CALL ME MR. BLACK | Fiction by Mike McHone

“Mister Black?”

A block of ice formed in his stomach. Every nerve in his body told him it was a setup, a sting, and this…, this—what? —eight, nine-year-old kid was the bait.

“I’m Nathan.”

He scanned the park. Empty swing set. Old lady walking a golden retriever. Mother pushing a stroller. Group of people doing Tai Chi. No. No, no, no, there had to be someone watching him, cops, feds, somebody, but where?

“You’re Mister Black, aren’t ya?” the kid asked.

The man thought back to the conversation he’d had online the week prior.

“I only agree to do a job after I sit down with someone,” the man wrote. “If something feels off, I walk away. Understand?”

The person wrote back, “K.”

“Meet me at McMillan Park. Noon. Bench by the playground. I’ll have a red ballcap, black windbreaker. Describe yourself.”

“Red hair. blue eyes. names Nathan. whats urs?”

“Call me Mr. Black.”

Before he stepped foot in the park, he did the usual recon: arrived thirty minutes early, looped around the block, looked for suspicious vehicles, checked the rooftops, the trees even. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, parked, and headed to the playground to meet a redheaded man.

Man.

An invisible fist clenched the center of his chest.

A light blue backpack sat beside the kid on the park bench. He unzipped it. “I got your money.” The boy lifted the pack so the man could see inside. Stacks of bills were nestled beside an inhaler and a small Ziploc bag filled with carrots. “Twenty thousand, like you said. I counted it all myself.” He smiled. The man felt his hands, jaw, anus, and soul clench.

Again, over the park. Swings. Old lady. Tai Chi. Again, nothing.

The fist tightened.

How many? Yes, how many jobs had he pulled since going private all those years ago? Three dozen? How many kills did he rack up in the military? Twice that many? A hundred or so lives taken by way of bullet, bomb, and blade. Rivers of blood spilled. Obits thick with ink. He’d made a name for himself amongst the people who benefitted from his talents, but this, Jesus, this, Christ, this kid, this… baby wanted to hire him?

“I got it all outta my dad’s safe,” the kid said. “There’s lots of money in there, so it was kinda easy.”

The man—almost—asked how the kid knew to reach out to him on the dark web, how he avoided being picked up by the cops for truancy, but, no, his nerves told him. Don’t ask the little shit anything. Duck out. Leave.

Now.

He obeyed.

“Mister Black?”

He heard the pitter-patter behind him. A hand tugged at his sleeve. “Hey, I need ya to do what I asked,” the kid said. “I need ya to kill my mom and dad.”

“Get away from me,” the man demanded and swatted the kid’s hand.

“Cmon, please.”

The man speedwalked to his sedan, got in, checked the mirrors for cop cars, vans, or SUVs with blacked out windows, saw none, and left. He turned on the radio to find some music but received nothing but adverts.

#

Solitary professions begat solitary lives. With any other job, one could complain to fellow co-workers about their issues or problems. Even mafia types in a similar line of work, be they New York goombahs, Westie Micks, or London Mali Boys could swap stories. But for him, there was only a vacuum. Yes, there were spaces on the internet. Message boards; pages where people could leave little tidbits about a hit gone wrong, a gun jammed, some lout that tried to pass counterfeit bills as payment, but the man would take no part. The less information about his kills, lesser the chances were of governments tracking him. It wasn’t just the inherent talent to take a life that afforded someone the opportunity to become a contract killer. Anyone can kill. Turn on the evening news and see. What determined whether or not someone would be a success in a vocation such as his was the ability to live in secrecy, to pretend you don’t do what you do, to compartmentalize the gore from the daily mundane, to, mentally, emotionally, sop up the blood, wring it free from your soul, and move on to the next job. Most of the time, it was manageable. When you’ve killed for thirty years, it becomes part of the routine, no different than paying taxes or buying shoes, but there were times when the burden became too much. To whom could he turn? Psychiatrists and religious leaders were out of the question, and again, there was no way he’d send out messages to strangers floating in the ether of the internet. What then?

The answer, like the ability to take a life, lurked within.

