Free April Evil by John D. MacDonald

accomplished or was contemplated, there was a choice of specialists who could be contacted. Ronnie was one of them. The most successful one. During the seven years he had killed twelve men and two women.
    There were several reasons for his continuing success. There was his capacity for planning carefully. There was his use of a variety of techniques so that no standard pattern could be ascribed to him. He did not look or act the part. On rare occasions when he had been picked up, he made no attempt to deny a criminal record. But in his quiet voice, using excellent diction and grammar, he would point out that he owned a small and profitable tire-recapping business in central Pennsylvania, and he was on a business trip. He had papers to prove it. And he did own the small business, and it was profitable.
    It was in the tiny cluttered office of his small business concern that he would receive a phone call. It would come from a pay station in New York or Chicago or Kansas City or New Orleans. It would be a voice he didn’t recognize. Go to Las Vegas and call such and such a number. He would make the trip. The phone call would result in a contact in a dark car or a dimly lighted room.
    The instructions were simple. “Frankie Delani in Reno.”
    And some time during the next month one Frankie Delani would cease to live—by knife or bullet, by a wire around the throat, or a fall from a high place, or a heavy blow on the head. And Ronnie would return to Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter hewould receive payment. It would come in various ways. It was always in cash, in used bills. There was never any specific clue as to who had sent it. Sometimes he suspected. But he never knew. Sometimes when the amount seemed too small, he was annoyed. Other times it would be larger, more satisfying. But only Ronnie knew that he would have performed the assigned tasks with no pay at all. Once, between assignments, he had gone to a strange city. He had selected a name at random, taking it from a phone book. It had been very simple because, in this case, the man had had no presentiment of danger. But Ronnie had made the stalk as carefully as with the others.
    But he resolved he would not do that again. It had been pleasurable, but it had meant a step across a thin line. He was aware that he was not as other men. He had read enough to know that other men, if they could see inside him, would call him psychopathic. So long as he kept his wish to kill within the channel of those cases assigned to him, he could pose as a man of business and the difference would not show on the outside. But he was superstitiously afraid that were he to continue to kill without cause, he would become marked, and other men would begin to read the difference when they looked at his face.
    There were, in the country, perhaps twenty men who knew his function and his importance. Few of them knew him by sight. They did not want to know him better. Should he ever fail, they did not want any tie-in provable. Some of the men who knew of him were police officials. Those men, wise and cynical in their trade, felt that he performed a reasonably valid function. Without Ronnie, and a very few other specialists, open warfare could result. A strong syndicate meant more crime—but more of a surface appearance of law and order. Weak links in the administrative chain had to be removed. It pleased Ronnie to think that two of the men who had known of him—had been high enough up in their territories to know of him—had been eliminated through his efforts.
    The last time he had come to Florida, he had come on assignment. He had come to Tampa three years ago. The man was named Mendez. Mendez had been involved in a serious disagreementover control of bolita. Serious for Mendez. It had taken three weeks of planning. Mendez had a bodyguard. But he had a bad habit of walking out of a place ahead of them. Ronnie had blown Mendez’ chest open with a twelve-gauge shotgun on a rainy night as the man left