FANDANGO
Aguinaldo and Jaskilka leaned against the hood of the Major’s car with a small collection of rifles, sledgehammers and gas canisters at their feet, waiting for the official niceties to finally pass. Boredom was evident in their faces; this was just one more mass killing shooting no different than the last one. Aguinaldo yawned picking his nose as Jaskilka smoked through an entire pack of cigarettes.
Maggie pestered the Major with her understandable and legal arguments against their latest plans. “So what do you want him for? I can think of at least a hundred things wrong with this whole stupid endeavour.”
“That sounds like something you’d say, Misses Bezzeg.” Major Templeman spat on the sidewalk and walked past her to Audie, in efforts to prevent himself from saying something he would not regret.
“This is from the Mayor directly. His orders are as follows: end this mess. Its right from the Star Chamber stamped and signed Lord Protector and County Director
Templeman turned around and handed the paper to Maggie. She crumpled the orders up and threw them to the ground. Templeman smirked acidly. Audie picked it up and shoved the paper into his pants pocket keeping a keen eye on his wife and her left hand gripping the holster of her sidearm.
“Gentleman Johnny’s sure got a sense of humor, don’t he?” Audie chided.
Maggie groaned in defeat, withdrawing her hand from the holster. With her head down, she thought to herself of English history, the information beaten into her head and her wrists from catholic school. The Ursuline nun’s distaste for organic churches such as the Saints was evident. The English Troika. The Star Chamber. The Chancellor passed judgment on those they believed guilty, without due process. No habeas corpus and no trial. Death was the only sentence, true draconian law. The One can take their head, torture them, seize their property or rape their wife. Wish I did not think like this. Wish I was unable to remember anything. Maggie was still infuriated but had submitted with a tight grimace and ignored the insults that the both genders of the Cranbury Police dispensed under their breaths whenever she was present.
“We are not going to bury you in that fucking shirt, Lieutenant. If it were a Bruins jersey, maybe.” Templeman winked to Bezzeg and returned to his shot-out car with Chief Aguinaldo.
Jaskilka led Audie away from the operational headquarters to the ERT support vehicles, which had been once been a delivery truck now painted in navy blue. Maggie held her husband’s hand as they walked behind the chain-smoking Commander.
Audie pulled on a Kevlar vest, embroidered in scarlet with a silver pictograph of the city seal covering the back, over his shoulders and lowered it down over his upper torso. The zebra strips of his Newcastle United jersey jutted out from the sides of the armored vest until Maggie compulsively tucked it in from sight. She fastened the straps around his waist. Audie took a sidearm from Jaskilka, stuffing it into the Velcro holster hanging off over his shorts. Maggie withdrew her blushed extremities as he kissed her face lightly offering her silent thanks for her presence. Jaskilka lit a cigarette and gave it to the Sergeant for a quick draw.
“Were you ever in the Army, Beg?” Jaskilka said adjusting the laces of his black boots.
“A long time ago not here and not with this asshole up in the Tower—Charles Whitman was a much better shot.”
Audie said as he puffed out a long drag of the ratty cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth.
“I remember doing things just like this a long time ago. We never had crowds this lively; it’s like the stage or a football match where everybody is free-basing on cocaine. This riot is going to be a real bad one.”
“Yeah, without the horses, y’all are going to get stampeded. Where, back in Poland
“Don’t quite know if it was really Poland
“In die British Armee—Gewehr. Warum, alles dis German?”
“Some kind of bad joke, I suppose. Never fired a gun have you?”
“I did serve some time. You’ve never made nitroglycerin explosives, fought religious fundamentalists or taken on infiltration missions I take it?”
Maggie listened to their very male conservation, watching from a close proximity. The wetness of spent tears boiled on her face and turning her green eyes a fiery red, riven with the ebb and flow of severe inflammation. Audie felt the heat escaping from her face, but continued on his conversation with Jaskilka, foolishly ignoring her.
“What are you going to do? Kill them all? Take the lift to the top and open fire soon as the door opens?” Maggie asked in an enraged fury. The words were barely audible.
Audie drew his weapon, pulled the clip back on the sidearm and blew clear the dust and powder from the barrel. It snapped cleanly and likely would not jam. Jaskilka test shot his carbine and other lesser calibers shotguns startling the crowd already harried by the incessant violence though their eardrums had bled out hours earlier.
“That’s the general operation for flushing out a sniper, Magpie.”