The first time he talked to himself came after a grisly job in Montreal (which entailed a grandfather who quite literally wanted the head of his granddaughter’s abusive ex-husband). He imagined a conversation between himself as if he were both therapist and patient. Yes, maybe it wasn’t as useful as an actual therapy session, but something was better than nothing, and when a confliction about a job exacted a toll, he resumed the sessions with himself just as he did an hour after he left the park.

He laid down on the bed in his hotel room, closed his eyes, and paid himself a visit. He imagined a therapist’s office, desk, couch, chair, decorated in grays and whites. He saw himself clean shaven, in a suit, in a chair, notepad on his lap. He imagined a second version of himself in jeans, a t shirt and a five o’clock shadow come through the door.

“Good afternoon,” his well-dressed self said.

“Hello,” his normal, average, everyday self answered.

“How are you?”

“Been better.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“You know why.”

“I know you know I know, and I know you know that I need you to say it.”

“The kid,” the normal-self said.

In his mind: he pictured an old timey theater with velvet curtains. He imagined the curtains parting, revealing a screen, and projected onto the screen was the face of the boy, loops of red hair framing freckled features.

“You’re disturbed about him?” the professional-self asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“He offered you money. He wants someone dead. It’s a straight-forward transaction.”

“A child wants his parents dead.”

“Some children do.”

On the screen: his father.

“Look, the kids—the adult kids that paid for the hits, where, you know, adults.”

“There should be age limits for our clientele? We should treat our profession the same way the government treats alcohol or strip clubs? You must be such-n-such years of age to finance this murder?”

The face of the boy.

“Your policy has always been no questions asked, correct? That’s what you learned in the army. You never questioned your orders. They sent you somewhere, you aimed, you shot, you left, end of story.”

He had no reply to himself.

“Maybe he has a good reason to want them dead, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe they abuse him, maybe he’s a twat. Can you say with absolute certainty you’ve never killed an innocent person? Can you say you’ve been comfortable with every single job?”

On the screen: The old woman in Nashville. The way she pleaded. The way she cried. God, the sound. The fear in her eyes. The way her dentures dislodged from the roof of her mouth as he garroted her.

“No,” his normal-self said. “I can’t. But this is…”

“Crazy?”

“Yes.”

“I guess that’s why you’re talking to yourself, isn’t it?”

“He’s so young.”

“Everyone’s young once. Some of us keep that way forever.”

The woman in Elyria, Ohio. Twenty-three. One shot, back of the head. He didn’t know she was pregnant until he read about it in the paper the next day. Her husband never mentioned the pregnancy when he paid for the hit. The man almost flew back to Ohio the next day and killed the son of a bitch on principle.

Almost.

A knock on the door. His spine catapulted him forward on the bed.

Cops? Feds?

Another knock.

“Better answer it.”

He crossed the carpet and started to look through the peephole but stopped. Why? If it was cops, whomever, would it matter? If it was to be the end of the line, would it make the crash any less painful seeing the brick wall at the end of the track?

He opened the door to a woman standing beside a cleaning cart loaded with towels and bedsheets. “Housekeeping?” she asked in English that wasn’t so much broken as it was desecrated like Nagasaki in ‘45.

“No,” he said and closed the door.

#

“u mad at me? i do something bad?”

The man stared at his laptop as if it were a hypnotist’s watch.

“He deserves an answer,” his professional-self said.

He read the words again. “i do something bad?”

“He’s a client.”

“He’s a child.”

“He’s a client,” he told the empty room.

On the screen in his mind: the stack of bills in the backpack, the plastic bag filled with carrots.

On the screen: His mother making ants on a log for him. Celery, peanut butter, and raisins.

On the screen: His mother weeping in a corner, her mouth bloody.

“Sorry,” he typed. “It didn’t feel right.”

“But?”

“But” he typed, “We can meet again. I’ll do the job.”

Minutes later: “u wanna go to th park tomorrow agin?”

“Yes,” he typed. “Same time.”

“K.”

He spent the rest of the day waiting for tomorrow.

#

“Let me see the backpack.”

The kid handed it to him. The man unzipped it, brought out a counterfeit detector pen from his pocket, and swiped random stacks of bills. The money was legit. He put the pen back in his pocket and zipped up the pack. “I’m not going to ask you why you want your parents dead, how you were able to skip out on school two days in a row. It’s none of my business. The only thing I’m going to ask is if you can pay me the rest of the money we talked about.”

