The second shooter, p.20
The Second Shooter, page 20
“They’re actually non-binary…” Karras started, but the look on Garn’s face, that of a hound confused and slightly angry as to why you refuse to surrender your dinner, made him stop.
“Yeah, I heard all about that,” Garn said. “Anyway, she didn’t want to piss in the bucket or pull over at any rest stops, so…”
“All right, let me up,” said Katrina Chu-Ramirez. “I need hand sanitizer. Is there a 7-Eleven nearby, or some place?”
“Go south into Oakland,” Karras told Garn. “Just a few blocks. Nothing’s open twenty-four hours in Berkeley.” Katrina clambered up into the cab, casually bear-crawled over Karras’s lap and slid into the sleeper immediately behind the seats.
“Socialism,” said Garn. “Figures.”
“It’s not socialism,” said Katrina. “Please.” They stretched out in the sleeper. Katrina really was still a kid: the top of their head and the bottoms of their feet brushed either side of the sleeper, but only just.
Two grown men driving around in a semi-tractor with an ersatz runaway down streets not meant for truck traffic at three o’clock in the morning struck Karras as a bit dangerous. How much of the past couple of weeks could have been solved had Karras just owned a used car of his own, outright, something without a computer in it, and had then just driven his own stupid ass around the country interviewing people?
And Karras had two more people to interview now. “So…” he said, “what a coincidence, eh? They say that there’s no such thing as a coincidence, that everything happens for a reason.”
“Who is they, Mister Karras?” said Katrina, shooting up to a seated position, their head just missing the ceiling. “That’s an absurd belief, anyway. Not everything happens for a reason. Do you think Middlesex happened for a reason?”
Of course Middlesex happened for a multitude of reasons, and just as surely Katrina knew some of them: toxic masculinity, white supremacy, the ubiquity of firearms, perhaps adverse effects of psychiatric medication. But Katrina wasn’t asking, they were objecting.
Karras and Garn spoke over one another: “I’m interested in what brought us all together” and “There are no uncaused actions,” but only Garn immediately repeated himself: “There are no uncaused actions. I told you that before, Katrina. There’s a master plan at work here. And you know it too, which is why you got into my truck. We’ve been brought together as if by some occult hand.” His tone was grave, but he quirked his lips at Karras and winked.
“Oh, look, there’s the 7-Eleven,” Karras said, thrilled. “I’ll go in with you, Katrina.”
“I’ll join you all,” said Garn.
“Wouldn’t you rather stay with the truck?” Karras asked. He met Garn’s sudden gaze and lied. “This is a pretty dicey neighborhood. Somebody might try something. You know, Oakland.”
Garn relaxed, nodded.
“C’mon, kid,” said Karras, and Katrina did not object.
The 7-Eleven was busy for the early morning—four customers, two employees, one behind the counter and the other cleaning up. Karras and Katrina didn’t stand out, because he’d been hanging out outside all night and got sweaty doing the stunt of getting into and out of the church basement, and Katrina had been on the road for days. They grabbed a small packet of Oreo cookies, a larger bag of Frito’s corn chips, some unpromising bananas, and a couple tall cans of Monster Energy drink. Vegan, Karras thought.
“Slow down, we can talk without having to include Garn,” said Karras as he slipped into line behind them.
“How do you know him, anyway? Are you friends with him? I bet he’s one of those guys who thinks the only thing Hitler did wrong was invade Poland and interfere with the ‘free market,’” Katrina said, juggling the stuff in their hands to dismiss the 7-Eleven, and all consumerism and capitalism, with a single gesture.
“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Karras said, but then he realized that he didn’t actually know how bad Garn was. “Sorry. He’s bad.”
“He is. I tried to tune him out,” said Katrina. “Miss me with that ‘well-regulated militia’ shit. Are you going to buy this food for me, Mister Karras? It’s a tax write-off, isn’t it? I’m going to go back home, and I spent more of my budget than I thought I would getting out here.”
“Sure. But Katrina, you wanted—”
They whispered, “Buy cigarettes.”
