So in my new role, surveillance could last a fuck of an open-ended long time.
But eventually my subject would lead me to the mark. This would require some detective work on my part. For example, what if I’d followed somebody whose role was the passive one?
Shit!
More surveillance!
More often, though, I’d drawn the active half. That was partly luck, but also the list sometimes specified a preference. Active would check in with passive, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to get a fix on who was being staked out and targeted.
That’s where having people skills comes in handy.
I would approach the target. Yes, you’re ahead of me. This is indeed where I would explain to somebody that he or she had been marked for murder. How I did this varied from sticking a gun in a guy’s ribs to just cornering him in a public place.
Sorry about putting you through all this boring background. I wish I could tell you that skipping it is fine, but you rookies better not. Some basics are coming.
Let’s start with why somebody who grew up in Ohio (if it was Ohio) in a quietly middle-class neighborhood (that much is true) turned into a killer for hire. Obviously, Vietnam played a role. And coming home to find my wife in bed fucking another guy probably should be factored in, too.
Now I’m repeating myself, but I never claimed to be a writer, and anyway the point is — Uncle Sugar developed in me certain skills. Skill set, remember? I learned about firearms, and as a sniper, I learned to kill without compassion and at a distance. That “at a distance” idea is both literal and figurative.
What the Broker explained to me, when he recruited my services, was that people who have been selected for murder usually have it coming. That’s glib, I realize; but there’s often truth in it — the marks have stolen from employers or cheated on spouses or diddled business partners, or otherwise put themselves in the position of the world around them being better off without them in it.
They may even have killed people themselves, got away with it, and now really have it coming.
Circumstances have dictated that, due to the illegal nature of a mob-tied business, say, going to the cops isn’t a good option. Or consulting a divorce lawyer isn’t either, because a pre-nup or religion or some stupid damn thing gets in the way.
Which means not every victim deserves it, no matter what the Broker said. Not everybody in the crosshairs put themselves there by their own wayward actions. That’s just a recruiter’s trick, like telling you you’re making the world safe for democracy when some poor little yellow (not in the cowardly way) bastard is just trying to keep invaders off his pathetic little piece of rice paddy.
Plenty of people get quietly killed because their favorite uncle left his fortune to his favorite niece, and the nephew nobody liked, especially the uncle, has another idea. Some young wives have old husbands who stubbornly refuse to die of natural causes, and the death of said spouse is preferable to divorce. And some crooked businessmen have honest partners who just get to be a pain in the ass.
Yet even if they don’t deserve it, any mark has managed to come between someone and what that someone wants... enough so for that someone to hire the mark’s fucking death. And that is a decision made a long time before an asshole like me came along with a way to make that happen.
Such a death has already been decided. Once the down payment has been made, the intended target is just an obituary walking around, waiting to go to press. You don’t have to have big money to hire somebody dead. Fifty bucks in the right dive can swing it.
But if you wind up giving money to a middleman like the Broker, you’ve got coin all right. You’re rich or close to it. And specialty murders, like accidents or frame-ups, are on the menu. Not my specialty, though. In that rarefied climate, I was neither fine dining nor fast food — more like an old-fashioned steak house. Nothing fancy. Just a bullet in a steer’s brain. And, in the case of a “suicide,” a baked potato with all the trimmings on the side.
Now I know I referred to this as “the murder business,” but it isn’t really. That’s just words. Me? I was no more a murderer than a gun or a bullet is. Firearms and ammunition and yours truly, we’re just about the mechanics of the matter.
You see, murder is personal, like when I kicked the jack out and crushed my wife’s lover under that little sportscar. Killing, however, is a fait accompli, as the French said when they left Vietnam.
So if you’re thinking I was some kind of contract-killing Robin Hood, exorcizing my guilt and remorse by warning the potential victims of other contract killers, well, think again. I was a businessman charging for a service. Like a lube job or fries with that. As for informing the victim that death was coming for him, that was complimentary.
Like the drug dealers say, first one’s free...
But taking out the contract killers — preventing the immediate threat to somebody’s ability to breathe — that’ll cost you. And it costs you more if I can determine — and remove — who took the contract out on you.
I had been doing that for almost ten years — quite successfully — when I picked a name off the Broker’s list and set out for Naperville to try to save another life.
I’m just that kind of guy.
Two
Winter was almost over, but it was still cold.
Spring wouldn’t show up for a while yet and the skeletal trees with their bony branches seemed to scream autumn till you noticed the occasional clumps of snow stubbornly clinging. The ground had some snow, too, plopped here and there like oversize bird droppings.
Going from the Lake Geneva vicinity, barely inside Wisconsin’s border, to Naperville in the greater Chicago area made for one of my easier trips to a name and location plucked from the Broker’s list. We’re talking maybe an hour and forty minutes, depending on traffic, after white-patchy farmland turned into urban sprawl.
The dark-blue, mildly battered Chevy Impala, a decade old, had decent heat, a radio-cassette player and surprising pick-up. This was hardly competition for my Batman-black Firebird at home, but I’d felt lucky to pick it up for under a grand in Muskego, where I would sell it back on my return. The used car lot, where I’d done business before, even let me store the Firebird in back at a pittance of a weekly rate.
I never used my own car on a job.
The wind rattled the windows and nuts and bolts that weren’t exactly new-car-lot fresh, but my fleece-lined bomber jacket did right by me, and I left my leather driving gloves on. The latter were nicely snug for use with my nine-millimeter Browning, which was on the seat next to me, under a spread-open Playboy. I took Highway 12 all the way, some of it four-lane, some two-lane, but a direct route. I had some homemade cassettes along — Beach Boys; Beatles, for memories; Bangles and Blondie, to convince myself I wasn’t an old man yet.
Naperville, thirty miles or so outside of Chicago, was booming, like so many other suburbs in an area whose populations had swelled up when the East-West Tollway went in. Right now I was on Ogden Avenue, clogged in traffic in a commercial garden blossoming with AllState, Kwik-Kopy and Burger King signs. I pulled in for a sub sandwich at the Original Italian U-Boat (slogan: Accept No Substitutes!) and asked for directions to Ridgeview Lane.
Which proved to be a typical suburban Pleasant Valley Sunday kind of street, two quiet blocks in a subdivision called Steeple Run. We’re talking plenty of trees currently growing nothing but snowy daubs on otherwise bare branches, and butch-haircut lawns of brown and green and white, no color dominating. Not that this was a cookie-cutter area — each house was distinctive, in its non-distinctive way, a ranch-style here, a split-level there, plenty of two-stories.