I got a forty-five dollar parking ticket and decided I was going to kill the meter maid who wrote it. What followed were several of the best months of my life. It was a monastic kind of lifestyle, focusing on myself and my newfound passion. Sleeping eight hours, eating healthy, exercising frequently, ejaculating infrequently.
To begin with I paid the ticket and began to think about method. I started watching crime dramas from countries with no guns. East Asia was particularly instructive here. Korea. Japan. Taiwan. China. All countries with very strict gun laws and very active organized crime communities. I watched a film where a man slit another man’s throat with a machete in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded street market and just walked away. He didn’t smirk or howl or foam at the mouth. He had no expression at all. He just wanted it bad enough. That, I decided, was the first and most essential ingredient. Wanting it.
You can buy a set of “as-seen-on-TV” kitchen knives on clearance at any department store. At a Penney’s or a Macy’s or some other WASP stronghold selling stretchy pants to old ladies they’ll keep them with the waffle irons and the masculine-branded blenders on some sort of gilded rack of shame away from the watches and the perfume. I find the floor managers tend to tuck them in somewhere near the boys clothing and the kitchen wares. They come in plastic sheet packaging and tend to have some kind of chef I’m meant to recognize on the cardboard inside. I never bought more than one set at a time from any given store and always paid cash.
In the coming months I would project an infinite amount of inward-facing gratitude due to my foresight in investing in a whetstone. The knives never come out of the packaging as sharp as you’d like them and so a whetstone is necessary to help the knife to achieve actualization as a murder weapon. The act of sharpening the knife is also good for the soul of the aspiring murderer. The work at the whetstone is slow, menial, and impossible to rush. It becomes meditative. It allows one to focus on that vital first element: wanting it. I laid the wrinkled paper slip out on the kitchen table and stared at it as I worked the blade up the length of the whetstone, looking for some hidden, mocking message in Castillo’s handwriting. In time I learned that any knife set advertising some kind of protective coating on the metal was better left to gather dust. It makes the sharpening process impossible and is bad for your sharpening surface.
To review the bare facts: I work in a high rise office building. I park in a public garage, next to a mixed-use mid-rise building full of specialist doctor’s offices. I receive a monthly parking pass from my employer. It is a small square of paper with the current month and year in green block text. It was displayed in the same place as always, slightly off center on my dashboard, in the style of a zen painting. Still, the yellow envelope waited for me under the windshield wiper of my Toyota. Forty-five dollars. For nothing. From some guy named Castillo.
I think people get the wrong perception of what is being implied when I suggest murder. People think of guns. That’s the problem. There’s no need for guns. If anything, buying a gun to shoot the meter maid who wrote the unjust ticket is a greater submission to the mechanisms of power which placed the envelope under one’s windshield than just paying the fine. A gun means a galaxy of data points gifted to the police department in the relevant municipality where the body will be discovered. A gun means a caliber, a shell casing, a splattering of blood and a splintering of bone. It means a serial number and a date of sale and a receipt and a gun shop proprietor who can confirm or deny whether the firearm in question was one of his. It means, on uncountable fronds of a whole vast willow tree of antecedents, a connection to every dollar ever donated by a card carrying member of the National Rifle Association in exchange for a meshbacked trucker cap and a yearlong subscription to a lifestyle magazine on which every page holds an image of a gun and yet the word “weapon” is never used once. Murdering an enemy of yours via gunshot is like threatening the job of a part-time fast food employee. It is soulless and meaningless and most of all bloodless (that is in the sense of anima, the spiritual lifeblood of all living things lest you correct me and point out the red-dyed jissom leaking from some new ballistic anus in a snuff film star’s forehead, you smug fucking pedant). It has no internality and no externality. It is a net zero. It is the sending away of the housekeeper at a Holiday Inn, not through tearing the door open and telling them to fuck off so you can sleep, but by pretending to be asleep still, covers pulled up over your head, nursing a deep fear of the humiliation which will inevitably ensue if you are discovered.
I bought some iso-toners off that same clearance rack, in that same big box store, next to those same untouched blenders and waffle irons and had thus acquired the vocational kit of the classical murderer stretching back to biblical times. One imagines something of similar proportions to my growing arsenal of hand-sharpened kitchen knives in the hands of the children and grandchildren of Cain, scoffing at their no-longer-with-it old man for being so gauche as to beat Abel to death with a rock. This doctrinal debate presumably shaped the whole history of murder, the blunt-object devotees against the sharp-object reformists, maybe with some reconciliation millennia down the line to beat back the heretical rituals of the ballistic and explosive apostates. I would embark in this spirit of healing schisms between the sects of death worship. My approach was missing some signature flourish (perhaps I was picking up the attitude of the celebrity chefs on the cardboard backing in the packages containing my knife sets through some sort of memetic osmosis). It would come in the form of a blunt object, though it would be one far evolved from Cain’s bloodied rock.
