felt any moment of shame or regret about her discovery, she didn’t know. She was waiting for him when he walked down the stairs, standing with the model between them.
“What did you do?” she barked.
“Carla…”
“Just tell me what this means!” She pointed at the model, at the collapsed miniature train. He circled around the table toward her, his arms outstretched, and she wanted to be hugged, needed to be hugged, but she wasn’t ready to let him touch her yet. She realized tears were streaming down her face and she tried to blink them away. She had barely slept, had pictured this confrontation a million times since yesterday, but the reality never lines up with the way we imagine it. “What did you do to those peop-”
The last word stuck in her throat as his hands closed around her neck. It took her a full five seconds to realize what had happened, was happening. So sure was she that he was coming around to placate her, to comfort her, to soothe her, that she never imagined he’d try to kill her. She flopped backward into the model, his precise model, and she felt a sting of pain as her back smashed through the light rail track and crushed the rest of the miniature train.
He was strong, much stronger than she would’ve thought. When did he get so strong? She kicked at him but her legs were on the wrong side and she couldn’t gain any traction. Her fingers clawed at his hands but the grip was solid and his face, his horribly twisted face started to blur as tears soaked her eyes. She might have a chance for a couple of words, just a couple if she could get his fingers off her throat.
What had the self-defense expert said in that meeting at the hospital back when they had that rapist scare? Forget the neck. Thoughts whizzed around her head at a million miles an hour. Forget your neck and go for the eyes. His eyes.
She didn’t think about it anymore, just went hard for his eyes as she grabbed the side of his head and dug in with her thumbnails. The effect was immediate; he flopped backward, never expecting her to fight back, and she sucked in air like a swimmer coming to the surface.
Recovering, he took a step forward and she managed to screech out: “I took pictures!” The words sounded like they had been scratched with sandpaper, but they hit her husband flush and took hold. He stopped in mid-step, his feet rooted to the ground. His eyes darted back and forth as he tried to figure out his next move. Finally, he spoke. The calmness in his voice chilled her.
“Where?”
“Emailed to my hotmail account.”
He started to take another step, when her words stopped him again. “Where do you think the police are going to look when I go missing? You don’t know the password to that account, but all my friends have sent and received emails from me there. The cops’ll figure out how to open it.”
His face was flush with anger. “God. Dammit!” he spat, breaking it into two words so he could hammer the second.
“You stay away from me.”
“Just calm the fuck down.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it, Carla. I know.” Then he moved over to a chair, sat down heavily, and rubbed his head in his hands. “Just calm down and let me think.”
They went to breakfast. It seemed extraordinary at the time, and now even more so as she retold it to me. He told her everything. Everything. She had him by the balls, so he just came out with it. Maybe it had been weighing on his chest and he wanted to talk about it, just like she was doing now. Maybe he didn’t know how to broach the subject with her before this tipping point… she didn’t know. But over bacon and eggs at IHoP, he told her how he’d first gotten into the killing business after his discharge from the army; an infantryman in his unit had been taking contracts for a decade, and remembered Doug as having particular acumen for planning missions. Doug was adept at reading a map and conducting an ambush and presenting an almost geometrical strategy for accomplishing the squad’s goals. You need to raid a building? Go find Doug. You need to take out an ammo dump? Go find Doug.
Ten years later, he was married to Carla and making eighty grand a year in middle-management sales when his old friend Decker knocked on the door and walked him through the business. Gave him the basics on fences and hits and kill fees and tandem sweeps and time commitments and hidden money and weapons caches, all one needed to know to become a professional contract killer. It wasn’t much different than planning missions in Kabul, truth be told. Said if Doug were interested, then he’d introduce him to a fence and see how they did together. Said if he wasn’t, he’d never see Decker again. It was a crossroads moment and the timing was right: Doug was bored out of his mind and looking for some spice.
The first hit was messy and personal and upsetting. Face to face with a guy in an elevator who never saw it coming, but the blood and the matter and the splatter were enough to make Doug gag every time he thought about it. He had seen violence in Iraq, but it was mostly at a distance, and he was never the one actually pulling the trigger.
But he liked the work. By God, he really did. It was like everything he had ever done in his life was designed to make him an effective killer: his love of statistics and science and numbers and percentages-the very things that pushed him into a computer science degree after his service-also helped him execute the perfect hit. He just didn’t like the mess. Even when he was choking her hours before, he knew he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. He was in the death business, but he didn’t like the actual killing.
It was a paradox, but one to which he spent a month devoting his thinking time. Could he be an effective killer, but from a distance like in Iraq, where he wouldn’t necessarily need to see the kill? And in doing so, could he create a new niche in the market?
It hit him in a flash, the way the best ideas most often do. Accidents.
The difficult part in executing a hit is getting away after the mark is murdered. So what if there isn’t a murder? What if the death is ruled accidental? Would the client be willing to pay-possibly even pay a premium-if the hit appeared as though the mark were the victim of bad luck?
He floated the question to the fence Decker had secured for him. The man looked at Doug like his head had sprouted antenna. So he shut his mouth, took his next assignment, and started planning.
The mark was an Air Force colonel stationed in San Angelo, Texas. Doug didn’t know why someone wanted him dead and he honestly didn’t care. He just didn’t have much sympathy for people-didn’t value their lives; if he were being honest, he never did. Most people were assholes or stuck-up or inferior anyway. And no one lived forever, didn’t matter who you were. Why should Doug give a shit if some stranger had his ticket punched?
He knew the colonel lived in a ratty one-story home near the base and so he rigged the building to collapse on him while he slept.
The plan worked, the roof fell in directly on top of the mark, and Doug even added a weight set in the attic so the death would be instantaneous. Except it wasn’t. The colonel died, yes, but only after two weeks in the hospital in the ICU as doctors fought for his life. Spilatro sweated those two weeks like his own life hung in the balance. Maybe it did.
When he showed up to his fence after the mark finally died, Doug expected to be reprimanded. But Kirschenbaum clapped him on the back and asked him when he’d be ready to go again. It turned out the client was ecstatic with the way it went down, with the way the police and the press declared it to be a sad accident.
Kirschenbaum apologized for not recognizing what Spilatro brought to the table. He understood now the value in Doug’s killing style. He’d like to increase his fee. He was seriously impressed with the innovation. He’d like to step up their relationship. Move Doug to the top of his stable.
Doug was pleased with himself. His father had never once complimented him like this. Nobody had.
So that’s how he got into it and that’s what he did. He hadn’t worked in software sales in years. He was a contract killer, one of the most sought-after Silver Bears in the game. He told Carla how much money they really had, how much he had hidden away in cash, where no bank, no taxman, no creditor could get to it.
“But what about collateral damage?” she asked him. What about the other people who die in these accidents? What about the innocents on the train in Cleveland?
He shrugged. “People die in accidents every day,” he told her. “I don’t care about them and I don’t think about them.”
Then he put his hands out across the table, palms up, imploring her to hold hands, as if those same hands