“Fifty thousand. Dad’s got it in his safe.”

The man scanned the park once more. “I’ll let you know the day before I do the job. When that happens you need to get rid of your laptop, or… whatever it is you used to contact me. And when I say get rid of it, I mean break it apart, destroy it. Take it somewhere, bury it. Don’t throw it away at your house. Cops’ll dig through everything. And make sure you get the money out of the safe the day before the hit goes down. Keep it somewhere no one can find it. Cops’ll take stock of the cash money in the house, probably take it as evidence.”

“Okay.”

“And wipe down the safe after you’re done.”

“Okay.”

“Do your parents have ledgers? Something that says how much they have in the safe?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“But how does know? How can he know? He’s…”

“He’s bright. He’s probably considered all angles.”

“He’s a fucking child.”

“So were you.”

“All right. After you destroy your computer, we’ll be in touch through this.” He handed him a burner phone. “Again, keep this where no one can find it.”

“I got lots of hiding spots.”

On the screen: The cubby hole in his room where he kept his G.I. Joe’s.

“I want you to understand, if you don’t pay me the money you owe me when this is done, I’ll kill you. If I feel you’re trying to screw me over in any way, any way at all, you die. Get me?”

“Yep,” the child said.

“You can’t go back on this. Once it’s in motion, that’s it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“What am I…?”

“I’m going to need some information.”

“What do you wanna know?”

He asked the parents’ names, where they worked, hobbies, the usual. The kid provided it.

The man stood and slung the backpack over his shoulder. He started to walk off when the kid called, “Mister Black, wait.”

He stopped.

“I need my inhaler.”

He felt the hand again in the center of his chest but ignored it. The man opened the backpack. The kid dug in and took it out. “Allergies,” the kid said and took a puff.

The man noticed the bag of carrots from yesterday was gone. He rezipped the backpack and went to his car.

#

Leonard and Patricia DuPree were like most couples in their tax bracket. He was a trust fund kid, she was a former model. He made money in real estate, she sat on the board of a few charities and non-profits. He invested in a company that built cellphones, like a cellphone she was comprised mostly of plastic.

The man tracked their movements for weeks. Both had separate lunches and dinner dates with friends and business associates. Mr. DuPree spent fifty hours a week in his office in downtown Detroit. Mrs. DuPree spent about half that time in nail, hair, and tanning salons, as well as gyms and yoga studios. The one constant, however, was that they both enjoyed taking their boat out on Saturday mornings. They’d set off from the marina in Wyandotte, Michigan, right on the Detroit River and sail around for hours, sometimes south to Lake Erie, sometimes north to Lake Huron. Being the fact the security in the marina was about as thin as Mr. DuPree’s hairline, the man was able to sneak onto the boat and plant tracking devices and hidden cameras without any trouble. When he watched the footage he’d taken, he expected to see two debaucherous cretins living the life of Caligula, but it was not the case. The Duprees simply sailed and enjoyed the sun. Mrs. DuPree would usually bring a book. Mr. DuPree would hit the obligatory fifth of rum he’d bring along. While full-sail on the water, both of them were lost in respective seas of words and drink.

It was going to be easier to kill them than he anticipated.

#

A month later.

“We don’t usually talk when you’re in the middle of a job.”

“I know.”

“You should focus.”

“I know.”

He pulled his boat alongside theirs.

“Then why do you need to chat with me?”

He cut the engine.

“I guess I wanted to tell you… I was wrong.”

“About?”

“The hesitation.”

“Interesting. Why?”

Waves rocked the boat.

“I thought of something last night.”

“What is it?”

“This business, what I do… I think I really help people.”

“You can look at it that way. Clients pay you to get rid of a problem and—”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the people I kill.”

“Hello,” he called.

“Explain.”

“Right… Look, all of us have to die.”

Both Mr. and Mrs. DuPree came to the side of their boat.

“Most of us die of old age, some of horrible diseases, some get sent off to war, accidents, stupid slips and falls around the house. Since all of us have to take the trip…”

“Everything okay?” Mr. DuPree asked.

“…isn’t it a blessing if we don’t expect it?”

“Everything’s fine,” the man said.