You can, it turns out, steal cars with USB sticks now. Several genres of dour, nondescript sedans were constructed in such a way that the steering column can be pried away to reveal an access point where the insertion of any USB will start the car. This is very popular with kids. Not kids in the sense of twentysomethings but kids in the sense of fourteen year olds. People on the internet have a very dim view of this subculture. Much is made every minute of the apparent societal decline and the failure of the parents and the failure of the schools and the complicity of the Republican Party and the shortsighted idiocy of teens destined to end up skinned alive and smashed to bone shards at the terminus of an hourlong joy ride. The term antisocial kept coming up in various permutations and the apparent lack of self-reflection really began to bug me. What had these people ever earned through being “social?” Bar trivia and board game nights with charcuterie and nine-dollar craft beers and vast reams of parking tickets, and petitions, and fliers informing the apathetic of ballot initiatives to shape common sense progressive policy. Weight loss shots and prescription stimulants and porn addiction and “reasonable” dealings with people that pick your pocket and never apologize for it. Everyone could apparently be blamed except the manufacturers of the cars. It was just taken as a given that there was no longer any obligation on their part to deliver a quality product. This made me all the more certain that I was on the right track.
The first thing, I decided, was to move the car once I’d broken in and started it. Once you’ve moved the car, you just wait. Douse the headlights and don’t touch the throttle. Maybe get down below the steering column, though this is, in general, excessive caution. You can find yourself waiting for hours and so it helps to take an interest in the coming and going of people. Stay entertained, engaged, and present. I find strangers so much more sympathetic and interesting in the flesh than in any other permutation. The best game I thought of was to attempt to determine which passerby may be the owner of the car I’d taken. What sort of person drives a boring car? We have very strong and calcified perceptions of men with genitalia inversely proportional to the size of their trucks and balding men who buy European convertibles and American motorcycles to feel some blood in their own ambiguously proportioned sex organs. I identified several further subgenres with which you may or may not be familiar. There’s cash rich and asset poor young tradesmen who all seem to consume Japanese action cartoons religiously and adorn every surface in their lives with stickers depicting the same, they drive sporty hatchbacks and the odd electric sedan. There’s constantly-frazzled aging people who externalize their political anxieties onto their rear bumpers, usually attached to old domestic cars. But who owns a boring car? You may answer “a boring person.” I would deem that a boring answer and suggest you seek the boring person in question in the nearest mirror. The answer I eventually settled on was: “a person who uses apathy as a defense mechanism.” The most powerful words in the English language are “I don’t care and you can’t make me.” I envy the strength of the otherwise respectable person who chooses to purchase a car so incapable of inspiring any strong feeling that even its builders didn’t care if it could be stolen at any time by anyone willing to invest fifteen dollars in a screwdriver and a thumb drive. If you become a thing that cannot care, then you will never end up in the driver’s seat of a stolen car, waiting for an employee of the local parking enforcement agency to wander into your field of vision.
The first time I got a bite, I thought I was actually lucky enough to have Castillo on my first attempt. The parking enforcement officers drive up and down the ramps of the parking garages that dot this municipality in white crossover SUVs with yellow lights on top. Usually when they’re investigating a potential ticket they park in the middle of the aisle between the rows of parked cars, keep the lights on as a warning to anyone who may be coming, and step out to check for a parking pass on the dash first. If there isn’t one, then they enter the license plate number into the little hip-pocket console they carry to see if the car had paid by plate at one of the little kiosks down on the ground level. If they didn’t pay, then they tend to go for one more lap of the structure and then stop to write the ticket on the way back. I didn’t know any of this when the first guy parked his car in front of mine and stepped out. He was short and stocky with a brown crew cut and sort of Indigenous features hewn from reddish clay. He could have been Castillo, I thought. No dice. He was Duarte. Said so on the ID card hung from his lanyard. For the record, I didn’t just kill Hispanic guys. That was never the intent. Once I was about four or five bodies deep into the habit, a lot of people seemed very eager to brand it as a racial thing. That never really entered my own calculus. Your curiosity and ire would be better directed at the hiring professionals employed by the Parking Enforcement Administration. The word “quota” comes to mind. Not that you’d ever get anybody to tell you that. You’d never get anybody from the Parking Enforcement Administration to speak to you at all. But that’s just it. That’s the thing. Once I was done with Duarte I was mad at myself that I hadn’t asked him where I could find Castillo. But the anger was passing. I realized I wasn’t after Castillo. I didn’t have any specific grudge towards him. He was just the least sympathetic reachable organ of power. A power under which I had been chafing for years. A power which binds us all and can only be profaned and rendered juvenile by any effort to label it. Calling it “society” makes you a teenager. Calling it “bureaucracy” makes you a Libertarian. I had overshot my target and ended up in the throes of a far greater crusade. A search for a face to which I could attach the endless ineptitude and insult which plagued my life, all of our lives. I’d work my way through the food chain like a virus until I could find someone who could be held responsible for all my inconvenience. Or at least look like someone responsible for all my inconveniences if I squint.
