The second bomber went after a Tennessee Republican state senator who’d voted down the Medicare expansion, despite his campaign promise to make sure that “every Tennessean who wants insurance will get insurance.”
The bomber was named Logan Lents, and his people had been in Tennessee since it became a state in 1796. Though his background was wealthy, he was broke—his parents had lost the family fortune when he was a boy and he’d been a scholarship case at TSU, where six generations of his ancestors had matriculated, and he’d been the president of Phi Beta Sigma, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been.
Logan Lents was the widower of Patricia Lents, another Tennessean of long and fallen lineage, whose uterine cancer was treatable (according to her OB/GYN) or not (according to Cigna’s insurance underwriters). Patricia lost a baby early in the cancer, which everyone secretly counted as a blessing, what with her illness and all, and when she died a year later, at the age of twenty-six, Logan had been shattered.
Logan bombed Senator William Blount’s office on a fine Saturday, after a day’s worth of constituency meetings during the spring recess. Logan was considerate enough to wait for all the voters and staffers who’d been there for the day’s business to clear out and only killed himself, the senator, and a Tennessee state trooper. Another trooper and a cleaner were maimed, but they survived.
The men of Dark Fuckriff declared it a “surgical” mission and praised its “clean” execution.
Logan’s video was really well done, eloquent in the way of someone from a fine old family who’d once talked his way into the presidency of an exclusive frat. He had that American Brahmin thing, like a southern Kennedy, and it was easy to forget that he was about to blow himself up along with anyone standing nearby to make his point, which was that health care was a human right and that evil men had conspired to take it away from many Americans, which meant that they would die.
*
The third bomber was DeathEater.
Joe and DeathEater had gotten into much more open hostilities in the weeks after Logan’s death. DeathEater had access to Fuckriff’s logs, so he could see how Joe was sending private messages to everyone DeathEater egged on, and, being the admin and all, he was able to read these messages and see that Joe had turned himself into a shoulder-angel to whisper antidotes to all of DeathEater’s poison.
DeathEater confronted him in a private chat that started out hot but cooled down quickly as DeathEater told his story—adult son dead of a metabolic disorder whose pharmaceutical therapy was deemed “experimental,” wife dead “of heartbreak” within a year, seventy-four years old and conned into switching from Medicare to an HMO that told him that the dialysis he’d been doing for twenty years was “out-of-network” and had referred him to an alternate therapy that left him in constant agony.
> Old white guy in a wheelchair, no one searches that guy
Joe had had versions of this conversation so many times, and usually they came out all right. After all, there had only been two bombs so far, and Joe didn’t think he’d ever talked to Logan.
> All you’re going to do is make a whole bunch of men and women miserable for all their lives, leave a bunch of kids without a mom or dad
> Yup, that’s what I aim to do all right. Seems only fitting considering.
Now what? Two wrongs don’t make a right? This was Dark Fuckriff, not Pinocchio.
> Call me first? If you can’t talk to a real live person and tell them what you’re doing, how can you say you’re sure enough of yourself
> I’ll think about it
> Call me
> I’ll call you
And then Joe’s phone rang, at 6:00 A.M., and he said, “Hello, hello?” until he worked out that the noises in the background were a wheelchair and someone setting up a laptop to record a video straight to camera. The voice was wheezy but strong with emotion.
“I’m going to make a bunch of men and women miserable today, make them grieve for the rest of their lives for the husbands and wives they’re going to lose. A lot of kids will never see their moms and dads again.
“I’m not proud of that. I truly grieve for you. But I have to do this. Enough is enough. The people I’m going to kill today are part of a machine that every day, every year, cost so many of us our wives, husbands, parents, and children. We watch them die bad, slow, painful deaths, and why? Because it’s always someone’s job to watch the money, and no one’s job to keep those people alive, who don’t have to die yet.
“Somewhere along the way, there have to be consequences. There’s plenty of good people working for meth dealers, just trying to scrape by. I expect there are good people who just need to earn a living, who work for human traffickers, too. We arrest those people, send them to jail for the rest of their lives, even though they’re just trying to get by like the rest of us. Why should working for a legal murderer mean you’re innocent? That you get off scot-free?
“If you work for a health insurance company, or their lobbyists, or a senator or congressman who votes against health care for everyone, I want you to be afraid. Scared to leave home. Too scared to sleep. I want you lying awake at night, feeling a rush of fear every time you hear a creak. I want you to have a concealed carry permit, a shotgun by the bed, and still find yourself wondering every morning whether today’s going to be the day.
“If you can’t take that, quit your job. Tell your boss you didn’t sign up to get blown to pieces by some grief-crazed suicide bomber. Eventually, those insurance executives and lobbyists and politicians will have to move on to Plan B. Which is health care for everyone.
