Short Stories

of my guy’s head came off like a hard-boiled egg. His body came down in a heap and sprawled. I dropped the rifle on top of him and pulled his right shoe off. Tossed it on the ground. Then I ran. Two minutes later I was back in my car. Four minutes later I was a mile away.

I was up an easy hundred grand, but the world was down an industrialist, a philanthropist, and a racehorse owner. That’s what the Sunday papers said. He had committed suicide. The way the cops had pieced it together, he had tormented himself over the fact that his best horse always came in second. He had spied on his rival’s workout, maybe hoping for some sign of fallibility. None had been forthcoming. So he had somehow obtained a sniper rifle, last legally owned by the Israel Defense Force. Maybe he had planned to shoot the rival horse, but at the last minute he hadn’t been able to go through with it. So, depressed and tormented, he had reversed the rifle, put the muzzle in his mouth, kicked off his shoe, and used his toe on the trigger. A police officer of roughly the same height had taken part in a simulation to prove that such a thing was physically possible, even with a gun as long as the Barrett.

Near the back of the paper were the racing results. The big black horse had won by seven lengths. My guy’s runner had been scratched.

I kept the photograph on my mantel for a long time afterward. A girl I met much later noticed that it was the only picture I had in the house. She asked me if I liked animals better than people. I told her that I did, mostly. She liked me for it. But not enough to stick around.

Me & Mr Rafferty

I can tell what kind of night it was by where I wake up. If I’ve been good, I’m in bed. If I’ve been bad, I’m on the sofa. Good or bad, you understand, only in the conventional sense of the words. The moral sense. The legal sense. I’m always good in terms of performance. Always careful, always meticulous, always unbeatable. Let’s be clear about that. But let’s just say that some specific nighttime activities stress me more than others, tire me, waste me, leave me vulnerable to sudden collapse as soon as I step back into the sanctuary behind my own front door.

This morning I wake up on the hallway floor.

My face is pressed down on the carpet. I can taste its fibers on my lips. I need a cigarette. I open one eye, slowly, and move my eyeball, slowly, left and right, up and down, looking for what I need. But before we go on, let’s be clear: However haltingly you read these words, however generously you interpret the word slowly, however deep and 16-RPM and s-l-o-w your voice, however much you try to get into it, you are certain to be racing, to be galloping insanely fast, to be moving close to the fucking speed of light, compared to what is actually happening in terms of my ocular deployment. The part with the eyelid alone must have taken close to five minutes. The eyeball rotation, four points of the compass, at least five minutes each.

A bad night.

I am pretty sure I have a fresh pack of cigarettes on the low table in the living room. I concentrate hard in that direction. I see them. I am disappointed. Not a fresh pack. An almost-fresh pack. A pack, in fact, in the condition I like least: recently unwrapped, the crisp little cardboard lid raised up, and one cigarette missing from the front row. I hate that for two reasons: First, the pack looks violated. Like a dear, dear friend with a front tooth punched out. Ugly. And second, however hard I try to prevent it, the sight sends me spiraling back to grade-school arithmetic: There are twenty cigarettes in a new pack, arranged in three rows, and twenty is not fucking divisible by three. I see a pack like that and instantly I am full of rage and paranoia: The tobacco companies are lying to me. Which, of course, they would. They have an accomplished track record in that department. For forty years I have been paying for twenty, and all along they have been supplying me with eighteen. Eighteen is divisible by three. As is twenty-one, but are you seriously suggesting the tobacco companies would supply more than a person pays for?

So I lie and pant, but again, let’s be clear: The oldest, tiredest dog you ever saw sighs a hundred million times faster than I was panting. We’re talking glacial inhalations and exhalations. Whole species could spark and evolve and go extinct between each of my morning breaths.

