On the Hunt
Diaz Moldar was ready to make the kill. Although at the moment he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it. He didn’t have any apprehensions about violence. He’d been doing this for far too long to be worried about anything like that. But as he sat there waiting to commit murder for hire, he felt a distinct sense of boredom.
He had been following his mark for days, a man named Ryan Babeth. He had committed two sins of the sort that lead to being followed by a man like Diaz Moldar. He often reminded himself that everyone he killed was a sinner in one way or another. Good people weren’t worth paying an assassin for. Babeth’s first sin was sleeping with another woman behind the back of his wife, who was herself wealthy and powerful in her own right. Not the sort to go spurned quietly. The second sin however was the truly damning one. His father had died recently and so Babeth had inherited a very large sum of money which he’d kept hidden overseas from his now doubly spurned and (worse from her perspective) comparatively far less wealthy wife. And so began her hunt for a reputable, goodmet, liptight, and undeniably violent man to serve justice upon her husband’s sins. Diaz was such a man. And now was the day of retribution. When he got the job he’d been glad for the familiar thrill of the hunt. He always liked playing a critical part in the climax of the story of a life. Yet somehow this time there was far less thrum in his blood than was normal. He was sure that would come soon enough though.
The hunt began early that morning. He ate and drank nothing. Instead he spent the dark hours before sunrise preparing his equipment. Cleaning and loading his guns. Polishing his knives. Then he sat in the silence and watched the lights of the Manhattan skyline turn to silhouettes as the towers and lines of smoke were cast in shadow against the purple then red of the rising day. In that view thousands were starting their days. Lives in the moment. Such a strange and beautiful thing. A life. Lived and then died. All the ordinary people. Lambs content to sit and live at their desks and in their pens. Or else die on the toilet. He hated them. And we are defined by the things we hate. He tried to lose himself in the ritual beauty. The great joy of life that was the thrill of the hunt. But there was nothing. Normally by now he would be starving yet not hungry beyond the need to kill. Now his stomach growled, and all he wanted was oatmeal or maybe some buttered toast. He assured himself. The greed for brutality would kick in soon. It always did.
He was dressed and parked in his car on 86th outside Babeth’s brownstone when again he heard his stomach rumble. He checked his watch. It was 5am. And he was very very hungry. Babeth would be at work by 6, and there probably wouldn’t be a good chance to pick him off until he went for lunch around 11. Maybe he’d take the Subway today like he did sometimes on Fridays, and Diaz could just push him onto the tracks or else pull him into a corner and stab him in the gut before taking his wallet and watch. The death would be ruled either a horrible accident or a garden variety mugging gone wrong. No one would investigate much, and he’d have plenty of time to grab coffee and mimosas over brunch at Sarabeth’s.
But to his annoyance, a black car pulled up in front of the house and Babeth got in. He waited half a block before tailing them to the office. He found a place to park and walked increasingly larger circles around the area of the building. It was only 8:30 and the hunger was unbearable. Maybe he could grab a quick bagel at a bodega somewhere. No, he reminded himself. No eating. You have to kill someone today. He was very off his game. He sat on a bench to let the cold seep into his bones so he could assess the situation.
What was going wrong here? The money was good, the mark was acceptably morally dubious (or at least not particularly upright or innocent), and it had been a few weeks since his last kill. He hadn’t had a problem then had he?
Diaz thought back to that hit. It was out in Kentucky, one horse breeder out for revenge against another for some slight. Honor was a powerful motvator. He had killed the man his the stables, caving in his head with an iron gate. But wait, it had been warm then. Hot even. He was covered in sweat. It had been summer. That wasn’t his last job.
He’d completely forgotten about the hotelier in Vermont who’d caught that local politician taking a bribe. He was an older man, but strong enough and more full of fight than most. The brawl had made a real mess of the penthouse, throwing each other against walls and chucking silverware. He melted the man’s face on a clothesiron he’d been using on his shirts when Diaz walked in. Luckily the hotel was almost empty, so no one heard the screaming before he jabbed a shard of glass into the man’s throat. He remembered more of the details now. The place was almost empty. It was between seasons, before the ski and snowboard crowd came in, but after the summertime leisure folks were gone. That was September. Months ago.
Finally he realized it was the oil thing. That was his last job before this one. It had been simple enough rifle from a rooftop work. A petrodictator ina desert somewhere he forgot had needed a rogue family member killed. He paid handsomely. Diaz shot the target in broad daylight on a public street. In totalitarian societies important people are only killed by even more important people. No one batted an eye. That was November. His real last job. And now there was Babeth.
