct, the fact that he routinely gave himself putts that would have troubled a pro, an inability to count penalty strokes, to count past five in fact.) How he worked the patio, the dining room and the course, happy to talk to anyone. About how some of the members would grouse to him about Ivanka, with her touchy-feely policies, her softening up on ICE and the border. Reuniting these goddamned filthy immigrant kids with their parents. It was funny, Frank often thought, take some men of a certain generation away from their wives, put them in the men-only several-hundred-acre green bar room of the golf course, and something happened to them. They felt free to be themselves, or at least a version of themselves they couldn’t be at home, in polite company.

  Damn gubernmint … finish the wall … damn scavengers … send ’em all back, look after our own …

  After a while, even though he was playing well, just four over par and three holes up in their match play competition, Frank began to feel ill. Not just the daily ill he felt from the cancer washing through his body, from the pills he was taking, no, this was something else. He felt ill from the amount of this type of stuff he’d listened to in a lifetime playing golf on American courses. The type of stuff he himself used to say.

  America First … damn UN … you look at what Pootin did for his country, they were wiping their asses barehanded … damn Democrats … yeah, right, could use some of that global warming … a holocaust of the unborn is what they want.

  It was only when Brock said this last sentence (in relation to the Democrats repeated attempts to reverse the overturning of Roe v Wade – they’d foolishly thought for a moment they might have found an ally in Ivanka), as they drove towards the ninth tee, that Frank nearly spoke up. Nearly told Brock of the story of his only daughter dying in a motel room, having travelled hundreds of miles alone to have an unlicensed abortion. (And what use, the editor in Frank wondered, was that ‘unlicensed’ these days? All abortions were unlicensed now.) But he just smiled weakly. He still needed Brock. For the last part. The hardest. And here, at the next hole, was where he had to do his thing.

  He’d studied the course. The ninth seemed perfect.

  From his long hours staring at Google Earth, at the course guides and scorecards he’d printed off the internet, Frank already knew the hole well. A par five, just under five hundred yards, with palm trees and shrubbery along the right-hand side of the fairway. All golfers over a certain level of ability have a shot they can usually hit on demand and for Frank this was a high fade, moving from left to right, a shot that, if he exaggerated it correctly, would whale way off to the right, becoming a push, then a slice. He’d won the last hole (‘You’re killing me here,’ Brock had said) so it was his honour.

  Frank set the ball up forward in his stance, opened the club face up a little, and took the driver well outside the line on the takeaway. The slightest pause at the top of his backswing and then he unloaded. Frank watched the ball rocket off, high on a straight line, but then arcing right, farther right and farther right, clattering into the palms, into the bushes. ‘Ah shit,’ he said.

  ‘Damn,’ Brock said, secretly pleased. ‘Looks like you pushed it a little …’

  But now, for it to work, Frank needed Brock to find the fairway. As the old man lined up his drive, Frank was more nervous than he had been for some time on a golf course, probably since he sunk that five-foot putt to win the club championship, years ago, when his son was a toddler.

  Your wife and your son waiting for you at home. You’d got back to Pippa chopping vegetables for a stew and you’d told them, ‘The hell with it, we’re going out for a steak dinner!’ You hadn’t known then that that was as good as life got. That it would never get that good again.

  Brock brought the driver back. Frank closed his eyes until he heard the metallic tang of a good connection. He opened them to see his partner not watching his shot, just swiftly and nonchalantly picking up his tee, as amateur golfers did after they knew they’d hit a good drive, because it was what they saw the pros do on TV. The pros only kept a careful eye on the bad drives. But, unlike the pros, most amateurs couldn’t help pausing and turning back to enjoy an eyeful of the rare sight of a well-struck bomb tracing straight down the fairway, as Brock did now. ‘You caught that one,’ Frank said.

  ‘Toed it some,’ Brock said bashfully as he got into the cart, Frank already in the driving seat.

  ‘You gonna go for the green?’ Frank asked, accelerating down the fairway.

  ‘Mmmm, reckon I’ve still got nearly 240 from there.’

  ‘Come on, Brock. No guts, no glory.’

  Brock laughed. ‘What the hell. Long time since I had an eagle putt …’

  ‘That’s the spirit. I’ll drop you off at your ball, you take what you need, and I’ll drive on up into the scrub and start looking for mine.’

  ‘You sure you don’t want a hand?’ Brock, already drooling at the prospect of getting a hole back.

  ‘Nah. It
went in pretty deep. If I can’t find it fast I’ll just concede the hole.’

  ‘OK …’

  Brock hopped out – taking his three-wood, his sand wedge and his putter – and Frank accelerated up the shallow hillside into the treeline, out of sight of his playing partner. He jumped out of the cart and looked around – making sure he was fully hidden by the dense foliage. He found a spot between a thick rhododendron bush and the trunk of a palm tree and scrabbled in his golf bag. Frank took out the two items he’d brought.

  A ziplocked plastic bag and a trowel.

  He dug into the earth next to the palm tree, quickly going down about a foot. From over on the fairway, about seventy or eighty yards to his left, he heard a ‘clang’ followed by a growled ‘goddamnit!’ He’d have to work fast. Having hit his shot Brock would be coming to help look for Frank’s. Frank dropped the plastic baggie into the hole and filled it in, smoothing over the earth with his foot then kicking some leaves and palm fronds over it. Using the trowel he scored an ‘X’ deep into the bark of the palm tree just as he heard twigs breaking underfoot and then Brock, quite close, saying, ‘Any luck?’

  Frank stepped around the tree, wiping his hands on his pants. ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Brock asked. Frank looked down, his hands filthy, loose earth on his clothes. ‘Oh, I fell getting out the cart back there. How’d you get on?’

  ‘Pulled it into the front-left bunker.’

  ‘Still your hole, I think,’ Frank said. ‘Can’t find mine.’

  ‘Wait,’ Brock said, walking off to his right, ‘what ball are you playing?’