HIT #28

Hit number 28 was a public execution. It took place in a crowded, noisy Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. The restaurant was my only opportunity because the intended knew he had been placed on the bullseye and had holed himself up pretty good. His employers, and mine as well, resolved that problem by inviting him out to dinner and then telling me to make him the main course. I never actually found out what it was that he had done wrong, although I later heard a rumor that he had just been caught with his hand in the numbers take once too often.

It was what could be termed a classic kill. I walked into the restaurant about a quarter after nine and went directly into the men’s room. On my way through the place I took one quick, very good look and saw where my man was sitting. Naturally enough, as anyone who has seen a lot of crime movies will tell you, he was sitting toward the rear of the place, facing the door. Of course, I was now coming from the men’s room, which was on the side and in the rear. Which goes to show you how much you can depend on crime movies.

When I got into the men’s room I had to wait until one individual got out of the toilet, then I locked myself in and checked my .38. I put it back in my belt and returned to the restaurant.

He never saw me coming. I walked right up behind him and blasted him three times in the back of the head and neck, blowing parts of his brain into his veal marinara, and causing blood to run into the spaghetti sauce, ruining it completely. As usual, the loud noise of the .38 going off sent everyone diving under the tables. I’m sure a few people had both the time and opportunity to get a quick look at me, but I’m just as sure the memory of seeing my man’s head sprawled in his spaghetti is going to keep them from remembering too well. Scared witnesses have a way of confusing details, and I had just created a restaurant full of scared witnesses. If the police tried to put together a composite drawing from the descriptions of this crowd, they would have ended up searching for the Loch Ness monster.

I left the restaurant by a door on the side—quickly, but I didn’t run—and got into the stolen car I left parked outside. I drove five blocks and parked in a perfectly legal spot and abandoned the car. I walked over two more blocks and got on the uptown subway. By the time I picked up my own car, disposed of the gun and got home, it was nearly 2 A.M.

Hit number 28 earned me one paragraph on page 26 of the New York Daily News and $20,000 hard cash money. I liked the money better.

There were absolutely no recriminations. I was never picked up, never questioned, never bothered. In short, a perfect, professional job. It was, in fact, too easy, which is where my problems began.

Normally, after doing a hit, I stay away from heavyweight work for at least a couple of months. This way, if the coppers do have anything on their minds or police blotters, I give them every opportunity to find me and speak to me about it. Secondly, if you start knocking them off too quickly you tend to get careless. And mine is a profession in which anything less than perfection isn’t easily tolerated. One mistake is all it takes to make you a state boarder. So, when it comes right down to it, I never should have taken job number 29.

Of all the hits I’ve done, number 29 was the strangest. More things went wrong with it than any I did before or after. Part of the reason was my own fault. I knew I should have waited before taking another job. But 28 had been such a breeze and 29 originally came from a man I regard as a friend. And then there were these horses that took just a few seconds more than I thought they would to get from start to finish. I wasn’t in debt, but I wasn’t rolling in money either, so I took the contract on number 29. Because I knew I had broken my normal pattern, a bad thing for a hired gun to do, I was super-careful, too super-careful. I saw potential problems where there weren’t any, and missed some of the simple ones I should have seen. Everything combined to make number 29 the most dangerous, and the most interesting of my career. It is the textbook case of how not to make a hit.