I didn’t think I’d been drinking that hard, but I started to feel pretty hammered. My tolerance had gone way down. I was a middle-aged, underemployed, burnt-out hack, but at least I’d avoided one cliché by giving up liquor as soon as I couldn’t afford it. I spent my nights drinking Sanka, searching for paying venues that took unsolicited pitches.
“So you want to know why I’d even talk to you, right?” Brack asked.
“People enjoy my company.”
“I looked you up: Michael Roth. I like the way you write. You don’t try to show how smart you are all the time. You just tell us what’s going on in regular English.”
I’m a sucker for a compliment, and I was almost drunk enough to get into Mikey’s 7 Rules of Unpretentious Journalism. Instead I smiled and nodded and let him continue.
“There’s no one else within a hundred miles who could do a story like this.”
Probably true.
“And you hate cops,” he said. “Cops hate you, right?”
I wouldn’t have put it that way, but he wasn’t exactly wrong.
“You were writing about brutality before it was fashionable.”
I wouldn’t have said that either, but there was some truth to it.
“So you’re not going to run and tell police about me. I know that.”
“Okay. Say I write an article, and it gets a little attention,” I said. “The police can pressure me to give you up.”
“Don’t we have a constitutional protection? An amendment? Something like that?”
I went on a bit about Judith Miller and Charles Manson and a few other pieces of legal pomp that came into my buzzing brain.
“What if it was a book?” he asked.
“Still tricky.”
But maybe we could manage it. Offer up pretend facts as autobiographical fiction. Or maybe we could go nonfiction and claim the source was a third party, or that I got my info from a man on his deathbed. It would probably all seem ridiculous in the morning, but I took the guy’s phone number and stumbled out of the bar.
I wasn’t looking forward to the trip home: a long wait, then a thirty-minute bus ride and a fifteen-minute walk. Out in the parking lot I considered the possibility that Brack had once been some local dirtbag who killed a guy for five hundred bucks, and now years later he’d invented this whole hit-man persona. Maybe one of the murders he’d told me about was real. If I could track him to it, that might be something. Or it might be nothing.
Along the shoulder of the road, I heard a single beep. Brack rolled down his window.
“What, you don’t have a ride?”
I shook my head. It had come down to keeping the car or the Internet. In the twenty-first century the Web wins.
“Get in, man. I’ll drive you home.”
So I got in a car with a self-confessed mass murderer. At first we went the right way, but after about ten minutes he took a turn off the main road.
“No, stay straight another five miles,” I said.
“I’ve got a different proposition for you.”
My stomach tightened up just a bit.
“I’ve got a client. We’re looking to get it done soon.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll give you sixteen grand.”
“For what?”
“If you’ll do it. The hit.”
“I’m a journalist.”
“Hey, for six years I thought I was a glazier.”
He took a thick wad of cash from the glove compartment and counted out six thousand dollars.
“That’s for now. The other ten when you’re done.”
I shook my head and didn’t take the money.
“Sudden. I know,” he said, and kept driving, deeper into the hills. “There’s this woman — nice lady. She marries Prince Charming. Wonderful, all wonderful. Eventually she meets his dad. Guy is really fucking creepy. You know how you sometimes get that off a guy? And when she talks to her husband’s brother and sister, they don’t come out and say it, but she thinks the old guy used to touch them.”
“But they don’t come out and say it?”
“Sometimes those people are like that. You know what I mean? Scarred. They just don’t want to say it happened.”
Yeah, I knew all about that. I’d done a series on adult victims of child molestation. It was the last good, honest journalism I’d done. I put in some real research and took the time to get the interviews right. I sold it as a three-parter to a big daily paper in one of our largest cities. Sober, intelligent people read my words and maybe learned a little something. I made about two dollars an hour on that job.
“But the husband — Prince Charming — seems to think his dad is a great guy. Fine, she’ll just hold her breath and nod when she has to see the father-in-law twice a year. But three months back she had twins and the dad moved to town to be nearer his grandkids. The husband thinks it’s great. Talks about letting old Gampy watch the kids while they go to the movies, have romantic steak dinners. That kind of thing. So far she’s been able to put that off, and she watches Gampy like a hawk when he’s in her house, but she’s going back to work in a few weeks. Eventually he’s going to be alone with those kids.”
“She can’t level with her husband?”
“Tell your husband his dad’s a perv? How’s he going to take that? But she also figures we’re all better without this guy. Kids in the neighborhood? Maybe he’s got a little chamber in the basement? Who knows? The guy is bad for the world. Take the money. It’s yours.”
He stopped the car in the parking lot of a convenience store and pulled a knapsack out of the back seat.
“In the bag you’ve got gloves, shoe covers, a key to the back door, and a Glock G29. You know how to use it?”
As it turned out, I did. I’d actually joined a club back when I was still at The News. I pretended it was so I could write a story. One of those Hey, I’m a liberal guy trying to get into the mindset of all you redneck bastards who love guns. But I have to admit it was a real kick to hold that little slayer in my hand. The Glock was exactly the kind I’d used.
“There’s one bedroom upstairs. He’ll be asleep. You put three or four in his head. Then you leave out the back. Same way you came in. You walk past the pond and into the woods. If you keep going about a mile, you’ll come out on Rook Street. I’ll pick you up, give you ten grand, and take you home.”
I still hadn’t touched anything he’d offered me, but when he handed me a photograph, I took it. It was the old guy — the pervert. Yeah, I could see it in his eyes. There’s a few varieties of molesters. He was the type with the big, fake smile and the comfortable sweater. I’d seen plenty of them before. He did deserve to die, and I deserved sixteen grand.
There was a map showing me how to get from the convenience store to the house. The address would be clear on the mailbox. The neighbors weren’t that close by. If all went well, they might not even hear the gunshot, and the body might not be discovered for a few days. As I neared the house, I saw all the lights were off. I approached the back door, but I didn’t put in the key. I wasn’t a killer. This was crazy. I had that one clean bolt of sobriety before I heard the snap of a shotgun blast. I ran and fell and another shot rang out. I was pinned between the side wall and the house. There were a few low shrubs about five feet away. I scuttled behind one of them.
“Get up. Then I’ll put you down for good.”
I could’ve made it to the wall, but he would’ve gotten a clear shot at my back. Or I could’ve run past the house, but then he’d have me at close range. Or I could’ve surrendered. Please don’t shoot. But he’d already shot at me twice and threatened to kill me if I stood up. I heard him step off the porch and shoot again toward the bushes. There weren’t too many places I could be hiding. He knew roughly where I was. As he drew closer, he came into view through a hole in the shrub. For a second I saw his face clearly, lit from behind by the porch light. I could see all the cunning, all the evil. I got him twice in the gut. Then I ran. Past the pond and into the woods like Brack had said. I made it out to Rook Street and walked along the dark road for fifteen minutes, but no one came to pick me up, so I ducked into the adjoining trail and stayed in there until morning, when I came out near the highway and found a bus stop some twenty miles from where I’d shot the pervert.