IT WAS RANDY WHO’D GIVEN HIM THE IDEA. LAST FALL, VICTOR had returned from a marathon week of sign-planting to find Randy at his laptop, scrolling through USA Today. Now that it could be read for free online, it was his sole source of information. His favorite section was “News From Around Our 50 States,” brief items culled from local papers across the country.
They raided a hoorhouse in some little piss-ant town in Alabama, he told Victor. Look at this poor bastard. They caught him with a girl and put his pitcher in the paper.
Sorrow in his voice, genuine empathy. After he got his first frack money, Randy had been a prodigious consumer of prostitutes. An online pharmacy kept him supplied with Canadian Viagra, and once a month he’d disappear for a weekend and come back with tiny soaps and shampoos from Pittsburgh motels. It took a drunk-driving arrest to break his habit. The fine was eight hundred dollars. After that he stuck close to home, his needs satisfied by anonymous women with webcams. Such women existed all over the world, apparently. Randy’s monthly subscriptions cost less than a single night in a motel.
That could of been me, he told Victor. Makes you stop and think.
And Victor did just that. He stopped and thought. Shame, he knew, was a powerful motivator. You could shame a person into just about anything.
HE BUILT THE SITE HIMSELF, OVER SEVERAL WEEKS. TECHNICALLY, it was nothing special; he knew this. Still, he was proud of what he had accomplished. He had a fifty-year-old diploma from a backwoods public high school. Nobody would have called him an educated man. And yet—with the help of Web Design for Dummies—he had brought the Hall of Shame into being. Everything he knew, he had taught himself.
The idea was elegant in its simplicity. On any given day, thousands of pregnant White females walked into abortion clinics; thousands of precious White children were executed in secret. The Hall of Shame would shine a light on these crimes.
The abortionist plies his trade behind closed doors, Victor wrote. Those who commission these murders count on his discretion.
The writing came easy to him. He had always been good with words.
They present themselves to the world as responsible employees, neighbors, wives, and even mothers. Do you recognize these faces?
Getting the photos was easy. Every major American city had an abortion clinic, or several; every pro-life American had a cell phone in his pocket. Victor put out a call on 8chan. Within hours, he had an army of volunteers. The response was heartening. American heroism was alive and well, the country full of right-thinking men, eager to be of service. Their can-do spirit touched and inspired him—total strangers volunteering their time and talents to make a Whiter world.
San Diego, Boston, Minneapolis. Orlando, Phoenix, Colorado Springs. Once or twice a week, a new collection of photos appeared in his inbox. Victor picked through them carefully, long nights at the computer in his dime-store reading glasses, which never seemed strong enough. Every few months, he bought a new, more powerful pair.
9
The Russian kid worked out of a garage in North Quincy. Timmy pulled his new Honda Civic into the parking lot just as the shop was closing. As instructed, he parked behind the shop and texted: I’m here. And then, as an afterthought: This is Tim.
He got out of the car, twisting to stretch his back. He missed the legroom of his Ford Escape, the roomy seat that reclined to the perfect angle. After a week of driving the Civic, he’d developed a chronic twitch in his sacrum. In nearly every way, the Civic was a disappointment. Mechanically, aesthetically, it was a piece of crap. Its only virtue was its banality. The Civic was the sort of anonymous tin can a law-abiding citizen would drive.
His naked face tingled in the cold.
That morning, after a long shower, he’d studied his face in the mirror. It was not the face of a law-abiding citizen. The beard was the problem. The beard would have to go.
He had planned ahead, bought shaving cream and a razor—an item he hadn’t owned in years and that now, apparently, cost twenty dollars. First he went at the beard with a pair of scissors. Hair mounded in the sink like some exotic plankton.
What am I doing? he thought as he took the first swipe.
His face didn’t look the way he remembered it. The last time he saw it, the face was twenty-nine, the face of a new husband and father. His face had missed its thirties. Under all that hair it had sagged and softened into the face of a middle-aged man.
The garage door opened. A teenager with a patchy goatee waved him inside.
THE RUSSIAN KID CAME HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. THERE WAS A story Timmy had heard many times, now legendary among the weed sellers of Greater Boston. One of the kid’s customers, a Portaguee from Fall River, had been traveling west on I-84 when he was pulled over by a Connecticut statie, his SUV searched with a sniffer dog. The dog alerted at a spot behind the rear seat, the exact location where the Russian had installed a trap. The cop searched by hand, but found no loose wires or extra rivets or signs of jerry-rigging. The Portaguee drove back to Fall River a free man, with twenty pounds of product in his truck.
In the shop’s back office, they smoked a joint to get acquainted. Alex Voinovich was a skinny kid, possibly still growing at age nineteen. Since childhood he’d enjoyed ripping shit apart. A vacuum cleaner, a stereo, the thermostat in the snug apartment where he lived with his mother and sister. He was no more destructive than the average boy. He dismantled these machines not to destroy them, but to see how they worked.
He explained this emphatically, as though Timmy had argued otherwise. He seemed to enjoy explaining himself. In the daytime he installed car stereos at Def Jam Sound Design, a job he found unsatisfying. He did the same two or three generic installs over and over again, for punks with no sense of style; they cared only about the size of the speaker and the whomping bass line it could put out.
“Punks,” he repeated. He had a faint accent that didn’t sound Russian. He could have come from Chicago or Philly or Detroit or New Jersey. To Timmy he sounded American, nothing more.
The punks had no interest in the kind of sick installation Alex had done in his own car, a rebuilt Golf hatchback: custom subwoofer mounts in fantastical shapes, wood frames he’d cut himself and covered in fiberglass. And so it was boredom, ultimately, that had brought him to this body shop in North Quincy, owned by a distant cousin. The cousin let him use it nights and weekends, on the DL, to do his real work.
His real work, his money work, was building traps.
He led Timmy to a newish Toyota Camry, parked at the rear of the shop. “This is just an example,” he said. “Your job will be a little different. Every customization is unique. No two vehicles have same code.”
A Camry was the one car Timmy could think of that was even lamer than a Civic.
He thought, I should’ve bought a Camry.