“They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: ‘that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.’ Violence is the only way to get some people’s attention. You know which ones I mean.
“Brady, I’m sorry, son. You deserve a better legacy than this. Marla, you too. You both deserve better, but this is all I got. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
DeathEater clicked on something and the video ended, but he kept talking to Joe, monologuing as he rolled his chair around his cramped home, getting ready to blow himself up.
“Hope you heard all that, Joe. Sorry about leaving a trail pointing at you, but you did ask me to call you. I printed out our chat logs so they’ll see that you were trying to stop me all along.” A scuffle as he picked the phone up, his voice getting louder and clearer. “Thanks for trying, Joe. Tikitiki6538 is going to run things from now on.”
Joe tried to say something to him, but he wasn’t sure if the video was still being recorded, and he knew that someday—soon—he’d have to explain this call to some very serious men from federal law enforcement, and whatever he told them would have to be reconcilable with whatever fragment of his voice was on the recording.
And anyway, DeathEater hung up on him.
*
Joe dialed 91-, and his finger hovered over the 1. It was 3:00 A.M. in Phoenix, 6:00 A.M. on whatever East Coast city DeathEater lived in (Clearwater, Joe learned later). Lacey and Maddy were fast asleep, the breath of the AC drowning out their soft little snores. He tried to imagine what would happen if he pressed 1, and spoke to a Phoenix 911 operator, explained that someone whose name he didn’t know in a city he couldn’t name was planning a bombing. Another bombing. Tried to imagine the Tempe PD cops who’d come to his door, the conversation they’d have, the conversation he’d have to have with Lacey.
He couldn’t do it.
He looked in on Maddy and adjusted her covers, smoothed her hair, kissed her forehead. Then he climbed in next to Lacey, the smell of her wafting out from under the covers as he crawled between them, and he stared at the ceiling for a long time. He must have fallen asleep eventually because the next thing he knew, the room was filled with sunlight, Lacey and Maddy were arguing about whether Maddy was allowed YouTube before breakfast (she wasn’t) and Joe had his phone in his hand, scrolling through headlines.
DeathEater had wheeled himself into a health insurance conference at a Sheraton, a big trade show that had put on extra security because the people who went were already a little afraid. But DeathEater had booked a room weeks before, and he paid for valet parking and had a bellman help lift him into his chair and hang his pack on the chair back, then wheeled himself in, checked in, and wheeled toward the elevator bank, flashing his room key at the private security guards who were stopping everyone who tried to go past the ballrooms. No one wanted to pat down an old white man with a room key, wearing a gaily colored aloha shirt and a battered straw hat, pale skinny legs sticking out of baggy shorts.He had timed his arrival for ten minutes before the morning plenary, when all the conference-goers were milling around out front of the big ballroom, drinking coffee and eating muffins and chattering. He wheeled himself dead center of the crowd and—
The death toll was spectacular.
*
Lacey didn’t know what was wrong with Joe, but she knew something was up.
“No more of that message board, Joseph,” she said sternly.
“Too much screen-time, Daddy,” Maddy said, a perfect impression of her mother, made all the more uncanny by their increasing resemblance and a recent matching mommy-daughter haircut with blue highlights.
He picked up Maddy and gave her a hard squeeze while she squealed and kicked and laughed. “OK, kiddo,” he said, and caught Lacey’s eye. Lacey looked worried.
Joe had the school run that morning. Lacey had gone back to work, landing a job at a call center that handled reservation problems for a big hotel chain, and Joe had shifted his hours around so that he could do the drop-off in the morning and Lacey could do the pickup at night. It wasn’t a good career move—there was a direct correlation between being at your desk at 8:00 a.m. and getting a promotion—but since the day of Lacey’s diagnosis, all his passion for a career had leaked out of him and been replaced by an equally urgent sense that his time with his family was a fleeting thing to be savored.
On the drive to school, Maddy wanted to talk about when mommy got sick, which was a topic that came up a lot. Neither Joe nor Lacey were religious, but inevitably, Maddy had a friend at school who wanted her to know that God had saved her mommy and that she should be giving thanks to God. She kept bringing this up and was obviously, visibly anxious that they weren’t doing enough on that score and maybe God would change His mind.
“So you know that I don’t believe in God, right, kiddo?”
He snuck a glance away from the slow-moving traffic and looked at her. She was nodding solemnly.
“I think that Mommy just got really, really, super lucky. Like rolling two sixes in Monopoly, ten times in a row. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful and thankful that we get to have her with us. I wake up every day and I’m thankful. Aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was tiny.
“Yeah. So if there is a God, then She or He”—She or He was a phrase Lacey insisted on when they talked about God with Maddy—“knows how you feel.”
He heard her crying in the back seat and pulled the car over. “What is it, baby? Why are you crying?”