Audie puffed out hot air from his throat and approached Maggie.
“What if you get killed?” She asked softly, low for privacy, but loudly enough for everyone inside the jersey barriers to hear. She need these last moments and would not easily accept her husband’s fearless bluster.
“Then I won’t be going to prison.”
“I meant what am I supposed to do without you.”
“What do I care—I’ll be dead.”
Maggie stomped her feet and slapped hard Audie right across the face. Jaskilka grimaced sadly and handed him his weapon.
“Weapons check complete.” Jaskilka said as he had finished inspecting Audie’s arsenal, who had done the same for the ERT Commander.
“What do you want to listen to on the way up, some Supertramp perhaps?” Audie changed the tone of the moment in an instant from the drama of his wife’s wrath to the waiting battle high above them in the clouds.
Maggie stared at him coldly, regretting her decision to lease her prisoner back to the Cranbury police, who needed his skills as an unfeeling killer. He was a mercenary, as were his Hessian ancestors and was good at this job. She did not want him to go. The world without him was not one she wanted to live in, and had hoped that she would not survive to see that possible world of emptiness.
“No, I’m afraid that that look means Supertramp is right out. Well, what do you suggest Commander? I can’t think without prior approval from the queen bee herself.”
“Fuck you, Audie,” barked Maggie.
“That’s the saintly woman I love. We could read a passage from the good book. Something about Jacob’s Ladder, Revelation or the Words of Wisdom?”
Maggie despite her animus for her husband approached and spoke directly to him as if they were alone at home, in a voice that could barely carry six inches. His brown eyes kept to her green eyes for a long embrace. She had blood underneath the sharp and slender cuticles of her fingers, but failed to notice. Audie gripped the hilt of a long sledgehammer in his left arm and kissed her smugly. He was gone.“Too late for tomorrows,” Maggie whispered to herself.
The camera was rolling as she continued her exclusive interview of the Shooter.
Rachel countered, “They will kill you. There is no other way that this will play out. It is instant karma.”
“And may we all shine on . . .”
The emaciated skeletal contours of Shooter’s face emerged from the shadows to the light of the camera. His dark brown eyes leaped from sockets searing into the film with a grave and distant voice that could lilt the smartest soul into dumbfounded submission. The twitching of his crystallized blood veins was nominal, but the evidence of his losing battle with the addiction was starkly abundant.
Ernie bit his lip, noting to himself that she lost her journalistic integrity, although none of this could really be blamed on her unfortunate circumstance. The vulgarities would bring down the heavy-hand of the FCC, ending her career, but that was unimportant and somewhat absurd to the moment. This end was far better than the stories of the anchors and reporters, who had lost their jobs for cursing out invalids, punching police officers in the face, and attending sex parties with the defensive line of the Minnesota Vikings. This interview was her best work, the something that would make his own career seem almost worthwhile, even as a camera operator on a local network affiliate.
“This world is hell. Nine levels of endless shit to bear.”
Ernie countered the weight of his heavyset body. The shot was adjusted for the camera to capture Rachel’s shaking hands in the light of the Benson burners and the lights of the old downtown. Her nerves betrayed her growing horror. Ernie felt it necessary to let the audience see her honest and understandably shaken nerves. He wanted to show her as everyone else saw the world scared witless.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Your own mother slit her own wrists. You were in and out of Butler Psychiatric and rehab clinics for attempted suicides and heroin addiction. You may care about the life of others, but you say fuck me and prove it. Destruction is noble. Self-destruction is human frailty. Weakness.”
“A bit preachy with that big gun aren’t we? Up on the high horse and prophetic, eh? Making up for a lack of something. This is most fucked-up way to commit suicide! Charles Whitman is not a hero—he’s nothing.”
“You would know, I suppose, Mistress Cox or is it now Kemken?”
“I hate that Ukrainian whore. I know she’s using my Dad to run the city. The only way Kemken can retain his power is through his cunt of a daughter.”
Ernie snickered. He enjoyed and encouraged the inadvertent release of state secrets for the sake of transparency, scandal, and ratings. Profanity, on the other hand, like sex and violence was still chided away from because it was more real than acceptable.
Ernie said to himself: It’s all he can get. No one wants to fuck the Mayor of Cranbury. She must be a real psycho, worse than Rachel, if that is even possible. The Mayor and the Chamberlain, by definition of their relationship, had to have the same agenda not of some elaborate socialist conspiracy.
