Bedminster, New Jersey
The president of the United States is pissed-off. He is at his New Jersey golf estate. On May 10th, 2017, the New York Times had come out with a story that after the president dismissed his FBI director, James Comey, the day before, May 9th, he followed the next day with a chummy unprecedented meeting in the Oval Office with both the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. The FBI—concerned that The Bad King was working as an agent on behalf of Russia—launched its own counterintelligence investigation. Later, it was also charged in another story that the president sought to cover up the content of discussions in five separate face-to-face meetings with the president of Russia—that he had confiscated and ripped up his interpreter’s notes so there did not even exist a classified record of the meeting. Most stunning—and most humiliating for the U.S.—was The Bad King’s shameful defense of Tsar Peter at their July 16, 2018, summit meeting in Helsinki. Asked point blank by a White House press reporter if he was a Russian agent, The Bad King denied that he had ever worked for Russia. The “Russia thing,” as he disparagingly refers to the press preoccupation with Russia, has hung over his presidency like a hovering, ever-present dark cloud.
In March 2019, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, delivered to the Department of Justice the results of his almost two-year investigation. The Bad King’s recently confirmed AG, Bill Barr (known now as The Consigliere), tried to block the report from being released to the public, but there was such a ferocious backlash in the press and media—with the Congress threatening to call the special counsel to testify to Congress himself on the results of his investigation—that the AG was forced finally to pass the full report to the Congress. It is a damning indictment of the president and his close associates, both before and after the election, showing collusion with the Russians to elect The Bad King president and hurt the candidacy of his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton. The quid pro quo, as the special counsel’s report took pains to show, was the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and the lifting of sanctions against the Russian president and his oligarch and mafia cronies.
It takes more than a year following the special counsel’s report, but the Democrats in the House finally vote out a bill of impeachment charging the sitting president, The Bad King, of committing “high crimes and misdemeanors” during his term in office. The Southern District in New York (SDNY) is pursuing investigations of numerous of the president’s businesses—his charitable organization, his real estate company, and multiple connected LLCs, plus his inaugural committee—for tax fraud, bank and financial fraud, and money laundering charges. Only through the active, clandestine intervention of Tsar Peter himself with promises of payment (bribes) to over twenty prominent Republicans—totaling 200 million dollars doled out, ten million to each Republican senator to stand firm for the president—was The Bad King able to survive being convicted in the Senate. As far as the Russian president was concerned—a man estimated to be worth possibly as much as two hundred billion dollars—it was money well spent, a cheap price to control the Republican dominated senate and own the current U.S. president.
The Democrat 2020 primaries for president are now in full swing. The embattled president is under siege, being attacked daily by the Democrats for his past policies and criminal practices—his open lying, his cronyism and corruption, his attacks on the FBI, calling them “dirty cops”—his subservience to the Russian president, and the shut-down of the government in early 2019. The Bad King, however, has already started his own 2020 campaign. The president is in a fight for his very political survival. He has, in fact, just returned from a campaign swing through four mid-western cities. His base—those staunch, disaffected rural, MAGA voters in “Fly Over Country” in the heartland—still enthusiastically turn out at the rallies (though not in such large numbers as The Bad King claims) and are still enthusiastic in their support.
Cruising at 34,000 feet, enroute to Washington
Billy continues his story. “Two weeks later I was paid a visit by a couple of officers from the New Orleans police department. A body—or at least what remained of a body—had washed up onto the beach of one of the outer-barrier reefs. The cops had information that the remains might be those of my friend Razzy. They asked me to accompany them to the city morgue to make an official identification. I recognized immediately the sailor’s chain and anchor tattoo on the forearm of what remained of the body. The theory was that he had been killed in New Orleans and then the body taken out and dumped in the Gulf to be eaten and disposed of by the sharks.”
“That’s awful,” Rosie gasps. “What do you think happened? How did they catch him?”
“Well, I can’t know for sure, but I think Razzy must have gone back the following Wednesday to again observe what he thought was a drug smuggling operation being run by Arab terrorists. Probably he climbed up on the barrels; and, if he was drunk, maybe he slipped again—as he did that time when I was with him—and then was discovered by the guards.”
Rosie says what Billy himself had only surmised and left unsaid, “So you think then that they caught him, and then killed him?”
Billy shrugs. “I don’t know, and I can’t say for sure; but that’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense. I told him to leave it alone—not to go back there.”
“So, then what happened?” Rosie asks curiously.
Billy frowns. “Well, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I knew there would be no justice for Razzy—a poor indigent—unless I delivered it. In America, the wealthy and powerful are immune against prosecution.”
Rosie gives Billy a discerning look. “So, what did you do?” Rosie is curious, but she is not sure she wants to hear the answer to her questions.
