Dupont Circle Hotel, Washington, D.C.
Rosie is waiting upstairs in their room when Billy gets back to the hotel. She has nervously been fidgeting the whole time. He is apprehensive, feels a sense of dread when he steps off the elevator on the tenth floor. Rosie has been there an hour, drinking, worrying, and fretting. When Billy comes through the door, he sees the half-empty bottle of wine on the coffee table. Rosie has been crying, and the devastated look on her face only confirms his worst fears. Rosie wastes no time; as Billy sits down, she pointedly asks the question.
“Did you kill The Judge?” Her tone is harsh and insinuating. “You’ve been going out in the mornings to run in wilderness park on the Potomac. It didn’t mean anything to me until this morning when the news broke on NBC that he had been assassinated while jogging on that trail along the Potomac.”
Billy takes a deep breath, settles back and relaxes on the couch, is forthright, direct, and unapologetic. He stares at Rosie. “Yeah, I shot the asshole,” he says with a small smile and not the least bit of remorse.
Rosie buries her face in her hands, fights back the tears. “How could you do this, Billy? Everything was perfect between us. I finally thought I’d found my man, and then you go and do this. Didn’t you give any thought to us, Billy, about how this would affect our relationship?”
Billy is bland, matter of fact. “My killing The Judge doesn’t have anything to with our relationship.”
Rosie is incredulous. “Billy, you kill a man, and you don’t think it should have an impact our relationship. I don’t care about The Judge, but I care about us. Did you really think I could just pass this off?”
Billy breathes a sigh. “He’s one man, Rosie. One vile and despicable little man who could, by his decisions on the Court, negatively impact the lives of millions of people—especially women. There are young women who will be raped and get pregnant—maybe even by incest—who will be forced to deliver an unwanted child because he has decided in his twisted, perverted, religiously fucked-up, conservative mind that they don’t have the right to an abortion, the constitutional right to make personal and private decisions about the health and welfare of their own bodies.”
Billy gives Rosie a hard stare. “That’s not right, Rosie.”
She shakes her head, puts her hand on her forehead. “I know, Billy. I feel the same as you. But you cannot just kill a man because you disagree with his politics.”
“What would you have me do, Rosie? If his politics are going to cause untold misery and possibly kill people, deny women their constitutionally protected right to choose. Would you want me to just idly stand by? Where there is evil, Rosie, somebody needs to do something. I’m not going to stand idly by and watch millions of people suffer and die because of a broken, dysfunctional political system.”
Rosie looks heavenward, rolls her eyes. “But that is not for you to decide, Billy. You’re just one man. We have courts, juries, a system of laws.”
“That’s right, Rosie,” he replies. “But I’m one man who can do something. And it’s not just about abortion, Rosie. It’s about the rights of the LGBTQ community, the DACA immigrants, blacks, and other disadvantaged minorities. It’s about the right to vote. It’s about social justice and equal protection under the law.”
Billy gets heated. “Let me explain something, Rosie. When I was in Afghanistan, in a deadly urban battle in Kandahar, I killed (murdered) twelve Taliban in a single day: three with my knife in close-in hand-to-hand fighting, and the rest close-in or at long-range with my pistol or rifle. But that was all okay, Rosie, because I was wearing the brown desert fatigues of a U.S. Army Ranger. We in America call them Islamist terrorist, but in their minds, they are patriots fighting to rid their country of imperialist, Christian infidels. What’s the difference, Rosie? Like they say: one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot. It’ll be like that someday here in America when there’s a civil war. Remember, the patriots at Lexington and Concord were considered insurrectionists by the British king.”
Billy is emphatic. “Someone needs to step up take responsibility, Rosie, when the courts, the law, the so-called system no longer operates to produce justice. The Judge was a political hack. In our American system, judges—and this applies to the Supreme Court as well—are not the impartial guardians of the rule of law that we expect and want them to be. They are just cloistered political opportunists, selling out to the plutocrat billionaires, and exploiting the law for their own selfish ends, as subject to what the Founding Fathers called the “passions of the mob” as any common brigand. The conservative majority on the Court will twist the law whenever it is to their political advantage, just as they did in 2000 in the Bush vs. Gore case that handed George Bush the presidency. We’re in a battle for the soul of this nation, Rosie.”
“I understand, Billy, that you want to be a crusader, want to right all the wrongs in the world; but I’m a reporter—a professional journalist—and I can’t knowingly be an accessory to murder. Don’t you see what you have done? The position you’ve put me in. What you’ve done to us?”
Tears well up in her eyes, and Rosie gives Billy a sad, disgusted look. “I love you, Billy. But I cannot stay here anymore,” she says, fighting back the tears. She stands, picks up her purse and her suitcase, and starts for the door. Billy jumps up and follows. He stops her at the door.
“Where are you going, Rosie?”
“I don’t know,” she says in a pathetic, small voice, the tears streaming down her face. “I just can’t stay here.”
Billy steps aside, and Rosie opens the door.
“Goodbye, Billy,” she says, stepping out into the hall.