The Opposition would take on the temporary mantle of the moralist, puritan, perfectionists until they were in government and had Ramsay’s head on a pike. They would demand that their perfection must be satisfied and that this out-of-wedlock relationship did not reflect that perfection in any facet. Such a political opportunity was hard to not exploit.
Dust gathered as Rachel starred meekly away into the shadows of the steeple. The Shooter felt her mood and inched his body out from the belfry to the open deck with his rifle. “I think that it was time you left. The song is ending.”
Ernie cut the feed, turned off his camera, and packed it into its case for the long way back down to the loading dock. He helped Rachel to her feet and continued about his tasks to leave. She did not cry as she left the overlook. The Shooter, Robert, waxed sentimental over his life as Ernie vanished into the shadows of the stairwell.
“I thought I was meant for so much more than this.”
Rachel responded from the threshold, “That future is not for us. Just the fucking Mormons and Jews. We are not the chosen—just the trash.”
Audie was winded after he had ascended about half the height of the Tower. Jaskilka continued on the way leading the pace ever upward. The steepness of their vertical ascent was daunting on the verge of causing severe vomiting.
“How many flights are in this goddamn Tower? Isn’t there an elevator? Shit.” Audie vented his frustrations to the captive audience of one. Jaskilka had to listen, as he slowed his progress to keep his charge moving along to his objective.
Jaskilka was calm. “There was an elevator, but it broke and killed eleven people. The city was sued and lost, so they decided to remove it.”
“That sounds about right.”
“But it does seem to go on forever, guess that’s the point of a challenge . . .”
“Think that cocksucker’s waiting for us?”
“Most definitely. He knows the outcome. Might over Right.”
“What he thinks is right. Offing random people who have done nothing to him, does not seem to be in the right.”
“What’s the difference? Morals are personal and the liberty of discretion. A freedom of conscience.”
“Is all our conversation going to be about your anarchist amoral Trotskyite nonsense philosophy or do you have other things to offer?”
“It’s boring you?”
“Yes it is. Don’t you play darts? Cruise bars? Pick fights with witnesses?”
“Without dreaming about why we’re here than what’s the point of dreaming at all? We want what we can’t have and we hate what we have. Americans have no sense of their place or time.”
“When you’re worm food I’ll remind you how meaningless it all was.”
“You could get shot dead soon as the door opens and that’s it.”
“You sound like you’ve been planning for the next world.”
“I am an old man ready for whatever is on the other side, if there is more than oblivion. HP Lovecraft said—.”
His conclusion was rudely interrupted when there was the loud stumble of heavy weighted feet above their position. That thunderous clap of noise had killed the quiet succor of the poignant conversation. Audie glared at Jaskilka and took the point up the stairs.
Audie drew out his sidearm and crept up the steps cautiously ahead of Jaskilka. He moved quietly watching the figures circle around above him aiming his way while he climbed. Jaskilka held the rear, his shotgun cocked, holding the second line of fire for whatever was barreling down the way. Two figures came around the next bend and were grabbed by the two waiting policemen from the shadows.
“Drop the fucking camera!” Audie barked at the genuinely surprised pair.
Jaskilka held his sights firm on the right temple of the female reporter. He did not blink as he unlatched the safety. She became hysterical. His finger gripped the trigger tightly as he waited ready to pull it and stamp her flame out.
Audie grabbed the camera kit from the man when he refused to surrender it. He held the kit over the railing and dropped it down the center of the stairwell. Seconds later, it exploded into a thousand pieces at the cement base upon impact. The Reporter was livid as her eyes bugged out like Chaucer’s.
“We have a fucking right to be here!” The Reporter spat out in ferocious desperation despite the gun digging into her temple.
“I’ve read the constitution too, Miss, and this is nowhere in it.”
Audie turned away from her glare to address Jaskilka, “Arrest these two for trespassing in closed county property, breaking the police picket and consorting with a criminal.”
“Arrest us, who are you fucking kidding?” Rachel Cox was not pleased and had no control of her emotions for the killers of her only husband.
“I’m kidding. Kill her then the cameraman.” Audie deadpanned perfectly to his temporary partner, who understood the humor and finally blinked.
“Going out with a bang, eh, Lieutenant?” Jaskilka said as be descended the stairs, escorting the two, as he prodded them on with his shotgun butt. Audie breathed heavily and continued on his way up the last flights to the belfry.
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