I had left cigarette butts at the scene. Two of them, Camels, close to but not actually mired in the spreading pool of blood. Deliberately, of course. I know exactly how the game is played. I’m not new to this. The police need the illusion of progress. Not actual progress, necessarily, but they need something to tell reporters, they need smug smiles and video of important things being carried away in small opaque evidence bags. So I play along. It’s in my interests to give them what they need. I give Mr. Rafferty things to smile about, and I’m absolutely sure he knows they’re gifts.

But they’re useless. A cigarette smoked carefully in dry air retains almost no saliva. No DNA. No fingerprints, either. The paper is wrong, and most of it burns anyway, at a temperature close to two thousand degrees. So the gifts cost me nothing, and they give me the satisfaction of knowing I am playing my part in keeping the whole show on the road.

I move the fingers of my right hand and make a claw and start to scrabble microscopically against the resistance of the rug. I have future events to plan: getting to my knees, standing upright, stripping, showering, dressing again. A long agenda, and many hours of work. No breakfast, of course. Long ago I decided that respect for minimum standards of propriety forbade eating after killing. I am hungry, make no mistake, but the promised cigarette will help with that. Plus coffee. I will make a pot and drink it all, and compare its thin fluidity to blood. Blood is less viscous than people think, especially when generated in the kind of volume that my work produces. It splashes and spatters and runs and drains. It is spectacular, which is the point: Obviously Mr. Rafferty does not want to work cases that are mundane, or trivial, or merely sordid. Mr. Rafferty wants a large canvas, and a large canvas is what I give him.

I push with my left palm and ease my shoulders an inch off the floor. The pressure is relieved from my cheek. I am sure the flesh will be red and stippled there. I am not young. My face is doughy and white. Tone has gone. But I can pass it off as razor burn, or bourbon. I focus again on the almost-fresh pack ten feet from me. Tantalizing, and for now as distant as the moon. But I will get there. Trust me.

I have no clear recollection of last night’s events. The details are for Mr. Rafferty to discover. I sow, he reaps. It is a partnership. But lest you misunderstand: My victims deserve to die. I am not a monster. I have many inflexible rules. I target only certain kinds of repulsive criminals; I never hurt women or children. I look for the people Mr. Rafferty can’t reach. And not hapless, low-level street pimps or escort bookers, either: I set my sights a little higher. Not too high, though: for that way lies frustration. Neither Mr. Rafferty nor I can get to the real movers and shakers. But there is a wide layer of smug, culpable people between the two extremes. That is where I hunt. For two reasons: I can feel a glow of public service, and, more importantly, such careful selection puts Mr. Rafferty in a most delicious bind. He wins by losing. He loses by winning. The longer he fails to find me, the more the city is relieved of bad people. The reporters he deals with understand, although they don’t say so out loud. Everyone—me, Mr. Rafferty, citizens, inhabitants—benefits from perfect equilibrium.

Long may it continue.

Now I have to decide whether to roll right or left. It has to be one or the other. It’s the only way I can get up off the floor. I am not young. I am no longer agile. I decide to roll left. I stretch my left arm high so that my shoulder goes small and I push with my right. I roll onto my back. A significant victory. Now I am well on the way to rising. I know that Mr. Rafferty is getting up, too, ready to start his day. Soon he will get the call: another one! Hung upside down, as I recall, zip-tied to a chain-link fence that surrounds a long-abandoned construction zone, gagged, abused, eventually nicked in a hundred places, veins, arteries, throat. I don’t recall specifically, but I imagine I finished with the femoral artery, where it runs close to the surface in the groin. It’s a wide vessel, and, given adequate pressure from a thumping heart, it spurts high in a wonderful ruby arc. I imagine the man jerked his chin to his chest to look up in horror; I imagine I asked him how he was enjoying his BMW now, asshole, and his big house and his Caribbean vacations and his freebies with the poor Romanian girls he imports with all kinds of false promises about jobs with Saks Fifth Avenue before turning them loose to perform disgusting acts for six hundred dollars an hour, most of which he keeps, until the girls grow too addicted and haggard to earn anything anymore.