Blvd. of Blood

Book 1, chapters 10–11

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang has acquired a tricked-out, unregistered rifle. Officer John Oberman and the rest of the police have no idea what he’s up to. CW: Hate crimes, antisemitism, constant looming threat of violence.)

10.

Officer John Oberman crouched behind the vehicle in the synagogue parking lot and watched the three boys and wondered: How much of a swastika did he have to let them paint?

The easiest thing to do would be to allow them to finish their graffiti, however many swastikas and slurs and swear words they wanted to produce. Then he could nab them as they came back to their vehicle. He’d already popped the hood—they hadn’t even locked the car—and removed the starter relay. They were’t going anywhere.

But then the synagogue would be covered in swastikas! Someone would have to clean off the graffiti, and cleaning just one swastika was hard enough. Maybe he should go as soon as they started, walk right up and arrest them. Even if they bolted, they’d be leaving the car there; it’s not like he wouldn’t know who they were. If he did it this way, he wouldn’t even have to explain away the starter relay in his pocket; taking it from a car was not strictly legal, even though he did it all the time. It was his signature trick. He called it his trademark.

“You’ve got to wait,” his partner whispered between expectorations. Campbell was sitting spreadlegged, leaning against the tire. He couldn’t smoke here, lest the smoke give him away, so he chewed, aiming the juice so it landed right between his shoes. It did not always land right between his shoes. He was watching Oberman with his one good eye, and perhaps he could tell that he was about to run forward.

“They’ll jack up the synagogue,” Oberman said.

“You’re just worried about the relay,” Campbell said. “Put it back and no one will know.”

“I’m not worried about the relay; I’m worried about the synagogue.”

Campbell spat. It ricocheted off the tip of his shoe. Shoes like these were no longer required as part of the uniform, but Campbell was old enough that he wore them anyway, while also being slovenly enough that he would coat them in tobacco juice. “If you go now, what do you have them for? Planning a hate crime by text.”

“Social media isn’t texting,” Oberman said, not for the first time.

“Whatever. It’s all computer bullshit. It’s all” (Campbell warmed up to the subject) “cyber bullshit.” He then said cyber bullshit, or the equivalent, six or seven more times.

The three boys—Pelilla, Carter, and Parkhurst—had been called in by a suspicious hardware store clerk after buying spraypaint with what the clerk though, in retrospect, might be a fake ID. Turned out to be Pelilla’s older brother’s real ID, but in a routine check before he did anything, Oberman had found on Parkhurts’s Twitter feed this threat, this synagogue.

Campbell would not let it go. “Internet bullshit.” He never returned to the actual topic—rush them now or wait—but Oberman understood: Let the kids commit a serious crime before you arrest them. Otherwise what are you even arresting them for?

So the two of them lurked in the darkened parking lot, waiting for three teenage idiots to ruin their lives.

11.

When Colin thought about it in general terms, as opposed to specific, step-by-step terms, he called it, in his head, the Incident.

The Incident was a ways away. It was nearly six long months until April. When Colin Lang had told Bernie April, hadn’t he picked the date at random? He’d looked at a calendar on his phone, but it just been a random work day, or rather the night before a random work day. But hadn’t he also been putting the Incident off as long as possible? Assigning the actual job not to him, but whatever future-Lang would be in existence six months from then?

Nevertheless, the April date (Colin figured) had been fortuitous. He needed time for everyone at Munster to forget his face. He needed time for the Poison Fair/Gun Show to forget that gawky rube from the north. He needed the leaves to come in on the trees.

Colin wiped every part of the rifle down with a disinfectant wipe. He tried wiping the gym bag down, but decided he didn’t know how, and just went out and bought another one, being careful not to touch it without gloves. (The encroaching winter made it easier to wear gloves in the store.) This time he went further out of town, to a small sporting good store in Pennsylvania. He bought, while he was there, a dark gray windbreaker with a hood, and a pair of hiking boots, making sure to select a brand and size he’d worn before. He didn’t try them on. They turned out to be too large to fit into the bedroom drawer, so he tucked the boots in the basement, where they didn’t even look out of place.

The old gym bag went in the garbage, as did the plaid shirt and the CAT cap. Nothing wrong with throwing out old clothes. Nothing wrong with a windbreaker in a drawer or boots in a basement. Colin wasn’t even a criminal, really. A rifle like this was probably illegal in New York, but he put it in his basement, in the gym bag, half-inside (it stuck out) a suitcase in a closet near the boiler room; if anyone actually found it there, he could always plead ignorance of the complicated patchwork of firearms regulations that made up the American landscape.

Back when he had been studying for his actuarial exams, Colin had figured out a secret that let him sail through them while so many of his peers had had to retake test after test. The secret was: Never stop thinking about the actuarial exams. While you were driving, while you were shopping at the supermarket, think about actuarial math. While you were showering, while you were kissing a girl, think about mortality in cohorts. Never stop. This went on for years.

Once the exams had finished, Colin had nothing to think about. But now he thought about the plan. He drew diagrams on the white board, he wrote checklists on the white board, and every night he erased them all. The great day was still a long way off, and Colin found this comforting. He ran every event over and over in his head, and he had so many times left to do it. He had so many days of nothing but him and the plan. Everything was easy except not getting caught, and not getting caught would be very tricky.

The key was how quickly the rifle fired. He could run through an entire magazine in three seconds. How many cars could he reasonably be expected to pass in three seconds? He would have to take out one magazine and snap in another quickly. There was no way to practice the actual firing—bringing the rifle out of the house was too dangerous—but he could practice switching magazines. He owned a pair of tight leather driving gloves, and they made his fingers feel thick. When he practiced while wearing them, he bobbled and dropped more magazines than he got in place. For one wild moment, Colin feared that a gloved finger would not be able to fit into the trigger guard, but when he triple checked to make sure the gun was unloaded, double checked the safety, and slipped his finger around the trigger, there was plenty of room. He tried flexing his index finger—not directly on the trigger, but around it, near it—and it felt fine.

Night after night, after work, in the basement, he got better at switching magazines rapidly. He sat down cross-legged, leaning several magazines against his thighs; with a gloved hand he popped one free from the rifle, grabbed another off the floor and snapped it home. Eject, grab, repeat. Any action repeated again and again gets smoothed out, like a stone in a stream, and after a couple of weeks, Colin could replace a magazine in an eyeblink.

He returned Nicholas Nickleby to the library. No black marks on his record like an overdue fine! No librarian asked him about it.

There had been nothing suspicious about the time Colin spent on the library computer map of Cottinend. Who isn’t interested in the local geography? Finally he decided, though, that he was better off with a paper map and after a few false starts found one at a gas station.

His beard stopped itching. Because he could not shave at all, by the Movember rules he had laid out and passed around work, it came in uneven, and his neck looked ridiculous. People at work gave him the ironic thumbs up, but Colin was thinking about the plan. He could hardly lean a series of magazines against his thighs in a moving car. This was the riddle.

In search of an answer, Colin stalked in the evenings through department stores and Salvation Army centers. He had no idea what he was looking for; the instinct of a lifetime told him that a product would be the answer to his problem, and he just had to find out what it was. His patchy beard, which he was already regretting, made him feel conspicuous, so he left his coat in the car; since he came from work, he was wearing a nicely tailored suit. It would hardly do for the police to pick him up as a vagrant.

He passed other dead souls wandering the aisles, their eyes scanning shelves blankly for an answer that never came. He wanted to tell them that he was not like them, not any more. But he didn’t say a word.

No one knew anything. He could back out at any time. He would never back out.

(Continued here.)