Somewhere in America tonight, two men are at work.
You have not read about them in the newspapers, because no newspaper has connected the cases. No detective has connected them either, which is a scandal I will come to in due course. It has fallen instead to the emergency physicians of this country to assemble, one bedside statement at a time, the file on the two most prolific violent criminals in the history of the republic. I am one of those physicians. I have never seen these men but I have spent a career cleaning up after them.
The file begins where it always begins, at the bedside. A young man arrives by ambulance with a bullet wound in his thigh, or a knife wound in his flank, or the imprint of something blunt across his scalp, and when I ask him what happened, he tells me, with the weary patience of a man who has explained this before, that he was minding his own business when these two guys came out of nowhere. He does not say two guys he recognized from the neighborhood. He does not say two guys with whom there had been, perhaps, some small prior disagreement. He says These Two Guys, as though I ought to know them already, and by now, of course, I do. Then he asks for a sandwich.
I have taken this history in every hospital where I have ever worked. My colleagues have taken it in Portland and in Pittsburgh, in Mobile and in Milwaukee, in glass trauma towers and in four-bed rural departments, and the account is the same word for word, decade after decade. In my own department the recognition is instant. The charge nurse can identify their work from across the room, and when she asks "These two guys?" the resident only nods, because nothing more needs saying. This is familiarity, not amusement. Nothing about the two guys is funny.
A skeptic might pause here. Tens of thousands of strangers, who have never met, separated by three time zones and thirty years, do not ordinarily produce identical testimony unless the testimony is true. The only alternative is a coordinated national script, rehearsed in secret by an entire generation of young American men, a conspiracy so vast and so disciplined that it would dwarf the crimes it was invented to conceal. This is plainly absurd. I proceed, as any honest investigator must, from the only remaining conclusion: the two guys are real, and they are the busiest men in America.
Consider the arithmetic. On a single Saturday night, credible eyewitness testimony places the two guys in Houston and in Hartford within the same hour. Bilocation of this kind has previously been reported only in the life of a certain obese, jolly saint, and the two guys are no saints. Their work ethic nevertheless commands a grudging respect. Two men, several hundred assaults a night, every night, for as long as any physician now living can remember, without a vacation, without an arrest, and without once being photographed. Whatever else may be said of them, they are not idle.
Their methods are consistent. They come from nowhere. The witnesses are unanimous and emphatic on this point: not from around a corner, not from a parked car, not from up the block, but from nowhere at all, as though the night itself had briefly condensed into two male figures. They attack without provocation, and no victim has ever been able to supply a motive. They are frequently described as attempting robbery, yet in all my years I have never treated a man who was actually robbed. The chain arrives with the patient. The phone arrives. The cash arrives, folded and intact. The two guys are history's least acquisitive muggers, wanting nothing, taking nothing, demanding nothing, administering their violence with the disinterest of weather and then returning to the nowhere from which they came.
But it is their choice of victims that most urgently demands investigation, because the two guys prey exclusively upon the virtuous. In my entire career I have never treated a victim of theirs who was doing anything wrong, a record of selectivity no other predator in nature can match. Many of the wounded were on their way to church, and since the two guys favor the small hours, we must conclude that the churches along their hunting routes keep a liturgical schedule of remarkable ambition and rigor. Some victims were reading Scripture at the moment of the assault, and a few were still holding the Bible on arrival; it grieves me to report that the pair's hostility to the Word appears to be total. Above all, the victims were Minding Their Own Business. By the numbers available to me, minding one's own business is now the most dangerous activity in the United States, more hazardous than motorcycling without a helmet, and if these men cannot be stopped, the public health authorities may eventually be forced to advise Americans, purely as a protective measure, to mind one another's business instead.
A composite description has been assembled from the testimony of the wounded, and I circulate it here in the hope that some reader may recognize them. The subjects are two in number and male in sex. They are always two, never one, never three, a numerical discipline unheard of in the annals of organized crime. Their height is unknown, their build unknown, their clothing unknown. Their faces have never been seen by anyone. They speak either not at all or in words no victim can recall, and they depart in no particular direction. In an era when every doorbell in America keeps video, they have never once been recorded. The sketch artist, given this description, produces a blank page. The blank page has been shown around, and nobody recognizes it and everybody does.
And here is the scandal: there has never been an arrest. There has not been one, in any jurisdiction, ever. Tens of thousands of victims have given statements to the police, cooperative and consistent and word for word, and the greatest manhunt in American history has simply declined to occur. Congress has convened hearings over less. Entire podcast empires have been built on a single cold case with a single victim; here are tens of thousands of cases, all of them warm, and not so much as a limited series. The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains a list of the ten most wanted fugitives in America, and I say this with all the sobriety my profession affords: give the two guys all ten spots. They have earned each one individually.
I will close with a theory, because every case this cold eventually acquires one, and this one was first proposed to me by a charge nurse at three in the morning, which is the hour of all our best theorizing. She had noticed what we have all noticed, which is that the victims return. A young man treated for a gunshot wound in the spring stands a conspicuously elevated chance of meeting the two guys again before autumn, as though the pair kept accounts and settled them punctually. The medical literature calls this violent injury recidivism. The nurse calls it something simpler. Her theory, which I cannot refute and have stopped trying to, is that the two guys are not two men at all but two positions, perpetually filled and refilled from among their own victims, which would explain their tirelessness, their ubiquity, their eternal youth, and the curious fact that every young man in my trauma bay appears to know a great deal more about the two guys than he is willing to say.
If you should ever meet them, and if you are a young man in this country the arithmetic is not encouraging, know that you will not see them coming. No one ever has. You will be doing nothing at all, as their victims always are. You will be on your way to church, at an hour when only the truly devout are awake, with your Bible in your hand and your own business firmly in mind, and then they will be upon you, both of them, out of nowhere. And when the ambulance brings you to my department, we will stop the bleeding, as we always do, and we will ask you what happened, as we always do, and we will write down your answer word for word, exactly as you tell it. It will be true. It always is.