It was a good idea. Karras bought the food and decided to ask for Pall Mall Gold, his mother’s old brand, and Kurt Vonnegut’s. “A classy way to commit suicide,” he said to the unblinking man behind the counter, who didn’t get it, and didn’t get that it was Vonnegut’s line. He bought a cheap Bic lighter too.
The pair exited the store. Karras waved the cigarettes at Garn as they passed the truck and found a corner by a dumpster to light up. The sun was coming up, it felt too warm for cigarettes already. Katrina took a proffered cigarette and Karras’s new lighter, lit up, and sucked on the butt without inhaling. Karras did the same, except he actually knew how to smoke. He uselessly turned his head to exhale away from Katrina.
“Mister Karras, there were other people on the roof of my school, and in the hallways, not just Aram. They were like holograms or something, from a movie or a VR game,” Katrina said. “I’m already seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist and a family therapist with my folks. They all want to put me on Risperdal. You know who else was on Risperdal? Aram.”
“Were you friends? Do you know if he has a cousin named Serj?” Karras asked.
“We weren’t friends. He wasn’t the type to have friends. Not even in third grade, when everyone was friends with each other, much less in middle school, where we’re always at each other’s throats,” said Katrina. “He liked to brag that he was on ‘crazy pills,’ as he called them.” They played with the cigarette some more, made a noise something like a hiccup, and then began to weep. They turned to Karras, held up a palm, and then turned their head away. Karras had no idea what this gesture was supposed to mean except that Katrina did not want a hug. So he raised his own hand, pressed his palm against theirs and they both laced their fingers together.
Then Katrina pulled themself to Karras, stood on her toes, and whispered in his ear. “One of them looked just like you.”
Garn flashed his lights impatiently.
Back inside the 7-Eleven, Katrina Chu-Ramirez getting close to Michael Karras and putting her mouth to his ear was enough for the man behind the cash register, who whistled rudely for the man with the mop to take over, and then went to the tiny office behind the cooler. There, he rewound the recordings of both the exterior camera by the dumpster and the one normally pointed at his own bald spot during his shift, then pointed his phone at the split screen quad monitor, and recorded Michael Karras purchasing cigarettes while standing next to Katrina Chu-Ramirez, and then the pair of them smoking and touching. It was less than a minute of footage, but the employee didn’t know how to compress the file, so it took nearly fifteen minutes for him to upload it to the Michael Karras Tip Page on Christopher Bennett’s website.
By then, the sun was up in the Bay Area and the fog melting away. In LA, where there was no fog at all, Christopher Bennett’s girlfriend Melinda slid her sleep mask off one eye, found Bennett’s phone on her nightstand, and tossed it over to the other side of the California King-sized bed where Bennett snoozed kittenishly in a semi-fetal position. Blindly he groped for it, found it, and thumbed the screen. The phone, on most days, woke up faster than he did, but this morning the notification from the tip page sent him bolt upright in bed.
19.
“I agree,” said Garn. “It is more than a little odd that none of the mass killings in your immediate proximity have been carried out by straight white males.” They were in the truck, in another parking lot down in the warehouse section of West Oakland by the port, waiting for Djimon to come by with Karras’s electronics. Then… nobody was quite sure, though Garn would reclaim his semi-trailer and get a new container to haul. He was losing a lot of money chauffeuring Katrina and Karras around, and was happy to let them both know it. “So, is that racism? Is everything racist? Am I doing it right, Katrina?” They exchanged sneers.
“Rasnic was white. Aram Sargsyan is white,” said Karras. “I’m not going through the whole ‘Are Armenians white?’ thing again.”
“It’s interesting, though. Where are the white men?” Katrina said. “Aram’s cousin—”
“We don’t know anything about Serj as a fact yet,” Karras said.
“Some dude told you that there would be a nationwide shooting spree in a couple of days, coordinated and organized,” Katrina said. “That has to be a white dude thing. At least mostly a white boy thing.”
So far Katrina hadn’t said anything about the other shooter they had seen at Middlesex looking like Karras, probably due to holding Garn in such intense and reasonable suspicion. “So what do we do?”
