His phone rang, and she went to get a drink while he answered it. She was still forming her rage into words when Mack began to shout.
“Who the fuck is this?Who is this!”
Then he was quiet.
He stayed that way for what felt like forever, listening. When Hailey said his name, he put his hand up to silence her.
“Yes.” Mack said finally. “I heard you.”
Hailey tried again, putting herself in his line of vision and mouthingWho?He shook his head and turned his back on her. He seemed to listen for a thousand years. He shook his head again and again.
“Yes, I understand. But you need to understand, I would never—”
The voice on the other end of the phone cut him off. Hailey stepped closer, slowly so that Mack would not back away, and she heard fragments of speech. The words sounded robotic.
“No,” Mack said in a whisper. “No fucking way.”
Then eventually he said, “Yes, I said that I heard you.”
“No,” he said, and then “Yes.”
Whoever was on the other end of the line must have hung up because Mack simply slid the phone from his ear and stared at it.
“Who was it?” Hailey asked him, but he couldn’t answer her.
39.
In criminology, they call the person who hires a hit man the instigator. This is unfair, if you ask me, because if someone wants a particular target dead, more often than not the target is the one who has set this chain of events in motion: maybe she got in the way of true love, maybe he was about to ruin a perfectly good business deal.
Fun fact: the most common reason for ordering a hit is to get rid of an unwanted spouse. (See previous example.) Usually this involves amateur hour on the dark web... some philandering housewife clicking around fantasizing about someone who will shoot fat, balding Robert, so she can bang the personal trainer in peace. Most people don’t really have the stomach for it, or the determination, and they won’t ever get all the way through the process.
But some do. Some will.
Be warned though, there are fraudsters out there who prey on just such disgruntled instigators. These contractors—these hit men—take a down payment, and then they don’t follow through with the hit, or worse, they call the cops on you, and then they disappear back into the dark corners from whence they came.
You can also find a hit man offline, the old-fashioned way. The sketchiest person you know will ask the sketchiest person he knows, and so on and so forth. The trouble with this approach (and I speak from experience) is that somewhere down the chain, no matter how long it is, someone knows the guy who pulls the trigger personally. If he gets caught, the whole chain will sing like a choir of canaries, and this is how a serious instigator could end up on the wrong end of a conspiracy-to-commit-murder charge. The only way to deal with this situation is to take out the whole chain at the first sign of trouble. Which is excessive, in my opinion, and will usually result in the instigator having to find a whole new identity.
Practice has taught me that the best way to instigate (if indeed we must call it that) is this: you find a person or persons that would never, ever in a million years kill someone, and you set the conditions just right—because almost anyone will kill someone, if the conditions are just right.
Then you call this contractor you’ve chosen—your fledgling hit man—and you tell him to be in his car on Danekar Road in Richfield, Ohio, at 6:30 a.m. on the twenty-sixth of December, waiting. You even give him directions.
You tell him that a man will come by, jogging, in a neon-green jacket. This man runs every day at the same time, in all weathers, because he’s training for a marathon. Danekar is a long, newish road with no houses on it yet, and thus none of those intrusive doorbell cameras. It leads to a trail through the woods that this man likes.
You tell your contractor that, traveling between fifty and sixty miles per hour, he should strike this neon-clad fitness fanatic with his car. It won’t be difficult; all the contractor really has to do is drive in a straight line. You tell him exactly where to park while he’s waiting for his target, and you warn him very clearly about doing any preliminary reconnaissance—that is the quickest path to the witness stand. You explain that, when the deed is done, the contractor should head directly home and park inside his garage. If there is damage to the hood or the windshield, he might want to think about waiting a while to get it fixed. You conclude by telling him that once this hit is complete, his balance is zero, his tab is closed, and you will never, ever contact him again.
Now, at this point in the conversation, your contractor will balk; they all do. That’s when you point out that you’ve already paid him. You tell him that the authorities really might not like where that money he took came from, what it’s tied to. You remind him of his penchant for burning down buildings and (almost) burning up teenagers. You reassure him that the target in this instance is an evil, evil man who deserves exactly what’s coming to him.
Finally, you remind the contractor in painstaking detail of his attractive wife—his co-contractor—and his darling little daughters. Of his in-laws in Akron, and his mom all the way down there in Florida all alone. So vulnerable, all of them. Why, even this contractor’s sister-in-law, his nieces and nephews, his young students, could be at risk, because this instigator, for one, isn’t an amateur. This instigator might even have other contractors out there, just like him, with just as much to lose.
And they aren’t all from fancy suburbs like Bratenahl, either, in case that matters.
40.
Mack
It was like a disease, like a cancer. There was nothing to go after head-on without destroying themselves in the process. Hailey had told him that this was not David Rainier, and Mack had to believe her—the prick wasn’t even in the country, the prick was swanning around Switzerland. But who else had they ever come across that could be capable of the threats Mack had heard with his own ears? Who else had the time and the money to torture them this way? He hadn’t even told Hailey the worst of it, how this weird, electronic voice—something straight out of a spy thriller, exceptreal, except coming through right there in their family room—had talked about her parents and their plastic lawn junk, had used the full name of their babysitter, had dropped an address for Tilda’s family, which Mack could only assume was correct.
All of them, any of them, could die because of you, the voice had said to him.I could not be more serious.
