THE PACKAGE arrived a couple of weeks later. A nine-by-twelve flat envelope. Thick with paper inside. Routed from my Jersey P0 box, the one I use for mercenary stings. Max handed it to me in the warehouse.
I slit it open. A single sheet of paper. Neatly typed letters. "Put on a pair of gloves before you open the next envelope. Burn this part."
I did.
A dozen sheets of single-spaced typing. On a typewriter they'd never find. Each page numbered. Written in blood so icy it ran clear. My hands trembled. I lit a cigarette.
My name is Wesley. You never knew me. None of you did. But you know my work. I killed my first human in 1967.
He gave the lieutenant's name. Where it happened.
Four rounds in the chest. M-16. I killed two men in that prison you put me in.
Dayton and another guy I hadn't known about.
When I got out of prison, I started killing people for money.
Names, places, dates, calibers. The dope dealer even the Marielitos and Santeria couldn't protect. A blowgun with a poisoned dart. An ice pick in the kidney in the middle of a racetrack crowd. The list went on for pages.
Marco Interdonanto. Car bomb. Carlos Santamaria Ramos. At La Guardia. A spring bomb in a coin locker.
The one where the whole crowd died along with him.
Tommy Brown. I cracked his skull with a lead pipe and set fire to the house.
Near the end, I got to the part he left me in his will.
I killed somebody named Mortay. It was a contract from a man named Julio. He works for Don Torenelli. I shot him with a.38 Special, then I dropped a grenade on his face. I killed a man named Robert Morgan. In a playground in Chelsea. A rifle shot from the roof The same contract. Julio wouldn't pay me. He said it was the don's orders. So I hit Torenelli's daughter on Sutton Place. I cut off her head and stuffed it in her cunt. I wrote 2 on the wall. It was a message. They didn't listen.
Then he listed the other hits. Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island.
Torenelli put out a contract on me for revenge. I shot him on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. A.220 Remington with a night scope. Then I killed Julio. I killed a man named Train. I blew up a car on Wards Island with him in it. A man named Morrison hired me to do it. On Long Island. He tried to get out of paying me, so I killed him too. With a.357 magnum, wad cutters. Two in the chest, one in the face. He owed and he had to pay.
All my life, I worked for the same people. They had different names, but they were all the same. All bosses. Generals. I was a soldier.
I have no love in me for any of you. You have no love for me. You don't need my story. Why doesn't matter. What I did, you did it. You did it to me, I did it to you. I'm tired. I'm tired of all this. I'm not a man. I don't know what I am, but I wasn't born to be it. So I'm dying to be it. What I am.
I have no friends and I have no fear. I only stopped because I got tired. You could never have stopped me.
I worked for my money. That's what I did. They didn't pay me. So I made them pay. They didn't listen to my warnings. So I'm leaving them one last warning. I don't know where I'm going and I don't care. But they better not send anyone after me.
If you're reading this, you're a cop. Some kind of cop. I'm not leaving you this as a favor. It's my last chance to tell you how much I hate you.
Pray to your fucking gods that I'm the last one. But you know I'm not. There's more coming. You do things to us, we grow up and we do things to you.
I'm signing this with the only name you ever cared about.
His dark thumbprint was at the bottom of the last page.