Have I edged you enough yet? Have you lost your erection you filthy little gore-pervert? Has your favorite true crime podcaster lingered too long on the ad read when you were all revved up for the blood and guts? Wanna hear about the police? Wanna hear how bad and dumb they were so you can feel smart and capable? Wanna hear about the fat little wife and the precocious kid on the debate team left behind? Fuck you. You want the close up on a murder go get one the old fashioned way. I did the work, so can you. If you’re frustrated then use your imagination. Try to hear the squealing tires as I floored it out of the parking spot and the crumpling aluminum of the impact. Hear Duarte’s broken-legged screaming as he tried in vain to wriggle free from between the cars. Hear my panting as I stabbed nearer and nearer his vitals. Hear the throbbing car alarms and the sound of rushed shoes on concrete steps as I walked away. The resonance of a soiled knife point hitting asphalt. Whatever you conjure up, I can virtually guarantee it was sexier than what actually happened.
For weeks afterwards I kept assuming some TV detective pastiche would appear outside my apartment door to taunt me with my obvious guilt. None came. I went to work. I went home. I watched more movies and sharpened more knives. I let the local news websites give me seizures from targeted advertising, just looking to prove to myself that I’d actually done it. A month went by and I got nothing. So I went again. I decided that reconnaissance was a priority for this next round. I loitered around parking garages to learn exploitable habits. I’d later conclude that this was unnecessary, I’d already reduced murder to athletic terms. Good athletes find a formula that leads to wins and replicate it until they no longer can. I found my formula and could only overcomplicate it by thinking of it further. It wasn’t a complete waste of time, I suppose. It allowed me to get back to that essential spark. Wanting it. I’d go up and down the highways, air-conditioning vents in my Toyota numbing my hands, concrete bollards running by like panels in a zoetrope. I’d go to shopping malls. The older ones, built in optimistic times. They always have too much parking. Football field sized ink-blotches of asphalt serving as a supplement to five story brick structures, mostly empty. People prefer to park down on the surface level, even in bad weather, when a covered parking spot would serve some real utility. They’ve seen too many movies, I suppose. Too many police procedurals with well-dressed women set upon by malnourished rat men and cruel, tumescent, bald orcs in dark garages like these. I couldn’t quite tell you when it began to coalesce but there’s a dedicated demographic of people that regard leaving their homes as a gamble where the penalty for an unkind roll of the dice is a sordid, gory death. There’s a real hypochondria about them, but I suppose I can’t write them off entirely. They’re worried about people like me.
I had read online that the commonly-accepted threshold to be considered a serial killer was three victims. My fourth victim ended up being my breakout. Go figure. The fiber-optics came alive with outrage. Everyone had their own theory and not a single one was on base. They all thought I was so much more interesting than I am. People thought it was political, sexual, compulsive, and of course you’ve already heard about the racist that I suppose I have become by weight of public opinion. The reaction to body number four meant that I had graduated from hobbyist to vocational. I might have quit if not for the obligation to press on which one receives from a spurt of success. Now quitting was the furthest thing from my mind. I couldn’t disappoint my adoring public.
What kept me going through bodies five, six, and seven was you. Sitting at my desk, still with no meaningful work, browsing the comments underneath the latest news article on how the police had no leads and were urging any witnesses to come forward. I was accused of embodying every anxiety under the sun. I was accused of being Russian, Chinese, Antifa, Mexican, a Neo-Nazi, a Jihadist, an exhibitionist, a Ballardian car-crash fetishist, an Anarchist, gay, black, and a woman. In learning where you see evil I came to know you. That is why I am certain that you are still waiting for me to get weak, or giddy, or proud and tell you about how number five said a prayer, or how six begged for his mother with glistening wet puppy-dog eyes, or how, given that I disposed of seven at three in the morning in an otherwise empty parking structure, I decided to try pissing and then masturbating over his corpse, just to give it a try. None of that happened. But I bet you imagined it. I bet you put yourself in my shoes. You filthy little wannabee. You wish you were me. What? You gonna ask for my top ten next? You want my serial murder hot takes? BTK: Poser. Bundy: Overrated. Ed Gein: Actually the GOAT. That kind of thing? You want more true crime? Then be the change you wish to see in the world.