“You go on home. We’ll put you on the Amtrak,” said Garn. “You completed your little mission to meet the famous Michael Karras and said what you had to say to him, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did…”
“When I get my phone back, we can look up a schedule,” Karras said. He’d offer to wait with Katrina at the station, and there get a chance to question them a bit more. Anyone overhearing him would just think him another Bay Area crackpot, and Katrina—he hoped—wasn’t so famous that they couldn’t blend in as just another post2-punk street kid.
“What if it’s happening now?” Katrina asked. “And we’re just sitting here. If we don’t believe in Serj’s identity, why believe in Serj’s timeline?”
“Why believe in his claims at all?” asked Karras.
“Gir...The teen is right—we believe in his claim because it’s already been happening. School shootings, terror attacks, church shootings, that poor fellow who killed himself on TV. Something’s building, something’s cresting, like a wave,” said Garn.
“We don’t need another hot take on social media, or a book in two years, Mister Karras,” said Katrina. “We need you to do something now.”
Karras knew what was coming next. Garn asking Katrina why it would be up to Michael Karras to do something, and Katrina saying that Michael Karras knows why, and both of them simmering and waiting for him to do something. To forestall the conversation and awkwardness, Karras reached to turn on the radio, and found a local news station.
“You’ll drain the battery,” Garn said.
“Of a semi?” Karras said. “Anyway, maybe there will be news. If this was some sort of contrived narrative, we’d hear about a mass shooting event right now.”
The next story was about a criminal case surrounding a fire at a warehouse housing an illegal nightclub. Then one about a wildfire several counties away and how imprisoned felons were being pressed into service to dig firebreaks. A story about the Tau variant of the small version of the big virus. Nothing longer than ninety seconds—the commercials, for solar power, for new Fiats, and for the station they were listening to, those were all at least seventy seconds.
Katrina’s attention span collapsed on the eighth minute. “God, turn it off! Take me to the train station, Mister Nibley.”
“Garn’ll do,” said Garn. Karras had to smile at nibbly. Maybe the surname was the key to opening the rusty, battered footlocker of his soul. Not very masculine, ‘Mister Nibley,’ so there’s the reason for his performative stoicism; but also a Scots name, so Appalachian background, and maybe Garn was somehow related to the old Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley, which could explain his conservatism—
The reverie, and the revving of the semi, were both interrupted by a small truck barreling into the parking lot and blocking the exit. It was Djimon’s bread route truck, of course, but the surprise was Tony and Rahel spilling out the back and rushing out with the sack of Karras’s electronics and their own phones held high in their hands. Tony got to the passenger-side door first.
“You have the child with you! Bennett’s all over it!” he said, presenting the screen of his iPhone to Karras.
“Well, shit.”
“Peee-dough-fiiile,” Tony said, in mimickry of Bennett’s sound effects board. Rahel finally caught up with him, jumped onto the running board and started yanking on the door handle.
“Oh, God,” said Katrina, slumping back into the depths of the sleeper.
“Bennett—friend of yours, as I recall,” said Garn. He chuckled. “Friendly acquaintance maybe?” Rahel started banging on the window, and Garn looked past Karras with his basilisk gaze aimed at her. Karras unlocked the door and let her in before she damaged something and gave Garn a reason to perform misogyny and racism.
She muttered a ‘Thank you,’ then reached past Karras and grabbed Katrina by the ankle. “Come with me!”
“What? No! Who the heck are you, lady?”
“I am a lady,” said Rahel. “Much better company than these two, and we need to get you somewhere safe.” She clamped down on Katrina’s foot. All Karras and Garn could do was look on.
“I’m going home, they’re taking me to Amtrak!”
“You can’t get on that train, it’s run by the government. You’re a missing person, a runaway, and these men are suspected of kidnapping you, of doing worse things,” said Rahel.
“I have my parents’ permission—”
“I know Mocha, I was the contact,” Rahel said. “The permission’s been rescinded. A visit from men in black suits can be very persuasive.”
“But… my mom, I, I don’t want to go with you…”
“This is the emergency,” Rahel said, softly.
