Ed Gorman
Elimination
To my longtime friend and agent, Dominick Abel
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my sweet and hilarious first editor Linda Siebels, one of the finest people I’ve ever known.
Thanks to all the organizations dedicated to keeping all of us with the incurable cancer multiple myeloma alive as long as possible. Thank you, my friends.
There was one of them that scared Dave.
The one who was always talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and the guy who popped Martin Luther King.
What that would’ve been like.
The balls that would’ve taken.
Dave agreed with a lot of what the other ones talked about. How all the minorities got privileges the whites didn’t. How the fags were making a mockery of normal life. How the things they were teaching in school were making gullible kids ashamed of their country and its history.
But actually assassinating somebody...
Cindy hated his friends enough already. If she ever heard them talking about that kind of thing...
So it was kind of funny that he would be the one the man with the money would approach. The man who wondered if he could interest Dave in doing a certain kind of job...
Part One
One
They’re still out there.
‘You bitch. I hope somebody gives you a mastectomy the hard way.’
‘I’m watching you. Every single day I watch you. I own about a hundred of those guns you’re trying to take from patriots across this country.’
‘God is planning to make an example of you for how you’ve forced homos on our families. He has promised me that you’ll be dealt with within forty-eight hours.’
When Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb, killing 168 people and injuring more than 600, I remember thinking maybe this country will come to its senses again. Move back to the center. Get together again without all the acrimony.
I was wrong. The militia movement McVeigh had championed had grown stronger than ever. The rhetoric had become bizarre, then clinically insane. Not that I disagreed with everything the far right said. I consider the massacre at Waco and the murders at Ruby Ridge reprehensible. Waco is a crime of historical proportions. Many government people should have gone to prison. Needless to say, though I work for the liberal party I don’t always agree with its conventional wisdom.
But what brought all this to mind were the emails I was reading on this rainy autumn afternoon in Danton, Illinois, population eighty thousand and home of Congresswoman Jessica Bradshaw, whose reelection campaign I was running. Her friends called her ‘Jess,’ and we’d begun to use that in some of our radio ads.
My name is Dev Conrad. I own Dev Conrad and Associates in Chicago, a political consulting firm. Previous to that I was in the army, serving as an investigator for several years. This election cycle my firm of fourteen people was running eight campaigns. We hired freelancers as we needed them.
I was in Danton because in the past three weeks we’d dropped three points in general polling and four in our own internals. We were now only one point ahead at best. The easy excuse was that our far-right opponent Trent Dorsey was reaping the rewards of having a fanatical billionaire uncle spending five times as much on TV attack ads as we were. I’d flown in early that morning from Chicago at the request of the congresswoman’s chief staffer, Abby Malone.
‘Uncle Ken,’ as Dorsey always referred to him, had also hired a team of hit men who were experts at using automated phone calls — called robocalling — to smear opponents. You could reach thousands and thousands of voters this way in a single day. Robocalling became widely used after George W. Bush’s people started the rumor that John McCain, their opponent, just might be the father of an illegitimate black child. The phone calls were particularly effective in the South.
This district was being bombarded by robocalling, suggesting everything from Jess as Commie, Jess as lesbian, Jess as drug addict, and that Jess’s rich father had been mobbed up. Jess had won before because the man who’d held the seat ended up going to prison for taking bribes that unfortunately (for him) were videotaped by the state boys and girls. This time her run was different. We’d never faced a machine like Dorsey’s and anti-incumbency was a formidable platform this time.
Danton itself was a river town that was heavily leveraged by a gambling casino. It had been known for decades as the place where Al Capone had sent his soldiers when the feds were getting ready to move on them. Not much had changed. The law, police and judges alike almost always ruled in favor of the gambling establishment. Jess Bradshaw’s family had made their money in the stock market. They had not only survived the Depression, they had prospered from it. Everything was cheap, and if you had the money you could become unthinkably wealthy. Jess was an example of how wealthy. And she was typical of a Congress where sixty percent of its members were at least millionaires, if not much wealthier than that.
They’re still out there.
‘You have a lovely daughter. I wonder what her face will look like after I cut it up. One cut for every abortion you’ve made possible.’
‘Fun, huh?’
Abby Malone had once worked directly for my shop in Chicago. At that time she’d been married to a young attorney everybody liked. She spent part of her time in Danton keeping Jess’s constituency office running well and always preparing for the next election. Then one day she came into my office and announced she was getting divorced and would like to work for Jess directly. It would help her get over the end of her marriage. How could I say no? And having her there was probably a good idea anyway, even if it meant losing one of the finest employees I’d ever had, not to mention a world-class smart ass.
‘I read them every day,’ she said. ‘I never tell Jess about them. If they’re really bad I tell Ted. Some of them are so terrifying they’re funny in a strange way.’ In a simple red blouse and straight black skirt she was, to understate, compelling to see.
‘Yeah, like those two morons in Florida who sent ricin to the White House a few months ago. One of them was an unemployed Elvis impersonator and the other a taekwondo dude who was running for president.’
Her smile parted the heavens. She was one of those slight, efficient blondes whose comeliness almost distracts from her skills as a planner and organizer.
‘How’s the prep going?’
Abby had spent the past four days in a rented dance studio firing questions at Jessica in preparation for tonight’s televised debate. Given the polling numbers we were looking at, tonight’s debate had become damned consequential. Jessica had to respond to and overcome all the lies Uncle Ken’s money had been spreading for the last five months.
‘She’s good. So smart. I wish Ted was.’ She allowed a wry smile for Jess’s vainglorious husband. ‘God, he’s as narcissistic as a gigolo.’
‘I guess I hadn’t noticed that.’
‘Yeah, right. You hadn’t noticed. The old Dev Conrad deadpan. Cory told me he can’t tell when you’re joking sometimes.’
‘The intern?’
‘Yeah. He’s good. I like having him drive me places. Makes me feel like a movie star.’
Cory Tucker was a political science major at Danton University. He was an amiable twenty-year-old who considered politics to be a cool and desirable calling. He also admitted that with so many young female volunteers it offered the possibilities of frequent hook-ups.