I apologize to those of you whose interest is purely historical or anthropological. I don’t mean to make you collateral damage in my abuse of the hobbyist set which seems to float like a miasma around murder. If you’re here merely to supplement the public record, I can’t hate you. I can’t even really hate the hobbyists. I just hate their attitude, their passivity. The average person wants blood. I am proof of this. But most of you want someone else to go take scalps for you. That I can’t abide. We’re all murderers here in America. We live atop a mountain of rotting flesh and bleached bone. Separating yourself from the making of the sausages doesn’t grant you any surplus of morality. It just numbs you, it’s a self-imposition of helplessness, the only thing keeping you from becoming all you can be is you and- oh to hell with all this self-help speak. I do hate the hobbyists, but not because of their morbid interest. I hate that a minority of them will be reading this with a bottle of lotion and a box of tissues close at hand. Murder never granted me any sexual satisfaction, don’t objectify me.
By the time body number seven was cold in the ground I had to admit that the whole business wasn’t granting me any satisfaction of any kind any more. That giddy rush from five through seven had subsided. I decided it was time to wrap it up and get a new hobby. But I couldn’t end it at seven, it was a number too charged with thematic and spiritual meaning. Eight was also out for the same reasons, due to its associations with both the concept of “infinity” and Adolf Hitler, making it a number divided between two distinct camps of annoying people. Nine, though, nine I could get down with. I liked nine, liked how short it was of a nice round ten. Felt like a taunt to the onlookers of all stripes. Nine would do.
Eight was so smooth and so simple that it made me all the more certain that I should quit. Yeah there was a cop car outside the garage where it happened but I really have to question what exactly they thought that would achieve. Cops in radio cars are basically paid to ignore screaming and crashing noises and the lady didn’t even scream that loud.
I figured I’d get nine polished off in short order and move on with my life. Let the lease lapse and move, maybe go abroad. I’m still not sure how they got my scent. Detectives don’t explain how they caught you in real life. I came home from the office one day and they were there, with my knives and whetstone laid out on the black-washed wood grain of my kitchen table. I could potentially get the full story in court but I can’t imagine actually having to pay attention to all of that. What would the fun in a murder trial be when I can’t laugh at other people’s opinions on the matter? No, I’d rather plead guilty. Don’t give ‘em the satisfaction. I’d rather wait for some murder hobbyist to write a book and get the details on my fall from grace when I’m sitting for an interview. It’s difficult to imagine having the time for that, but in prison time is one thing that is not at a premium. It’s rather nice. Confinement has about met my expectations so far, which I appreciate. The only real surprise has been that none of the police have attacked me. I expected some sort of group beating and one has yet to arrive.
A woman from the government came to speak to me a few hours after my arrest. I don’t know why. I think she thought she was going to teach me some lesson. I realized shortly after she sat on the other side of the table from me, in that cinderblock room with the plastic chairs and the stainless steel table to which I was handcuffed, that she was the ideal number nine and I’d never even get a chance to touch her. This was what I was looking for. A true believer. Someone proudly asserting their status as a decent fucking human being. The kind of person that wants a moral at the end of every story. So strangled by politeness that they can’t admit how terrified they are of every face they pass on the street. Every immigrant food delivery driver a potential home invader-cum rapist-cum murderer, every large, loud man with no fashion sense a mass-shooter in the making, every woman who likes cigarettes and dark jokes hides Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS behind her latex alt-girl mask. She went at me for forty-five minutes solid, laminated ID card bouncing up and down the playing surface of her crisp white dress shirt when she grew animated, her ballet flat hammering on the floor in anxious traveling upwards and downwards again, five minutes into the lecture I realized she wasn’t even speaking to me. She’d already decided who I was and was speaking to that guy, somewhere behind me, hovering over my shoulder. In that way we served a vital purpose. We objectified each other and calcified the righteousness of our respective causes. My work was ending but hers could stretch on until she died at her desk, leaving behind cats, dogs, kids, spouses, unread books of the month and a backlog of television. Every time she missed a veterinary appointment or a ballet recital or a baseball game or an anniversary dinner she could just think of me, make me uglier and more monstrous with every successive recollection, swallow hard, conclude that the sacrifices she made were justified by my own malice, and go back to work, get a little older, a little deader, let some joy turn to antimatter within her breast and reduce herself inexorably to a negation. When at last she stopped speaking she looked at me once more and asked if I had anything to say. I asked her where she got the energy to be so mad at someone like me. She thought I was mocking her and left soon after, prodded out the door and out of my life by the sausage fingers of cops. I smiled, closed-lipped as number nine left. I’d get her yet, and she wouldn’t even know it was me that would be sending her to an early grave. It was perfect.
Anyway, I seem to have become a trendsetter. I’m told that they lost five parking enforcement officers in cities all over America last week. Week before that they lost seven. A funny thought floated into my head and hasn’t left yet: I hope none of the guys who got it were Castillo.
— J.W. Yablonsky lives in Washington DC with his fianceé and a large, needy cat. His short fiction has previously appeared in APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, as well as Muleskinner Journal. He is a founding member of the literary and arts collective KINDNESS REPORT. He essays regularly on Substack, and is also active on Letterboxd.