What had he been doing since then? It was February and he thought back on the last few weeks: a cloudy haze of jogging, reading, occasionally seducing women, and usually drinking himself into a stupor at least every other night. He hadn’t done anything he really enjoyed in the last six months. And that included all the killing. How had this happened? He’d spent his entire life hating the cowards who sacrificed their lives and their time at a desk, on the altar of nothing at all. Now here he was, a lamb just like them. Bored and helpless in his office.
He got back in front of Babeth’s office just before 9:30. He still had a man to kill regardless of whatever state of mind he was in. He decided to kill Babeth on his lunch break even if it had to be public and messy. Then he could get some waffles, a stiff drink, and to the bottom of all this.
He settled in for a long stakeout but Babeth came out much earlier than expected. He went off in the opposite direction of his normal lunch place, towards 8th avenue and thick bands of people. Diaz followed on foot, constantly scanning for an alleyway or open sewer grate. This route was unexpected, but he’d still done his prep work. He knew there wasn’t much useful in this direction. Babeth was walking fast like he had somewhere to be. Diaz was in the mood to get this over with, but now it was far too crowded even for a boldfaced kill. This was getting very inconvenient.
Finally Babeth turned into a nondescript building covered in scaffolding. He waved at the doorman and Diaz did the same. He had the vague sense that he’d been in the building before. Maybe he had. Probably he had. Who cares. They waited for an elevator and he considered strangulation between floors. But there were always cameras in those things.
They got in and Babeth pressed for the 14th floor. Somehow that felt familiar too. Why was that? When had he been here before? Another hit maybe, it must have been years ago.
“You taking a writing class as well?”
Diaz looked up. Babeth was staring right at him. He’d been too caught up in his thoughts to press a decoy button. Now they were headed to the same floor. Always suspicious.
“Sorry, what?” he stalled for time.
“You’re on 14 too,” Babeth said, “Are you here for a writing class?”
“Yeah,” Diaz mumbled, “First One.”
“Me too. Good luck.”
Diaz Moldar looked off into the steel wall of the elevator. He realized he’d just lied without meaning to. This wasn’t his first writing class. He’d been here years ago, in his twenties before all the violence, before he realized how much he loved to kill. Simpler times. All he’d had to do back then was wait tables and write. And he had loved to write. He was even good at it, when he had the right idea. Other people loved their sob stories. But he was what the literary types called a “genre writer”. For them it was almost an insult, but he took it as a compliment. It meant that he wrote interesting stories where things actually happened. He knew his worth. Once he got a story going it didn’t matter who you were or what you liked, you needed to know how it all turned out. Remembering all this he started to smile. He turned to Babeth, the man he was supposed to kill.
“I’m excited,” he said, “I haven’t written in years.”
They got out on 14 and he charmed his way past the class check-in person. A part-time literary bureaucrat was easy enough work for a professional murderer who regularly grifted his way into consulates and high-security corporate offices. Babeth was in some literary nonfiction workshop that sounded boring as all hell. Diaz had no desire to follow him. Instead, he took a seat in an intermediate fiction class.
The professor came in carrying a hot lunch in a plastic bag. He smelled the food and realized he was no longer hungry, his foot was tapping, and most importantly he didn’t have anything to write with. An old woman next to him was chatting with her neighbor so he unzipped her bag, found a pen, and ripped off a handful paper out of her notebook. He smoothed the crinkled few pages on the table as the Professor introduced herself. He was shaking and picked off the scraggy mess of ringlets that had connected his pages to that woman’s notebook. People were going around and introducing themselves but he couldn’t listen. Couldn’t wait anymore. Couldn’t stop tapping his foot. His eyes were wide and he was looking everywhere as he clicked his stolen pen at a mile a minute. Ideas grew in his blood and itched at his fingers to get out. Diaz Moldar had killed dozens or even hundreds of men and women. He didn’t know the exact number, but he had broken countless bodies, his will always triumphing over theirs. He was as strong a person could be. But now the need in him was crippling. And he broke to it. He collapsed, bent low over the table with his whole being in the tip of his pen as it crawled and spent its inky life to mark the white of the page with something worth seeing. Babeth was gone. His hunger was gone. Everything else was gone. The wasting, the violence, the boredom. None of it was anything. Now there was only the story. His whole life was in those lines. And he would live whole lives in making them. He wrote the title, and then the words began.
