The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Preston Lang Top Ten Vacation Selfies of YouTube Stars

from Deadlines

There are no professional hit men in America. That’s not to say people don’t take money in exchange for shooting a guy in the head. Some heavy kid gets a thousand bucks to whack another banger? Sure. But there’s no suave pro who lives a normal life until he gets the call from his handler to take down your difficult mistress, your work rival, your wealthy uncle. And there’s certainly no telephone number some suburban dad can call to order a fifteen-thousand-dollar hit on a Little League coach. It’s a cool setup for a story, but I’ve been a reporter too long, covered too many murders — it can’t really happen. Not only would a business like that get busted in a week, but there just isn’t enough work out there to make it feasible.

Yet there I was, drinking with a man who told me that’s exactly how he’d made his living. He called himself Brack. He had big, rough hands, but his voice was smooth and unexcitable.

“Another time I had to dress up like an emo kid to get into this club. You can laugh, but I put on the makeup and the skinny pants. Dosed the target’s drink, then I hit that dance floor. Flopped around all moody. I even took home a girl with a fish skeleton on her backpack. The hit went down as an accidental overdose. A work of art, if I do say so myself.”

His email had come to me out of the blue — I’ve got a story to tell. With nothing else going on, I decided to meet him. Then I almost walked out when he said he was a hit man. You can’t write a legit article about a guy spreading bullshit in a bar, but in truth I’d been writing more and more trash lately.

I used to have a regular job with a real newspaper. Then I didn’t. I used to do reporting. Next thing I knew I was putting out a lot of trend nonsense: Why are the kids wearing their socks over their shoes? Interview a few hip young things, generalize a bit, then get a clinical psychologist with a few bromides to put a button on it. I sold an article like that to the online arm of a national magazine. A few people read it. A lot of folks didn’t read it but wrote salty comments underneath. Old friends probably thought, Hey, Mike’s doing pretty well for himself, but when you factored in expenses that I never got reimbursed for, the piece netted me just over eight hundred bucks. It was my only income that month. My cousin works thirty hours a week at a frozen yogurt place. Last year she made more than I did, and she lives in a trailer with her mom, an EBT card, and a stack of really poorly written collection threats. I get just enough work that I still feel like a professional journalist but not enough to actually survive as a human being.

“Strangled this guy in a park one night with an ace bandage,” Brack said. “Then I set him down on a bench. He sat there a day and a half before anyone thought to check if he was dead.”

Body in a park, dead for more than twenty-four hours in public view? I’d look it up when I got home. We kept drinking and Brack kept right on talking. He once impersonated a Department of Agriculture agent, then shoved a rancher into his own decomp pit. He drowned a lady at the YWCA. He got a hunter with bear shot during pheasant season.

“But I haven’t been in the field in years,” he said. “I’m on the admin side now. It’s a job like any other. Answering phones, managing personalities.”

“How many people do you have working for you?”

“A few. It varies. Right now I’m a bit strapped for talent. They don’t always last as long as you’d like them to.”

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.

I was exhausted when I got home, and I fell asleep almost immediately. I woke up late that afternoon and checked the news online. There was a preliminary report of a murder up in the hills. Neighbors heard yelling and fighting from at least three people. Then gunshots. The old man died in the ambulance. I felt all right. I had the pulse of self-preservation, but the murder itself — those two shots to an old man’s gut — wasn’t really biting at me.

Maybe it was very stupid, but I went back to the bar where I’d met Brack and asked after him. I wanted my ten grand, and — though I’m a little embarrassed to say it — I wanted another job. I still wanted to believe there was a valid reason he hadn’t met me on Rook Street or that his phone number was invalid. I saw this whole life of ease and leisure, punctuated by four or five hits a year. Maybe get my price up to an even twenty grand. But after four shots of bad whiskey, the image of me in a tailored suit, skulking in the shadows, sizing up victims, began to dissipate. I wouldn’t be a hit man. I wouldn’t get to call up Brack and say things like The fly has been swatted. I wouldn’t even get my ten grand.

Six thousand bucks to kill a sixty-eight-year-old widower named Keith Pelfrey. The murder was a big local story. A friend of mine from New York even called to see if I was working on it and whether there was anything nationally interesting about an old guy shot on his back lawn. Pelfrey had worked as a financial adviser for forty years before retiring the previous May. He was one of those unostentatious rich guys: nice house, decent car, but nothing crazy. He’d lived at his current address for the past twenty-five years. All his money went to his only child, a daughter named Lana. There were no twin infants and no reason to believe Keith had ever molested a child.

A blogger called me one morning, a young guy who sometimes took me to lunch. He had some family money to keep him upright while he tried to take on local stories, and he liked to hear me talk about turn-of-the-century newsrooms — We had to plug into a telephone jack to look at the Internet.

“The police are basically nowhere,” he told me over seafood. “A burglary gone wrong. Nothing left behind at the site. Really common weapon and ammo. They looked into a guy who robbed a few places with a handgun about ten years back, but that didn’t go anywhere. There’s even a theory that it was just a poor guy who took a wrong turn, went up to Pelfrey’s place to ask directions, and the old man opened fire.”

“Why would the old guy be so paranoid?”

“Old guys living alone? Once night falls, they’re ready to shoot at anything that moves.”

“So the cops have no one on the radar?”

“His daughter, of course. She’s getting all the money, but they seemed close. She’d visit twice a year. They’d bike around the neighborhood with little helmets and kneepads. All very wholesome. And she was in Florida when it happened. Unless you think she hired a guy.”

“That’s pretty far-fetched.”

“Maybe. But I have to say — and this is just raw hunch based on nothing — I have a feeling it’s a professional job.”

“How do you figure that? He didn’t even get inside the house, Pelfrey got three shots at him before he fired back, then our pro gets the old man in the stomach and dashes off before he’s even dead. Doesn’t sound all that well put together.” I ate more shrimp. I’d taken down nearly the entire plate while the kid had been talking. “I’d be wary about paying too much attention to raw hunch. Careful research and reasonable deductions are where the truth usually lies.”

For the first time since I’d known him, he looked at me like I was an old buffoon who didn’t realize his time was up.

“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s the wild ideas that get you clicks.”

He ran with wild ideas for a while but ended up abandoning the story a few weeks later as his blog pivoted from local news to outrage pieces that fed a certain kind of political idiot.

Lana got her money without a hitch and moved to British Columbia, where six months later she married someone called Jonah Reed. Jonah was at least his third legal name. I tracked him back to a man named Lou Kovacs who’d managed a punk band in Georgia. Younger, prettier, but with those same rough, dangerous hands, it sure looked like Brack. Last I could tell, Lana and Jonah had sold all their Canadian property and flown to Amsterdam.

I thought I might feel the guilt eventually, but it hasn’t come. Instead I feel an incredible sense of freedom, and for the first time in years I’m paying my bills with words. Last week my most widely read article was called “Top Ten Vacation Selfies of YouTube Stars.” You might have seen it pop up on your screen, daring you to read it. If you do click on it — or any article like it — you can be sure that you’re reading the work of a journalist who has abandoned any set of morals he may once have had. You can be sure that the writer has stolen from children, or gotten decent folks hooked on smack, or maybe even killed for money. And if you see a typo, an obvious inaccuracy, or a paragraph that seems spliced in from nowhere, don’t tell me about it. I don’t care. I’m making a living.