Billy just smiles. “I went back there the next Wednesday and waited until they were finished with their work. Then I followed one of the Russians overseeing the operation into the adjoining parking lot. I surprised him just as he was getting into a custom black Mercedes.”
Rosie’s eyebrows arch up. “What happened then?” Again, Rosie is not so sure she wants to hear the answer to the question.
Again, Billy just smiles. “I dragged him out of the front seat of the Mercedes, punched him in the face and broke his nose. Then I sprawled him out over the front fender and stuck the muzzle of my gun—the Glock you now have in your purse—into his crotch. I asked him who killed Razzy, told him that if he held back or tried to lie, I’d blow his balls off.”
Rosie’s winces and her face blanches white. “Then what’d you do?
“He gave me the name of another Russian—a local mafia figure. Then I pulled him down off the fender, pinned him on the ground, shot him and blew out both of his kneecaps, as payback for Razzy. I left him there on the asphalt, to bleed out in the parking lot.”
Billy shakes his head with sad regret. “I should have killed that piece of shit right then. If I had, Mercy might still be alive today,” Billy says with conviction.
Rosie is incredulous. “Billy, this is terrible. It all sounds so horrid, almost to fantastic to believe.”
Billy’s stares straight ahead, his face a blank emotionless mask. “Later, I learned that the other Russian guy, the guy he identified to me was Viktor Puchenko, the kingpin of the local Russian mob. It was not hard for them to identify me, make the connection to Razzy. Everybody on the docks knew me. And they all knew I was Razzy’s friend. To get back at me, Puchenko sent his henchmen after Mercy.” Billy starts to choke up, and Rosie sees a single tear roll down his cheek. Briefly, she looks away.
Then, Rosie stares back at Billy, her face a mixture of regret, sadness, and sympathy. She fears that she has picked at a still sensitive scab, opened an old—and yet—unhealed wound.
“They grabbed her one afternoon,” Billy says, his voice quavering with emotion, “took her back to the trailer, beat her, raped her, and shot her up with a lethal dose of heroin. I came home and found her on the bed, curled up in a fetal position, and shivering in a cold sweat. I called 911. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital her body started to convulse, and she went into cardiac arrest—and then she was dead.”
“Oh, no!” Rosie gasps and can hardly catch her breath. “I’m so sorry, Billy.” She can see the sadness, the deep sorrow, and abject sense of loss on his face.
Billy continues. “When I finally got home, back to our little trailer, I sat on the bed and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I knew the law would never touch these criminals, so I swore a solemn oath to myself that I was going to kill them all.”
The CJ-3 is on automatic pilot, on a flight path to Washington. Billy stares intently straight ahead out the front windshield. “It drove me crazy, Rosie,” he says. “I almost lost my mind. Sam advised me, ‘you must let this go, Billy. Don’t let it eat you up.’ But I couldn’t ‘just let it go.’ It just seemed—that for poor, powerless people like Mercy and Razzy—there is no justice in this world. I decided—for her sake, and for my own satisfaction—that I would get revenge on them all.” The dire look on Billy’s face confirms for Rosie the vengeance that is in his heart.
“I started with the judge,” Billy says. “He was already the target of a corruption investigation by the local newspaper for allegedly accepting bribes and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options from the oil company that was principally responsible for the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe—the same company where Mercy’s father had worked.”
Then, as by a flashback, Billy remembers and says, “I stalked him for a couple of weeks, found out he kept an apartment in a downtown high-rise building where he took prostitutes. I found another high rise about eight blocks away with an empty apartment on the seventh floor. It had a balcony that looked straight across over a small city park to the patio balcony outside the judge’s apartment. I picked the lock on the door and staked myself out on a few separate occasions to see if could get a good shot on the judge when he came out onto the balcony where he kept a grill for grilling steaks.”
“Your intention then was just to assassinate him?” Rosie bluntly states.
“That’s right,” Billy says.
Rosie is appalled. “But you can’t just shoot people, Billy.”
Billy is sullen, and matter of fact. “It wouldn’t be an assassination. I considered it justifiable homicide. Revenge for the wrong that had been done to Mercy, justice in place of the justice denied her in the courts. Even though she had been beaten and raped, the cops just wanted to dismiss it as an over-dose case.”
As a national reporter, Rosie—of course—remembers that the federal judge for the district of New Orleans had been shot and killed by a sniper, and that the killer had never been found.
She looks in disbelief at Billy. “I don’t know what to say, Billy.”
Billy shrugs, “There is nothing to say, Rosie. I extracted my own brand of vigilante justice on a criminal masquerading in a judge’s robes as a champion of justice.”