Train to Anywhere
Page 26
***
Mike had a unique way of being hired for most jobs. There were two people, only one he had actually met, who would send him a letter describing the contract. If the job looked promising, he would reply with a price, with the stipulation that half be paid up front. At some point, a deposit would be made into one of his accounts, indicating that he had been hired. His handlers, as he called them, probably took a cut of the payment, but he did not care as long as he got what he asked for. No negotiation was ever done. Aside from McBride, a continuing arrangement that did not work out, he always was hired in this manner.
Therefore, when the request came to take out McBride, he attached the exorbitant price of five thousand dollars. This had nothing to do with revenge—Mike never worked from any emotional angle—rather, it had everything to do with McBride's high profile. Although they had argued almost continually when he was working for him, Mike had no compunction to see him dead, other than to be paid for a job well done.
McBride lived in a quiet part of Providence, one where neighbors would whisper and uneasily joke about what the man who lived at number 714 actually did for a living. Over the course of three evenings, Mike waited and observed McBride's patterns of when he usually came home and what he did when he arrived. The job looked straightforward, as McBride always arrived alone, probably either thinking that nobody would touch him at his house or not wanting to bring the business home with him.
Mike waited until a cloudy night. Mike let himself into the garage from an alley-side door that was unlocked. The garage held two cars, one of which was there when he walked in. The garage had about ten feet of space on one side of the door, plenty of room for him to stand in the shadows when McBride came in, and to hide in case he would not be able to perform the hit. Mike paced back and forth for several hours, hiding from time to time when he heard a car approach. Waiting was not a problem. In fact, he had no objection to sitting and doing nothing for several hours if needed. The later this went, the better for him.
A car drove up, and Mike saw the lights through the small gaps around the garage door. He walked over to the side and behind a bench, where he would have the perfect angle to catch McBride when he stepped out of his car. The car stopped in front of the garage, and in a few seconds the door was pulled open. McBride went back to the car, and began to drive into the garage. The car rolled to a stop a few feet from where Mike was crouched behind the bench. McBride shut off the engine and, in the now-quiet garage, Mike heard a sigh. The sigh of a tired man with much on his mind. He sat in the car for a few moments, not moving, then made a kind of low humming sound and reached over in the passenger seat. At first, Mike thought he might have been spotted, and McBride was reaching for a gun. Instead, he had a small case of some sort, too large and square to be a weapon of any kind.
Timing is everything in any attack. The optimal point is when the other person is in a position of vulnerability where they would not be able to move with any quickness. Mike knew instinctively that this would be when McBride opened the door, put one foot out, and began to stand. He also knew that the instant McBride saw him, he would know what was up. Seeing a person like Mike in your garage meant only one thing. McBride set his foot on the floor and began to lean out of the car, stepping away and turning at the same time, one hand on the doorsill and the other holding the case. Mike stepped forward, the small gun ready.
McBride saw him, and in the darkened garage, there was an instant of recognition and a sudden breath. The shot was perfect, an inch above the brow, squarely spaced between the eyes. And he was dead. A good, clean job. Before the body had truly settled to the floor, Mike was out the alley door. He left, quietly closing the door behind him and staying in the shadows as he went towards his car parked on a side street.
About fifty feet away, he heard a woman's voice. "Clarence?" she asked. A screen door opened and closed and a few seconds later, he heard the same voice. "Clarence?" A momentary pause, and then she repeated herself, only this time screaming. She screamed a couple more times, and then he heard what could only be described as a restrained wailing. Mike did not change his speed or direction. Somewhere he had heard that McBride had a couple of children, children who would now grow up fatherless. Mike did not have a father after age ten, which left him to find a means and way through life. He occasionally wondered how he would have turned out if his father had been around, and if he had followed his father into the insurance business as expected. However, he only thought about this briefly, since that was not what had happened, and anything else was simply useless speculation. McBride's children would be fatherless, and in time his wife might get over the loss. If he remembered right, she was an attractive woman.