Then Katrina sighed, expelling the tension in their body, and nodded, and scooted to the edge of the thin mattress. “Where are we going?”
“Do you like Ethiopian food?”
“Probably!” said Katrina.
“And you two gotta get this truck out of here,” said Tony, tossing the bag with Karras’s stuff in it onto Karras’s lap as Rahel and Katrina slipped past him. “Full of malware, by the way. Get your files off there and go to an Apple store and get a new computer, that’s my suggestion. The phone, I’d toss under the wheels of this truck. Total lost cause.”
“You went through my phone and computer?” Karras said.
“Me and half the world, from the looks of it,” said Tony.
“Why don’t you come with us?” Karras slid his right hand down to his thigh to keep it hidden from Garn and stuck out his forefinger and thumb to hint at the shape of a pistol.
“Us, eh? Where are you and that frog in your pocket even going?” Garn asked, “Because your ticket on this ride is about to be rescinded.”
“We’re going to go see Bennett,” said Karras, surprising himself.
“I heard the show—did he really pull a gun on you?” Garn asked. “Was it just another fake?”
“Fake as the moon landing, Mister Nibley,” Karras said.
“Okay,” said Tony. “Move over. I’m coming in.” He pointed up at the sky. “Time to go.”
Coming in high enough and slow across the gray soup of the sky was a helicopter. Too far off to hear the rotors or see the markings upon it—news, police, tech billionaire out on a lark?—it was obviously making a beeline for the parking lot. Rahel shouted something to Tony from Djimon’s van as it roared by. Tony wedged himself in the sleeper, banging his knee and then his head against the walls. “Follow them!” he barked.
“Yes, sir,” said Garn, his finger on the great gear shift, foot on the clutch.
“Okay, where are we going?” asked Karras.
“Not to Bennett?” said Garn.
“Follow the van, please,” said Tony. “Please.”
Karras half-expected the helicopter to disappear, like a hacked file or a second shooter in updated wire reports, but it followed him like the moon back when he was a kid, watching the sky from the back seat of his parents’ car.
“Sorry you’re going to miss your next pick-up,” said Karras to Garn.
“I’m an owner-operator, I don’t have a boss to answer to,” he said. “Or a wife. I want to know where we’re going, though. If it’s the I-80, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“There’s always a ton of truck traffic there; we could blend in,” said Tony.
“There is always a ton of truck traffic there; average speed in the early afternoon is thirty miles per hour,” he said. “Sitting ducks. Your sister better have a better idea.”
“She said God will provide,” Tony said.
“You believe that?” Karras said, distracted.
“She said God always has so far.”
The van avoided the on-ramps and kept to the surface roads, where trucks rarely rumbled. West Oakland was a mess of decaying Victorians, squat pillbox warehouses-turned-auto mechanics-turned-trendy restaurants-turned-boarded up and vacant ruins, low overpasses, and long-abandoned streetcar tracks poking out from the asphalt like oak tree roots. Garn was a Liszt in the driver’s seat, playing the gearbox, steering wheel, and clutch with a chaotic genius, taking turns like he was in a Honda Civic with a backseat full of sleeping toddlers. The van drove through Oakland and into Emeryville, the little spit of a town that was seemingly eighty percent shopping mall, all parking lots and corporate logos, and the semi-trailer followed it.
After picking past the movie theater, endless chain restaurants, and a scattering of slightly upmarket storefronts, they came upon the huge blue wave of an IKEA overwhelming the horizon. The van pulled into the adjacent multistory parking garage, and Garn turned his vehicle away and brought it to the big loading dock behind the enormous building where a few more semi-tractors were parked. “Better than nothing,” Garn said, “but what’s the point of stopping here?”
“They’re probably going to go inside. The Bennett stans won’t try anything in public,” said Tony.
“That’s absurd. An IKEA is an excellent place for a mass shooting. Well, a moderately appropriate one,” said Karras, his voice so tired he felt the urge to repeat himself just to make sure he heard even his own words. “Not appropriate… just, lots of corners and turns and places to hide.” He shrugged. “Helicopter won’t follow us in anyway.”