She snuffled and he gave her a tissue. “Sometimes I’m not grateful. Sometimes I get mad at her because she won’t let me wear what I want or she says I didn’t brush my teeth right. What if God sees that I’m not grateful and takes her away?”
For the ten millionth time, Joe cursed the little evangelical kid in Maddy’s class who’d put all this crapola inside her innocent, traumatized head.
“Well, kiddo, I’m the wrong guy to answer that one, because you know I don’t believe there is a God. But I don’t expect you not to get upset with Mommy. I get upset with her sometimes, too. That happens even when people love each other. Especially when people love each other! It’s hard work, loving someone. All that matters is that you talk about things when you’re upset and work them out. You know that even when we get really angry with each other it always works out and we always end up loving each other again, right? So what we need to do is just concentrate on getting past the mad part and getting back to the happy part. I’m sure if there is a God, that’s all She or He expects from you.”
Maddy seemed satisfied with that answer, so Joe put the car back into gear and pulled out into traffic. By the time they reached the next set of lights, she was singing the chorus to “Yellow Submarine” over and over and over again, which was always a good sign. He dropped her off in front of the school, and she blew him a kiss and then came back for her forgotten lunch and blew him another one.
Joe drove to work. He tried to focus on thoughts of his daughter and what he could say to her the next time she had questions like this. He tried not to think of the FBI pulling DeathEater’s phone records and conducting forensics on his computer. He tried not to think of fathers in Clearwater, Florida, who’d be explaining to their kids for years to come why a strange, angry old white man in a wheelchair murdered their mother. He failed.
*
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, Joseph, or am I going to have to drag you to couples’ therapy?”
The week since DeathEater’s attack had gone from bad to worse. Every ringing phone, every strange face made him jump and sweat and think about some DHS type, a federal marshal or an FBI agent. He did not log in to Fuckriff, which was hard because it was his customary 2:00 A.M. no-sleep therapy and he was having a lot of 2:00 A.M. no-sleep nights.
Lacey asked him several times what was going on, and he made vague noises about work stress, which was laughable, given how little he cared about work. Finally, it had come to this. They were in bed, Maddy was down for the night, and he was lying on his side, trying not to grind his teeth, his mind circling around and around from DeathEater to the FBI to the dead people of Clearwater, and now Lacey.
He rolled over. “I’m sorry, Lace. It’s just some shit in my life that I’m not able to shake off and that I don’t want to dwell on. The last thing I want to do is go over it with you.” And make you an accessory to a crime. “I just want to put it out of my mind.”
She gave him a look of pure skepticism. “You’re really doing a shitty job of it, if you don’t mind my saying so. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. I love you very much, my husband, but if you can’t figure out how to deal with this on your own and you won’t let me help you and you won’t get help from anyone else, then you and I are going to have a serious fucking problem.” Lacey didn’t swear often.
“I hear you,” he said. “Give me forty-eight hours? I probably just need to download that meditation app or go for a run or something.”
“Forty-eight hours, and then you either spill everything to me or I frog-march you to a shrink.”
Joe put on his bravest face.
“Deal.”
*
Meditation proved impossible. There was no way he could get his thoughts away from the DeathEater video, the words they’d exchanged, the thought of all those families torn apart. But he did go for a run, strapping his phone to his bicep and putting in his earbuds.
It was late fall and hot, but not blazing hot, and he lost himself in the rhythm of his footfalls and the Creedence Clearwater Revival in his earbuds.
The effect of losing himself was near miraculous, weight lifted from his chest and shoulders. Sounds were sharper, smells better. He picked up the pace.
Inevitably, he overdid it. Too much running after too long a hiatus. He stumbled and nearly went down, and when he straightened up his head was whirling and he nearly lost his balance again. He was in a cute pedestrianized shopping area and he found a bench and sat down on it, his legs trembling and his balance whirling.
He put his head in his hands until the whirling stopped, then sat back, sweat coursing down his face and back. His playlist ended and he got his phone out and started prodding for another round of music for a slower jog home, and autopiloted his way to the headlines.
A shooter had targeted Senator Graham—Joe’s own senator—on the steps of the Capital dome. Graham had won an insurgent seat with promises to “consider all options” and “fix the mess” in health care, and had joined the obstructionist block in the Senate, voting the straight ticket with the party leadership as they blocked every proposal, no matter how modest. After his first year in office, he’d canceled all town halls and Politico had done some data journalism showing that he was the hardest senator for a constituent to sit down with either at home or in D.C.
The shooter had winged two D.C. cops and a federal marshal, injured nine bystanders, got a center-mass shot in on the senator’s chief of staff, and took a piece out of the senator’s earlobe with a modified full-auto AR-15. That was all in eighteen seconds, which is how long it took for the horde of cops present from six agencies to shoot him forty-seven times. The
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