“Wasn’t the world a better place when you were a child?”

He pulled the .45.

“Wasn’t it better when you didn’t know anything about the world?”

Headshot. Mr. DuPree first, Mrs. DuPree second. Neither had a chance to scream.

“You’re rationalizing murder.”

He climbed aboard.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I can only hope for…”

He removed the tracking device and hidden cameras he’d placed throughout the boat.

“You can only hope for what?”

On the screen: Him, twelve, in the cornfield, tossing the gun into the hole that housed his father’s corpse. Him and his mother shoveling dirt into the hole, Mother saying to him, “He won’t hurt either one of us again.”

“Nothing.”

He climbed down to his boat and returned to land.

#

Later, he texted the kid. “The job’s done. Can you meet at the park around five?”

“Yeh,” the kid replied.

“See you then.”

“K.”

He closed the burner phone and stared at the wall.

#

Three months later at his home in Angola, Indiana, the man shoveled snow out of his driveway and went inside to make himself coffee. He noticed he was low on hazelnut creamer and later added “Hz Nut Cream” to his grocery list. It was supposed to get below freezing that night. On the list he wrote “2 bags salt.”

He took his dishes to the sink, rinsed and dried and them. That afternoon, he went out, got in his car, and headed east. Just as he turned on the radio, he drove through the intersection of Angola Trail and was T-boned by a semitruck that ran the red light. His world became a pinwheel of steel and pain. Like the body of the car, virtually everything in his body was crushed and leaking. He tried to move but couldn’t, tried to scream but was unable. A seat cushion of gray fabric—maybe the passenger seat cushion, maybe his own, he couldn’t tell—lay before his eyes. His sight grew dim. Everything started to fade, and along with it, blessedly, so did the pain.

He was… Yes. Dying. He was dying. In this moment. Here. Not in a field of battle. Not at the end of a knife. Here. In Angola, Indiana. His hometown, miles from the front steps of the home in which he was born. He was dying beneath a cloudy sky. He was dying as the forecast called for an inch of snow. He was dying as the radio played Mozart and a matted, gray, sun damaged seat would be the last thing he’d see on this earth. But that vision, that cushion wasn’t so bad, was it? It was nice. Smooth, clean, free of stains. It looked comfortable and inviting. No. It wasn’t bad at all. In fact, yes, in fact, it was beautiful. Everything, now, even the wreckage, was beautiful, and inside him, all the light in all the universe danced.

“So, this is what it’s like? This is what I brought to all those people?”

On the screen: The man strangled in Tel Aviv. The woman shot in Vancouver. The car bomb in Lexington. The slit throat in Liverpool. The shotgun to the back of the head in São Paulo.

“It’s so beautiful.”

The professional-self interjected, “You know this sensation, this euphoria is a reaction to the endorphins your body is releasing, correct?”

“I know. Still, such beauty. All the beauty in the world… But.”

“But?”

“I’m sad.”

“Why?”

“I’ll never feel this again. This beauty, this… This is what he felt? In his last seconds?”

On the screen: His father, in the shower, getting ready for work. The boy, twelve, pulls the shower curtain back and sees his father, wet, naked, vulnerable. Vulnerable like he was all those years. Like his mother was all those years. “What the fu—” is all his father says before the bullet enters through the nasal cavity and exits out the back of the skull. The father crumbles. Blood swirls. The mother comes running, sees what the boy has done. The boy thinks he will be in trouble. Instead, the mother grabs him and holds him and tells him she loves him.

“He felt all this beauty when I only wanted to give him pain?”

“Yes, but you can’t change nature.”

“Where do you think he is now? The boy from the park, I mean.”

“I don’t know.”

“How did he know to reach out to me? I mean… How did he know? How could he know?”

There was no reply.

“Do you think there‘s a chance he might end… up a good man? That he might… do something good with all the money… that… he’ll get…?”

He didn’t answer because he already knew the answer.

He heard voices, but he couldn’t tell whether they came from this side or the other.

The fabric. The endless patch of gray in the middle of an Indiana road beneath a winter sky with the smell of gasoline filtering into his skull alongside visions and voices of the dead and dying. Such beauty.

Such glorious beauty.

“So sad,” the man told someone. “I should’ve killed him too.”

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