Hit Man!
Texas is one of the centers of a profession devoted to death. Its practitioners believe in the American way of life, love their kids, go to church, and never leave fingerprints.
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"My average price, I'd say, is about ten [grand]. You charge more to hit a law officer, 'cause they're the only ones ya can burn for anymore. I'll check out both the guy who's hirin' me and the guy he wants hit before I'll take a job, and I'll figure out how much to charge him then. And ya gotta ask yourself how much does this guy really want'm hit. If somebody's gonna make halfa million if somebody else gets killed, I sure ain't gonna do it fer just ten.
"Mosta the kinda people ya get paid to hit are upper-middle-class, people who gamble a lot, are involved in politics. Usually they're crooked to start with. Hell, 95 per cent of the people I've hit've deserved it.
"And it's usually because of money. I mean, you've gotta have a helluva grudge to hit somebody, to have'm killed, unless there's somethin' in it. You take a average man, a guy who runs a service station or a beer-joint, what you wanta hit him for?
"It's like I hadta go to Alabama on a job once. A sister and two brothers inherited a buncha money, and I hit both brothers and that little girl got all of it, see? And nobody ever knew. They never even found one of 'em."
Paul has plied his trade in several places—"I've gone to mosta the Southern states, went as far north as St. Louis once"—but mostly in Texas or California, where he used to live. His most lucrative job was done there: "Was this guy that was heavy in politics, and in the Mafia, too. He was in business with this other guy who'd make a lotta money if he got killed. I got $30,000 in front, and halfa the money he got afterwards. I checked inta the guy and found he was real girl-crazy. Well, I had some girls workin for me then, so two of 'em set him up to go to Vegas one weekend. Left L.A. but he never made it to Vegas. The two girls helped me bury him out there. I don't even think I could take you back to it now if I tried to."
According to Paul, Texas is "one a the biggest states around" in professional murder. "California is so damn fulla hippies and beatniks—they'll go out and hit a man without even tryin' to. Texas has more experienced hit-men, more professionals, than really any other state I can think of. There's a lot I guess up in New York, but they're all in the Mafia up there, that's like bein' in the Army and killin'. They just hit each other. But Texas is so damn big, so damn much money in it. I know eight or ten hit men here in Houston, another five or six in San Antonio, four, five in El Paso.
"You have a grapevine in the underworld," he says, "that runs between me and others in my profession. You just find out about any jobs that're around, the word gets around. I just came into town yesterday and I heard about this hit. It's a hot job, which is usually a federal or a police officer, so nobody from around here wants to do it. If you're somebody lookin' for a hit-man, you just have to fish around a little bit, and you'll get a connection.
"Usually when somebody hires me to hit somebody, they'll tell me who it is, where he lives, what kinda guy he is. Usually they can give you a picture. Sometimes you can just walk right up and ring the doorbell; if the right man answers, then you do it right there. You'd be surprised how easy that is. Whenever other people hear those shots it stuns 'em so bad it's easy to get gone. I did that to this guy up in Virginia a few years ago, an Army guy, and in a halfa hour they had four different descriptions out on my car. And none of'm was close.
"Sometimes you hafta follow the guy around for a long time before you catch'm somewheres you can do it and get outta there. I like to do that myself but sometimes you need help if the guy moves around a lot. That's a bad one. When you do somethin' by yourself nobody can tell on you but you.
"I've used a sawed-off 12-gauge quite a bit, I guess most of the time. Between 40 to 60 feet it's better'n a machinegun. The rest've the time I used a pistol. After I'm done I'll always get me a cuttin' torch and melt the gun right into the ground. It's a lot harder to prove murder on ya if they haven't got a weapon.
"Killin' people's easier'n most any other type of crime if ya do it right. I know, 'cause I've done most've 'em. But not any more, I don't do nothin else any more. Other crimes, usually, there's always other people around who know about it, but not murder, not if you do it right. That makes it awful hard for'm to prove anything on ya. Hell, the cops know who I am, they know 'bout me, they even know 'bout some've my jobs. Just from talkin' around, y'know. But they can't do nothin' 'cause they've got no evidence. There isn't any evidence."
Paul's clothes. "I like to dress like a businessman," he'll tell you, "so people think that's what I am." An East Texas businessman, one should know. He dresses in what might be called Omaha Chic, white belt, white shoes, ugly-but-flashy dacron and polyester suits in ludicrous color combination, lavender-on-turquoise with, yea gods, matching stretch socks. Frankenstein meets Super-Fly.
"I got no conscience," he says, saying it eight, ten times in a two-hour converstation, belaboring it, pleading it, trying to convince—who?—that he really is amoral, that there is no warm breath in that dead soul. "I had to hit a woman once," he adds, those eyes closing even more unto themselves, staring into those waxy hands, "and I still don't feel right about that one; I guess. That was a hard one to do.
"I'm not proud of what I do, I'm not braggin' on it. Hell, I don't even like it. But you do what you have to do, y'know?"
Paul's business has earned him, by his count, a pretty fair living, better than most of those long-ago friends he went nigger-knockin' with, better than most of the friends he made in the penitentiary. Together with the salary from his front job ("I belong to a union and some've 'em sorta know what I do. They cover for me when I'm gone, mark me as workin, so I got a sure-fire alibi.") and the various benefits, always tax-free, that murder provides, protection and the like, Paul has amassed a $50,000 split-level suburban home (with shoulder-high windows and Doberman pinschers), four cars and debts.
He's sending five children through school ("My two oldest boys're finished—one's a rodeo rider an one's a hippie. My oldest girl's in college."), paying alimony to two former wives, and daily confronting that same amorphous discontent that staggers his neighbors in blue-collar suburbia. "This world's in a helluva place," he says, pondering his own place therein, "and it's hard to find your way in it. I'd hate for my kids to live like I do.
"It's hard to go to a bar and you hear somebody say, 'See that fella, for enough money he'll kill ya.' One time I'd like to hear somebody say, 'That's one good ole boy, if yer ever in trouble he'll help ya.'"
Besides his clothes, he wears other marks of his heritage, that doomed sharecropper legacy of struggle and stumble, among them a belief in a stark Calvinist God of power and retribution.
"I'm a Methodist," he says, "I go to church twice a week when I'm home, once at least when I'm away. I stop each night and talk to the Old Man Upstairs and try and get him to straighten me out. Someday He will.
"When I get loose from this stuff [his indictments] I wanta get away from here, go somewhere I can work, just live a regular life. I don't mean just move to Florida or New York or somewhere, I mean go. To Australia. I'm going down there and I'm gonna play it straight, I mean straight. The only thing I hate is I gotta leave my kids.
"But I need to get away from all this. I already quit once, about five years ago, but I went back to doin' it 'cause I needed the money. But I ain't mad at people. I've never been mad at any man I've shot. I've never known any of 'em. The first one's still to come that really bothers me. It's a good livin, I guess…If you've got no conscience."
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